To Deceive

Natural-Born Liars

In his book "Why We Lie" Professor David Livingstone Smith tell us:

The human mind is one of the most extraordinary and most poorly understood characters in Mother Nature's great gallery of creations. It took millions of years for it to evolve. Over immense expanses of prehistory, our ancestors acquired minds with a distinctively human cast—a range of passions and emotions, the ability to express their thoughts in words, to craft tools, to plan and to lie. Unfortunately or not, the gradual changes in brain structure that eventually produced the modern mind did not endow us with much ability to understand ourselves. Self-understanding does not come naturally to human beings, like eating, drinking, and having sex. Pursuing the reasons for this takes us to the heart of human nature…

Evolutionary biology teaches us that the tendency to deceive has an ancient pedigree. We find it in many forms, at all levels, throughout the natural kingdom….Deceptive creatures have an edge over their competitors in the relentless struggle to survive and reproduce that drives the engine of evolution. As well-honed survival machines, human beings are also naturally deceptive…

Deceit is the Cinderella of human nature; essential to our humanity but disowned by its perpetrators at every turn. It is normal, natural, and pervasive. It is not, as popular opinion would have it, reducible to mental illness or moral failure…Sheer social complexity compelled our pre-human ancestors to become progressively more intelligent, and as they did so they also became increasingly adept at social gamesmanship; the wheeling, dealing, bluffing, and conniving…Once established, the need to cope with skilled social players became a selection pressure that escalated cognitive development even further…

Why did self-deception take root in the human mind? As we will see, the propensity for self-deception probably became part of our nature because it was so helpful to us in our dealings with one another. Not only does lying to oneself soothe many of the stresses of life, but, more importantly, it also helps one lie to others. One of the most important insights of modern socio-biology is that self-deception is the handmaiden of deceit: in hiding the truth from ourselves, we are able to hide it more fully from others. Therefore, like deceit, self-deception lies at the core of our humanity…In order to hide the truth about ourselves from ourselves, we needed to evolve an unconscious mind. Evolutionary biology implies that there is a region of our mind devoted to our dealings with other people that never divulges its secrets to conscious awareness. There is a side of ourselves that we were evolved not to know.

The Fall of Man

Genesis 3

1. Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?"

2. The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden,

3. but God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.' "

4. "You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman.

5. "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."

6. When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.

7. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

8. Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden.

9. But the LORD God called to the man, "Where are you?"

10. He answered, "I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid."

11. And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat ?

12. And the man said , The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree,and I did eat .

13. And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat .

Original Sin

Just what did it mean to have our eyes opened to the knowledge of good and evil?

At what point in our evolution to fully modern humans was this knowledge attained; and at what cost?

Did the knowledge of good and evil involve the ability to deceive, and did dishonesty confer upon our ancestors an advantage over more guileless cohorts who lost out in the evolutionary competition?

Are we all descendants of Cain, bearing his mark? In Genesis 4 the Bible says: “Now Cain said to his brother Abel, ‘Let's go out to the field.’ And while they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him… Then the LORD said to Cain, ‘Where is your brother Abel?’ ‘I don't know,’ he replied. ‘Am I my brother's keeper?’… So Cain went out from the LORD's presence and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden.”

If the Bible is allegory, is it telling us that deceit and self deception lies at the core of our humanity?