THE LIAR’S TALE: A History of Falsehood.

By Jeremy Campbell. Norton. 363 pp. $26.95

In this beautifully written book, Campbell, a Washington correspondent for London’s Evening Standard, sets out to defend lying, or at least to explain it sympathetically. While stipulating that lying cannot succeed unless truth is the norm, he maintains that "humanity would never have stayed the grueling course to its present high place on the evolutionary ladder on a diet as thin and meager as the truth."

Nature, Campbell points out, routinely lies. The perched female firefly photuris imitates the mating signals of another firefly species, lures a male over, and eats him. A household dog—man’s best friend—will go to the door as if it wants out, and then race to claim the master’s vacated chair.

In a crisp and remarkably readable discussion of how philosophers have addressed the topic, Campbell demonstrates that truth has become less absolute and less compelling over the centuries. The "logos," where reason exists in nature such that humans can tune it in, allowed a harmony with the Almighty until Ockham’s razor sliced God away (as being incomprehensible) in the 14th century. Niccolò Machiavelli’s prince had to be a fraud to maintain power over the stupid citizenry. We move from René Descartes, who believed that falsehood arises because the will is free, to David Hume, who elevated the search for truth even as he acknowledged that the lie might be useful, to Immanuel Kant, who subordinated the search for truth to the search for meaning. Friedrich Nietzsche considered lying more natural than telling the truth, and Sigmund Freud deemed self-deception the key to human behavior.

Taking the next step, some modern-day philosophers conclude that there is no truth with a capital "T," and that any truth we happen to find is conditional and transitory. As a result, the many faces of falsehood today outshine the dull, singular, and prissy quest for an absolute. Because thought is a captive of language, and language is promiscuous, unreliable, and downright mischievous, truth telling in modern society is battered and abused.

Early on, Campbell suggests that polygraphs work because lying is so contrary to the human psyche that it can be detected electrically—in essence, that we are hard-wired to tell the truth. He never returns to this provocative notion, one that seems at odds with his later contentions.

In the last few pages, he argues that social morality is more important in a democracy than individual morality, citing as an example Bill Clinton’s survival of the Lewinsky scandal. Where did this distinction between individual morality and social morality come from? Perhaps Campbell’s next book will explain, or perhaps I should re-read this one. In any event, the final destination may be surprising, but it’s very much worth the ride.

—John Frohnmayer