Lies My Parents Told Me

Well, not my parents, at least not that I can recall. But children learn to lie from their parents:

Encouraged to tell so many white lies and hearing so many others, children gradually get comfortable with being disingenuous. Insincerity becomes, literally, a daily occurrence. They learn that honesty only creates conflict, and dishonesty is an easy way to avoid conflict....

In the thesaurus, the antonym of honesty is lying, and the opposite of arguing is agreeing. But in the minds of teenagers, that’s not how it works. Really, to an adolescent, arguing is the opposite of lying.

That's right. A fighting man can be an honest man; but an agreeable man is a liar.

A society that desires agreement and concession is a dishonest society, a civilization of liars. More, it is a society of people who don't respect each other:

Certain types of fighting, despite the acrimony, were ultimately signs of respect—not of disrespect.

But most parents don’t make this distinction in how they perceive arguments with their children. Dr. Tabitha Holmes of SUNY–New Paltz conducted extensive interviews asking mothers and adolescents, separately, to describe their arguments and how they felt about them. And there was a big difference.

Forty-six percent of the mothers rated their arguments as being destructive to their relationships with their teens. Being challenged was stressful, chaotic, and (in their perception) disrespectful. The more frequently they fought, and the more intense the fights were, the more the mother rated the fighting as harmful. But only 23 percent of the adolescents felt that their arguments were destructive. Far more believed that fighting strengthened their relationship with their mothers.

One of the key insights into the duel as a social institution was that its chief function was a display of mutual respect. Kenneth S. Greenberg explained, in Honor and Slavery, the way in which the duel allowed existing disrespect and tension to be resolved. When two men stood up and tried to kill each other, they were each also allowing the other to try and kill them. Allowing a man a fair shot at you, and taking your fair shot at him, showed that you existed on an even plane. The fight was intended to heal a rift in society, precisely because it was a show of respect between the parties. Indeed, that was often its effect.

Fighting is a form of negotiation, they say. An honest form. So what matters more: honesty, or peace? There are civilizations -- China, I can say having lived there, is one of them -- where the greater good is harmony, before which truth must yield. Arabian society is also that way; we say that, if all but one sheikh agrees, no sheikhs agree. You have to achieve complete harmony or you have no bond that will be recognized.

These are difficulties for Americans, who prefer honesty.

We are consequently very, very good at fighting.