Honesty or Kindness

mills:

An common situation: someone requests the opinion of his partner concerning his appearance: “How do I look?” It is often asserted –for our purposes it is not relevant whether this situation more typically involves a female or male asking- that this question is not what it appears; rather than meaning

Will you tell me your opinion of how I look or an estimate of how I look to others ‘objectively’

it in fact means

Tell me your opinion or estimate if and only if it is greater than or equal to “very good”; if it is less than that, lie to me.

This is, of course, not universally true; some people want to know if they look ridiculous; some people can accept that their partner’s opinions and estimates of others’ opinions are both subjective, and therefore won’t mind hearing them. Such people mean it when they say “be honest”; others say “be honest” and only think they mean it; others do not mean it at all.

I am in the last category, although because of that I tend not to ask for opinions! Honesty in the expression of opinions means very little to me. This is because such honesty consists of someone’s fidelity to himself, not to some external reality or moral ideal. In my own case, my opinions are not so important to me that I will knowingly offend others with them; I would not tell someone who loves a given band that I think their music is wretched simply to be “true” –whatever that might mean- to a subjective assessment that exists solely within me.

Said assessment is, in any event, inconsequential. What I think about a band is less important –to me- than the feelings of those who love it; honesty to what I think, therefore, does not outweigh considerations of others except in moral or principled concerns: to thine own self be true; not about thine own self. (This changes the closer one gets with someone, of course: because intimacy means one accepts and is accepted more completely; this is why I am more likely to tell a friend I dislike their favorite movie than a stranger, which at first seems an inversion of friendliness! Perhaps it is also a matter of trust: trust means we believe another is honest; to maintain trust, must one always be honest, even at the expense of the trusting partner?).

Honesty matters mainly when it requires something difficult from us: that we speak truthfully about what we’ve done when we’d rather not, that we admit to faults we’d rather conceal, or when it compels us to hew to promises we’ve made. The sort of honesty we use to justify our expressed, possibly hurtful judgments is not moral, despite the protestations of practitioners of so-called Radical Honesty. It is often said that life without a filter is freeing, but for whom? For the one who has decided the stress of being polite, of tailoring his expressions to account for the sensitivities of others in a world of walking wounded, is too great a burden!

But it is not a burden; like most forms of compassion, it is a gift. It is an admission that our own thoughts, opinions, and feelings are not universally true or even very important; they are elements of our meager and accidental internal world, which exists in a vastly larger social context; and in that context, we might reasonably decide that not everyone needs to know what we think all the time, especially if it concerns a subject about which they’re sensitive.

Notes: I also think you shouldn’t ask someone’s opinion unless you want their opinion fully and freely, so whenever the situation described above occurs and a fight erupts, I am on the side of the one so-queried, not the one who wants the world to censor itself even when asked what it thinks. This means that I am a hypocrite, which isn’t news. It also means that I only halfway believe anything I say or write, which is also not news. Last, I should add that nothing like this has happened with Abs; this is not autobiographical.

I really enjoy it when Mills writes things like this.