Honesty as a Secondary Virtue

I gotta be careful how I phrase this, because I do sincerely believe in the grave importance of honesty, for I have been around enough salesmen to know how dishonesty can corrode your soul.  Nevertheless, in my years teaching, I've come to realize that honesty is only the beginning, not the end--that it is a secondary virtue perhaps, not a primary.

For example, near every semester I've taught, I've at some point started class by asking off-hand if everyone's done the reading, and inevitably some student blurts out loud, "I didn't, I'm gonna be honesty with ya"--as though that made it better!  I tell my students this, and they protest, "Well, what do you want us to do?  Be dishonest?"  To which I reply, "I want you to do the readings!"

What I've come to realize is that honesty must be married with some other virtue for it to matter--e.g. you can maybe be totally upfront with someone about their flaws or mistakes, be utterly tactless and downright mean, fail to encourage or even recognize their better angels, and then justify your needless cruelty under a veneer of "I'm just keepin' it real" or "I'm brutally honest" or whatever--but that doesn't make it better, either!  It's but a negative honesty, destructive alone, absent anything worthy to redeem it or rebuild atop of it, and your soul is not saved.

Not for nothing do both Paul and Mormon write "If ye have not charity ye are nothing"--all the honesty in the world won't make up for a lack of basic human decency, kindness, and compassion; your moment of truth will be but a Pyrrhic victory, for your "brutal honesty" fails to make the world a better place.

If we sometimes bemoan the thousand petty hypocrisies we must daily commit to keep up our facade of polite society (Mark Twain has a hilarious essay on just that topic), well then, maybe that speaks less to our terminal lack of honesty than it does of our compassion.  Because let's be clear: when we tell someone an ugly outfit looks great on them, we're not sparing their feelings, but ours!  But "keeping it real" is just a flip side of the same coin: for if we take a sadistic glee in telling others they look awful, we're also only telling them for selfish reasons!

But in my experience and observation, people who are genuinely full of love and compassion (rare folks indeed, but they do exist--and it's something you can't fake if you don't have it, but also can't hide it if you do) are actually able to be completely honest, to say "yeah, you look terrible today!" and say it with such love and joviality and real friendship that it's impossible to get mad at them.  Perhaps what our world needs most isn't honesty, but a true love that enables honesty to exist!

Again, I rush to emphasize the dire necessity of honesty--if we lack even base-line honesty, then our world is in a dark place indeed.  When one feels the corrosive acid of dishonesty darken one's soul, a simple act of real honesty can be the first step towards healing one's self.  But honesty still is only the beginning of your journey into the light, not the end.  In your quest to be a decent human being, don't stop at that starting line.