The noble lie: Why countries that lie together, stay together

In some ways, the idea of a nation is a strange thing. You can understand families, tribes, clans, and small villages a bit more easily. It makes sense for a species to look after its kin, and there’s a compelling argument to be made that reciprocal friendships are evolutionarily advantageous in some way. We are a social animal.

A nation, though, takes a bit more explaining. How can you develop a sense of unity and connection between millions of people, hundreds of miles apart? Why do fans hug strangers in a bar when “their” team scores a goal? Why do scores and scores of men march to war to defend places and faces they’ve never seen?

In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with Dan Snow, a historian and founder of the media network History Hit, about just this matter.

The noble lie

Plato hated falsehood. His entire philosophy was built around the idea that all humans should pursue truth. Reason properly, think hard, and you shall banish the shadowy deceptions of the world. So, Plato hated lies — except for one: the “noble lie.”

Plato’s noble lie is a story or a myth that unites a people. In Plato’s Athens, this was the “myth of the metals,” where people were taught that citizens belonged to three different classes: Gold (the rulers), Silver (the army and police), and Bronze (the markets). A nation was like a person: It needed a head, a heart, and a body — so know which one you are, play your role, and do your duty.

Today, we see these “noble lies” everywhere. For example, it might be that “Britain single-handedly saved the world from the Nazis,” or “the Pilgrim Fathers of America were faultless saints,” or “China has always been a homogeneous, happy family.” Then you have the noble lies surrounding nationalist leaders like Napoléon Bonaparte, Simón Bolívar, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, or Oda Nobunaga — all of whom are often remembered as faultless icons who represent everything that’s great about our blessed country. Hands on heart, tears in the eyes — this is who we are.

What do we stand for?

For better or worse, the modern world is much more sensitive to the idea of a “noble lie.” Revisionist history, huge online databases, and an international community of fact-checkers and investigators allow us to challenge what used to be widely accepted. The British are now much more attuned to the complexity of Churchill’s legacy — this was not a squeaky-clean national treasure but a man who had also spearheaded monstrous things. The Americans are much more aware of their colonial heritage and their terrible relationship to slavery. All over the world, people are generally better educated about the nuances in national mythology — we often are taught only one side, and many voices are left unheard entirely.

And so, if we believe Plato, we should expect a kind of dissolution among the citizen body and a disillusionment with the idea of nationhood altogether. Indeed, many commentators have noticed a rise in what Émile Durkheim called anomie — a restless, unhappy disconnectedness.

Recognizing this, many countries worldwide have legalized the teaching of “national values.” In the UK, the law requires every school to actively promote the fundamental British values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance. In Australia, the national Civics and Citizenship curriculum states that students must develop the “values and dispositions” needed to be “active and informed citizens” in a secular democratic nation. In France, it’s been compulsory since 2015 to teach the subject Enseignement moral et civique, which promotes a shared foundation of values — dignity, liberty, equality, solidarity, justice, and tolerance — as the basis for republican citizenship. Of course, none of these countries has unique values. All three overlap almost entirely.

The issue of “national values” does not necessarily resolve the issue. This is what Snow had to say:

“The British values your son is learning about would be totally different even if you go back only 100 years. What British values are we talking about? Bear baiting? Not letting women vote? Conquering big chunks of North America? Like, what British values are you talking about? Enslavement. You know, we get to make our own values.”

The movable unmovable

There is an irreconcilable problem at the heart of all this. We can agree with Plato that we need certain national myths, values, or stories to unite us. We need to accept certain things as non-negotiable. But what Snow is saying is that, especially within a democracy, everything is negotiable. A value like “Britain should rule the world” changes within a generation. Myths like Churchill or the Founding Fathers are cracked open by a single revisionist book.

We’re left wrestling with a sort of doublethink. We have to pretend things like “human rights,” “the rule of law,” or “freedom of speech” are inviolable and unchangeable, while knowing fully well that they are not.