Most people are not habitual liars. Yet most of us do want lies told on our behalf by a government charged with protecting us. Paul Griffiths’ recent book Lying shows just how unique St. Augustine is among Christian thinkers for his absolute prohibition of the lie—most ethicists want some wiggle room. Augustine even argues (with eerie premonition) against the white lie to mislead the secret police pounding on the door in the dead of night and to protect the refugees hiding inside. Griffiths defends Augustine with the provocative argument that one should not lie to stave off the nuclear annihilation of millions.

The CIA has long been responsible for lying in defense of millions. Robert DeNiro’s The Good Shepherd narrates the founding of CIA. The film seeks to show the harm that lies can inflict on one family—that of composite historical character Edward Wilson (Matt Damon). Wilson enters CIA not out of any obvious patriotism, and certainly not for James Bond’s gizmos and girls, but almost out of compulsion. His father lied, he lies, his son will lie. Spouses, friends, colleagues, teachers, mentors, old flames accidentally bumped-into, secretaries, presidents, and strangers all lie too. After 2 hours and 40 minutes the audience is ready to guess that any sympathetic character introduced into the film will turn out to be another deceiver.

The film succeeds in taking the sheen off of espionage. It does so by telling a mistruth itself. Surely even spies can be loyal husbands, good fathers, decent neighbors, half-decent friends—as long as talk steers clear of work. If we lived in a world where everyone lied all the time, especially those closest to us, the truth would be clear 100% of the time, ironically enough, just flip over whatever you’re told. Here DeNiro’s omniscient camera unveils the lies, one by one, often with a zinger told by Damon—he asks one outted Soviet double agent to play the violin so that “just once I could hear something true from you.” A more terrifying world might be the one we live in: here the lie is more difficult to distinguish from the truth, even or especially by the one speaking it.

The film’s executive producer is Francis Ford Coppola, and DeNiro is clearly trying to channel the master of the mafia movie with his dark lighting, darker secrets, and hints of Catholic redemption just barely missed. Every whispered conversation between spooks takes place in a liturgical setting of some sort (and, ironically, only opposing spies ever tell the truth to one another in the film). Wilson pauses as he sees for the first time CIA’s motto engraved in marble in its new lobby building: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” His boss (and former frat house nemesis) recounts being asked by a politician why CIA receives no definite article. “You don’t put a ‘the’ in front of God, do you?” The very title is not Christological enough. Jesus may be the good shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep, but Wilson makes the more difficult sacrifice—he lays down his wife and son for us.

Yet this may be the movie’s singular failing. It feels as though if all spies simply took up vows of celibacy then spycraft would be safe: no wives to betray, no secret trysts during which to be photographed, no overgrown sons seeking daddy’s approval. If only we had domestic harmony, or at least mandatory abstinence for government employees, we wouldn’t need spies or lies.

The bigger scandal may be that spoken by a tortured Soviet dissident and embodied in this movie: America needs Russia to appear terrifying, when it is really rusty and imbecilic, hardly worth the empire-wide emergency alert. We are fascinated with spying, but spying is not actually worth our fascination. It is more akin to the blahs that accompany Damon’s long, slouched marches to work amid myriad other fedora-covered gray suits in 1960’s Washington. General Sullivan, CIA’s visionary (played by DeNiro) tells Wilson his agency will be “the real thing, not fraternity boys playing with their pricks.” But spycraft looks a lot like Wilson’s Yale days in Skull & Bones—bad sex, silly rituals, and bourgeois self-importance and decadence. One character accuses Wilson and CIA: “You guys cause the big wars.” “No, we keep the little wars from becoming big ones.” And look how successful they’ve been at that. When DeNiro’s character describes his vision for CIA he says it should be the wartime Office of Strategic Services made permanent—you can’t go start a spy service only after wars begin. Government-led permanent states of emergency were not born on 9/11.

How then do we—the church not America now—always tell the truth? With lots of forgiveness, as Augustine and Griffiths make clear. With refusal of those who patronizingly maintain they must defend us with lies even as we would rather they not. And with a darker view of humanity than that offered even in this very dark movie: our lies are usually subtly concealed in half or even almost-whole truths. Lies, like all evil, are parasitic on the truth, for truth can exist without a lie, but not vice-versa. The lies we tell and licitly approve are terrible not because they are unavoidable, but because telling the truth is possible.

I recently visited the Spy Museum in Washington DC, and was disappointed. ‘Look how small spy cameras were in the 50’s!’ doesn’t carry quite the same punch when every visitor is carrying one smaller on their camera-phone. The costumes on display were not on par with the average high school theater company. One display described an American soldier who sold secrets to Iraq during the first Gulf War. He made $1400. The museum told an Augustinian truth it didn’t mean to with its junk, tales of incompetence, and stories of pathetically small payoffs: spycraft, like all evil, is ridiculous, rather than fascinating.

8 July 2007