I was recently reading Uncommon Law, AP Herbert's book of spoof law reports first published in 1935, and it made me wonder whether ordinary, decent, middle-class people are more or less honest than they used to be. To cut a long story short: yes and no.
Even today, there is still much in Uncommon Law to enjoy, or at least there is if you are a lawyer or interested in the law. It's a mixture of 'law is an ass'-type invented but more or less plausible cases, poking fun at judges and judge-ese, liberal/libertarian fulminations at silly legal restrictions and the occasional clever observation. To give you an idea of the kind of thing, in one case a judge muses whether a marriage contract is unenforceable because it is in effect gambling, given that one never quite really knows what one is getting oneself into when marrying.
But whether that sort of thing is your cup of tea or not, you might want to think about divorce.
One of Herbert's imagined cases is an old barrister doing his last case who has stopped caring about keeping up the pretences involved in 1920s divorces. So he tells the judge that evidence will be given that the husband's ardour for his wife cooled quickly after marriage, but the reality is that the wife wants the divorce and the husband is still keen on her; he says that Mrs So-and-so will give evidence that she had a liaison with the husband, but in fact she's been paid; he says that the wife will ask for alimony but in fact her family are having to pay money to the husband to get him to agree to this charade; and so on and so forth. The barrister says that everyone involved is perfectly decent, but, in effect, they are all going to perjure themselves.
Now of course I knew that this kind of rigmarole was how divorces were conducted under the old law: you see an example in Waugh's A Handful of Dust, perhaps based on his own experiences, and I have vague memories of reading about rooms rented in Brighton, private detectives primed to pounce at the right time and so on, all to ensure that a decent husband was the respondent rather than the petitioner. But it had not previously dawned on me that the parties would go to court, swear on Bibles and straightforwardly lie in the face of His Majesty's judiciary. It may be pearl-clutching on my part, but wasn't this an awful lot of perjury or perverting the course of justice? And does it make it better or worse to think that the judges knew (sometimes? always?) that everyone was making it up and that it was their job, in order to make society (and Society) work, to go along with it?
Herbert's point was that ordinary decent people were forced into these expedients by the restrictive divorce laws of the time. His argument has won the day and divorces can be had nowadays without anyone being required to choose between ruining a decent woman's reputation or committing perjury.
There is, it seems to me, something very positive about that development. A world in which one can consider oneself a fine and upstanding gentleman despite deliberately conspiring to break the law (or perhaps because one is so conspiring) is, other things being equal, not as good in which fine and upstanding people hesitate and quail before misleading the legal authorities. It would not surprise me if an ordinary decent man who considered himself above the law when it came to divorce then came to consider himself above the law on other subjects too. Truthfulness is a habit, at least to some extent, and habits are formed by behaviour.
Even today, I don't think that everyone follows the law all the time - I'm a lawyer! - but the instances in which a decent person can hold their head up high while lying to the courts are pretty few. I can imagine that someone might consider it to be "doing the decent thing" to take points on a driving licence that should properly go to a spouse in order to prevent the loss of that licence. I can also imagine family members concealing crimes even to the extent of barefaced lying to the authorities: perhaps to hush up a repentant teenager's drug use, for example. But even these examples seem to be different from deliberately setting out, with a plan formulated in advance, to mislead the court in order to obtain a desired outcome. So the world has improved, in one respect at least.
On the other hand, there is a big part of our lives that is forcing us the other way: clicking online forms. Forms require us to say that we have read and understood vast screeds of terms and conditions that we have no intention of even looking at, or they ask questions when we know that, if we give the honest answer, we will be taken down a rabbit hole of unnecessary extra steps. What's your view on cookies? Do you have the consent of everyone involved in this booking? How did you hear about us? Have you forgotten your password (maybe ...?)? Once upon a time, someone might be able to say, with a straight face, that they always read the small print; but now no-one does (no-one always does) and yet everyone says that they do.
The whole world of doing business on the internet relies on, to put it at its lowest, a lot of polite fictions. On the one hand, that is not as bad as perjury but, on the other hand, this kind of lying is far more prevalent than divorce was in the 1920s.
"Ah", you might say, "but that doesn't really count. It'sjust online forms - it's just computers". But if AI is anywhere near as successful as both its proponents and its chief opponents suspect, filling in online forms is only going to become a bigger part of our everyday life.
We have trained ourselves to lie to computers. That wasn't so much of a problem when we mostly talked to humans. But it might be when we mostly talk to computers. In fact, once ChatGPT gets any good at humour, I might ask an it to write an AP Herbert-style story with that theme.
