Connect: Among the essay options on this year's Leaving Certificate English higher paper was the following: "Let's stop all this pretence! Let's tell each other the unvarnished truth for a change!" Students were asked to "write a personal essay in response to the above statement". Fair enough.
The first point - especially since we're dealing in "unvarnished truth" - is that the exclamation marks in both sentences are unnecessary. They're ungrammatical and not really optional. The best advice is to reserve such marks for true exclamations or commands ("Halt!"; "How wonderful!"; "Good God!") and not to attempt to emphasise simple statements by adding them.
When the examiners are adding exclamation marks for emphasis, it's no wonder that teenagers are doing likewise. Perhaps texting, with its multiple abuses of such marks ("Hi Mary!!!!!"), has infected normal prose. Perhaps the language of advertising, constantly striving for emphasis, has also contributed to the glut of overstatement. Perhaps it's sad and fogey-ish to care at all.
Anyway, let's return from gratuitous exclamation marks to the topic. The late John McGahern once said: "Lies are the oil of the social machinery." He was referring to the fact that everyday conversation avoids unvarnished truths. He knew that people couldn't cope without the pretence afforded by platitudes. So, people speak casually about the weather, war, the World Cup . . . whatever.
Determining the "truth" is invariably awkward enough without seeking the "unvarnished truth". "Unvarnished" implies truth in a more natural, more potent, less platitudinous condition. But who could cope with much of that? If everybody were to tell everybody else exactly what they thought of them, society, such as it is, would surely collapse even further.
The maintenance of a social order depends on a degree of pretence. There is, of course, hypocrisy in such pretence but one person's "unvarnished truth" can be wildly different from another's. What passes for "civilisation" - often reduced to "good manners", or, barbarously, even "etiquette" - embodies duplicity. Telling and receiving the "unvarnished truth" is often too distressing for people.
Of course, from time to time, we can all benefit hugely from confronting unvarnished truth. There's a saying that "the truth will hurt you before it sets you free", and that seems wise. But few if any people have the capacity to engage with raw truth constantly. Our psyches - though people differ greatly in their capacities for confrontation - simply couldn't survive too many such encounters.
Then there's the perennial problem of "truth". On Tuesday, Declan Kiberd wrote in this newspaper of Oscar Wilde's quip that "in exams, the foolish ask questions which the wise cannot answer", that Wilde clearly knew "there are no real answers to any questions worth asking". Kiberd is right. There is no "unvarnished truth" to any question worth asking.
Consider attitudes to, for instance, the invasion of Iraq. Most people believe the invasion has been a disaster. But others continue to argue that it's "right". Indeed, at least some supporters of the attack may still believe it was the best course of action. To most people, such a belief could be held only by the deluded, but presumably some are convinced that Bush and Blair behaved wisely.
Where, then, does the "truth", never mind its "unvarnished" variety, lie? We can all be convinced we know the truth of an issue but it's always a truth from a personal perspective. We can amass motivations and results that convince us but ultimately we decide - either with free will or from inescapable conditioning, who knows? - what we believe to be true and what we believe to be false.
In a sense, maybe the existentialists, now out of favour, had it right. They stressed our aloneness. They theorised that regardless of family, children, lovers, friends and colleagues, no matter how loving, caring or nurturing, ultimately we are all born alone and die alone. We're individual creatures from birth to death. Nature and nurture are determining but we are discrete beings.
We're communal creatures too, of course. It's true that every person is different and that every person is the same. Philosophies have been built on this conundrum and so regulating individuals in a society becomes a matter of balance. In excessively "civilised" societies, there is too much hypocrisy, but in excessively uncouth ones there is undue wounding of people's selves.
Thus the "unvarnished truth" has healing properties and destructive ones too. Mind you, the truth is the truth anyway, whether it's varnished or not. In a sense then, along with the gratuitous exclamation marks, the adjective "unvarnished" can be considered unnecessary. "Adjectives are the enemies of nouns," said Voltaire, and it's clear what he was saying.
Still, the essay question was good. It allowed pretence - or Yeats's "polite meaningless words" - to be explored. They have a function, all right. The problems arise when power - especially power pretending to be "authority" - tries to dictate how pretence should be used, inculcating undue deference instead of real respect. That is the truth - varnished or unvarnished - of the matter.