SECRETS: Is it right to keep them?
The man who can keep a secret may be wise, but he is not half as wise as the man with no secrets to keep.
E.W. Howe
Some time ago a friend of mine posed an interesting question. She wondered how much information you should give your children about your life. ‘That is,’ she added, ‘before they were born.’ Hmm. I supposed that meant there were secrets and whether or not it was wise to reveal them.
As usual, I had to do a quick check with my old chum the Shorter Oxford, to see how it defines a ‘secret.’ It has much to say, running in fact over the page into a total of almost 7 column inches. But I’m sticking with the definition most relevant to this post: Kept from public knowledge or from the knowledge of persons specified.
Why do we need secrets? Can life be an open book? Or are there always things in our lives that we feel unable to speak about? What drives us to keep secrets? Some secrets, after all, can result in delight. The unexpected party, or gift, planned in great secrecy to give someone – hopefully – a very happy surprise! But short of the benevolent variety, maybe secrets are a dubious thing. Especially as they’re very often accompanied by the word ‘guilty’.
Politicians, Businessmen, Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Scientists, Doctors, Priests all hold secrets. Governments world-wide regularly spy on one another. Manufacturers keep recipes or formulae from their competitors. Arms are bought and sold amid great stealth. Medical research on the verge of a breakthrough guards its secrets with draconian intensity. The developers of Artificial Intelligence almost certainly hold secrets beneath the information openly disseminated. Priests, and doctors too, keep secrets. Sometimes for better and sometimes, in cases of abuse or neglect, for worse. In the global, international sense, the world considers secrets to be a necessity.
Is this provoked by that old enemy of the human race, namely fear? Revealing a secret might result in loss. Money, prestige, respect, power, influence – at least those are some of the possible effects that cause us to be afraid. I began to wonder if the world could ever be run without secrets. I suspect that it cannot, at least at the present level of our human development.
Two thousand years ago, it was said, (Luke12:3) ‘There is nothing covered up that will not be uncovered, nothing hidden that will not be made known. You may take it then, that everything you have said in the dark will be heard in broad daylight and what you have whispered behind closed doors will be shouted from the house-tops.’ When I first read this passage, years ago, it struck me as being one of the most clear-sighted, plain-speaking statements you could wish for on the cost of secrets.
Since my personal utopia of an open, fear-free world looks a tad distant, what of closer relationships? To return to my friend’s thought-provoking question and doing a bit of further self-examination, I’ve reached the following conclusions. We all have secrets of some sort – maybe very innocent ones, others less innocent perhaps. But what is attached to them, I suspect, is a sense of shame or embarrassment should they indeed be ‘shouted from the house-tops.’ To say nothing of the respect we might lose from our friends and family. Or, indeed the possible disgrace we might cause them.
However, what I have learned in this regard is that if you can tell your worst secret to one understanding, wise, non-judgemental friend, it will remove the sting. Assuming, of course, it doesn’t actually involve a crime so serious your poor friend doesn’t know whether to laugh, cry or head for the nearest police station.
It’s impossible to break free of all secrecy in the outside world. Politics, commerce, the armed forces, medicine, technology – they all have secrets which may be both unhelpful and unwise to reveal. But that said, all organisations are made up of individuals. So perhaps if each one of us can free up our inner space from the so-called ‘guilty’ secrets, the better our chances of having an entire world like that.
When all is said and done, it might be worth remembering, as seventeenth century dramatist Racine put it, ‘There are no secrets that time does not reveal!’ Perhaps that’s the key – all may be revealed when it can no longer cause harm.