Honesty is not praised much these days. We pay it some lip service, of course, and we tell our children to be honest in their dealings and with their feelings. But many of us would rather have our children be shrewd than honest. We want them to learn how to be suspicious, how to protect themselves, how to ward off fast-talking people and nicely packaged, well-advertised distortions of reality ...

We hesitate to praise honesty too much, or to encourage it at the expense of common sense, or expediency or the pressures of practicality and the "real world." Even experts in interpersonal relations tells us that too much honesty can destroy a relationship. Honesty now looks like a dubious virtue if not an actual vice. It is studied and examined as a stratagem rather than as a hallmark of character.