Bullshit and Philosophy Read online

  So, I do not think that free riding is the origin of bullshit genres—since it is counter-productive. Much more likely, it seems to me, is the fact that the letter of reference has not multiple audiences but multiple interested parties. I need to be able to say with plausibility to the student that I have written him a good letter, to the departments that receive the letter that I have written them something that accurately expresses (not, reports) the strengths and weaknesses of the candidate, and to myself, that I have not lied or been dishonest (in any way that goes beyond the dishonesty of the genre itself). My ability to say these things with a plausible modicum of truth requires just the right amount of bullshit in the letter. Bullshit often arises in this way: I wish to recruit my colleagues to a cause, so I appeal to their values in arguing for the cause; thus, I offer an argument I myself do not believe or endorse. I have to craft this just right, however, so that I don’t lose, say, my colleagues who distrust the Dean when appealing to those who do trust him. The better I can do this, the more well-honed is the performative nature of argument. I have learned to use arguments I neither endorse nor believe to recruit people into doing what I want to happen for other reasons entirely. I have become a highly effective bullshitter—a politician, a courtier.

  Thus, given the nature of the act and to whom that act is responsible, the fate of reference letter writing to be a bullshit genre is sealed—and our imagined world of honest letters of reference disappears. The details of how bullshit will be deployed are still open. British letters are rhetorically less inflated than American letters. They still strongly smell of bullshit, however, although of a more genteel and institution-based variety. (The candidate is less praised than her American counterpart; but, her college at Oxbridge, good heavens, has been pumping out intellectual deities for centuries.) Moreover, the enormity of the American system and its diffuseness mean that letter readers often do not know the letter writers and the bullshit quota goes up the more personal trust goes down. (If I know Professor X and know that he knows me and we have a decent relationship, I can write in a more honest tone, relying on his ability to read my intent.)

  The World as Will to Bullshit

  So, in this our world, bullshit is unavoidable. So far that seems a depressing conclusion. But the most depressing aspect is yet to come. There is bullshit in the world, but it does not yet get to the core of what bothers so many today—the sense that bullshit is increasing, that a sort of smug dishonesty is overtaking everything, even where it is not needed.

  One of my local video stores posts, prominently, the following customer service guarantee:61

  Each of us at Ballbreakers is empowered, authorized, and committed to serving you.

  The service there is not notably better than anywhere else in retail. If one has a complaint, moreover, the guarantee does not cause the staff to take you very seriously and seek to remedy the situation. No, the guarantee serves for them as evidence that they have already done all that could reasonably be expected and that you, the customer, must be a crank.

  Another prominent example in the lives of many of the authors in this book is the recent rise of the university “mission statement” and “academic plan.” Universities have existed for hundreds and hundreds of years, but within the past twenty or so, their administrators have come to feel that someone (who?) needs to know better what their universities are trying to do, hence, the university mission statement. Mission statements cannot be honest: “We aim to provide a good postsecondary education subject to the constraints under which we operate” just doesn’t inspire. So, instead, we have hundreds of universities that “aim to be one of the leading universities in the world” or to be “world-class.” Here, for example, is the mission statement of my employer, The University of British Columbia62:

  UBC’S VISION FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

  The University of British Columbia, aspiring to be one of the world’s best universities, will prepare students to become exceptional global citizens, promote the values of a civil and sustainable society, and conduct outstanding research to serve the people of British Columbia, Canada, and the world.

  OUR MISSION

  The University of British Columbia will provide its students, faculty, and staff with the best possible resources and conditions for learning and research, and create a working environment dedicated to excellence, equity, and mutual respect. It will cooperate with government, business, industry, and the professions, as well as with other educational institutions and the general community, to discover, disseminate, and apply new knowledge, prepare its students for fulfilling careers, and improve the quality of life through leading-edge research.

  The graduates of UBC will have developed strong analytical, problem-solving and critical thinking abilities; they will have excellent research and communication skills; they will be knowledgeable, flexible, and innovative. As responsible members of society, the graduates of UBC will value diversity, work with and for their communities, and be agents for positive change. They will acknowledge their obligations as global citizens, and strive to secure a sustainable and equitable future for all.

  Everyone knows that very few universities can be “one of the world’s best”63; everyone knows therefore that these missions are, by and large, impossible and often, as in the case of UBC’s, just silly. More importantly, because everyone knows that, everyone knows that these are not really the missions of the universities at all. But every year huge pots of money go into carefully crafting more and more bullshit mission statements.

  I have written to administrators of my home institution, objecting to some things in the academic plans. My missives look like this: “You say that a strong faculty is the university’s chief asset and that, thus, you are committed to making the working conditions as good as they must be to attract and retain a strong faculty. Yet, you started knocking down the neighboring wing of my building in January—right at the beginning of our second term—and it is, in consequence, almost impossible for me to work in my office. Surely, what you say about a strong faculty is true but your actions are not in accord with your pledge.” The response, should there be one, is invariably puzzled. The administrator, much like our video store employees noted above, seems to think that the commitment to doing what is best for the faculty, having been made, is automatically fulfilled. The response has the form: “We have made that pledge. Therefore, we are doing everything we can to retain a strong faculty. You must be a crank and a prima donna.” The desire to make me see my own crankiness is so ingrained that almost invariably these responses go out of their way to say that “all other feedback received on this matter has been positive.” That I know that, too, to be false (since I know my colleagues well enough to know I am not alone) is again not to the point. Increasingly, it is hard for me to figure what the point really is.

  The video store and the university administration point to two phenomena. The first is the explosion of bullshit genres. University missions and customer service commitments have not been and need not be matters of bullshit; yet, now, increasingly they are. Even more disturbing than this explosion of bullshit is the phenomenon of self-fulfilling bullshit: “We have treated you well in the very act of pledging to treat you well; now, piss off.” This last is an odd sort of new-fangled performative bullshit. Its mark is a commitment that is taken to be fulfilled simply in virtue of its having been made.64

  Consider the video store employee who acts as if he has fulfilled his commitment to treating you with respect because it says on the prominently-displayed pledge that he will treat you with respect. If he genuinely believes this, then he does not understand that the conditions under which commitments are undertaken are different from those under which they are fulfilled. A commitment involves conditions both for its proper issuance and for its fulfillment, but these are (except in a few self-referential cases like “I hereby promise to make a promise”) distinct. You have not treated me well by saying that you will. You have placed yourself under an obligati
on to treat me well, which obligation you might not otherwise have had. I do not have complete say over whether that obligation has been fulfilled, but my sense that it has not is, on the face of it, evidence that it has not been. Moreover, no one whose commitment to treat me well is genuine will cite the fact that they pledged to treat me well as evidence that they have.

  Performative bullshit has the form of a commitment, but it is not a real commitment. There are two options, however, regarding its dishonesty. In the first case, the person performing bullshit might genuinely believe that she is making a real commitment. I am not certain that this ever happens. The second case, so it seems to me, is thus universal or nearly so. In this case, the person knows he has not really made the commitment but acts as if it is in effect in order to make it impossible to get anywhere. Thus, the video store employee does not really believe that he has treated you well because he has pledged to do so. However, if he takes his good treatment of you to have been discharged in the pledge to be good to you, then there is no place from which you can issue a complaint that he need take seriously. If a university administrator acts as if pledging to do everything it takes to retain her faculty is itself doing everything that it takes, then no faculty member may properly complain to her about mistreatment. Mistreatment continues as before, but the ground has shifted so that it becomes illegitimate to claim mistreatment.

  Performative bullshit is the source of much of the sense many of us have that the world is making us crazy. Whereas a public performance of a genuine commitment would precisely make it easier to demand that it be fulfilled, the pseudo-commitment of performative bullshit removes the ground for that demand. And the realm of performative bullshit goes well beyond commitments of various sorts.65 As applied to arguments, performative bullshit directs that an argument be taken as a good argument by virtue of having been offered as a good argument.

  Thus, if George W. Bush argues on the basis of fabricated intelligence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and, thus, that the USA has to go to war against Iraq, he attempts to defuse any objections to the argument simply by pointing out that the argument was offered as a good argument.66 If it is discovered that the intelligence was false, this does not touch the argument, performed as bullshit, which remains good because it was the proffered reason. For those for whom it is impossible to maintain that a false reason is a good reason, another bullshit reason can be fabricated (defeating Al-Qaeda, expanding freedom and democracy—take your pick). The entire sequence of reasons, whose truth does not matter and whose connection to whether the USA should go to war does not matter, has caused the deaths of countless people and destabilized the entire region. It has, moreover, further damaged the whole business of honestly and sincerely offering and demanding reasons for political action. True reasons might be able to contend with faulty reasons, but in a world of performative bullshit, all bets are off. The sincere person ends up diligently sifting through arguments that were never meant to be taken seriously in the first place.

  We live in a world in which arguments are proffered which not only do not present the genuine reasons an action was undertaken but also deny the very existence of genuineness in the realm of reasons. We live in a world in which commitments are publicly made not only without any intention to fulfill them but also with the intention that the public issuance of them will prevent anyone from claiming that they were not fulfilled. In such a world, sincerity is not even possible. Indeed, irony in the strict dramatic sense is not possible, for, having become the spectators in the drama of our own lives, the emptiness of our own gestures is clear to us. Even cynicism, since it posits ulterior motives, is not possible—there are only pseudo-motives, lacking even sincere self-interest.

  Overcoming Overwhelming Bullshit

  In a bullshit world, no one succeeds like the bullshitter. I mean the person whose very being is constituted from bullshit. There are such people. Consider the administrator whose whole job is to craft and then endorse the bullshit mission statement for a university. Whatever the university does, it does. But then someone adds the imprimatur of The Mission, which says of what was done that it was done so that the university will be “world class.” The whole professional being of this person is to add the bullshit that serves as the locus of value of the acts of the university. Absent the bullshit, this person would have no role. The bullshit being present, this person creates our contemporary replacement for genuine value, the pseudo-value that inheres in actions that must, constitutively, have value simply for having been done. This person does not hide what she really wishes to do beneath the smokescreen of the mission; there are simply actions and then the ritual claim that they were done for the mission.

  Our problem is not that a bullshit world is unstable, but precisely that it is inherently stable. If every employee-customer interaction is an instance of good customer relations because the bullshit pledge of customer satisfaction proclaims it so, then disrupting this situation is very difficult. Customers, who began only by asking for something more from the person who is “helping” them, come to be seen as subject to “rage,” and this provides one more opportunity to serve the customer by not serving her.

  Suppose, however, you are not happy about living in a bullshit world. Are there any remedies? If sincerity has been drained out of a situation, can it be put back in? There is one strategy in the field that seems to be of some consequence: flat-out, self-evident bullshit that outperforms its covert competitors. This is the Jon Stewart gambit: We will offer a news show that clearly is made-up and that yet does a better job of presenting the news than most of its alternative “serious” sources. Here bullshit comes full circle: By self-consciously flouting the conventions of truth-telling and making it clear that he does not care about the truth—and yet doing a better job at revealing that truth, Stewart reminds us what those conventions were for and reveals something about how they’ve been perverted. Bullshitters in covering themselves with faux virtue are notable for their lack of humor. In a bullshit world, humor becomes the sincerest form of unconcern for the truth, the only form of concern for the truth still available.

  But, what if bullshit or comedy are for you an insufficiently inspiring pair of alternatives. Suppose you would like more options than the insincere sincerity of Fox News and the sincere insincerity of The Daily Show. I can think only of one option. Consider the university mission statement and imagine what it would be like to take the task of writing one seriously. Imagine you genuinely believe that in light of the current world situation the mission of higher education needs to be rethought. You might have questions such as these in mind: Is it possible to export democracy to parts of the world in which fundamental religious beliefs preclude the possibility that, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, “governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”? Or, given that the principles of higher education have derived, since the eighteenth century, from Enlightenment ideals, can we either recover Enlightenment ideals we can endorse or reorient higher education in a post-Enlightenment world?

  Crafted with such questions in mind, a mission statement would not look like a corporate pledge to maximize profits or a sports team’s pledge to win a championship. It would seriously have to enunciate a new cultural mission for higher education and seek to make that mission both palatable and possible to our citizens. If we cannot sincerely endorse currently culturally available values, then we must fundamentally rethink those values. If we lack the courage or the ability to do that, then all we are left with, and all we deserve, is bullshit.67

  7

  The Importance of Being Earnest: A Pragmatic Approach to Bullshitting

  CORNELIS DE WAAL

  One of the tasks Frankfurt sets himself in On Bullshit is to sketch, as he phrases it, “the structure of [bullshit’s] concept” (p. 2). Frankfurt’s approach is largely that of an ordinary-language analysis of what people are trying to say—or do—when they use the word. I ag
ree with Frankfurt when he says that ‘bullshit’ is a generic term of abuse that is applied to a very vague and open-ended range of epistemic phenomena, but I aim to explore, further than does Frankfurt, that most interesting aspect of bullshit: the intention with which it is created. This is a paper on bullshitting rather than bullshit.

  To get a better grip on bullshitting I will compare it with situations where people are genuinely interested in figuring out how things really are, and situate it among other epistemic ventures that are illicit or unproductive. Part of the reason behind the prevalence of bullshitting and the ease with which it is accepted is a lack of confidence that genuine inquiry is worth pursuing, or even possible. Admittedly there are other reasons why people bullshit, such as epistemic sloth or the need to voice one’s opinion on matters one is only marginally familiar with. But contrasting bullshitting with the modest but honest attempt to figure out how things really are seems to me profitable. In brief, what distinguishes bullshitting from genuine inquiry is a difference of intention.