Bullshit and Philosophy Read online

  Consider what can retrospectively be seen as a classic statement of political bullshitting provided by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four’s account of Winston’s work in the Ministry of Truth:

  Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record.

  All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.... Even the written instruction which Winston received . . . never stated or implied that an act of forgery was to be committed: always the reference was slips, errors, misprints or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of accuracy. But actually he thought . . . it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie.144

  What’s of particular interest here is how the routinized production of falsehood converts what might have started out as lying into bullshitting: the truth becomes essentially forgotten in the process of telling whatever story is told to serve the regime’s purposes. To see this, we should realize that Winston might actually insert a truth in one of his daily corrections to the historical record of The Times. But it isn’t there because it’s true, or believed to be false, and the institutionalized rewriting of history is deliberately undermining the capacity—and, crucially, the willingness—to distinguish between the true and false. (The Party aims to destroy the very distinction, of course.)

  As Orwell’s satire suggests, totalitarianism provides the most obvious examples of ideologies and regimes attempting to embed themselves not simply in a web of lies—because that implies the truth remains, in its conscious concealment, as a potentially refuting presence in their midst—but in a morass of bullshit, where the premium is on adherence to their tropes and to the tales they tell to legitimate themselves and their actions, removing any notion that there could be a genuine realm of facts underneath by which the veracity of what are forwarded as truth-claims could actually be tested. The ‘interests of the working class’, the ‘manifest destiny of the superior race’, the ‘wise guidance’ of the party, or ‘the great leader’, when intoned often enough as mantras, become criterial of ‘reality’, manipulable to explain away anything and insulated from the very conceptual possibility of facts which would expose their bankruptcy. (I think it is implausible, for example, to think that racists are typically liars in the Frankfurtian sense. They dogmatically persist in their views, impervious to, and hence essentially uninterested to confront, the facts which could undermine their beliefs.145) Hence, when Vàclav Havel famously campaigned, in Communist Czechoslovakia, to “live in truth” he is actually best understood as calling for a political order which did not require one to live in this kind of political bullshit. Such totalitarianism aims at bullshit and many of its hapless victims become disposed to reproduce it even as they mistakenly think themselves already to be ‘living in truth.’ 146

  Without implying any degree of moral equivalence between them and totalitarianism, I claim that an analogous disengagement with the truth is evident in the belief-systems and the practices of liberal democracies and their governments. It is no less pertinent for its tragic obviousness to cite the Bush Administration’s notorious “weapons-of-mass-destruction” story told to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003 as a prime example of such bullshit.

  When we consider its demonstrably false elements, we might reasonably conclude that some outright lies were indeed told in the construction of that case. But I doubt that Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, and their many vocal lieutenants and supporters were always consciously lying. Rather, they manifested a quintessentially bullshitting disconnection to, and disinterest in, the truth, or in the evidence to the contrary of their intentions that pointed to truths about WMDs in Iraq which they wished to resist. And when the facts to the contrary became too visible to ignore, the bullshitting shifted tack to suggest other supposed justifications were also in place all along: ‘humanitarian intervention’, ‘democratisation’ and suggestions, made both directly and indirectly, of Saddam Hussein’s complicity in the 9/11 attacks.

  These examples of ordure may have issued from aim-bullshitters who consciously sought to deflect concerns for the truth (for example: the ‘humanitarian’ justification may not be a lie as such, but the post-war insistence on its strength as a justification may be intended to divert attention away from the fact of the failure of the original official justification: a post hoc ‘rejustifica-tion’). But there’s no reason to think that such tales were not or could not also be spun with the sincerity of those who were merely disposition-bullshitters.

  The point is that, just as totalitarian mythologies do, the story took on a life of its own: it had to, insofar as the decision to invade was not something which, for the Bush Administration and its allies, could be allowed to stand or fall on the evidence. What might indeed have started as lie-telling gradually slipped free of reality altogether in a way that lying doesn’t. What mattered was that, from the Administration’s perspective, some justification for the invasion had to remain in play; what was actually the case on the ground, so to speak, was not essentially germane. (The same refusal to face relevant facts is evident in its claim that the invasion has not been subsequently disastrous for Iraqi society.147)

  The Myth of the ‘Well-Informed’ Citizen

  At this point, a supporter of the liberal-democratic status quo might object that the Iraq invasion is just a one-off, and not therefore evidence of a systematic propensity to bullshit as is present in totalitarian regimes. But even if they fall well short of totalitarian proportions it is hardly difficult to come up with other examples of such bullshitting on the part of just about every liberal-democratic government. (The partisan belief that it is obviously only ‘the other side’ that bullshits is itself bullshit.) This is evidence that can be adduced in support of a claim that liberal democracy as a form of political order functions in a way that disposes those in, and around, power to bullshit—and if we rested content with that claim, we might be tempted to conclude that the cynicism thesis is well on the way to vindication. For on this basis one could perhaps plausibly surmise that the reason for such a prevalent disposition to bullshit is that politicians invariably have a lot that they wish to hide. Their dissimulation becomes so routine that they cease to tell lies as they retreat into a self-justificatory fantasy-land of bullshit whose illusions have to be propped up by ever greater piles of the stuff.

  To insist again, Frankfurt-thesis advocates don’t deny that politicians produce lots of strikingly malodorous bullshit. But they would warn against the frequent tendency to be so overcome by its pungency as to fail to discern its other sources. Not only do we have their claim (a): that citizens do their own fair share of (Frankfurt-) bullshitting about politics, but we can also extend the thesis as stated thus far with a further claim (b): that democracy exhibits a tendency to produce other, non-Frankfurt forms of bullshit which act to reinforce the Frankfurt-bullshitting of citizens.

  Substantiating (a) first: it is obvious that not all citizens are political cynics, or are as cynical as they like to think themselves to be. Many of them buy into the bullshit of their politicians in their own ‘understanding’ of the political world and doubtless do their own bit to embellish and propagate it. Indeed, it’s plausible to suggest a rule of thumb that, insofar as the citizens in question know even less about the facts with respect to which politicians are bullshitting, they are therefore more likely to be bullshitting whenever they confidently offer political opinions and evaluations. Now, the key to the Frankfurt thesis is not si
mply to understand why citizens formulate and voice such opinions but also to grasp why they tend to do so with such confidence.

  An explanation for this runs as follows. The political world and the choices that have to be made therein are incredibly complex, very difficult to grasp and negotiate. The idea that even its essentials can be properly understood by anyone lacking a high degree of intellectual ability and trained expertise is frankly absurd. But electoral democracy has to resist acknowledgment of this truth: in both its theory and practice it assumes a degree of political competence on the part of the citizenry—in the ideal of the ‘well-informed’ citizen—that it does not (indeed cannot reasonably be expected) to possess. Citizens are effectively encouraged, indeed they often feel themselves obligated qua citizens, to formulate what often turn out to be incorrect, over-simplified or otherwise flawed views on a whole range of issues without a concern for these failings being properly accommodated in either the mindset or the institutional embodiment of democratic deliberation.

  The electoral need to pander to such views surely accounts for a significant amount of the bullshit spewed forth by politicians. For when they campaign for votes they are forced, consciously or not, to present things in terms that citizens can understand (and of course many of them do not in fact possess much more than their voters in the way of such expertise anyway). 148 Candidates for office have to attempt to pull off a very delicate balancing trick. They have to (a) offer a sufficiently compelling critique of their opponents along with (b) an equally compelling account of what they would do in office instead, all the while (c) saying and (d) doing a host of things to try to co-opt typically dissimilar groups of supporters into what they hope to be a winning coalition, and (e) explaining away whatever actions and statements in their past (no matter how recent or distant) might cause them personal and/or political embarrassment.

  Sometimes they will deal with such difficulties by dodging the crucial issues, for example by pretending that certain concerns are of great importance when in fact, they are not—a strategy which has the effect (intended or otherwise) of deflecting critical attention to those issues which are really important (the ‘politics of distraction’). Or they confront the political world with dogged (sometimes ‘fundamentalist’) adherence to a simplistic set of ideological nostrums and a refusal (again, intended or not) to contemplate the possibility that they might fail to explain that world and orient us satisfactorily in it. And of course the flow of this bullshit is hardly stemmed once election time is over . . .

  Anyone who has actually studied politics—beyond the superficial, more-or-less partisan ephemera reproduced in the media to the more coolly detached, scrupulous and theoretically rigorous writings from academia, say—is fully aware of how simplistic and naive (and, to that degree, deluded) much everyday (‘real-world’149) political discourse tends to be. And the point is that it has to be: not, perhaps, in every respect as actually manifest, but over-simplification is a functional necessity for democracy. Citizens indulge in the same kind of bullshit as politicians when they affirm such over-simplified views, and its metaphorical stench becomes more noxious the more doggedly such views are affirmed in defiant indifference to the facts which would reveal the suppressed complexities.150 As already suggested, even acceptance of the cynicism thesis may sometimes be based on bullshit: most citizens fail properly to pursue the question as to why politicians always seem incapable of delivering their campaign promises, often resting content with the assumption that this must be down to their personal characters rather than being indicative of far more profound systemic problems in the polity. Depressingly, what keeps this whole system going in the wake of such a judgment is invariably more of the same: other campaigners feed on this ‘diagnosis’, promising to be a ‘different sort of politician’, trotting out platitudes on governance designed to accord with the voters’ own ‘plain common sense’—which is in fact usually a highly fragmentary, partial and ill-informed experience of the world, very poorly equipped to deal with political realities. When this leads to what could be called the ‘Governor Schwarzenegger Syndrome’, perhaps this is not too serious: but dangerous demagogues and fundamen-talisms also thrive in such circumstances.

  Yet all of this can hardly be said to be a fair criticism of the citizens in question, if it is wholly unreasonable to expect them all to have the time and competence properly to understand politics. I certainly don’t think that democracy produces a lot of aim-bullshitters amongst the citizenry and I share Cohen’s preference to focus critically on the product—the bullshit—rather than its producers. And even if, on these lines, we agree with Winston Churchill that “the best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter,” we’re not committed to rejecting democracy altogether (We have a reason instead to adopt Churchill’s belief that “democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.”) But we shouldn’t shy away from the observation that some of democracy’s problems arise from the bullshitting misapprehensions of political reality that citizens as well as politicians manifest.

  ‘Dumbing-Up’: Some Distortions of Democratic Equality

  All of this is not to say that we cannot increase current levels of knowledge and critical appreciation of political realities and arguments among the citizenry as a whole (although the present argument would be hoist by its own petard if it thought this partial amelioration was an easy thing to achieve). But now we must confront claim (b)’s deepening of the Frankfurt thesis, for this proposes that there are certain obstacles in democratic culture even to modest proposals for improvement which again are difficult to own up to in a democracy.

  Although one of modernity’s defining moments was the conversion of ‘democracy’ from ‘bad’ to ‘good’ thing, many defenders of democracy in modern times have nevertheless peddled highly elitist conceptions of who is actually fit substantially to engage in politics: for them, democracy works only if an elite political class is largely left alone to rule, barring the occasional election to keep them in check. But apart from any other reservation we might have about this as an ideal, such ‘democratic elitism’ is clearly prone to internal tensions: how can any such elitism be reconciled with the principle of equal respect for citizens, on which democracy is founded? The problem that claim (b) draws our attention to, however, is that this tension has in recent times been ‘resolved’ in ways that are detrimental to the very modest kind of purely intellectual elitism needed in the fight against bullshit.

  To explain: elitists have traditionally feared that increasing the voice of the ordinary citizens in politics, and culture more widely, would inevitably lead to a dumbing-down in those spheres, such is the mediocrity of the latter’s competence and tastes. There has been a powerful reaction against this view in the name of democratic equality, but one form it has taken has challenged the very idea of the objective standards invoked to distinguish, for example, good and bad, right and wrong, or sophisticated and mediocre, beliefs and judgments. ‘Equal respect’ leads to the relativist game of ‘I’m valid, you’re valid: we’re all entitled to our opinions’, wherein having ‘an equal right to express an opinion’ becomes conflated with the claim of ‘equal validity of whatever opinion is expressed’ (where ‘validity’ means ‘equal intellectual merit’).151 And no matter what nonsense this may legitimate, the anti-elitist aim is to raise everyone’s view to some level of substantive equal worth: it is, in effect, a dumbing-up.

  Such vulgar relativism is famously easy to dispatch in the fabled Philosophy 101 course and, perhaps more pertinently, those who think that they affirm it consistently can very often be shown not to do so absolutely. Few such putative relativists, when pushed on the matter, are happy to play the equal-validity game with the serial murderer’s, rapist’s, or child-molester’s conceptions of the good life. Some will readily embrace the idea that there are clear objective standards of evaluation for performance and achievement in sport and a
rt, say, without thinking that those who objectively achieve less are thereby denied equality of respect as people. But many do not apply this idea to the evaluation of specifically political views. In a putatively democratic way—which actually leaves out the crucial deliberative element of democratic discourse—it seems to be enough for opinions to be aired and left to stand as they are. From such a perspective, any argument about one’s views against those of others—as anything more constructive than mere ‘sounding off’—is pointless: nothing is bullshit (or, if something is, then everything is).152

  Frankfurt-bullshit has a natural bedfellow in relativism and, to remove it from political discourse, we must retrieve the democratic ideal of equal respect from the relativist clutch that has taken such a strong hold on it.

  Those who prefer to think of the situation in political culture as a dumbing-down might describe such relativism as an obvious product of ignorance: overwhelmed and embarrassed by the complexities of politics, perhaps jealous of those few who seem more capable of getting to grips with them, the ordinary citizen—encouraged by a distorted reading of what democratic equality implies—reacts by stubbornly refusing the possibility of such qualitative distinctions in political knowledge. But this quasi-Nietzschean story of democratic ressentiment, of ‘timid little people’ dragging us all down to some lowly, facile common cultural denominator, fits rather poorly with the dumbed-up self-images of the age. I agree with Laura Penny’s belief that we live in “an era of unprecedented bullshit production” (Your Call Is Important to Us, p. 1). And a significant amount of it is, I submit, the result not of a timid but an assertive, indeed aggressive, demand of equal validity in the discourse of multifarious spheres in social life.