Reading the Times today, I came across a
non-promotion-promotion of a slim volume from Princeton University Press reprinting the philosopher Harry Frankfurt's essay
"On Bullshit". I'd read the essay perhaps a decade ago, and enjoyed it, but didn't think much about it until early this afternoon. Rereading the essay today, I was struck by how perfectly it characterizes today's mainstream political culture. For example, the current discussion on Social Security "reform" that's taking place in the MSM is a perfect example of bullshit.
On the flip, I'll have a longish preamble explaining what Frankfurt means by "bullshit", followed by some remarks on how well the word describes much mainstream political discourse.
Warning: I'll be using the word "bullshit" a lot in these remarks. It's being used in a technical sense to be explained, not in the provocative sense we all understand as masters of English idiom.
Frankfurt's essay is about what bullshit is. Bullshit, as commonly understood, is in the same broad category as lies, humbug, putting on airs, and distortion--that is, in the broad category of misrepresentation. For Frankfurt, bullshit is a different specimen from lying, in that lying presupposes the value of truth: lying values the truth in its attempt to prevent the audience from knowing it. Bullshit, by contrast, is characterized by lack of concern for truth. When one bullshits, one doesn't really care about what the truth is: what one cares about is that one get away with whatever it is one wants to get away with by uttering bullshit. That is, bullshitting is orthogonal to honesty. As Frankfurt puts it,
[T]he essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony. In order to appreciate this distinction, one must recognize that a fake or a phony need not be in any respect (apart from authenticity itself) inferior to the real thing. What is not genuine need not also be defective in some other way. It may be, after all, an exact copy. What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made. This points to a similar and fundamental aspect of the essential nature of bullshit: although it is produced without concern with the truth, it need not be false. The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong.
Now, if this passage makes you think of something a politician said recently, or an ad you saw on television, you may be on the same trail as I.
One might think that the presence of "shit" in "bullshit" precludes the careful construction of bullshit--it is something extruded, not crafted. But this would be a mistake, as Frankfurt points out:
The realms of advertising and of public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept. And in these realms there are exquisitely sophisticated craftsmen who -- with the help of advanced and demanding techniques of market research, of public opinion polling, of psychological testing, and so forth -- dedicate themselves tirelessly to getting every word and image they produce exactly right.
Even so, there is a kind of carelessness in bullshitting, which makes the word "shit" appropriate. According to Frankfurt, this carelessness is simply a lack of concern for the truth:
It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.
We have a more polite, erudite word for this:
manipulation. The bullshitter is using language and imagery in order to manipulate us, not in order to make us see the world as it seems to the bullshitter, or simply in order to prevent us from seeing the world as it really is.
Now that my ambling preamble is done, why all this blather about bullshit? Because I see mainstream political discourse--especially as conducted on television and in the mainstream press--as being almost completely characterized by bullshit. Consider any of the following issues, as presented and discussed in the MSM: Social Security "reform"; the plight of the Democratic Party as it selects Howard Dean to be head of the DNC; the meaning of the elections in Iraq; the Ward Churchill kerfuffle. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, and bullshit.
The links above were taken more or less at random, although the Cokie Roberts radio piece was especially appropriate. Exercize for the reader: figure out how each of these examples qualify as attempts at bullshit. (The bullshitter isn't necessarily the author or speaker. The bullshit needn't have any particular political leaning; and there may well be multiple conflicting attempts at bullshit in the same piece.)
This isn't to say that it's mainly the journalists who are responsible for this bullshit; most of it comes from the current administration, or, as in the case of Ward Churchill, from a variety of conservative and progressive interests. But the danger with bullshit being the lingua franca in mainstream discourse is that otherwise intelligent people will believe it, at least in broad outlines. (They're especially susceptible if their career success depends on being able to work with powerful and influential purveyors of bullshit.) And if you believe in bullshit, while you're not a bullshitter yourself, you're still responsible for purveying bullshit.
The upshot is that, so long as we believe the bullshit, we're barred from talking and thinking about issues with the kind of honesty and reflection required for understanding them properly. The bullshit instances given above can be described as attempts to distract us from issues of real importance that demand careful thought. Instead of thinking clearly about why the Bush administration wants to destroy Social Security and replace it with yet another disguised subsidy for his base, we're invited to gaze upon the image of honest folks from both sides of the issue, working to hammer out a "compromise" that studiously avoids the facts; instead of thinking clearly about what Dean's election to the head of the DNC means for the Democratic Party, we're invited to look at yet another misleading red-blue map and buy into the absurd notion that Democrats are "out of touch with mainstream values," whatever that's supposed to mean. Instead of thinking carefully about whether elections in Iraq were a good idea, or in what ways the US military occupation is a positive or negative force there, we're invited to think abstractly about the damage withdrawing would do to "America's interests and ideals", as if what's right must always coincide with any particular nation's interests and ideals, assuming that this talk of American interests and ideals isn't itself bullshit. And instead of thinking clearly about whatever role of American policies and international behavior may have played in causing the 9/11 attacks, and what responsibility we as US citizens may have for the consequences of such policies and behavior, we're invited to witness the image of a raving, long-haired, hypocritical, out-of-the-mainstream lefty, as well as the image of Eichmannesque functionaries having their power lunches while brown-skinned babies die of malnutrition at their feet.
So the moral of this too-long story is: don't just watch for lies. In a way, lies are easy to counter. Watch instead for bullshit: for the attempt to manipulate that often, but not always, involves lies. Don't merely ask: Is this true? but also, Who benefits from this way of characterizing the issue, and how? What am I supposed to think (or not think about) by reading/hearing this? And, How would this issue be described by an intelligent, literate person from Mars who simply wanted to know the truth?