On "On Bullshit"

Harry Frankfurt's essay On Bullshit gets a good press. I'm not sure it deserves it. My theory is that people like it because it's by a real-life philosopher (from Princeton, no less) and yet it uses a naughty word. 

The first quibble I have is that I don't agree with his definition of "bullshit". I think the word just means "rubbish, but on a grand scale": it refers to exaggerated or self-aggrandising nonsense. The man who talks BS is someone who has big plans (that come to nothing) and important friends (who don't exist) - the "bull" indicates bigness.  But I'm happy defer to the lexicographer on this one. I'll get on to the concept that Frankfurt wants to talk about, whatever we decide to call it.

But before we get to his point, Frankfurt talks about "humbug". Well, that is something different again. Humbug is about outward piety combined with inward cynicism. Think of the celebrity who flies in on a private jet to deliver a lecture on global warming. There's nothing wrong with the lecture: it is not untrue or deceitful; it expounds moral virtues that we all agree with (or at least pretend to agree with). The point is that the humbugger doesn't really believe in it. Humbug is a true - or at least socially correct - statement made insincerely. What we are misled about is the nature of the person making the statement, not the contents of the statement. When Scrooge says that Christmas is a "humbug", he is accusing people of being insincere in their expressions of goodwill to all mankind.

We do eventually get to Frankfurt's point, but only by going through an ill-chosen anecdote about Wittgenstein. The anecdote appears, I think, only because Wittgenstein is in it: the reader is supposed to get the feeling that s/he is hanging out with real philosophers while reading this article with the naughty words in. 

I'll give you the anecdote because it is the source of some of the confusion that follows. Brace yourselves.

A woman called Pascal (feeling unwell): “I feel just like a dog that has been run over.” 

Wittgenstein (disgusted or mock-disgusted): “You don’t know what a dog that has been run over feels like.”

If you feel that nothing is to be gained by looking too closely at those words, which seem to involve Wittgenstein trying and failing to tell a joke, then you would be right. But Frankfurt disagrees.

Frankfurt worries away at this story for a bit and we eventually emerge to find that he has identified "mindlessness" as the centre of his concern. Let me quote him:

"It is for this mindlessness that Pascal’s Wittgenstein chides her. What disgusts him is that Pascal is not even concerned whether her statement is correct. There is every likelihood, of course, that she says what she does only in a somewhat clumsy effort to speak colorfully, or to appear vivacious or good-humored; and no doubt Wittgenstein’s reaction — as she construes it — is absurdly intolerant. [WHICH IS WHY THIS IS A BAD EXAMPLE TO USE - ED.] Be this as it may, it seems clear what that reaction is. He reacts as though he perceives her to be speaking about her feeling thoughtlessly, without conscientious attention to the relevant facts. Her statement is not “wrought with greatest care.” She makes it without bothering to take into account at all the question of its accuracy."

So here we are. What Frankfurt has spent many pages getting to is the concept of making a statement while having no positive belief, or no honest belief, that the statement is true. This is not a discovery. It is the concept well-known to English law of "recklessness" in the making of a representation.  

Don't worry, I won't go all JL Austin on your ass (two can play at the naughty words game, Frankfurt!) by giving you loads of law. I'll just give you a little taster.

The English common law has spent a great deal of time addressing the question of how to treat people who say untrue things. As a result, it has developed some good ideas about it. Lawyers often distinguish four kinds of misrepresentation or untrue statement according to the state of mind of the person who makes the representation. They are, from most to least serious: (1) fraudulent misrepresentation; (2) reckless misrepresentation; (3) negligent misrepresentation; and (4) innocent misrepresentation. 

Normally we think of only category (1) as lying, i.e. when A knows that the truth is not-X, but deliberately says that X is the truth. But sometimes "lie" or "lying" is used more broadly. All those people who say Tony Blair "lied" about WMD in Iraq: do they really think he believed that there were no WMD (category (1))? Or maybe he had no belief one way or the other but simply said what he thought he needed to say (category (2))? Or maybe he did believe that there were WMD, but he hadn't looked into it properly (category (3))? Or just that he was wrong about WMD, despite having taken reasonable steps to find out the truth (category (4))? I don't know what they think, but you can see that these categories are potentially morally different.

The law often treats categories (1) and (2) as being equally serious. Here is the famous House of Lords case of Derry v Peek, which establishes that fraud (deceit) can be committed by either deliberate or reckless falsehood: "For a man who makes a statement without care and regard for its truth or falsity commits a fraud. He is a rogue." Quite. The vital question for the law is not whether you believe your statement to be false (which is the question for category (1) - the straightforward lie), but rather whether you lack the belief that it is true (category (1) or (2)).

But back to Frankfurt. He goes on: "It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth — this indifference to how things really are — that I regard as of the essence of bullshit."

We then go on to look at various other sideshows including "bull sessions", "hot air", Ezra Pound and St Augustine (as I say, the reader really has the impression of playing with the big boys here), before we get to what I take to be the core message of the essay, namely that the bullshitter's recklessness as to the truth is something worse - something more corrosive to the truth - than the liar's deliberate deception. Here are some quotes:

"The liar is inescapably concerned with truth-values. In order to invent a lie at all, he must think he knows what is true. And in order to invent an effective lie, he must design his falsehood under the guidance of that truth. On the other hand, a person who undertakes to bullshit his way through has much more freedom.... This is less a matter of craft than of art. Hence the familiar notion of the “bullshit artist.” ... For this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way that bullshitting tends to. Through excessive indulgence in the latter activity, which involves making assertions without paying attention to anything except what it suits one to say, a person’s normal habit of attending to the ways things are may become attenuated or lost. Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."

If there is a central message in this essay, that last sentence is surely it: mindlessness or recklessness in the making of statements is worse - a "greater enemy of the truth" - than lying. 

To which I say: bullshit. This is the sort of counter-intuitive thing said in a newspaper opinion piece - or a tweet - in order to be striking and original, rather than something that bears much weight.

What do we mean by "the truth" ? A nice big juicy question for philosophers of the calibre of Wittgenstein, St Augustine and Harry Frankfurt perhaps, but I think it is tolerably clear that in this context we mean something like: "a shared, mutually comprehensible, trusted and trustable framework of beliefs that tends to correspond accurately to reality". We might think of this concept of truth as woven from these beliefs, a fabric which "touches reality at its edges", in the famous words (famous to philosophers at least) of WVO Quine.  

An enemy of truth, in this sense, is someone or something which undermines the shared comprehensibility of this framework, or the extent to which it is or should be trusted, or the extent to which it corresponds to reality; someone who leaves a rip in the fabric of truth, whether at its edges or in its heart.

The person who habitually talks with no regard for the truth is someone whose speech may have many positive qualities - it may be funny, for example - but on whom we will, in time, come to place little faith. In the serious affairs of life, we care about truth too much for the bullshit artist to be someone who is capable of doing much damage to it: by divorcing themselves from the fabric of truth, they lose the ability to rend it.

And what of the bullshitter himself, who seems to be part of Frankfurt's concern? Will such a person's ability to tell the truth atrophy? Will he have an attenuated ability to spot what is and what is not? Come off it. The man who told so many tall stories that he loses track of what is real and what is made up is a good idea for a funny film but not a terribly convincing one. Reality has too many corners - too many sharp edges and sharp teeth - for someone to be able to ignore it in favour of a private fantasy for very long. 

Far more damaging to the truth are those lies which pay close attention to the truth. Let me give you three examples.

First, conspiracy theories. Think of 9/11 conspiracy theories for a moment. The person with no regard for the truth might come up with "9/11 was done by the same aliens who made the pyramids and the Nazca lines", or "9/11 was done by Hillary Clinton - in league with Donald Trump!". Original and creative perhaps, but as these theories have no contact with reality they have no real ability to mislead. They don't even touch the fabric of truth.

But here are some facts for you. Modern high-rise buildings that are on fire just don't collapse. Really.  There are loads of examples pre-dating 2001 - Google them if you don't believe me. A striking example is a tower in Belgrade built in the 1960s that was hit by NATO Tomahawk cruise missiles in 1999. An actual military attack! - but it survived.  British people have the Grenfell Tower (designed in the 1960s, built in the 1970s) as a more recent example. But 7 World Trade Center, a tall building put up in 1987 (not not one of the Twin Towers, just a skyscraper in the neighbourhood) collapsed on 9/11 even though it had not been hit by a plane. NATO can't bomb a 1960s Yugoslav-era office block. But a 1980s gleaming New York skyscraper falls down just because it is nearby to a building on fire? What on earth happened? Surely something strange.

The standard 9/11 conspiracy theory pays really close attention to facts like these. And it is by paying such close attention to facts - not by freely bullshitting around with no regard for them - that this theory, and other conspiracy theories, has gained such traction. A "good" conspiracy theory is one that is thoroughly woven into the fabric of truth, one that creates its own appealing patterns within it.

Second example: show trials. Why did Communist regimes bother with show trials rather than just shooting people quietly? Lots of reasons. Shock and awe: imagine seeing your ex-colleague confess to crazy crimes, knowing he was about to be executed anyway, and wondering how they persuaded him to confess. Another reason is to make a bureaucracy complicit in your plans: there's no way back for the lawyers and functionaries involved once they became party to a murder. 

But one reason was to persuade the useful idiots abroad that there really were saboteurs undermining the Revolution. And for this purpose, it helps if the prosecution's theory of the case bears some relationship to reality. Being assigned to the category of Right Deviationist or Left Deviationist, for example, was not a matter of chance, it tracked real ideological disagreements. Show trials that lost all contact with reality - the bullshit, reckless, invented ones - alienated foreign sympathisers. 

(If you don't like the example of show trials then think instead of famous miscarriages of justice, or convictions that are now hotly contested long after the event: the more that the facts alleged by the prosecution correspond with reality, the harder it is to give the benefit of the doubt to the accused.)

Third: historical fiction. Sir Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell have both been the subject of popular historical fiction which has given them notable reputations. More has generally had the better press over the years, but Hilary Mantel recently set out to rehabilitate Cromwell's reputation at the expense of More's, and has largely succeeded. (Here is a short and balanced piece which suggests that there is "much to admire" about the historical Cromwell, namely that he was clever, good at puns and liked to party. Each to his own.) I'm not here to fight More vs Cromwell, rather to make the point that the repuation of one or other of More and Cromwell has been the beneficiary of lies based on truth.

Now, if one had no regard for reality, one could bullshit a rehabilitation of Cromwell. Here's an example:

More spat on a passing peasant. "I'm off to see the wenches at Stringfellows, Cromwell," he said, before farting loudly. "Fancy coming along? I'll burn some heretics to keep us warm."

"No thank you," Cromwell answered politely, carefully wiping More's spittle from the peasant, and giving her a gold sovereign with a muttered apology for his companion. "I have to complete the new law protecting LGBTQ+ yeomen and yeowomen this evening before I start my shift volunteering at the animal shelter."

This sort of nonsense would of course have no effect on either Cromwell's repuation or More's. But Mantel's work has been far more successful precisely because it is based on reality, on carefully researched facts. Equally, More's earlier reputation, deriving from the likes of A Man for All Seasons, was also based on facts - his actual words, his actual deeds, surrounded by fictional embellishments. 

Of course no one expects historical fiction to be historically accurate. A fair amount of licence is not only accepted, but encouraged in order to turn the inevitably slightly random events of the past into an engaging story. But there is also a shared understanding that the skyscraper of fiction is built on foundations of fact, and will not collapse when subjected to the fire of forensic investigation. 

It is the fact that a good piece of historical fiction adheres to - or, rather, picks carefully from - the known facts that gives it a power and persuasiveness that a reckless or mindless piece of made-up rubbish does not have. "Well," we think, "the book tells us X and Y and Z, and I know that X is true, and I looked it up and it seems that Z is true too, and, well, Y seems to fit, so Y seems quite likely...". If that power is used to persuade us of something which is not true - if Y is a well-disguised cuckoo's egg in a nest of historical facts - then that is far more damaging to the fabric of historical truth than mere bullshit. 

Why does any of this matter? 

Frankfurt is quite taken with the problem of people who espouse sceptical philosophical theories that make it hard to believe in any kind of objective truth. He thinks that once we lose respect for the endeavour of bringing our statements into line with objective truth, we try instead to bring our statements into line with our subjective beliefs: we prefer sincerity to accuracy. 

I tend to agree with that worry, but that danger is one that seemed more substantial a few years ago than it is today. The big problems with truth today are ones that, I think, confirm my thesis that careful attention to the truth is a better starting point for undermining it than simply ignoring the whole thing. 

We use the phrase "fake news" in a variety of ways. But perhaps the most common - and most pernicious - form is not really "fake" at all. If we consider the "fake news" journalist or politician we see that, as with the estate agent, the problem is not reckless disregard for the truth, but something more subtle, something that tracks the truth just enough to stay plausible. The "fake news" media do not, by and large, make up stories in the manner of the Sunday Sport. Instead, they take facts which they have made more or less reasonable efforts to verify and weave them into slanted meta-narratives. You can't just ignore [insert your most-disliked news source here] as being lies: their stories are not made out of whole cloth, to use a revealing American idiom, but woven into the same cloth that we all call truth, making the threads of fact hard to disentangle from the threads of comment, and even harder to understand. The problem is that the fabric created nowadays has a lower truth-thread-count than used to be the case.

The most notable social justice campaigns have similar combinations of truth and not-truth. Take demolishing statues of bad dead men and re-writing history to emphasise past injustices: these campaigns are not wholly unconnected with real facts about bad things that really happened. The problem is that swathes of truthful fabric can be cut out and destroyed because of flaws which could have been better repaired with more careful, if less exciting, needlework, while the remaining cloth becomes twisted and puckered as it is closed around the holes left behind, or else repaired with ill-matching or badly-made patches. 

Or, finally, take the debate about whether transwomen are women. The lawyer in me wants to say: they are and they aren't. Sometimes whales really are fishes, for example: it all depends on the context. A biological answer to a legal question, or a question of manners and etiquette, is not necessarily the right answer. To that extent, I agree with the trans rights activitists: their demands are to some extent based on the fabric of truth, which is made up of more than scientific material, and that is why they cannot be brushed aside as mere bullshit. But, equally, the fabric of truth can only be stretched so far before it rips. Truth has to track reality, and science is a pretty good way of helping it do so. The fabric of truth is rich and multi-textured; we cannot allow it to become monotonous because some people loudly prefer it that way.

Well, there you have it. "On Bullshit" is, not exactly bullshit, but certainly not the best starting point for considering these questions. You would be much better advised to consider my wise words above. And just to show that I am a real philosopher I shall conclude with some words of wisdom: pee po belly bum drawers, Wittgenstein once waved a poker at Karl Popper and it was very funny!