Bullshit and Philosophy Part 2
In some circ.u.mstances, we may even sympathize with active, deliberate bulls.h.i.tters. Shortly after Judge Jones's ruling that ID is concealed creationism, for example, ID organizer Stephen Meyer publicly defied this ruling by a.s.serting the opposite: "Contrary to media reports," he wrote, "intelligent design is not a religious-based idea, but instead an evidence-based scientific theory about life's origins-one that challenges strictly materialistic views of evolution."30 Artists and playwrights know that this kind of supreme confidence fascinates us. Here, we are not far from the boundless, American optimism shared by Arthur Miller's w.i.l.l.y Loman, Al Pacino's bank robber in Dog Day Afternoon, and the positive-thinking salesmen in David Mamet's Glengary Glen Ross, ever-sure that things are looking up for them, that their big deal is just a phone call away-but, of course, only if they play it just right. In ID's case, this optimism would seem to lie behind its knack for successive reinvention, with "Intelligent Design" rescuing the failed creation-science movement, and now (it appears) a new program, "Critical a.n.a.lysis of Evolution," waiting in the wings to rescue the faltering ID campaign.31 With just the right language, and just the right kind of public relations campaign, creationists seem to think, they will eventually take the world by storm. Until they do, however, failures will always be viewed as minor setbacks and attributed to misunderstandings, inaccurate "media reports," and anything but the fundamental incoherence of the plan or the dubious quality of the product in question. Here, the bulls.h.i.tter is concerned about truth in a slightly different way: he clings to the bulls.h.i.t he originally created to deceive others in a bid to avoid the bitter truth of his own failure or defeat.
Finally, we tolerate bulls.h.i.t because it indirectly expresses basic cultural values that we admire and uphold. That tolerance does not extend to bulls.h.i.t's insincerity, of course, but it does extend to the myriad beliefs, practices, and discourses that serve as bulls.h.i.t's raw materials. Were it not for the relentless efforts of ID's devotees to commandeer high school biology cla.s.ses, for example, most scientists, educators, and philosophers would not even take pains to criticize the movement or its claims. Like the many cultures and subcultures that dot the modern landscape, ID-advocates are free to cultivate their own understandings about "how things really are," and, in the United States, at least, they enjoy const.i.tutional and civil protections to speak their minds. We may regret that they promote their own agendas duplicitously and at the expense of other people's concerns and practices, but we can hardly regret this pluralism and variety itself.
The Case for Purism about Bulls.h.i.t.
So, if bulls.h.i.t taps into our sympathies for others who have been taken in, and reflects the myriad beliefs and agendas that make modern life go, you might think that our culture is knee-deep in it. You'd get the same impression from the common use of the word 'bulls.h.i.t'. Yet that impression would be wrong. One implication of this pragmatic definition of bulls.h.i.t is that there's really not quite that much of it about. It has a specific pragmatic structure, does not come into being by accident, and is certainly not very effective unless it is crafted with good measures of creativity and pragmatic intelligence in the use of language. All that is obscured, however, by our casual use of "Bulls.h.i.t!" or "That's just bulls.h.i.t" to express disagreement, disapproval, or disappointment about, more or less, anything at all.
But if you look at things from any bulls.h.i.tter's point of view, all this vagueness and misidentification of bulls.h.i.t is a good thing. The less discerning we are about bulls.h.i.t, the less able we are to identify the real thing when it comes along. So, when your significant other announces that your relationship is over, for instance, you should not say "that's bulls.h.i.t!" It's not. Yes, saying "Gee, that's very bad news for me. I'm sorry to learn of it" doesn't seem appropriate to the occasion. But bad news is not bulls.h.i.t. Nor is a White House official's claim that the citizens of some oil-rich nation, but for its controlling dictator, are eager to embrace Western-style democracy and economic markets. These are just announcements which-semantics, again-may be true or false, credible or incredible, clear or unclear. They are not bulls.h.i.t.
Bulls.h.i.t, instead, is your significant other's effort to part ways through very different means-such as conversations about feeling misunderstood, or smothered, or something feeling "not right"-that just might lead to a mutual, blame-free breakup. Bulls.h.i.t, instead, is being informed that this dictator possesses nuclear weapons and soon plans to use them on allies and neighboring nations. Indeed, I suspect it will only be possible to understand the seemingly magical power of language to persuade and manipulate individual and popular opinion when we begin to appreciate bulls.h.i.t as a specific and precise creation, like a poem or symphony with multiple, interconnected layers of meaning that are intelligently designed and artfully orchestrated.32
4.
Bulls.h.i.t and the Foibles of the Human Mind, or: What the Masters of the Dark Arts Know.
KENNETH A. TAYLOR.
Public discourse in our times is in many ways debased. It contains a depressing stew of bulls.h.i.t, propaganda, spin, and outright lies. The sources of these debas.e.m.e.nts are many. Those who seek to distract, manipulate, scam or mislead have full and easy access to the instruments of ma.s.s representation, communication and persuasion, while those who aim merely to speak the truth, no matter how discomforting or inconvenient, or to advocate for hard, but necessary choices struggle to be heard.
Political discourse is the outstanding example. Politicians and their handlers typically subject us to an unrelenting stream of manipulative, mendacious misinformation, designed to mobilize the angry and dishearten the sober. We are seldom treated as democracy's primary and essential stakeholders, hardly ever treated to an honest, systematic and fair-minded exploration of the issues that face us, the cost and benefits of the available alternatives, or the real potential winners and losers of our policy choices. And politics is by no means the only contributor to the debas.e.m.e.nt of the public sphere. We are enticed by the hypnotic techniques of contemporary marketing into ever more buying and consumption, with hardly a concern for the downside costs of that consumption. Night after night on the so-called news, we are numbed by stories that momentarily t.i.tillate or shock, but seldom offer meat for sober reflection or lasting enlightenment.
It would be easy to lay blame for the debased state of public discourse in our times squarely and solely on the shoulders of those who purvey this endless stream of propaganda, bulls.h.i.t, spin and outright lies. Certainly, in these times, the production of bulls.h.i.t, propaganda, and spin have been exquisitely honed into high, if dark, arts.33 Nor is it altogether surprising that the bulls.h.i.tting arts, as I will call the whole lot, should have reached such exalted heights. Given a putatively open public square, in which competing interests must freely contend for control of the means of shared representation and persuasion, the bulls.h.i.tting arts could not dominate without being highly developed, insidious and infectious.
In a totalitarian state, by contrast, these arts can afford to remain crude and underdeveloped. Such a state exercises exclusive control over the means of public representation and persuasion. And it reserves onto itself the right to bludgeon citizens into at least the pretense of belief when official bulls.h.i.t and its cousins fail to persuade of their own powers. Where the bulls.h.i.tting arts are not backed by the power to bludgeon, they must stand entirely on their own and win dominance over the means of public representation and persuasion through their own art and artifice. Though one might antecedently have hoped that in an open marketplace of ideas, good discourse would spontaneously drive out bad, the purveyors of bulls.h.i.t have proven themselves more than adequate to the seemingly daunting task of dominating large swaths of the marketplace. Over the air, on the printed page, in public debate, even in the lecture halls of the academy, bulls.h.i.t confronts us at every turn.34 But the purveyors of bulls.h.i.t, propaganda, spin and the outright lie cannot sell what we do not buy. So the fault for the pervasiveness of bulls.h.i.t must lie partly within ourselves. The human mind is a powerful instrument, one of natural selection's most amazing products. It's the creator of art, science, and philosophy. It has sp.a.w.ned complex forms of social life and a dizzying variety of cultural formations. Yet, for all its astounding cognitive and cultural achievements, that very same mind not only produces, but is regularly taken in by bulls.h.i.t, propaganda, spin, and the outright lie. Our susceptibility to these is, I shall argue, deeply rooted in the very architecture of the human mind. The human mind is afflicted with certain built-in architectural foibles and limits that render it permanently susceptible to a host of manipulations. Wherever there are humans cogniz-ing, there is bound to be a niche for the bulls.h.i.t artist, for purveyors of easy and comforting falsehoods or half-truths.
To be sure, no one self-consciously and explicitly says to herself, "That is pure bulls.h.i.t, but I will take it at face value, nonetheless." Like its cousins, the outright lie or the self-serving spin, bulls.h.i.t works best when we don't recognize it or acknowledge it for what it is. It's most effective when we are blind to its effects. This is not to deny that we sometimes do willingly, if not quite knowingly or consciously, co-operate with the bulls.h.i.t artist, the spinner, or even the liar. Allowing oneself to be taken in by a misrepresentation, but not quite consciously so, is, perhaps, an effective means of self-deception, one requiring less torturous mental gymnastics than the wholly self-driven variety. But even granting our propensity to believe the comforting falsehood over the discomforting truth, it is not altogether easy to explain why there is so very much bulls.h.i.t and other forms of misrepresentation around, why we are so often taken in by it, and why we find it so hard to distinguish bulls.h.i.t from its contraries. I address the bulk of this essay to these questions and focus on just a few of the many foibles of the human mind that render it liable to be taken in by bulls.h.i.t and other forms of misrepresentation.
Some Cognitive Foibles of the Human Mind.
In recent decades, cognitive and evolutionary psychologists have logged a depressing catalog of the foibles of the human mind. For all our amazing cognitive achievements as a species, human cognition turns out to be a bewitching stew of the good and the bad. We are subject to confirmation bias, p.r.o.ne to self-deception, and bad at many and diverse forms of reasoning-including statistical reasoning, reasoning about conditionals, and the a.s.sessment of risks and rewards.
Consider the run-up to the war in Iraq. Many putatively authoritative voices in the administration and the media told us repeatedly that we would be welcomed as liberators, that stockpiles of WMD were present in Iraq, that Iraq bore some vague connection to 9/11, that the war would be quick, cheap, and largely financed by Iraqi oil. Far off center stage, a few dissenting voices could be heard whispering that none of it was so. By and large, the public ignored those voices and bought the tale they were told by the putatively more authoritative voices shouting from center stage. I am not at present concerned with what led to widespread acceptance of the initial tale in the first place, but rather with the persistence of belief in that tale long after an ever-increasing body of evidence spoke decisively against it. Though belief in the wisdom of the war is at this writing far less widespread than it once was, there is no doubt that for a long while certain falsehoods held a vice-grip on the minds of many in ways that rendered those beliefs at least temporarily impervious to any subsequent disconfirming evidence.
This vice-grip reflects what social psychologists call confirmation bias-the tendency to notice and seek out things that confirm one's beliefs, and to ignore, avoid, or undervalue the relevance of things that would disconfirm one's beliefs.35 Confirmation bias is not a merely occasional affliction of the human mind. It's deeply ingrained and endemic to it. Confirmation bias helps to explain the imperviousness of already adopted beliefs to contravening evidence and it also helps to explain our tendency to overestimate our own epistemic reliability. If one believes some proposition, then one typically will also believe that one has good reason for believing that very proposition. We tend, that is, not to believe that our beliefs are ungrounded or ill-formed. And we tend to reject not just evidence inconsistent with already adopted beliefs, but also evidence that would tend to challenge our own epistemic reliability or authority. So if one believes Bush's rationale for the Iraq war, then one will tend also to believe that it is perfectly reasonable to believe Bush's rationale, that one was not being duped or deceived into believing that rationale, and that any reasonable person would share one's belief. Such confidence, even when undeserved, will lead one to reject not just evidence suggesting that what Bush said was false, but any evidence suggesting that one was foolhardy or in some ways irrational in accepting that rationale. By the lights of the true believer, the person who rejects Bush's rationale for the war is not just mistaken but irrational, or in some way self-deceived. It is not the believer who is a dupe or a fool, but the unbeliever. But the deeper point is that any evidence that the skeptic might muster to try to convince the true believer otherwise is, in effect, antecedently discounted before the argument ever begins.
Confirmation bias helps to explain our dogged resistance to changing our beliefs.36 But it may appear that confirmation bias must play only a negligible role in the initial formation of new beliefs. As such, it may appear to be of little aid to the propagandist or the bulls.h.i.t artist in gaining initial leverage over our beliefs. Though there is a certain truth to this, we should not underestimate the extent to which confirmation bias aids the spread of bull. One has only to consider the rise of information coc.o.o.ns like Fox News, right wing talk radio, Air America, and the fragmented and unruly blogosphere. Information coc.o.o.ns systematically promote a certain narrow range of views and outlooks and systematically misrepresent or exclude alternative points of view and competing sources of evidence. That more and more Americans self-consciously seek their news and information from information coc.o.o.ns is the direct result of confirmation bias run rampant. Though the creators of such coc.o.o.ns are merely responding to our own self-generated demand, they are nonetheless able to exert great influence over public discourse through their highly skilled management of such coc.o.o.ns. Once an information consumer's confirmation bias has led her to give herself over to the managers of an information coc.o.o.n, she has, I suggest, made herself easy pickings for the propagandist, the spinner, and the bulls.h.i.t artist.
There are, to be sure, a host of foibles of the mind that more directly and immediately affect the initial formation of our beliefs-and preferences-rather than just the dogged maintenance of them. I have in mind our susceptibility to framing effects on the formation of beliefs and preferences.37 Imagine that the US government is preparing for an outbreak of the Avian flu. Suppose that without intervention the disease is expected to kill, say, six thousand people. Two alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed. The exact scientific estimates of the consequences of each program are as follows: If Program A is adopted, two thousand people will be saved.
If program B is adopted, there is one-third chance that six thousand people will be saved and a two-thirds chance that no one will be saved.
When experimental subjects are asked to choose between these programs, seventy-two percent choose program A, while twenty-eight percent choose program B.
Notice that the "expected return" in lives saved of the two programs is identical. So why are subjects not indifferent between the two programs? Because we tend to be risk averse when we choose between outcomes all of which have a positive expected return. That is, people tend to prefer a sure thing to a risky thing of equal or greater expected return when both expected returns are positive. This means that people tend to prefer the certainty of saving two thousand lives over an alternative that risks losing more lives, even if that alternative involves the possibility that more lives will be saved. In preferring A to B, people a.s.sign disproportionately greater weight to the two thousand additional lives that might be lost than to the additional four thousand lives that might be saved by pursuing program B.
Now consider an alternative scenario that is typically presented to a different set of experimental subjects. As before, the government is preparing for an outbreak of the Avian flu. Two programs are being contemplated in response to the outbreak. The exact scientific estimates of the effectiveness of the programs look like this: If program C is adopted, four thousand people will die.
If program D is adopted, there is a one-third chance that no one will die and a two-thirds chance that six thousand people will die.
Presented with a choice between programs C and D, seventy-eight percent of experimental subjects will choose program D, while twenty-two percent choose program C. Again, the expected return, this time in lives lost, is identical on the two programs. And again, we might wonder why subjects should prefer plan D to plan C. The answer is that people tend to be risk seeking with respect to losses. This means that people tend to prefer pursuing the chance that no one will die-even if it pursuing that chance means running the risk of more deaths-to the certainty that fewer will die. In preferring D to C, people are, in effect, a.s.signing disproportionately less weight to the two thousand additional lives that might be lost than to the four thousand additional lives that might be saved by pursuing plan D over plan C.
What is striking about these results is the fact that program C and program A are identical programs. They are merely described differently-one in terms of lives lost, the other in terms of lives saved. If we pursue program A, two thousand people will be saved. But that just means that four thousand will die who otherwise might not have. Exactly this set of outcomes is envisioned by program C. Similarly, programs B and D also envision the same exact outcomes, with just the same probabilities. But B describes those outcomes in terms of lives saved, while D describes those outcomes in terms of lives lost. It seems painfully obvious that whatever rational basis there can be for preferring A to B, or vice versa, obtains equally well for the choice between C to D. But over and over again, experimenters find the choice between equivalent scenarios to be highly sensitive to the way in which the choice is framed.
Our sensitivity to the way a set of alternatives is "framed," together with our insensitivity to that which is invariant across different ways of framing the same set of alternatives provides powerful leverage for purveyors of spin, propaganda, and bull. To take a not altogether fanciful example, imagine two politicians, Smith and Jones. Smith wants to convince the voters that program A (that is, C) ought to be pursued. She wants to do so because program A will be highly beneficial to a pharmaceutical company that has made significant contributions to her campaign. On the other hand, because a certain medical supply company will benefit highly from program D (that is, B) Jones wants to convince the voters that program D (that is, B) ought to be pursued. Smith knows that if she succeeds in framing the choice in terms of potential lives saved, she has a better chance of swaying the voters. Jones knows that if she succeeds in framing the issue in terms of potential lives lost, her arguments have a better chance of swaying the voters. Neither has an incentive to point out the frame-invariant regularities. Both have an incentive for exploiting our susceptibility to framing effects. To that extent, they co-operate in jointly misleading the voter into thinking that he has been subject to a real debate about competing options fairly and dispa.s.sionately considered. In reality, he has been no more than fodder in a war over the framing of the issues.38 Another kind of framing effect has to do with simple if-then reasoning. Human beings have a complex understanding of the causal structure of the world, more so than any other creature on this planet. It would not be unreasonable to expect that we as a species must be rather adept a simple if-then reasoning. Not just our understanding of the causal structure of the physical world, but all of social life would seem to be founded on our capacity for if-then reasoning. But, surprisingly, we are not as adept at such reasoning as one might antecedently have expected. Consider the so-called Wason selection task. That task tests for the ability to falsify conditional hypotheses. Here is a typical experimental set-up. Subjects are given four cards. They are told that each card has a number on one side and a letter on the other. They are asked to name those cards and only those cards which should be turned over in order to determine whether the following rule is true or false of these four cards: If a card has the letter D on one side, it has the number 3 on the other D.
A.
3.
7.
Applying straight-forward propositional logic, the correct cards are the D card and the 7 card. If a D is on the other side of the 7, then the rule is falsified. If anything other than a 3 is on the other side of the D card, the rule will be falsified again.
Subjects perform remarkably poorly on this task. Typically, less than twenty-five percent of subjects give the correct choice. Indeed, in some version of Wason's original experiment this was as low as five percent. The most frequent choices are that only the D card need be turned over or that the D card together with the 3 card should be turned over. The 7 card is seldom chosen by subjects. Moreover, subjects are remarkably resistant to training on this task. If shown the correct response for a particular run, they get the point, but they seem to lack the ability to generalize to new runs of essentially the same task.
Notice that turning over the 3 card cannot falsify the rule. Whatever is on the other side of the 3 card is consistent with the rule. So there is a weak sense in which the 3 card might be thought to "confirm" the rule. Perhaps that is why subjects tend to turn it over. So we may be seeing our old friend confirmation bias rearing its head again.
The persistent inability of subjects to perform well on this and other tests that would seem to require little more than a certain minimal logical ac.u.men has tempted many to conclude that human cognition is irredeemably irrational. But that conclusion is hasty and crude. For one thing, whatever can be said for the rational powers of this or that individual mind, our amazing cognitive achievements as a species suggest that human cognition, taken as a whole, must be one of natural selection's most consequential innovations. Only the first advent of s.e.xual reproduction, I suspect, was more consequential. I do not mean to deny that most of us probably are destined for some degree of cognitive mediocrity. But the real key to our cognitive success as a species rests, I conjecture, on our evolved capacity for culture. Where cultural mechanisms function to spread the benefits of one or more individual's cognitive innovations and successes to others, it is not necessary that everyone be an Einstein, Newton or Leonardo. In effect, our shared capacity for shared culture enables the many to free-ride on the cognitive achievements of the few. This is a fortunate fact indeed and another testament to natural selection's sheer brilliance at mind-design.
Even granting that many or most of us may be cognitive free-riders on the astounding cognitive achievements of the few, it would still be a mistake to conclude too hastily that human minds are irredeemably irrational. Sometimes, in fact, our sensitivity to framing effects works to give our minds a greater semblance of rationality. For example, performance on Wason Selection Tasks is known to improve dramatically when the conditional in question is "re-framed" in terms of something like a social contract. You are a bartender. Your task is to see that there is no underage drinking. That is, you must see to it that the following conditional is true: If someone is drinking beer, then she must be older than 21. Which cards should you turn over?
drinking beer drinking c.o.ke 25 years old 16 years old From a purely logical point of view, this problem has exactly the same structure as the earlier one. Nonetheless, subjects perform significantly better on the second version of the task than on the first.
Some evolutionary psychologists have concluded on the basis of this sort of data that natural selection has endowed the human mind with a special purpose "cheater detection" module. 39 Since the making and enforcing of social contracts of vary-ing scope and complexities is no doubt a core human competence, it would not be at all surprising if we were somehow naturally and specially adapted to be able to determine swiftly and reliably whether a contract was being respected or violated. Still, it is striking that we are apparently unable to generalize, to transport what works in a given problem domain to different but structurally similar problem domains. The evolutionary psychologist concludes, partly on the basis of such inability, that our minds are not general-purpose problem solving machines. Rather, they were specifically adapted to solve specific cognitive problems that were of recurring significance in the environments for which we are evolved. Often those recurring problems came with what we might call built-in frames that enabled certain structures in our mind to quickly and effortlessly recognize the kind of reasoning that had to be applied. In his book, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997), Stephen Pinker puts it nicely: No organism needs content-free algorithms applicable to any problem no matter how esoteric. Our ancestors encountered certain problems for hundreds of millions of years-recognizing objects, making tools, learning the local language, finding a mate, predicting an animal's movements, finding their way-and encountered certain other problems never-putting a man on the moon, growing better popcorn, proving Fermat's last theorem. The knowledge that solves a familiar kind of problem is often irrelevant to any other one. The effect of slant on luminance is useful in calculating shape but not in a.s.sessing the fidelity of a potential mate. The effects of lying on tone of voice help with fidelity but not with shape. Natural selection does not care about the ideals of liberal education and should have no qualms about building parochial inference modules that exploit eons-old regularities in their own subject matters. (p. 304) If this is right, then it is not altogether surprising that at least some framing effects actually improve the functioning of the human mind. And that conclusion provides some grounds for hope that if we could always but frame matters rightly, much cognitive detritus might well be swept away. Once again, we see that for good or for ill, he who controls the frame may well control all.
Reclaiming the Public Square Our all-too brief examination of just a few of the many cognitive foibles of the human mind supports both a bleak conclusion and a more hopeful one. The hopeful conclusion is that our minds appear to be finely tuned instruments, well adapted for solving the plethora of recurrent cognitive challenges that were endemic in the information processing environments of our hunter-gather progenitors. To the extent that contemporary information processing environments match those in which we were designed to function, our cognitive capacities serve us well. Unfortunately, the modern world subjects human cognition to stresses and strains unlike anything encountered on the ancient savannah. We are bombarded with information and misinformation in a dizzying variety, often intentionally framed in ways unsuited for our natural cognitive capacities. The mismatch between our cognitive capacities and the informational environments in which we now find ourselves partly explains both why there is so much bull, spin, and propaganda about, and why we are so often taken in by it.
Now it bears stressing that the fundamental cognitive architecture of the human mind was fixed eons ago on the ancient savannah. So my claim is not that contemporary humans, as such, are any more or less susceptible to bulls.h.i.t and other forms of misrepresentation than humans have ever been. Our minds are as they have always been. Only our circ.u.mstances have changed. Nor do I wish to deny the evident powers and achievements of the evolved human mind. The long march of human history has decisively established what a wondrous instrument the human mind is. It has scaled great cognitive heights. It has peered deeply into the innermost secrets of the natural world; it has given rise to cultures and to social formations complex and various; and it has even plumbed the depths of its own operations.
Lest I be accused of nostalgia for some bygone cognitive order, let me stress that I am fully aware that in every age and epoch, the mind has produced a profuse abundance of cognitive detritus. In every age of humankind, superst.i.tion, illusion, and falsehood of every variety has existed along side the highest art and deepest knowledge that the age has mustered. Moreover, we are blessed to live at a time when human beings collectively have scaled greater cognitive heights than humans ever have before. We see far more deeply into the workings of everything natural and human. So how could it possibly be that there is more cognitive detritus about in our own times?
The answer is, I think, twofold. First, the masters of bulls.h.i.t, propaganda, and spin have paradoxically been aided by our improved the understanding of the workings of the human mind. In our times, the masters of the dark arts are astute students of the enduring foibles of the human mind. Second, the means of public representations and persuasion available to the masters of the dark arts have a vastly greater reach and efficacy than they have ever had. Consequently, in our own times, the masters of the dark arts are vastly more effective than their predecessors could have dreamt of being.
I don't mean to say that those who seek a hearing for sweet reason in the public square have no weapons of their own. The battle must be waged on at least two different fronts. First, it must be waged in the trenches of education. We must seek to instill in our children distaste for all dogma, an enduring suspicion of all easy and comforting falsehoods. We must instill in them an insatiable appet.i.te for unyielding argument, a propensity to seek out and confront even the most disquieting evidence, even if doing so would undermine their or our most cherished beliefs. They must learn never to take at face value frames that are merely given. They must learn the skills of re-framing, the habit of asking after that which is invariant across alternative frames. If our children are educated in this way, their minds will provide far less fertile ground for the spread of bulls.h.i.t.
Though such a mind-by-mind slog in the trenches of education is necessary, it will not suffice. In addition, we must reconfigure the very means of public representation and persuasion. In our times, a narrow, self-serving elite, interested mostly in its own power, wealth and prestige enjoys a certain privileged access to the means of public representations and persuasion. We must seek to diminish that access by all the ways and means available to us-via the fragmented and unregulated internet, via politics, in still unoccupied small niches of the ma.s.s media. The purveyors of inst.i.tutional and official bulls.h.i.t will of course not yield easily. They are powerful, clever, and determined. Moreover, experience bears ample witness to the fact that good discourse does not spontaneously drive out bad. Neither, however, will bad discourse wither on its own. If bulls.h.i.t is to be driven from the public square, only those who seek more than bulls.h.i.t can drive it out. So let the battle be joined.
5.
Bulls.h.i.t and Personality.
SARA BERNAL.
Some bulls.h.i.t is public and political. Other bulls.h.i.t is more private, arising in interpersonal interactions. Yet other bulls.h.i.t is more private still, arising within a single individual: people sometimes bulls.h.i.t themselves.
Many of those of us who oppose the war in Iraq see the present cultural moment as one particularly rich in bulls.h.i.t. But in this era of heightened public bulls.h.i.t, private bulls.h.i.t should not be overlooked. It seems to me that bulls.h.i.t is at the core of many of the problems encountered and created by those afflicted with so-called personality disorders-those who have certain severe problems with navigating the social world.40 Accordingly, I will propose an a.n.a.lysis of bulls.h.i.t that may be usefully applied to the psychology of personality disorders, and perhaps more widely in psychiatry.
My a.n.a.lysis takes Harry Frankfurt's justly famous account as a point of departure. The departure is rapid: I disagree with his main contention, that bulls.h.i.t is essentially unconnected to a concern with truth. I think many core cases of bulls.h.i.t are better captured by an account on which bulls.h.i.t has a stronger connection to the truth than Frankfurt countenances. What's more, applying this notion of bulls.h.i.t to personality disorders tells us something interesting about why their core features lead to social difficulties, and sheds light on them in other ways as well.
Does the Bulls.h.i.tter Pay Attention to the Truth?
Frankfurt claims that an "indifference to how things really are" is of the essence of bulls.h.i.t. Bulls.h.i.tters say whatever they need to say to achieve a certain purpose, without regard for the truth of what they say. Thus for him, bulls.h.i.t is very different from lying: Both in lying and in telling the truth people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are . . . Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game . . . The bulls.h.i.tter . . . 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. (On Bulls.h.i.t, pp. 5961) While this may be true in some instances, Frankfurt fails to acknowledge that in the typical case, the bulls.h.i.tter is strongly connected to the truth via a desire to obscure a specific part of it. This desire may be more or less conscious. The bulls.h.i.tter may have that part of the truth in mind clearly or fuzzily, or it may be in some mental compartment to which she has no immediate conscious access.
Consider a prototypical case of bulls.h.i.t: the undergraduate who knows that she has nothing thoughtful or deep to say on an a.s.signed essay topic, and that her opinions are not as well informed by the course material as they should be, but who aims to prevent her instructor from realizing all this by throwing up a screen of verbiage. She may be clearly aware of the awkward facts behind her screen. Or she may just know "deep down" that there is a mess behind it, so that she is not surprised if her ruse fails and her grade is poor. Undergraduates do sometimes bulls.h.i.t with malice aforethought. Sometimes, however, a student may proceed less calculatingly, but still be motivated by a desire to get an A that she knows is not really deserved. In such cases we cannot make sense of the student's behavior except by reference to this unconscious (or partially conscious) motive.
The bulls.h.i.tter in this example, in both its variants, is like a liar in that she seeks to conceal from her audience some part of the truth (the mess behind her screen). She is unlike the liar in that she need not be clearly aware of this goal. She is unlike the liar also in that her method is indirect: she does not directly deny the truth behind her screen, but rather contrives various ways of implicating the contrary of that truth. Her bulls.h.i.t is contained not in any single a.s.sertion within her essay, but rather by things like a pompous tone, a reluctance to get to the point, and general windiness. Thus her method bears out Frankfurt's observation that a lie is a "more focused act" than an instance of bulls.h.i.t.
One may bulls.h.i.t not only by using indirect means to get one's audience to believe the opposite of some part of the truth that one finds inconvenient, but also by simply distracting the audience from that part. In this second type, the bulls.h.i.tter is again concerned with the truth in that she is motivated by a desire to conceal a specific part of it, and again this desire may be conscious or not.
Two Modes of Bulls.h.i.t.
Advertising and politics are replete with the two kinds of bulls.h.i.t I've just distinguished. Two examples follow.
a. Indirect Implication of Falsehood.
Newport cigarettes are advertised with the phrase "alive with pleasure." This phrase is emblazoned on billboards along with images of young, beautiful and (so far as I know) mostly African-American people in situations of luxurious leisure, such as on a yacht.
This ad campaign aims to plant in its audience the belief that representative smokers of Newports are healthy, vibrant, and wealthy, and that smoking Newports is a badge of membership in this select group. The truth is that representative smokers of Newports are poor, unhealthy African-Americans who live in the rough neighborhoods in which these billboards are so obnoxiously displayed.
b. Distraction.
The Bush administration used dubious intelligence reports about Iraqi efforts to obtain yellowcake uranium from Niger, suggestions that Saddam Hussein was somehow connected with 9/11, and various other red herrings to direct our attention away from a key fact: they had an antecedent intention, and perhaps something like a plan, to invade Iraq no matter what.
I do not imagine that these are all the kinds of bulls.h.i.t there are, but they are two kinds worth paying attention to. Before moving on to further ill.u.s.trations, I should note some features of this two-part conception.
First, as I've said, bulls.h.i.t is connected to the truth in a way that Frankfurt does not acknowledge. The bulls.h.i.tter must at some level pay attention to the truth, or else her bulls.h.i.t is not likely to succeed. The "indirect means" of type (a) must, in order to be effective, be somehow vetted for their ability to jointly implicate a specific falsehood. The distractors of type (b) must lead the audience away from a particular bit of truth, so the bulls.h.i.tter-or something in her-must be cognizant of what that bit of truth is, or she may end up with something that leads towards it rather than away. Bulls.h.i.t of both types must be framed in sensitivity to a certain painful bit of the truth, or it will conceal that bit only by dumb luck.
That said, I can agree with an emended version of Frankfurt's claim that the bulls.h.i.tter "pays no attention at all" to the truth. For a bulls.h.i.tter can say anything and everything that distracts her audience-except, of course, the truth that she wants to hide! Or she can say anything and everything that jointly implicates the opposite of the truth she wants to hide. That is, her utterances must be checked (at some level) not for their correspondence with the facts, but for their tendency to distract from, or to implicate the contrary of, certain key facts. So the emended version of Frankfurt's claim is this: the bulls.h.i.tter must pay attention to just one key part of the truth, namely the part she wants to hide. Call this her target.
Second, bulls.h.i.t on my conception is related to lying as follows. The bulls.h.i.tter always differs in her method from the liar: she never denies the target directly and explicitly, but instead distracts or contrives to indirectly implicate the contrary of the target. In the case of fully conscious bulls.h.i.tting, the differences end there. Just like the liar, one who bulls.h.i.ts consciously has clearly in mind a target truth that she knows she wants to hide. That cannot be said of one who bulls.h.i.ts unconsciously, who therefore differs from the liar in more than her method. Thus the similarity to lying of any given case of bulls.h.i.t depends on where it falls on the spectrum of conscious awareness. (Recall that I am countenancing degrees of awareness, so that "fully conscious" and "unconscious" are two ends of a spectrum.) Third, since the bulls.h.i.tter as I've painted her may not be aware of her wish to obscure her target, my story depends crucially on the a.s.sumption that there are unconscious motives. In the typical case, like that of the bulls.h.i.tting student, she is at least dimly aware of her motive (and hence of her target) as she frames her bulls.h.i.t, and may become more clearly aware of it in hindsight-after she gets a poor grade on her essay, for instance. But again, the bulls.h.i.tter may be completely unaware of her obscuring motive.
I cannot describe the operation of the bulls.h.i.tter's unconscious motive, but I can say a bit more to defend the claim that it is there, however it operates. The idea of an unconscious motive is of course not new. Neither is it the exclusive property of Freudians who would a.s.sociate the motive with some bodily orifice. It is an idea with some currency in the neuroscience of today: it is commonly held that the bizarre confabulations of some neurology patients can be understood only by reference to unconscious motives.
Consider, for instance, some fascinating and well-known results about split-brain patients.41 These are patients whose corpus callosum has been surgically severed in order to treat their severe epilepsy. The corpus callosum is a thick band of fibers connecting the two hemispheres of the brain. When it is cut, the hemispheres cannot communicate with each other, which can result in bizarre internal conflicts for the patient. One sort of test that was done on these patients was to show a picture to one hemisphere and ask for a report from the other. This is done by showing a picture to one side or the other of a patient's visual field: pictures on the left project to the right hemisphere, and vice versa.42 It is the left hemisphere that talks-that side is primarily responsible for language. Thus when a split-brain patient sees a picture in her left visual field, and she is asked to say what she sees, she has a problem: the information is "stuck" in the non-talking (right) hemisphere. Patients in this situation reacted in a number of different ways: some would just frown and shake their heads; others could at least say what the picture was not of. Some, however, would make up stories about their own reactions to what they were shown: they would confabulate. It is these cases that are relevant to the present point.
To take just one example, a picture of a naked woman was presented to one patient's left hemisphere, then her right. When it was presented to the left hemisphere, the patient giggled, then accurately described what she saw. When it was presented to the right hemisphere, she smiled mischievously and began to giggle. When asked what was so funny-and this is the startling part-she said, "I don't know . . . nothing . . . Oh, that funny machine" (Gazzaniga 1970, p. 106). Such confabulations are often understood by neuroscientists in terms of an overarching unconscious motive to maintain a stable and internally consistent world-view.43 What incoming information might threaten the stability or consistency of the giggling split-brain patient's world view? She has just giggled unaccountably. To uphold her belief that she is a sane, rational person who does things for reasons, and reacts appropriately to situations, she must somehow explain away the fact that she has just giggled slyly for no apparent reason, like a madwoman. Her target, then, is that she has just done something that appears crazy, nonsensical, bizarre. She has an overarching motive-an unconscious one-to maintain her image of herself as a sane, rational person. Her unexplained giggling threatens that world view, since it looks like the behavior of a madwoman. So she has a second motive, derived from the first, to explain her giggling as something quite sane and rational (Who wouldn't laugh at "that funny machine"?). It is commonly accepted that patients who confabulate in this way have some such unconscious motive, though there is as yet no fully worked-out, generally accepted story about how this motive operates. Thus my own claim of unconscious motives is in good company-in this regard at least.
Fourth, while bulls.h.i.t a la Frankfurt seems to be a largely verbal affair, the misleading and distracting of bulls.h.i.t as I construe it may be achieved by non-verbal as well as verbal means.44 The photos that appear in Newport ads provide one example; I'll discuss further examples below.
Fifth, bulls.h.i.t as I construe it may occur intrapersonally. That is, you can bulls.h.i.t yourself in either of the ways I've distinguished. The person who distracts from a painful part of the truth and the distractee may be one and the same; the person who contrives to implant a belief contrary to that truth may be the same person in whom the belief is implanted. Such self-bulls.h.i.tting is a species of self-deception. Indeed, it may be all that self-deception is. Whether that is so is a large question on a rich topic (self-deception), and I cannot answer it here.
There are, however, some differences between self- and other-bulls.h.i.tting. Conscious self-bulls.h.i.tting is less straightforward than conscious bulls.h.i.tting of others, if indeed it is possible at all. This is so for the same reason that explicitly lying to yourself is impossible. To do that you would have to be fully aware of some proposition p and at the same time a.s.sert not-p to yourself with the intention of getting yourself to believe not-p-an endeavor that would seem futile in the face of your established belief that p. To consciously self-bulls.h.i.t you would have to deviously attempt to get yourself to believe not-p, though you are fully aware of p's truth, either by implicating not-p or by distracting from p. This may be possible,45 but your own clear awareness of p introduces a difficulty with self-bulls.h.i.tting about p that is absent from other-bulls.h.i.tting about p. But having noted this complication, I can set it aside, as the cases of self-bulls.h.i.tting I shall consider are not fully conscious.
Finally, it is an advantage of my account that, unlike Frankfurt's, it has application in psychiatry. In particular, it nicely frames some key features of personality disorders.
Bulls.h.i.t and Personality Disorders.
Some people have bulls.h.i.t deeply embedded in their personalities. Everyone knows that politics and advertising are replete with bulls.h.i.t. It is not as widely appreciated that certain problematic personalities are also goldmines of bulls.h.i.t. Indeed, so far as I know the concept has never been applied in any systematic way to personality psychology (or elsewhere in psychiatry, for that matter). Yet if you examine the strategems that characterize personality disorders, the bulls.h.i.t fairly leaps out at you.
What Is a Personality Disorder?
A personality disorder is defined in the DSM-IV (the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the bible of psychiatry) as "an enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates markedly from the expectations of the individual's culture." 46 To count as having such a disorder, one must have difficulties in two or more of the following areas: perception of the social world and one's place in it; appropriateness and range of emotional responses; social interaction; and impulse control. The problematic pattern must be inflexible, and must be manifest in a broad range of situations. It is especially distinctive of personality disorders, among psychiatric disorders, to cause trouble and pain not just for the afflicted but for those around her as well.
Personality disorders are standardly characterized as encompa.s.sing maladaptiveness in several domains. First, they comprise maladaptive traits. These traits are normal, healthy traits taken to an extreme degree, and sometimes combined in especially problematic ways. Thus, conscientiousness taken to an extreme degree becomes obsessive-compulsiveness; very low trust combined with high hostility becomes paranoia. The mal-adaptive motivation characteristic of personality disorders is exemplified in the antisocial personality's complete lack of motivation for intimacy. Maladaptive patterns in perceiving, interpreting, and planning-aspects of cognition-are also ubiquitous in personality disorders. The afflicted are especially challenged when it comes to perceiving and interpreting the social world: each personality disorder is marked by distorted perception of others and impaired social judgment. Each personality disorder is also characterized by some abnormal and maladaptive pattern of emotion: extreme volatility, perhaps, or an extreme of one emotion such as anger. Finally, the self-concept of a disordered personality tends to be out of whack: often, she doesn't know quite who she is, lacking a clear, stable sense of herself; or her self esteem is either excessive or deficient.
The DSM-IV lists ten personality disorders, arranged into three cl.u.s.ters: the erratic cl.u.s.ter, often characterized by unpredictable or violent behavior; the anxious cl.u.s.ter, characterized by fear and distress; and the eccentric cl.u.s.ter, characterized by social awkwardness or disengagement. Brief descriptions of the disorders, drawn mostly from the DSM-IV, are supplied below. Sub-types are sometimes recognized, but the DSM-IV lists only the basic or "pure" type.
Here's a clue to where the bulls.h.i.t lurks in the following list. Where the afflicted is herself out of touch with some key aspect of reality, or where her stock behavior tends to lead others to false beliefs, bulls.h.i.t is often found.
Antisocial personality disorder (erratic). These people have little concern for others. They are generally impulsive and irresponsible, and often violent. They feel no guilt over the suffering they cause to others. The textbook case of antisocial personality disorder is a violent, crafty, and remorseless criminal. They need not be violent, however: the Enron crew, for example, exhibit antisocial behavior in spades.47 They are con artists of a sort, and many con artists are diagnosable as antisocial. Antisocials often possess a glib, superficial charm, which allows them to take advantage of the unwary.
Borderline personality disorder (erratic). The borderline personality is always riding some kind of roller coaster: her emotions, relationships, and self-image are all marked by wild instability. They can shift rapidly from idealizing to demonizing a partner or friend. They are terrified of abandonment, and can become very aggressive when they see it on the horizon. They are also p.r.o.ne to harming themselves in the face of real or imagined impending abandonment Suicidal gestures are common in this type; threats of suicide ("if you go, I'll kill myself") are still more common.
Histrionic personality disorder (erratic). Histrionics are recognized by their frantic attention-seeking, inappropriate s.e.xual provocativeness, and excessive displays of emotion. They are generally uncomfortable when they are not the center of attention. They are seductive and flirtatious in situations where such behavior is inappropriate-in professional settings, for instance. The textbook case is a female undergraduate who often visits male professors during office hours, devoting her time there to talking about herself in a general way, rather than to legitimate academic business.48 Histrionic women often wear too much makeup, and dress in clothes that are too s.e.xy and bright. Histrionic men, for their part, are often hyper-macho, boasting of success at work or s.e.xual exploits. Histrionics are shallow in various ways: opinions, friends, and projects may be taken up with great enthusiasm, then quickly dropped. But their enthusiasm can be magnetic: they often possess a kind of meretricious charm.
Narcissistic personality disorder (erratic). The narcissist has an inflated sense of her own importance and accomplishments. Correspondingly, she undervalues the accomplishments of others. When their accomplishments threaten to outshine her own, she responds with violent envy. She has a strong sense of superiority, and she is elitist: the only people worthy to be her a.s.sociates are those whose gifts and accomplishments are in the same exalted realm as her own. She requires admiration and special treatment from those around her. She expects lavish praise and recognition, and may angrily mete out punishment to those who deny her her rightful obeisance. Self-centered as she is, she has little attention left over for the needs and desires of others, into which she lacks insight. Narcissists are often wildly ambitious, and better-functioning ones can be quite successful.
Avoidant personality disorder (anxious). Avoidant personalities have an inferiority complex. They believe steadfastly that they are inadequate. They cannot abide criticism-it calls attention to their shortcomings, which they imagine to be severe-and will go to great lengths to avoid it. This results in their leading very restricted lives: potentially rewarding activities and relationships are shunned out of fear that they will open the door to criticism.
Dependent personality disorder (anxious). These individuals believe that they are incapable of taking care of themselves. They require constant rea.s.surance from others, which makes it difficult for them to work independently. Since they depend so heavily on others, they will generally take a submissive line, suppressing any dissent they might feel, in order to keep the peace. In extreme cases this can lead to their withstanding physical abuse in order to hang on to a "caregiver."
Obsessive-Compulsive personality disorder (anxious). Obsessive-compulsives are preoccupied with order: rules, lists, schedules, and all manner of details are very often on their mental front page. Their perfectionistic pursuit of order leaves little time for relations with others, which relations are stunted by this neglect. Leisure activities have little appeal. Obsessive-compulsives are hard-working to a fault. Their own standards are so high that they have difficulty delegating tasks to others, who are likely to aim for a lower standard. They are generally very stubborn in their insistence on their own hyper-orderly way.
Schizoid personality disorder (eccentric). Schizoids are intensely solitary, eschewing friendship, often drifting out of contact even with immediate family, and taking jobs that minimize their contact with others. Their emotional lives are very restricted: they come off as cold and affectively flat, and take pleasure in few activities (if any). s.e.xual relations with others hold no interest for them. They appear indifferent to praise and criticism: if reprimanded for some aspect of their job performance, for instance, they'll return a "does not compute" sort of response.
Schizotypal personality disorder (eccentric). Schizotypals are close relatives of schizoids.49 But while the schizoid is indifferent to the social world, the schizotypal regards it with suspicion and fear that verges into paranoia. This does not conduce well to social relations with others, which are generally absent from their lives. While the schizoid evinces no affect at all, the schizotypal tends to evince inappropriate affect: a smile in response to a sad story, for instance. Schizotypals are recognized by their odd beliefs and superst.i.tions, clairvoyance and telepathy being special favorites. They often report unusual perceptual experiences, such as seeing the future.
Paranoid personality disorder (eccentric). The paranoiac needs no introduction. Universal distrust is her signature. Utterly benign social gestures may be interpreted as insulting, threatening, or otherwise sinister. Imagined slights become the occasion for grudges that are held indefinitely. A paranoiac's romantic partner has her work cut out for her, as she will often be the object of pathological jealousy. Those who question the irrational beliefs of paranoiacs generally meet with extreme hostility and combativeness, which may turn violent.
This, then, is our cast of colorful characters. Notice that it is of the essence of a personality disorder to be rigid. Afflicted individuals will try the same strategy over and over, regardless of its success or failure in the past. Since the strategy is deployed reflexively, rather than with sensitivity to the situation at hand, it tends to fail. Thus for them life becomes like a "bad one-act play that repeats again and again" (Personality Disorders, p. 14).
Some of the disorders are diagnosed more frequently in men, others in women: thus diagnosed antisocials are much more likely to be men, dependents and histrionics to be women. But it is not clear that these patterns of diagnosis reflect the truth, since the evidence regarding the epidemiology of personality disorders is questionable.50 Also, at least some of these patterns are changing: diagnoses of antisocial personality disorder in women appear to be on the rise. For these reasons I have chosen to treat the disorders as gender-neutral.
Some Examples of Bulls.h.i.t in Personality Disorders.