by Joe Bennett
The whole of evolution is founded on practical, unwitting science. If something works it endures. If it doesn’t, it withers. We alone on this planet believe stuff in defiance of evidence. It would seem to be the flipside of our capacity to reason. And we are endlessly encouraged in this folly by the legions of bullshitters.
7
It’s simple: vote for me
Mr Gorbachev,’ said Ronald Reagan, in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin in 1987. The old performer paused for rhetorical effect and cocked his head slightly to one side in a manner that made him look like a folksy parrot. ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’
‘Now there’s an idea,’ thought Mr Gorbachev. And twenty-nine months later, the delay being caused merely by the need to sort out a few administrative details, he tore the wall down.
Which, children, is how brave President Reagan brought freedom, happiness, burgers, iPods, hedge funds, realtors, advertising and all the other joys of capitalist democracy to millions of enslaved people. (And in case you hadn’t got the point, he returned to Berlin after the wall had fallen in order to be filmed swinging a sledgehammer against one of the bits left standing.)
It’s a story, and for Republicans it’s the sort of story they like. Its virtue, as with all effective tales, is its simplicity, but that simplicity is based on a post hoc fallacy. Reagan said what he said and the wall came down. But there is no evidence that the wall came down because Reagan said what he said.
Historians have offered and will continue to offer numerous reasons for the Berlin Wall coming down when it did. What is clear with hindsight is that it was bound to come down. The monstrous, tyrannical edifice of bullshit that the Soviet Union had become under Stalin and his gargoyle successors was doomed eventually to implode. It awaited only the moment when outrage and poverty outweighed fear, and the sole point at issue was not if that would happen but when. You could argue that Reagan’s speech brought that date forward a few months. But you could also argue, and perhaps more plausibly, that it delayed it. Even the reforming Gorbachev would not want to be seen as taking advice from the president of a country that his people had been encouraged to revile.
Politics is a messy business, in the sense that precise cause and effect can rarely be distilled from the chaos of human activity. The wood is vast, the trees innumerable, and discerning any pattern to the forest is beyond most of us. But we want to see patterns. We crave clarity. Which is why the post hoc fallacy is a staple of political bullshit.
Those contending, as I write, for the Republican presidential nomination are keen to pin blame on Obama and the Democrats for America’s current economic malaise. That he took office when a global financial crisis was at its height and that President Jesus himself would have struggled to reduce the ill consequences is ignored. The post hoc arguments pour from their mouths. Under Obama, x million hard-working Americans have lost their jobs; under Obama, x million decent American families have lost their homes to foreclosure; and so on. The implicit conclusion is that since these things happened while Obama was in the White House, they happened because he was in the White House.
In recent months the graphs of American prosperity have begun to flick upwards again. Jobs have been created. More cars and houses have been sold. The big corporations have made profits again. It has been entertaining to watch the same Republican candidates wrestling with these unwelcome improvements. By their post hoc reasoning, if Obama was responsible for the bad stuff simply because he was in office when it happened, he must be equally responsible for the good stuff.
Some of Obama’s opponents have resorted to a neat rhetorical trick. They have argued that the good things are happening not because of Obama’s policies, but despite them. In other words, if he hadn’t enacted his policies the good things would have happened sooner. But they are merely compounding their deception. It was dishonest in the first place to exploit the post hoc fallacy. It is doubly dishonest to exploit it selectively.
Human society is too complex for us to grasp in its entirety. If it wasn’t, there would be only one political system and only one economic theory and all things would be well. But simplicity appeals to us because, like paradise ducks and other sentient creatures, we evolved to handle the simplest possible equation of cause and effect — if x then y or, as my dog might put it, if sit then liver. The post hoc fallacy appears to offer exactly such an equation, so our leaders, who love to please us, seize on it.
I have in front of me a shiny campaign brochure from the last New Zealand general election. It was issued in the name of Ruth Dyson, the local Labour MP. I know her a little and I admire her. She works hard for others yet doesn’t take herself too seriously. A good woman, in other words, and a good MP. But a naughty post hoc-ist.
Page two of the brochure displays a box of six simple graphs. Each purports to illustrate how some aspect of life has deteriorated under the current government: ‘56,000 more unemployed Kiwis under National’, ‘$40 billion more government debt under National’, ‘Record deficit of $18 billion under National’, etc.
In the light of which I was surprised not to see ‘Over 10,000 more earthquakes in Christchurch under National’.
8
May I blame Walt?
In the winter of 2011 an emperor penguin washed up on a beach in New Zealand. It was a long way from where emperor penguins live and it was hungry. So hungry in fact that it ate sand from the beach, which did it no good.
But the bird was rescued, cleaned out and sent to Auckland Zoo to recuperate. It was the sort of story that the media love because it touches an emotional nerve. And sure enough the public took great interest, and the bird acquired the name Happy Feet, after a Disney-style movie about a penguin. Many thousands of dollars were spent in nursing Happy Feet back to health and its devoted keeper became almost as famous as her charge.
In September the bird was crated up, put on a ship and taken to its natural habitat of the Southern Ocean. A chute was let down from the side of the vessel to allow Happy Feet to slide gratefully back into the world it belonged to. But the penguin didn’t want to go. It just stood at the top of the chute and didn’t budge. Eventually someone had to shove it. It slid down the chute bottom first, seemingly looking back to the comforts of a safe enclosure and unlimited free fish.
Boffins had glued a GPS transmitter to Happy Feet’s back. Initial signals suggested the bird was trying to get back to New Zealand, for which one could hardly blame it. But then nature reasserted itself and the bird headed strongly south. New Zealand breathed a nice warm sigh at the thought of Happy Feet returning to its icy world and finding its worried partner and rearing a chick that perhaps, one day, might make a pilgrimage to the shores of New Zealand and raise its little flipper in grateful salute and — but then the transmissions abruptly stopped. It was possible, said the boffins, that the transmitter had failed. But it was more probable, they acknowledged, that something big had eaten Happy Feet.
It was a delicious moment and not just for the something big. It was delicious for anyone who enjoys it when the orca of reality crunches down on the penguin of bullshit. The specific variety of bullshit here is Disneyfication, a selective and sentimental falsification of the nature of nature.
An emperor penguin is an organism with its place in the food chain. Naming it doesn’t alter that fact. One might as well name the orca that ate it, or the fish that the penguin eats or the shrimp that the fish eat. Disneyfication is a form of bullshit that has become increasingly prevalent the more removed we as a species have become from the realities of the planet we inhabit.
Knut was one of two polar bear cubs born in 2006 in Berlin Zoo and then rejected by their mother. Using a net on a stick, zookeepers scooped the cubs off the rock where they’d been left to die and put them in incubators. Knut’s brother still died but Knut pulled through to become the symbol of the zoo. The media flocked, visitors flocked, the American ambassador was photographed with him, a million stuffed fluffy toy replicas of his cha
rm were sold, both he and his keeper became globally famous and the value of shares in the zoo doubled. Knut was profitable.
Then in 2010, at the age of four, in front of 600 spectators, Knut trembled, fell backwards into his pool and drowned. The public wept as one and the authorities are now planning to put up a memorial to Knut. What the inscription on the memorial will be I can’t tell you but may I suggest ‘Disneyfication makes money’. And while I’m at it, may I also suggest two people who won’t be laying a wreath on Knut’s shrine. They are the parents of an Eton schoolboy who went on a camping trip to the Arctic in August 2011. A polar bear attacked their camp and killed the lad. The bear was shot.
Disneyfication of the world starts young. I was raised on Beatrix Potter books: Jemima Puddleduck, Squirrel Nutkin, Peter Rabbit and other anthropomorphs. I loved them, felt for them in their travails. So much so that when, at the age of perhaps seven, I found a wounded squirrel in the road I immediately went to pick it up. I would nurse it back to health, tame it and train it to sit on my shoulder. The squirrel had other ideas. It sank its teeth into my finger to the bone.
When evil Mr McGregor, the gardener and representative of my own species, captured all Peter Rabbit’s nephews and nieces (they’d fallen asleep after eating, as I recall, too much lettuce. It was where I learned the word soporific) I was appalled by his plan to give them to the unseen but villainous Mrs McGregor, who would bake them into a pie. Fortunately Peter Rabbit managed to extract his relatives from the sack in which they’d been imprisoned and replace them — how, it was never made clear — with shoe brushes, much to the distress of Mr McGregor and the delight of me, the little reader who had been emotionally manipulated to side with the rabbits.
One takes a slightly different view of rabbits in New Zealand. Here they were deliberately introduced by nineteenth-century settlers as a source of wild protein, as pie filling, in other words, for the Mr McGregors who had fled here to escape the feudal servitude of Victorian England. The rabbits took one look at New Zealand’s green and pleasant pastures and set about eating it and breeding. Mrs McGregor could have baked pies all day without denting their numbers. Rabbits remain a pest here, so much so that they are now subject to an annual Easter Bunny Shoot, the title of which neatly and simultaneously skewers two widely disparate varieties of bullshit.
I cannot abide cruelty to animals. The word humane is unique to our species and one from which we should take pride. We invented kindness, and the developed world is kinder to the animal kingdom, or at least to some members of it, than it was even fifty years ago. May such progress continue. But at the same time it would be nice if we saw the animal kingdom and our place within it through plain, rather than emotionally distorting, glass.
9
The puppy that never grows up
Because it wilfully misrepresents the actual world we live in, Disneyfication is not only bullshit but it is also a form of child abuse. Parents surround their offspring with fluffy stuffed parodies of top-end predators. It’s as if they were trying to swaddle the child in threatlessness, to draw the world’s sting. Yet were one of those predators to nudge open the bedroom door and stick its muzzle round the jamb there would be instantaneous panic.
Similarly parents will read the child a bedtime story of the Three Little Pigs even while the kid is digesting its supper of bacon sandwiches. I once taught a ten-year-old who simply would not believe it when I told her what an egg was and where it came from. She dismissed the notion as gross.
Quite why we Disneyfy the world for kids I don’t know. I doubt that hunter-gatherer societies did. I doubt that farming families do. Indeed I suspect it is possible only in cities. But once the sentimental seed has been sown, the crop of commercial gain is readily harvested, not least, oddly enough, by Disney.
Disneyland is a bloodless, synthetic heaven where the lion lies down with the lamb. On arrival you are likely to be greeted by a human being dressed as a mouse. The mouse is fully clothed but lacks any genital bulge. It is capable of only one facial expression, which is a grin. Inside the mouse costume the employee may be a lank-haired misanthrope but externally he is and can only ever be a joyous and loving mouse. Meanwhile, were an actual mouse to be found in the Disneyland kitchens, they’d be on the phone to Rentokil before you could say hypocrisy.
The image of the man in the Mickey Mouse costume will serve as a metaphor for the Disney company itself. It’s a corporation. It exists not to promote joy, nor to cheer up sick children, nor to sanitize the world. It exists to make money. Should it cease to do so it would cease to exist. The image of happiness, the denatured nature, the sexless animals, the drenching sentimentality, these are the snake oil that it sells. Behind the perpetual grin is a granite-faced devotion to profit. The company occupies, and adheres to the rules of, a commercial world that is as competitive and ruthless as the natural world it makes its money by misrepresenting. It behaves, in other words, in its self-interest and urge to survive, precisely like a mouse, an actual mouse, a mouse that gnaws its way into the pantry and nibbles at your groceries, a tiny beast that can cause enormous human beings to leap onto a stool and scream.
If I step out of this basement study, I emerge into the garage where there’s a dirty Toyota Carib, a few tools and a toilet with a sliding door that sometimes doesn’t. The corners of the toilet floor are littered with mosquitoes that die there in vast numbers for reasons I am ignorant of. Above the cistern is a shelf, and on the shelf a ‘family’ pack of sixteen Kleenex toilet rolls. And beaming from the side of the plastic packaging around these toilet rolls is a puppy. It’s a labrador puppy, only a few weeks old, and it appears to be smiling. I don’t know whether the good people at Kleenex tweaked the photo a bit, but the dog’s lips are noticeably upturned.
I like soft toilet tissue because I remember its predecessor, the shiny and densely interleaved paper that came in a box. It was sturdy but there its virtues ended. It was cold, it produced a crease as sharp as a blade and rather than removing what it was tasked to remove it tended merely to redistribute it. Soft tissue was a vast improvement. But its manufacturers were faced with the problem of how to promote it. Any literal reference to its function or its qualities — ‘Collects what other papers leave behind!’, ‘Your finger won’t go through it!’ — was unlikely to go down well. Nor were you likely to find a celebrity to endorse the stuff, and thus expose his or her reputation to the inevitable peristaltic jocularity.
Whoever came up with the puppy as a conflationary metaphor for the unmentionable paper was a marketing genius. Like a puppy, the paper is light in colour and soft to the touch. That’s about it for legitimate similarities, but they were more than enough to set the conflationary ball rolling. But conflation was not the sole reason for the campaign’s success, nor even, I’d suggest, the principal one. (And it has been such a success that it has persisted for over half a century.) What the puppy did was to tap into Disneyesque sentiment.
Many people dislike dogs, but just about everyone likes puppies, at least on sight. They’re so cute, playful and adorable, a sales pitch made flesh. Which is exactly what they evolved to be. Puppies need to appeal to the bitches that whelped them, otherwise they are likely to be neglected.
Bitches are mammals like us. Indeed we and they share such quantities of DNA that we are more similar than we are different. So it is unsurprising that the qualities that render a pup appealing to a bitch also render it appealing to us: those huge eyes, that snub nose, that soft vulnerability. It is precisely these qualities in our own species that cause certain people to lean into a pram and acquaint its occupant with terror.
The maternal urge to love and protect is a powerful and positive emotion that goes beyond words. If by conflation the makers of bog roll can attach a ghost of that urge to their product they are likely to be on to a good thing. But at the same time they are selectively denaturing the natural world.
The point about the Kleenex puppy is that it’s a puppy with no downsides. It never
shits on the carpet or chews the furniture. More significantly still, it is perpetually a puppy. In fifty years the adorable beastie hasn’t got a day older. In the actual world a puppy gets a day older more or less every day. And those days add up fast so that within a few months it becomes a dog. And once that happens its mother stops feeling sentimental about it and shoos it away.
Some people do the same. In the pet shop they fall for the puppy’s sales pitch of cuteness. But within the year they find they have something less winsome on their hands, whereupon they shoo it to the vet to have its inconvenient doghood — and you have to admire this euphemism — put to sleep. Thus the dog becomes a blameless victim of the Disneyfied mind.
The nub of Disneyfication is the denial of sapid reality, the sanitization of a blood and sinew world. Its aim in so doing is to foster a sentimental response. Sentiment and reason are not bedfellows. And since reason is the bullshitter’s perpetual enemy, arousing sentiment serves the bullshitter well. Indeed the arousal of emotion is the weapon that the bullshitter reaches for most often. Almost any emotion will do. The bullshittee under the influence of any feeling from love to loathing, from disgust to delight, is easier to manipulate. The bullshitter’s mantra is ‘Just make the buggers feel something’.
It isn’t hard. We are emotional creatures and we like it that way. The life of pure reason is unappealing. If we were given the choice between living as Mr Spock or Captain Kirk, we’d go for Kirk. He can think but he can also feel. Not to do so is not to be human. It is our nature. But it is also our vulnerability.