The stakes are high. The struggle for political advantage is a winner-take-all game. Surely the power of one agent is constrained by the relative power of other agents, and this in turn is constrained by a system of procedural checks and balances. However, since the rules are themselves subject to revision by those in power, the struggle for political power is a struggle for control over the rules of the game. Bullshit is the main tool for the ultimately unconstrained struggle for the flexible and malleable rules of political power.160
There’s a distinction worth making here. In the context of public political discourse we get both kinds of bullshit: the kind custom-crafted by those deviously intending to obfuscate and the kind innocently repeated by those too uncritical to recognize bullshit, who often seize upon bullshit that strikes a chord with them or fits some self-image or narrative they embrace.
Stories Shape Our Feelings
Bullshit’s role in political narratives gives it one of its most interesting features. Bullshit links images and types which are both familiar and fascinating, and so taps into cultural prototypes. It uses familiar expressions to convey mental images, and leaves an impression that achieves the speaker’s goal.
A narrative, or story, is not merely an interpretive framework superimposed on otherwise disconnected acts, images, impressions and emotions. As Peter Goldie argues, a person’s narrative is that person’s life insofar as it is understood as a sequence of meaningful and emotional episodes.161 The narrative structures of our lives themselves shape and color how we understand and how we feel about particular episodes in the past, and how we will perceive and interpret episodes in the future. Narrative also shapes how we view others, their lives and their attendant worthiness, and how they relate to us and affect our lives. In short, it forms our understanding of our place in the world.
The narrative is therefore much more than the mere stringing together of impressions and emotions into a coherent structure. The narrative structure itself shapes our feelings towards objects and, by extension, to particular episodes. It’s largely due to an event’s location in the narrative that we feel the way we do about something or someone. When asked why we feel as we do about someone or something, we often say, “Well, there’s a story behind it.” It’s this background story that gives the emotion its content—we wouldn’t feel anything if there weren’t a story. So the relation of an event or emotional episode to a narrative is symbiotic; it flows both ways. The episodes shape the narrative of which they are a part and give it meaningful content, and the narrative shapes the content of the emotion we experience. As the narrative and the background story evolves, so do our emotions.
To understand how bullshit functions in this light, we need to look at the nature of emotions themselves. As Goldie shows, emotions relate to values in important ways. First, emotions give epistemic access to values. If I feel love or fear, for example, then there is something that I love or fear (p. 4). This is a stronger claim than saying merely that emotions have aboutness or ofness. This is demonstrated by the fact that emotions can be phrased as transitive verbs of the standard form, ‘A Fs B’, where B is the object picked out by the emotion-verb F experienced by the person A. “An object of an emotion, in this sense, could be a particular thing or person (that pudding, this man), an event or an action (the earthquake, your hitting me), or a state of affairs (my being in an aeroplane)” (p. 17). Emotions thereby reveal the people, objects, events, and states of affairs we value, positively or negatively—the ones we want and the ones we wish to avoid. There is a caveat here, though, that applies to any intentional state.
First, the object of the emotion has to be identified in a sufficiently fine-grained way to capture why the person feels that emotion about that object: Oedipus might be delighted he married Jocasta, but would not be delighted that he has married his mother. Secondly, the object of an emotion need not exist. Jimmy might be afraid of the Abominable Snowman, when there is no such creature. (p. 18)
Emotions, finally, are not created in a void: there are significant conceptual relations between emotions and the beliefs that ground them. I fear losing the man I love because I believe that my life would be substantially impoverished without him. If I believed I would be better off without him, I probably would not have the same fear. Perhaps this is an assessment rather than a belief? Then consider a different example. I might be angry at seeing another woman with a coat like mine if I believe it’s mine and she has stolen it. I wouldn’t feel the same anger if I believe she has simply bought it at the same shop, rather than stolen mine; I would find it an amusing coincidence.
Martha Nussbaum believes that the narrative of an emotion is in fact the narrative about judgments.162 These judgments are about things important to us that we do not fully control—both the lack of control and the importance are implicit in the intense experience of an emotion. This is, in fact, the Greek Stoic view of emotions. Not only are emotions intentional in that they point at their object, but they are deeply intentional in the way they are internal and encompass a set of beliefs about the object. These beliefs pertain to the value of the object. The object is seen (believed, judged) to be important. “So there seem to be type-identities between emotions and judgments; emotions can be defined in terms of judgment alone” (p. 196).
Emotions also shape values. Pride, vanity and resentment are predispositions, but they are also emotions that shape what we value, what is important. If I’m proud, I will value respect or independence or both. If I’m vain I will value praise and attention. If I’m resentful, I will value stories of perceived rivals brought low. These emotions and their attendant value are not disruptive of a life’s narrative, but very much part of it. The triumvirate of emotion, judgment and narrative is as old as philosophy itself. The Greek concept of eudaimonia, commonly mistranslated as ‘happiness’, encompasses them. In eudai-monistic theory a well-lived life (mistranslated as a ‘happy’ life) is one that includes all those things to which the agent ascribes intrinsic value—all that the person deems important in her life, without which she would not consider her life complete (p. 190).
Imagination, and the dynamic character of judging ourselves, takes place against the background of narrative (p. 51): “what would my life be like with/without/if . . . ?” The evaluation of importance is, as mentioned above, shaped by the narrative and pushes the agent’s cognition towards an object, itself assessed within the framework of the narrative. “When we have an emotion,” Goldie says, “we are engaged with the world, grasping what is going on in the world, and responding accordingly.” That’s why “the emotions can be educated” (p. 48). Goldie gives the example of how children are raised to have an appropriate, and proportionate, response to appropriate stimuli: “this warrants sympathy,” “this should make you proud,” and so on. As we will see, the most dangerous of political bullshit tries to educate our emotions by telling us what should make us proud or patriotic, angry or frightened.
These processes are a part of every life: the ebb and flow of one’s life and reason, one’s narrative. The power of bullshit is that it can be used to tell us what should be eudaimonistically included among our feelings, wants, and needs. It tries to make us desire and long for things we had not previously considered. In other words, it tells us what philia should be important to us. It tells us what we should consider our civic duty, what we should covet and—ultimately—who we are with respect to those around us. The special problem with bullshit, however, is that it gets its power by appealing to and motivating that part of us that is base and non-rational. In that respect, it degrades us. Let’s look at some examples from international politics.
Bullshit Around the Globe
The sentence ‘we are waging a war on terror’ is specifically designed to elicit a strong and specific emotional response—not to give any further facts, elicit a debate, or give ethical justifications for actions. It is useful here to parse out the mechanism of this phrase, one word at a time. First, there is the ‘we�
�. This is a clear identification of a group vis-à-vis another group: ‘we’, not ‘they’, not ‘others’. If the listener is engaged in the activity (here, fighting in the war on terror—more on this in a second), then the listener is included in the group. If she is not, then she is not in the group—and may be, possibly, on the other side of the confrontation (maybe even an ‘enemy combatant’, to use another popular and vague phrase). Second, this us-versus-them feeling is reinforced by the imagery of waging a war, which conjures visceral reactions of patriotism (possibly jingoism) and a call to violent and unquestioning action. If we are at war, then we must join our compatriots—and fight without questioning our orders. This is very useful for those seeking extra powers and a curb on civil liberties in order to wage this war.
Last, but not least, there is that word ‘terror’—not terrorism or terrorists, as these would be too specific for the bullshit purpose at hand. ‘Terrorists’ would designate individual people who are defined with reference to specific actions. Our attention would then turn to these individuals and perhaps look at them closely to see if they fit that category and are being judged accurately. ‘Terrorism’ would designate a type of action: again, something that can be defined and specified—perhaps as the murder of innocent civilians, who are at least innocent in the sense that they are not the individuals that perpetrated whatever offense has come to be the excuse for violence.
‘Terror’, on the other hand, is suitably vague. It is an emotion and figures powerfully, even universally, in human narratives. We have all know terror from childhood, when we were terrified of being punished or of the bogeyman. The ‘war on terror’, then, is a ‘war’ on an emotion? ‘We’ will vanquish this extreme form of fear?’ Again, ‘we are waging a war on terror’ is a bullshit phrase not because we are not undertaking a course of action to end terrorism. That would certainly be a laudable cause. It is a bullshit phrase because it is a narrative that evokes emotions, rather than the thought and discussion wise, democratic policy and military decisions require. It teaches us to fear some vague Other, ‘terror’, and, by tapping into our deep-seated craving for security, urges us to hunt this bogeyman Other.
Whether it is ‘the war on terror’ or ‘Western imperialism’, parties in international conflicts or standoffs will use bullshit to persuade their followers to support their actions rather than engage in a lucid debate about the underpinning moral commitments. For instance, the United States government does not explain why such extraordinary resources and curbs on civil liberties are justified to eliminate something that even in 2001 caused only 0.13 percent of all deaths in the US. Likewise, the militant Muslims calling for jihad on all Westerners on the premise that this “jihad is God’s will” do not elucidate how they are able to know (and espouse) God’s will to murder innocents (a term used even by Osama bin Laden in his Ummat Daily interview of September 28th, 2001, where he denied involvement in the 9/11 attacks) especially within a religion that explicitly forbids the murder of women and children even in warfare. Neither the militant Muslim terrorists nor the Bush administration fighting them has addressed how bombing or torturing people who are not the ones that actually inflicted harm (whether to Palestinians or New York City) will bring peace or end fear.
We can see, therefore, precisely how political bullshit degrades us. On the one hand, it seeks to shape our values in a manner that circumvents our treasured human faculty to be moved by ideas. It appeals to our emotions and avoids engaging those faculties of reason and debate that make us human. The call to spread democracy, for example, lulls us into feeling that it is our civic duty to share our freedom, but it says little about whether the people in fact want democracy or how such an intervention is to be justified. To tell one’s constituency that the administration’s task is to spread democracy, without any discussion of how such a “spread” is to be justified or undertaken, is to insult the intelligence of the constituency.
On the other hand, as this example suggests, bullshit has an almost irresistible pull because it so effectively appeals to our baser impulses. It can give us a strong sense of identity and importance as we become players in the narrative of others—and they in ours. If we’re lucky, they will view us as valuable—especially if we are spreading democracy or God’s will. In this way, bullshit plays a large role in current claims of nationalism, liberty, and democracy. It is used to unite, to band together, and also persuade.
This is not to say that we do not or should not have a role in the world, for I concur with Richard Haass that given the present global situation the United States has a role and indeed an opportunity to define a moment in history, an opportunity it is missing.163 This is an opportunity to discuss and define, an oppor-tunity too precious to be squandered on the bullshit of obfuscation and suppressed debate. Yet as long as we derive a strong sense of identity from bullshit, we will be hard-pressed to eradicate it.
This, of course, presents a challenge for the consumer of bullshit, namely, to ascertain the speaker’s intent and to surmise the speaker’s state of mind. Does the speaker intend to obfuscate? This is no simple task, but one that is certainly facilitated by the Cohen strategy: identifying the content will lead to an eradication of the process, and eradicate it we must, if we are to maintain our human dignity and maintain our capacity to reason and be moved by ideas, especially the ideas of right and wrong that allow us to lead lives we value.
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Bullshit at the Interface of Science and Policy: Global Warming, Toxic Substances, and Other Pesky Problems
HEATHER DOUGLAS
In recent public discussions about the use of science in policy-making, confusion has bred bullshit. The interface between science and policy is notoriously difficult, requiring technical competence and political savvy. At this difficult boundary, the need for quality science advice remains a pressing concern.
Ever since Plato’s parable about the stargazer as expert navigator for the ship of state in The Republic, governments have grappled with the problem of how to get accurate and reliable expert advice on technical matters central to policy-making. In recent decades, as the scope of government concern has expanded and the need for technical advice becomes more acute, the debate surrounding the quality of science advice for policy-making has shifted, from excluding pseudoscience, to worries over “junk science,” to the most recent concern over “politicized science.” These shifts, however, merely rephrase the same question: On whom should we rely for expert advice? The question is not easily answered, and the resulting confusion allows bullshit to proliferate.
Two different kinds of bullshit flourish at the science-policy interface. The first trades on the complexities of evidence and technical detail on which many substantive policy choices rest—complexities that make it easy to confuse the public about the extent of uncertainties and contravening evidence in particular cases. This leads to a pervasive kind of bullshit in which statements are made that are not false, and thus not lies, but are deeply misleading. Operators on the interface can propagate these true but misleading statements, thus building support for desired policy choices.
The second kind of bullshit is more pervasive. It occurs when critics of scientific claims suggest that the evidence on which a decision is based is insufficient to support the decision. What makes this argument bullshit in most cases is that it often presupposes that we have a universal standard of evidential support which all claims must meet in order to be “scientific.” Yet there is no such standard—particularly in cases where one must take into account evidence from multiple sources—and thus any appeal to such a standard is pure bullshit. Usually, what the critic really thinks is that the evidence is insufficient in this case to overcome their concerns about the implications of the claims, particularly if the claim is wrong and is accepted (or correct and is rejected). The consequences of error, of making an inaccurate empirical claim with political implications, is what is of concern to the critic, but rather than discuss these concerns openly, the critic
simply declares that the evidence available does not meet the standards of “sound science” or is an example of “politicized science.” This move confuses genuine cases of junk or politicized science from cases where burdens of proof are disputed, helping only to obscure the issues at stake.
Both of these kinds of bullshit are prevalent in discussions of science and policy-making, and they will be difficult to eliminate. The technical and esoteric nature of much of the evidence on which policy is based will make the first kind of bullshit attractive to anyone seeking to score political points in a science-based dispute. Constant vigilance is the only remedy. The second kind of bullshit is more amenable to cure, but only if we adjust our ideas about scientific reasoning to emphasize the weighing of evidence, uncertainty, and the consequences of error. Unfortunately, this will make science-based policy debates more complicated, and the temptation to oversimplify things and assume the existence of a universal standard of proof will always have an allure, especially in our sound bite age. Bullshit is more compact, portable, and convenient than full and open discussion.
Bullshit of the Isolated Fact
In many policy disputes that depend on technical or scientific backgrounds, a welter of facts are relevant to the issue at hand. Even in the relatively simple cases of regulating toxic substances, for example, one needs to know the details of animal toxicology studies, whether there have been any accidental human exposures studied, what is known about the biochemistry of the substance, and how humans are currently exposed and to what levels. This welter of facts must then be considered in total to figure out whether and how to regulate a substance. Missing just one crucial piece of the puzzle can throw the whole picture off. For example, if a chemical causes liver cancer in rats, and is consumed by many people (although no studies of human effects have been conducted), it would seem prudent to regulate the chemical. But if one also knows that the rats have a substance in their livers that interacts with the chemical of concern to produce their cancers, a substance that is absent in humans, one will likely be much less alarmed. One must have as much of the available picture as possible.164 But having that takes a lot of work to develop, takes time to present to others, and even worse, may undermine the political outcome you desire. It’s much easier in these inherently complex cases to pick and choose one’s facts rather than grapple with all of the available evidence.
Bullshit and Philosophy Page 25