Tuesday, March 20, 2007
On Bush and Bullshit
Did our president lie his way into a disastrous war? Rather than facing the tedium of the factual record, I would like to approach this question by examining the philosophy of lies and their bastard cousin, bullshit. The key work in the area is On Bullshit, a book by Harry G. Frankfurt. Despite its title, the book is a completely serious work of analytical philosophy.
Frankfurt points out that every lie is actually two lies. One is the lie about what is the case in the world, for example, “I am entitled to a tax refund of X dollars.” This is a lie, of course, because we have exaggerated or fabricated some of our itemized deductions. In making this false claim about the world, we must also lie about our mental state. Our claim entails a second, implicit claim to be experiencing the mental state of believing our statement to be true. Such a mental state is incompatible with our actual ideation, which includes thoughts such as, “I’ll just tell them I lost the reciepts,” and “Nobody gets audited anyway.”
With this understanding of the dual nature of lies, Frankfurt turns to the question of bullshit. When we bullshit, as opposed to when we lie, we do not knowingly misstate the truth of what is or is not the case. The truth of the case is irrelevent to a bullshitter; he is not knowingly misstating the case, because he does not know or care what the case may be. A bullshitter tells no explicit lie. He only tells the implicit lie, the second kind of lie that liars tell. The bullshitter is only lying about his mental state: he wants us to believe he knows and cares what is or is not the case, when in fact he does not know or care.
Given his equananimity in the face of post-invasion revelations, it is obvious that President Bush did not know or care what was the case with Hussein’s WMDs and ties to al Qaida. But there is more.
In the run-up to war, President Bush authorized the creation of an organization that may be regarded as a kind of model institutional organ for the production and dessimination of bullshit. He called it the “Iraq Study Group.” This name itself is two-thirds bullshit, because while it was a group, he didn’t expect it to study Iraq. The stated purpose of the group was to provide access for the president and other select leaders to unfiltered intelligence about Saddam’s purported WMDs and links to al Qaida.
What does it mean to filter intelligence? Well, if someone offers a report in which someone claims he witnessed the processing WMDs in a certain building in Iraq on such and such a date, filtering this intelligence would mean considering the reports of other agents and agencies to consider whether, for example, such a building exists, where the man actually was on the date he named, whether he would have been given access to the building, or whether, say, he may instead have been a substance abuser with crushing debts who just made the whole thing up to get asylum for his family.
Or, if one were handed documents purporting to authorize shipments of uranium from an African country, filtering the intelligence might mean asking allied intelligence services in, say, Italy, whether they aren’t just a cheap forgery, or checking to see if anyone might ever have been sent to Africa to check out the story.
Unfiltered intelligence lacks the benefit of such attention. As we have seen, and as intelligence analysts will confirm, intelligence can only provide an accurate picture of what is in fact the case if it has been filtered.
For this reason, unfiltered intelligence is useless to a decision maker who wants to know or to tell the truth. It is no more useful to a decision maker who wants to lie. In order to lie, one must know the truth, so that one can distort or deny it in the lie.
Unfiltered intelligence is only useful for a decision maker if he wants to bullshit. For this it is unmatched. Unfiltered intelligence allows a leader to illustrate any position he chooses without ever shouldering the burden of knowing what is or is not in fact the case.
It is possible that President Bush told some lies on the road to war, but his favored approach was to bullshit.
At the end of his book, Professor Frankfurt notes that liars are condemned more readily and with greater vehemence than mere bullshitters. He argues that liars value the truth more than do bullshitters, because liars must know the truth to construct their lie, while bullshitters have no use for it at all. Those who value truth, he says, should fear bullshit at least as much as they do lies.
I think we should join Professor Frankfurt in asking, as he does at the end of his book, why we should bother to condemn lies if we are perfectly willing to tolerate bullshit.
Frankfurt points out that every lie is actually two lies. One is the lie about what is the case in the world, for example, “I am entitled to a tax refund of X dollars.” This is a lie, of course, because we have exaggerated or fabricated some of our itemized deductions. In making this false claim about the world, we must also lie about our mental state. Our claim entails a second, implicit claim to be experiencing the mental state of believing our statement to be true. Such a mental state is incompatible with our actual ideation, which includes thoughts such as, “I’ll just tell them I lost the reciepts,” and “Nobody gets audited anyway.”
With this understanding of the dual nature of lies, Frankfurt turns to the question of bullshit. When we bullshit, as opposed to when we lie, we do not knowingly misstate the truth of what is or is not the case. The truth of the case is irrelevent to a bullshitter; he is not knowingly misstating the case, because he does not know or care what the case may be. A bullshitter tells no explicit lie. He only tells the implicit lie, the second kind of lie that liars tell. The bullshitter is only lying about his mental state: he wants us to believe he knows and cares what is or is not the case, when in fact he does not know or care.
Given his equananimity in the face of post-invasion revelations, it is obvious that President Bush did not know or care what was the case with Hussein’s WMDs and ties to al Qaida. But there is more.
In the run-up to war, President Bush authorized the creation of an organization that may be regarded as a kind of model institutional organ for the production and dessimination of bullshit. He called it the “Iraq Study Group.” This name itself is two-thirds bullshit, because while it was a group, he didn’t expect it to study Iraq. The stated purpose of the group was to provide access for the president and other select leaders to unfiltered intelligence about Saddam’s purported WMDs and links to al Qaida.
What does it mean to filter intelligence? Well, if someone offers a report in which someone claims he witnessed the processing WMDs in a certain building in Iraq on such and such a date, filtering this intelligence would mean considering the reports of other agents and agencies to consider whether, for example, such a building exists, where the man actually was on the date he named, whether he would have been given access to the building, or whether, say, he may instead have been a substance abuser with crushing debts who just made the whole thing up to get asylum for his family.
Or, if one were handed documents purporting to authorize shipments of uranium from an African country, filtering the intelligence might mean asking allied intelligence services in, say, Italy, whether they aren’t just a cheap forgery, or checking to see if anyone might ever have been sent to Africa to check out the story.
Unfiltered intelligence lacks the benefit of such attention. As we have seen, and as intelligence analysts will confirm, intelligence can only provide an accurate picture of what is in fact the case if it has been filtered.
For this reason, unfiltered intelligence is useless to a decision maker who wants to know or to tell the truth. It is no more useful to a decision maker who wants to lie. In order to lie, one must know the truth, so that one can distort or deny it in the lie.
Unfiltered intelligence is only useful for a decision maker if he wants to bullshit. For this it is unmatched. Unfiltered intelligence allows a leader to illustrate any position he chooses without ever shouldering the burden of knowing what is or is not in fact the case.
It is possible that President Bush told some lies on the road to war, but his favored approach was to bullshit.
At the end of his book, Professor Frankfurt notes that liars are condemned more readily and with greater vehemence than mere bullshitters. He argues that liars value the truth more than do bullshitters, because liars must know the truth to construct their lie, while bullshitters have no use for it at all. Those who value truth, he says, should fear bullshit at least as much as they do lies.
I think we should join Professor Frankfurt in asking, as he does at the end of his book, why we should bother to condemn lies if we are perfectly willing to tolerate bullshit.
Labels: Iraq
¶ 4:55 PM
