Hunting the Snark

“…what I tell you three times is true.”
--Lewis Carroll “The Hunting of the Snark”


I teach a class for the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IB) called the Theory of Knowledge. The point of TOK, as the course is widely known throughout the IB world, is to investigate the nature of knowledge, what it is, how it is made, the degree to which certainty is possible, and the degree to which the nature and methods of knowledge cross boundaries of subject areas. We always spend some time at the beginning of the course pondering the idea of truth. This is always an unexpected experience for the students, as “truth” is something that they have always simply taken for granted—so much so, that they have never stopped even to consider what it is. I doubt, in fact, whether many people ever actually take a few minutes to stop and think closely about what it means to say that something is true or to consider how we decide that something is true or not.

Philosophers, of course, have tread this path before us, and philosophy thus offers us a variety of ways to think about truth, so I walk my students through a consideration of some of those: truth by correspondence, truth by coherence, truth by pragmatism, and truth by assertion.

Truth by correspondence, the kind of truth that, when pushed, virtually every student will propose as a definition of truth (without knowing the fancy term, of course) means that we can determine that X is true when it corresponds with reality. It sounds simple, but in fact, when push comes to shove, the difficulty of ascertaining whether any given X does, indeed, correspond to reality are legion. To give just one example: most of us will readily say that it is true that the apple is red, because we can see that it is red. But when we start to try to pin down what “red” is, it turns out that the apple itself is almost certainly NOT red. Red, instead, is a product of an involved process of light bouncing off a surface that has texture and shape and density but not color, and then traveling through the filter of the human eye, which converts the light to an electrical impulse that speaks the language of the neurons in the brain. The neurons translate the stimulus into an idea (whatever shape THAT takes in the physical universe) to which we have given the name “red.” To some degree, then, “red” is in the word, in the brain, in the electrical impulses traveling along nerves, in the light, in the apple, in the very properties of physics. It is mobile and transitory. The statement “the apple is red,” therefore, is not true. We just think it is, assume it is, and act as if it is.

The thinking shortcut that allows us to function happily with the untruth of the color in the apple would seem, on the surface of things (pardoning the pun), to be harmless. It’s functional. The apple looks red, and the linguistic approximation serves us very well. If I ask for someone to pass me the red apple, I will get the red apple. I will be happy and blissfully untroubled by the fine-line difference between where I said the red was and where it actually is. The very functionality of our untrue truths, however, lulls us into a habitual lack of vigilance. We don’t feel the need to examine the degree to which appearances and reality align; thus, we learn to accept appearances as reality in a ever-widening array of circumstances. If we don’t learn to enact a conscious process of checking, we eventually fall victim to gullibility, and then we’re happy to accept as true pretty much everything we see or hear or read or think. At the extreme end of that transformation, we arrive at truth by assertion, in its worst possible incarnation.

Truth by assertion simply means that something is so because we say it is so. On the surface of that, it seems ridiculous: we generally think of reality as something that exists independent of us—independent of humanity—the tree that would fall in the forest and make a sound whether we were there to hear it or not. Pure common sense tells us that we can’t make ourselves into a major league pitcher by simply stating “I have a 98-mile-per-hour fastball,” or end the war in Iraq by proclaiming it over. There are, nevertheless, irrefutable realities that we do, indeed, create through the sheer force of speaking them: “You’re fired!” spoken by Donald Trump on his television show (or in his office) makes it so, the minister pronouncing a couple man and wife binds them legally together, and “Out!” means the runner goes back to the dugout, whether he actually, physically, beat the ball to second base or not.

The line between true and untrue blurs for truth by assertion, though, just as it does for truth by correspondence. Some things that we say are true are true because we say them; some things we say are true will not be true no matter how loud or often we say them. But some things that appear to be true independent of us and our words are actually, subtly, products of our agreement that they should be so, and some things aren’t true because we say them, but cannot become true until we say them. Today is Monday. We think of that as being a fact external to us, and certainly it isn’t Monday because I, personally, say so, but it is only Monday because we, in the form of the English speaking human race say so. We are functioning inside a framework constructed by human beings. It’s an old framework—so old that we almost never stop to think it about the reality of Monday being something created—but Monday is a function of human say-so. As in the case of the red not really being in the apple, a concern about the source of what makes Monday Monday would seem to be a pointless quibble, but the logical conclusion of the failure to ensure that we know which realities we have control over is that we end up thinking ourselves powerless when we’re not.

My students, as an example, mirrored the common public reaction to the decision at the International Astronomical Union in Prague to reclassify Pluto as a dwarf planet. Many of my students were outraged, and their first, and sometimes lasting, impulse was to insist that “they can’t say Pluto isn’t a planet—it is one!” A number of students had a very difficult time learning to understand that “planet” is not a thing that exists in the external universe, that it is, rather, a word for a category and the category itself is not a thing, but an idea. If we think our ideas are real, and outside ourselves, and outside of our control, we can come to feel ourselves powerless—we can BE powerless.

Politics always seem to trade on the fact that many—maybe most—people can be counted on to relinquish their power over truth by simply believing what they hear—especially in situations in which it’s difficult to check the accuracy of what is said. Because of this, and because we have often in the past seen politicians apparently willing to say whatever was expedient in a given situation, many of us have grown cynical about politicians and politics. But despite that cynicism, much of the drama of a political campaign arises from the fact that some people believe some politicians, while other people believe others. The 2008 Presidential campaign has been a little different from what I remember from the past: during this campaign, the L word has emerged. For the first time that I remember, there have been open accusations in the press and by the candidates themselves of out and out lying by almost all parties. This is, actually, a fairly extraordinary development. We understand intuitively and deeply that reality matters, and so we are reluctant to accuse anyone directly of deliberately repudiating it. At least one reason for the ratcheting up of the language of accusation in this year’s campaign is that some of the lies have been so transparent that it has been impossible to maintain the polite fiction that all politicians mean well, and that our main worry is not finding an honest leader, but rather finding one whose beliefs and values match ours.

George Bush’s stint in the White House has been so characterized by the manipulation of the truth to get what he wants that there is now a term for it, named after his chief advisor, Karl Rove. But even Karl Rove has come out against the McCain campaign tactics this year, not, presumably, because they are dishonest, but because the dishonesty has no deniability. Andrew Sullivan, a rabid opponent of the Sarah Palin choice for what it says about McCain’s fitness to lead, has cataloged a series of demonstrably untrue statements Palin has made. Factcheck.org published a similar catalog of incorrect statements by both Barack Obama and John McCain during last Friday’s debate. I will leave those catalogs to them, other than to say that a close perusal will reveal untruths of a variety of sorts: plain misstatements, deliberate falsifications, one-time lies, repeated assertions of non-facts, and so on. I am interested, at the particular moment, in the heavy reliance by the McCain campaign on untenable truth by assertion. This week we were treated to a number of statements that were apparently designed to create non-existent realities, realities that were, to my mind, shocking, because they were not only not true, but if true, would be extremely dangerous. What I saw the McCain campaign doing was fear-mongering, just as Bush has done before them for the past eight years.

This kind of untruth is of a particular type that Harry G. Frankfurt, in his essay “On Bullshit” (also re-published as a small free-standing book), explores. In “On Bullshit,” Frankfurt examines the nature of untruths and makes a compelling argument for the difference between lies and bullshit: “It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are—that I regard as the essence of bullshit." This is what we have grown accustomed to seeing in the Bush administration: the willingness to say whatever is expedient without regard to whether it is true or not. In a nation grown heartily sick of it, I was, perhaps naively, not expecting to see the same behavior from a candidate who has been so desperately trying to distance himself from Bush that the sitting President of the United States was not invited to come to the Republican convention to speak,. But this week we were treated to a spectacular display of what Frankfurt would clearly classify as bullshit: the so-called suspension of McCain’s campaign.

McCain SAID that he was going to suspend his campaign because it was time to put country ahead of politics, and it was more important for him to go to Washington and help resolve the bailout crisis than it was for him to run for President or debate Barack Obama on Friday. That sounds noble and self-sacrificing, if you don’t stop and dig a little deeper. But subject the claim to just a little examination, and it becomes clear that it wasn’t true. McCain hadn’t been in congress for a vote since April. He has been, in fact, the most absent congressman this term. The second most absent congressman is Tim Johnson, who suffered a brain hemorrhage and was out for several months in early 2007. For McCain to imply that suddenly congress couldn’t get along without him was to misrepresent the situation.

Even if we want to give McCain the benefit of the doubt on this, and say, for instance, that even though he has had to miss 64% of the votes of the 110th Congress because he has been campaigning, this one is too important to miss, the claim still falls because we all know what actually happened: McCain did not, in fact, go directly back to Washington, DC. When he went, he accomplished nothing and might have actually done some damage. Frank Rich spelled out the whole sequence of events from Wednesday to Saturday in his New York Times column on Sunday summing up, in part, thus:

By the time he [McCain] arrived, there already was a bipartisan agreement in principle. It collapsed hours later at the meeting convened by the president in the Cabinet Room. Rather than help try to resuscitate Wall Street’s bloodied bulls, McCain was determined to be the bull in Washington’s legislative china shop, running around town and playing both sides of his divided party against Congress’s middle. Once others eventually forged a path out of the wreckage, he’d inflate, if not outright fictionalize, his own role in cleaning up the mess his mischief helped make.

As things turned out on Monday, Rich was prophetic, but the fiction was even more outrageous than anyone could have imagined. Mere hours after the McCain campaign tried to claim credit for the accord reached on the bailout, McCain turned around and blamed the failure of the bill on Barack Obama. No one observing the astounding switchbacks of the last week can credit any of these claims as true. All these words constitute a desperate attempt to make reality by talking it into being, but Lewis Carroll could tell Senator McCain that when he wrote that “…what I tell you three times is true” it was in the context of snark hunting. Snarks, of course, are mythical, and we find ourselves today in the midst of a crowd of hunters of snark, chasing the myth with the biggest guns they can find. (And maybe a helicopter or two.)

For snark, read, in Harry Frankfurt’s terms, bullshit. Frankfurt talks about the fact that bullshit is more insidious, even, than lying:

Both in lying and in telling the truth people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are. These guide them as they endeavor either to describe the world correctly or to describe it deceitfully. For this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way that bullshitting tends to. ...The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are (132).

McCain isn’t interested in pursuing the truth; he is interested in winning a campaign that has suddenly, inexplicably, gotten away from him. He is interested in saying whatever magic words will get him back the attention and the lead. But magic words won’t cut it. McCain can’t absolve himself of blame for the failure of the bailout bill just by saying so any more than he can give himself credit for solving the economic crisis just by saying so. Saddam Hussain wasn’t responsible for 9/11 just because George Bush said so. The physical proximity of Alaska to Russia doesn’t give Sarah Palin foreign policy credentials, no matter who says so, or how many times; Barack Obama isn’t naïve just because McCain said so, and we aren’t winning the war in Iraq just because McCain says so. Some truths we can create with words; some we can’t, and it behooves us to know the difference.

Happily, one good thing that arises from all this is that it appears that Al Gore was right, when he wrote in Assault on Reason that the Internet has the power to be the instrument that restores to American politics the public discourse that the founding fathers were counting on when they designed the system of democracy that they embodied in the Constitution. Where the mainstream press has not, in my recollection, been prone to setting themselves up as watchdogs for the truth in the past, thousands of bloggers on the Internet have, and the Internet debate over whether what Palin or McCain or Obama or Joe Biden says is true is widespread, ongoing, and healthy. That debate seems to have spread to some degree into the mainstream press. Anyone paying any attention, therefore, is being asked to think about what they are hearing and decide whether they think what was said is true. It may be that we can’t finally know, and that most people will ultimately decide based on what they want to be true, rather than on what really is true, but at least we are not, this time, content to just accept what we hear unthinkingly.

Frankfurt wrote a follow up book to On Bullshit; On Truth, published in 2006. In it he says, in part:

Any society that manages to be even minimally functional must have, it seems to me, a robust appreciation of the endlessly protean utility of truth. After all, how could a society that cared too little for truth make sufficiently well-informed judgments and decisions concerning the most suitable disposition of its public business? How could it possibly flourish, or even survive, without knowing enough about relevant facts to pursue its ambitions successfully and to cope prudently and effectively with its problems? (15-16)

Couldn’t have said it better myself.




NEWSFLASH: As I finish writing this on Monday evening, I find myself presented with the snarkiest of the week’s snark hunts: Eric Cantor on the floor of the house, waving Nancy Pelosi’s pre-bailout vote speech and proclaiming in fury that “this is all her fault!” His contention is that Pelosi’s speech (which I have not heard, but which, I gather was partisan and blamed Bush for the economic mess, a claim I have much less problem believing than most I’ve heard this week) caused at least 12 Republicans to change their minds and vote against the bill. Barney Frank reasonably and promptly put that remark into proper perspective by suggesting that the implied insult therein to Republicans is one that Democrats wouldn’t even think of making.


Works Cited

Carroll, Lewis. "The Hunting of the Snark." The Online Literature Library. Literature.org. 28 Sep 2008 http://www.literature.org/authors/carroll-lewis/the-hunting-of-the-snark/chapter-01.html.

Frankfurt, Harry G. “On Bullshit.” The Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge University Press: New York, 1988. 117-133.

Frankfurt, Harry G. On Truth. Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 2006.