The Pity Party (22 page)

Daniels sounds surprised that even some liberals emphasize performance and effectiveness, suggesting that such obvious criteria are
not
that big a deal to most. For a conservative politician to question liberals' sincerity may prove little, but Daniels is not alone. Philosophy professor Daniel Shapiro criticized his famous peer, John Rawls, on the same basis: stipulating that justice requires government policies guaranteeing the worst-off person in society be as well off as possible is all well and good, but it won't do to collapse the distinction between setting up government programs for the purpose of pursuing that goal and actually achieving it. In fact, writes Shapiro,

Institutions cannot be adequately characterized by their aims. In the real world, political decision makers do not simply have intentions to achieve a just society that they can simply implement. They have agendas and interests of their own.

Moreover, even the most dedicated, selfless public officials “face informational constraints, such as their ignorance about most of the facts that are relevant for a decision, the difficulties in evaluating the relevant evidence, and our uncertainty about predicting the consequences of various policies.”
¹¹

Implementation—translating good and usually vague intentions into specific achievements—is not necessarily an insurmountable problem. (It is sometimes, though, which means we should choose the crusades we embark on with caution and humility.) But it's usually a big problem, which means that calling for and creating government programs to effect some social reform doesn't really mean much unless we overcome the barriers to successful implementation, thereby making sure a government program actually achieves its goals. Joe Klein argues forcefully that liberalism's deepest flaw is exactly its disregard for implementation, which leads activist government's practitioners and advocates to judge their efforts too leniently by equating good intentions with concrete achievements. The “liberal project cannot survive,” he contends, “unless liberals take the lead in weeding out programs that aren't working, and either reforming them or closing them down.” There are people who really do need help, and government programs that can improve their lives. But, Klein cautions, “if supporters of collective action are going to have any credibility at all, they have to focus perpetually on the efficiency of the programs they support.”
¹²

Let's consider whether Head Start's meager results, and liberals' complacence about them, are outliers or indicate a deeper problem.

“Bullshit” is American English's assertion, maximally succinct and vigorous, that a contention is factually preposterous or logically absurd. According to philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt, however, the “essence of bullshit is not that it is
false
but that it is
phony
.” His slender volume devoted to the subject,
On Bullshit
, invites us to think of a Fourth of July orator “who goes on bombastically about ‘our great and blessed country, whose Founding Fathers under divine guidance created a new beginning for mankind.'” The speaker's point is not “to deceive anyone concerning American history.” Rather,

What he cares about is what people think of
him
. He wants them to think of him as a patriot, as someone who has deep thoughts and feelings about the origins and the mission of our country, who appreciates the importance of religion, who is sensitive to our history, whose pride in that history is combined with humility before God, and so on.
¹³

It's difficult to banish the glum suspicion that life in the twenty-first century, for all its economic and technological benefits, necessitates putting up with
much
more bullshit than our ancestors had to. One cause for this is that it's increasingly uncommon to make a living by rendering a good or service that can be judged directly, the way a carpenter or barber does. Instead, more and more of us perform work where, as political theorist Matthew Crawford argues, “you have to spend a lot of time managing what others think of you.” Where reputation management is a dominant concern, “Survival depends on a crucial insight: you can't back down from an argument that you initially made in straightforward language, with moral conviction, without seeming to lose your integrity. So managers learn the art of provisional thinking and feeling, expressed in corporate doublespeak, and cultivate a lack of commitment to their own actions.”
¹⁴

Bullshit, writes Frankfurt, is defined by its “lack of connection to a concern with truth.” In some circumstances, a lack of concern with truth is not simply the result of a speaker's phoniness, but is a shared communicative premise. For example:

What tends to go on in a bull session [such as in a college dormitory] is that the participants try out various thoughts and attitudes in order to discover how others respond, without its being assumed that they are committed to what they say: it is understood by everyone in a bull session that the statements people make do not necessarily reveal what they really believe or how they really feel. The main point is to make possible a high level of candor and an experimental or adventuresome approach to the subjects under discussion.
¹⁵

The bull session, in this account, partakes of the willing suspension of disbelief crucial to various art forms, especially the dramatic. Knowing that the actor portraying Hamlet is neither Danish nor indecisive does not cause us to consider his performance a betrayal. Even Frankfurt's Fourth of July orator avails himself of the considerable latitude extended by his listeners: they discount, as excesses inherent in the rhetorical context, his efforts to signal allegiance to national characteristics he thinks especially admirable.

The bullshit hits the fan when a speaker tries to have it both ways: to speak with the freedom of one who is not necessarily committed to what he says, while encouraging his listeners to take what he conveys seriously. Bullshitting, writes Frankfurt, culminates in “a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity.”

Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature.
¹⁶

This subordination of accuracy about verifiable objective realities to sincerity about unverifiable subjective ones explains how Oprahfication renders bullshit safe for modernity. As Lee Siegel observes, Winfrey “has made the sincerity of a statement more important than the content of it. Which is to say, she has made it virtuous to be amoral.” Under the dispensation of this ethic,

You are not responsible for what you do because your truth as a person lies in the future as your “goal.” You don't tell lies, because what might seem like a fabrication to other people is the expression of your genuine feeling, which is authorized by who you know you really are and can be in the future.
¹⁷

It will be noted that what historian Daniel Boorstin discussed as the “language of anticipation” has a long, albeit equivocally honorable place in American discourse. Nineteenth-century go-getters, transforming a wilderness into a superpower, began availing themselves of “a new linguistic confusion of present and future, fact and hope.” Under this dispensation, statements that otherwise would have stood condemned as fabrications were extenuated as descriptions of events that had not
yet
undergone the “formality of taking place.”
¹⁸

Unfortunately, Frankfurt argues, “sincerity itself is bullshit” since it is hard—much harder than the gospel of sincerity prepares us to comprehend—to know ourselves so well as to meet the standard of honest self-presentation, given that our natures are “elusively insubstantial.”
¹⁹
He does not elaborate two other difficulties his argument suggests. First, very few of us have enough objectivity or self-discipline to meet the challenge of providing complete, revealing representations of ourselves without succumbing to the temptation to offer, instead, highly flattering representations of ourselves. As the saying goes, sincerity is so important because once you've mastered faking
that
, you can get away with anything.

Second, sincere bullshit not only cheapens and distorts our interpersonal communications, but threatens our individual psychological integrity. Holly Golightly in Truman Capote's
Breakfast at Tiffany's
is both a phony and not a phony because she's “a
real
phony,” someone who genuinely “believes all this crap that she believes.” A mere phony holds in reserve some part of his soul that never participates in the charade, realizing cynically but at least clearly that it
is
a charade. A real phony, however,
becomes
the part he's playing, so that the consummation of falsity yields a new, higher honesty. “To thine own self be true,” commands me not to a journey of discovery but one of creation. If I can be anything I really want to be, then just by wanting to be something I have already fulfilled the essential requirement for actually being it. Those who would dispute my aspirations or authenticity are asserting that my transformation has not yet gone through the formality of taking place, a judgment resting on their objective assessments, which are necessarily less informed than my subjective one.

And if we can be
any
thing we want to be, then we can be
many
things we want to be—serially, simultaneously, or even contradictorily. The perils inherent in exalting sincerity were the gravamen of the late Michael Kelly's indictment of Bill Clinton, delivered during the second year of the latter's presidency:

The President's essential character flaw isn't dishonesty so much as a-honesty. It isn't that Clinton means to say things that are not true, or that he cannot make true, but that everything is true for him when he says it, because he says it. Clinton means what he says when he says it, but tomorrow he will mean what he says when he says the opposite.
²⁰

Frankfurt limits his discussion of bullshit to descriptive statements, analyzing and regretting our departure from the standard of truth. He does not take up the question of prescriptive statements, the mainstay of politics. Criticizing Republican proposals to cut spending on Head Start and other educational programs, for example, President Obama said, “We know that three- and four-year-olds who go to high-quality preschools, including our best Head Start programs, are less likely to repeat a grade, they're less likely to need special education, they're more likely to graduate from high school than the peers who did not get these services.”
²¹
The first part of Obama's statement is not bullshit, because it does nothing worse than employ the politician's constant companion, the selectively revealed half-truth. Children who attend the
best
Head Start programs show positive results but, as we have seen, Head Start attendees
overall
are no better off than peers not enrolled in the program. Obama invokes the sunny side of the law of averages without acknowledging its grim side: if children who attend the best Head Start programs do better than their peers, children who attend the worst programs must, necessarily, have developmental problems even more severe than those afflicting children in a control group who never enrolled in the program at all.

The more interesting part of Obama's statement, for our purposes, is the generic political prescription, the assertion that government program X will solve problem Y. Prescription lends itself to bullshitting if, following Frankfurt, the prescriber has a lack of connection to a concern with
efficacy
. Both kinds of bullshitters, describers and prescribers, are more concerned with conveying their ideals, of which idealized understandings of their true selves are a central component, than with making statements that correspond scrupulously to empirical or causal reality. A bullshit description may be, at least in part, factually accurate, but any such accuracy is inadvertent. The accurate data was incorporated into the spiel not for the sake of correctness, but because it helped express the speaker's “values” or “vision.”

A bullshit prescription, by the same token, might actually work to some degree, but any such efficacy is inadvertent and tangential to the central purpose: demonstrating the depths of the prescriber's concern for the problem and those who suffer from it, concerns impelling the determination to “do something” about it. As the political project that exists to vindicate the axiom that all sorts of government program X's can solve an endless list of social problem Y's, liberalism is always at risk of descending into prescriptive bullshit. Liberal compassion lends itself to bullshit by subordinating the putative concern with efficacy to the dominant but unannounced imperative of moral validation and exhibitionism. I, the empathizer, am interested in the sufferer for love of myself, Rousseau contended. Accordingly, an ineffectual program may serve the compassionate purposes of their designers and defenders as well as or better than a successful one.

Thus, while a particular program X
may
alleviate problem Y, it is hard for neutral observers to conclude efficacy is all that important, given that liberal programs are so rarely dropped from the lineup or sent down to the instructional leagues, even if their batting slumps continue for decades. In calling for “bold, persistent experimentation” in 1932, Franklin Roosevelt said, “It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”
²²
“Experimentation” clearly implies that failed efforts will be discontinued, but logic and experience show the formidable difficulty of doing so. At the dawn of the Great Society the sociologist Nathan Glazer wrote, “How one wishes for the open field of the New Deal, which was not littered with the carcasses of half-successful and hardly successful programs, each in the hands of a hardening bureaucracy.”
²³
The practice of liberalism would be much easier without the legacy of liberalism.