"The Prevalence of Humbug", by
Max Black, 1980, 23 pages, 10.2k words. Black (1909-1988) was a philosopher who finished his career at Cornell.
In "On Bullshit", Harry Frankfurt sez that "humbug" is a more polite term for "bullshit". He turns to this essay by Max Black almost immediately, as his 1st main source.
Frankfurt's effort was disappointing, let's see if Black does better.
I'm going to mention this right up front, this essay seems like far more of a serious work than "On Bullshit". "On Bullshit" had 9 footnotes, with references to 5 external sources. This essay has 28 footnotes, with references to 20 external sources.
Black opens with a quote from P. T. Barnum:
It would be a wonderful thing for mankind if some philosophic Yankee would contrive some kind of "ometer" that would measure the infusion of humbug in anything. A "Humbugometer" he might call it. I would warrant him a good sale.
-- P. T. Barnum
DuckDuckGo'ing "bullshit meter" returns many images, 1 of which is shown above. The rest I put in
a post creatively titled "Bullshit Meters".
Black opens with a statement of purpose. After Frankfurt, I am totally in favor of a more inductive method.
Humbug has the peculiar property of being always committed by others, never by oneself. This is one reason why it is universally condemned. No doubt we can agree that humbug is a Bad Thing; but what are we agreeing about? It proves astonishingly hard to say. In trying to understand what humbug is, which is my main objective, one soon finds that no satisfactory definitions are available. I therefore propose to use for the most part an inductive approach. I shall offer a number of varied examples for consideration, hoping that we can eventually arrive at some reasonably satisfying analysis of this elusive concept. There should be time, also, to reflect on the mischief that humbug can work, and to consider some ways of curbing the disposition to produce it.
So Black preceded Hamburg in declaring bullshit to be a difficult, slippery thing to try to define. I fully concur. I have coined the phrase "
bullshit contagion" to describe this phenomenon: it's hard to talk about bullshit without being completely tempted to just emit bullshit. Seriously, try to write something about bullshit, or discuss bullshit, & you will immediately begin sliding into emitting bullshit. I've referenced "
bullshit contagion" in a couple of posts already. Here is where it was defined - I really got bogged down in this review/summary - I will say it more than once, bullshit/humbug is a hard topic to work on.
Here is the list of Black's examples of humbug, with my comments:
- Chekhov's Lady - morbus fraudulentus, meh.
- Bernard Shaw on Disarmament Conferences "Disarmament? No, armament!" In 1930.
- The Shavian Probe
Bernard Shaw's formula, "Do you really believe that?" is a useful device; but it needs to be generalized into "Do you really mean that?" in order to fit cases involving something other than belief. In this form, it is a useful blunt instrument that deserves a label. I propose to call it the Shavian probe.
Reviewing the above, Black makes this IMO cogent assessment:
No matter: without impunging a speaker's stance, we can sometimes condemn what is being said as balderdash, claptrap, rubbish, cliche, hokum, drivel, buncombe, nonsense, gibberish, or tautology. With so rich a vocabulary for dismissing the substance of what is said, we could dispense with this use of "humbug. " That useful word might well be reserved for criticism of a speaker's stance -- to discredit the message's provenance rather than its content. I shall respect current usage, however, by sometimes using "humbug" in the sense of "piece of humbug."
...
What then is the prima facie charge against a speaker accused of humbug? Well, some of the words that immediately suggest themselves are pretense, pretentiousness, affectation, insincerity, and deception. Often there is also a detectable whiff of self-satisfaction and self-complacency: humbug goes well with a smirk. A common symptom is clever-me-ism, as in Jack Horner's case. In this respect, it resembles cant, which Dr. Johnson memorably defined as "a whining pretension to goodness, in formal and affected terms."
Black moves on to "
A Short History of the Word's Shifting Meanings". There were references to the word in 1751, but Dr. Johnson did not include it in his 1775 dictionary, "
possibly because he thought it too coarse or vulgar to be noticed".
By 1828, the first edition of Webster's dictionary treated "humbug" as an approximate synonym for "swindle" or "fraud." As a noun, Webster says, it refers to "an imposition under false pretences"; and as a verb it means "to deceive; to impose upon" -- or, as we might nowadays say, "to con." So the relatively innocent old sense of a practical joke had made way by then for something more obnoxious.
An excerpt from Dicken's "The Pickwick Papers", 1836-1837:
"You're a humbug, sir."
"A what!" said Mr. Winkle, starting.
"A humbug, sir. I will speak plainer if you wish. An impostor, sir."
Jumping forward to 1939, an obvious reference, in "The Wizard of Oz":
"I'm supposed to be a Great Wizard."
"And aren't you?" [Dorothy] asked.
"Not a bit of it, my dear; I'm just a common man."
"You're more than that," said the Scarecrow, in a grieved tone; "you're a humbug."
Is calling someone a humbug equivalent to calling them a bullshit artist? To me it is more calling them a fraud, a phony.
Finally, in 1966, from Webster's Third New International Dictionary:
for the noun's head sense, "something designed to deceive and mislead" (with cross-references to QUACKERY, HOAX, FRAUD, and IMPOSTURE);
for the verb, "impose on" (with cross-references to DECEIVE, CAJOLE, and HOAX);
for its application to a humbugger, "a person who usually willfully deceives or misleads others as to his true condition, qualities, or attitudes, one who passes himself off as something that he is not" (with cross-references to SHAM, HYPOCRITE, and IMPOSTOR).
So a noun, a verb, & a noun. For bullshit, those would be bullshit, to bullshit, and bullshitter. I have had the thought re bullshit, that these 3 glosses may need to be treated separately.
I also was somewhat surprised that there was no mention of "humbuggery", which shows, say in the Cambridge Dictionary, as another version of "humbug". Is humbuggery a flavor of buggery?
Black now resumes enumerating examples of humbug:
- Russell's Tirade, featuring British nobleman Bertrand Russell behaving as a complete asshole to an architect & builder.
- Ghotbzadeh's Indignation, featuring a government official (Iranian) spewing bullshit.
- Emerson's Friendship, in which bullshit is called on an Emerson piece extolling friendship which got totally carried away.
- The Czar's Vodka, in which bullshit is called on a pretentious vodka commercial.
- Zaftig Bedfellows, in which Black takes offense to the phrasing of personal ads?!?!? Must have been a pet peeve.
- The Cornell Ship. On October 7, 1868, Cornell University was very much a work in progress, but the president still felt compelled to give a speech proclaiming the school to be firing on all cylinders.
- Finally, Academic Humbug (Veblen), which quotes H.L. Mencken excoriating Thorstein Veblen's book The Theory of the Leisure Class for its overblown prose, aka bullshit.
Black finishes out the book with 6 sections:
- "Misfires and Violations"
Humbug occurs in the context of conversation.
I propose to speak in such cases of the framing presuppositions of the initiated verbal transaction -- or, more briefly, of the conversation's framework.
When someone mishears, or misspeaks, or is misinformed within this framework, and replies in error, Black calls that a "misfire".
When someone intentionally breaks the framework, e.g., lies, Black calls that a "violation".
- "How Humbug Differs from Lying"
So you can mislead people while telling the truth - this is not lying.
Sissela Bok [born 1934], in her valuable book Lying, is following a long-established tradition when she confines her discussion to explicit lying, defined as the production of an utterance expressing what the speaker disbelieves. Let us call such an utterance, with acknowledgment to Shakespeare, the lie direct.
Immanuel Kant thought lying was about as bad a thing as you could do. Black wonders why the bible doesn't come out against it more strongly.
A plausible justification of the prominence assigned to the vice of lying is suggested by a gloss of Montaigne's [1533-1592] contention that as human beings "we . . . hold together only by speech." It is obvious that children could not learn to speak if they were reared only by adults who lied to them irresponsibly and at random. For in such an environment a child could not even learn the common names of familiar objects.
Black introduces the concept of "virtual lying":
One can intimate "the thing that is not" by implication, by significant silence, or even by the double bluff of pretending to lie while actually speaking the truth (as in the classical Minsk-Pinsk joke). (The annals of espionage are a rich source for this kind of deception.) Such maneuvers, a standard resource of advertising and diplomacy, are secure against the accusation of explicit and knowing mendacity: the offender can always plead that he didn't literally say anything that he himself disbelieved.
This he places in a spectrum (bullshit meter) between outright lying and humbug. I'm pretty sure I don't buy his argument about "the sophistication of the means" being significant.
The difference between such cases of humbugging deception and outright or even virtual lying is not in the content of the communicated message, or in the intention to deceive by implanting false beliefs, but rather in the sophistication of the means used to achieve the purpose.
The continuities between explicit lying, virtual lying, and what I now propose to call falsidical humbug (I borrow the term "falsidical" from W. V. Quine) have tempted many writers to regard the conventional distinction between lying and humbug as superficial and ultimately misleading.
[Falsidical is defined as "based on a falsehood".]
Of course, there are philosopher types who are OK with lying, humbug, the whole spectrum. Black quotes George Steiner:
Linguists and psychologists (Nietzsche excepted) have done little to explore the ubiquitous, many-branched genus of lies. . . . Constrained as they are by moral disapproval or psychological malaise, these inquiries have remained thin. We will see deeper only when we break free of a purely negative classification of 'untruth', only when we recognize the compulsion to say 'the thing which is not' as being central to language and mind. We must come to grasp what Nietzsche meant when he proclaimed that 'the Lie -- and not the Truth is divine!'
Steiner quotes Nietzsche again:
There is only one world . . . and that world is false, cruel, contradictory, misleading, senseless. . . . We need lies to vanquish this reality, this truth, we need lies in order to live.
IMO, getting Nietzsche involved is never a good idea. Why listen to what the Father of All Trolls has to say? Talk about Bullshit Contagion! Black agrees:
If you fail to make the distinctions that I have been proposing between plain lying, virtual lying, pretentious inflation of belief, and so on, proceeding so far, in Steiner's case, as to regard hypothetical if-then statements as cases of lying, you will end with a conceptual gruel in which everything looks like everything else and all intellectual distinctions have vanished in the service of grandiose obfuscation.
Sounds like a Bullshit Apocalypse to me, with Bullshit Contagion thrown in.
Increasingly, it seems to me like the right approach might be to define what is NOT bullshit, because it's not hard to see almost everything as bullshit.
- "The Complexities of Self-Deception"
Can one really, really deceive one's self? Black offers arguments both pro and con. Maybe the subconscious could pull it off. Certainly someone with Multiple Personality Disorder - now Dissociative Identity Disorder - could do it.
I originally thought that self-deception is impossible - in some part of your mind, you would know you were lying to yourself. But, I've know times where a person has been told something unfavorable about themselves flat out, and they will rationalize it away - "they didn't mean it"; "they were just trying to push me", etc.
I think that, universally, we are each the hero of "the story of me" that each of us is playing in our head. Does the existence of evil men - take your pick in the Orange Turd's cabinet - prove that self-deception is indeed possible?
- Is Humbug Ineradicable?
Ought implies can, say the moralists. So before considering antihumbug remedies, we ought first to hear the vehement objections of those who consider such a project dangerously quixotic because, as one writer has put it, "deception is an inevitable aspect of human action." That quotation comes from a critical review of Sissela Bok's book on lying ... by David Bazelon. [1909-1993. A liberal federal judge??? I'm not sure this is the right guy, but he's the only David Bazelon that comes up.]
...
He ... wants attention to be paid to "the phenomenon of deception in full, rich context." Lying should always be regarded, he claims, as "the major form of modern power," short of actual violence, and hence "an actual or potential aspect of all action involving two or more people." Convinced as Bazelon is, then, of the ubiquity and inevitability of lying as an exercise of power over the deceived, he ends with the following remark and conclusion:
"Once the ubiquity of deception is appreciated, and also its central relation to power, the need of power to achieve one's purpose, the issue clearly becomes -- which lie to tell, when, to whom, and for how long."
Wow, this guy was a judge? Maybe I've got the wrong guy???
I think that this idea is very powerful - that deception is a weapon, exceeded in potency only by outright violence. Why does this keep coming back to the Orange Turd & his Toadies? [Worst band name ever] They have clearly weaponized deception in all its forms.
Black doesn't buy this argument, concluding:
We need not be committed to the Utopian project of a society completely free from humbug in order to hold, as I do, that the evil should be combated to the best of our ability. Humbug may well be as ineradicable as degeneration and death, but that is a poor reason for indifference or complacency.
- Coping with Humbug
Black is not a fan of humbug, calling it "an insidious and detestable evil". We should always be on our guard against it.
When we detect it [my bullets]:
- I recommend first the ploy that I earlier called the "Shavian probe" -- the deliberately naive and rather impolite challenges expressed by the questions "Do you really believe that?" and "Do you really mean that?" (If the answer is yes, one might then use one of G. E. Moore's
[1873-1958] favorite expressions: "How extraordinary!")
- A more elaborate maneuver is to take the humbugging formula literally in order to reveal its latent exaggerations and absurdities. Thus if somebody solemnly delivers the shoddy bit of proverbial wisdom that "the exception proves the rule," one might trump it by saying, "Quite so. The more exceptions, the better the rule!"
- But a more useful therapy is to translate humbug into plain and clear English. Such translation is especially effective in coping with learned humbug. ...
- Strongly to be recommended also are humor, parody, and satire.
These are IMO all good suggestions. Going back to politics again, the last suggestion clearly seems to greatly annoy the leaders, both in government and out, of our kleptocratic, kakistocratic, plutocratic oligarchy.
The section ends listing well-known literary and real humbuggers & anti-humbuggers.
- Coda
In this, the last section, Black takes a shot at defining "humbug":
HUMBUG: deceptive misrepresentation, short of lying, especially by pretentious word or deed, of somebody's own thoughts, feelings, or attitudes.
We've seen this before, in Frankfurt's "On Bullshit", broken down & analyzed in depth. Frankfurt didn't particularly like it, nor did I.
Black says that defines first degree humbug, with a slightly different definition for "second-degree humbug, produced by a self-deluded speaker or thinker":
HUMBUG: deceptive misrepresentation, short of lying, especially by pretentious word or deed, of somebody's own thoughts, feelings, or attitudes that might be revealed by candid and rational self-examination.
The penultimate sentence of this section, & this essay:
Plenty of work remains to be done.
I will definitely agree with that!
IMO, this was definitely a better effort than "
On Bullshit", although I don't like his definition at the end. I have formulated a definition of "bullshit", & it currently is so general as to be useless.
This is a really hard subject. Seriously. As I mentioned above, it increasingly seems like the right approach might be to define what is NOT bullshit, because it's not hard to see almost everything as bullshit.
Black's inductive approach contributes to this attitude. He lists 10 instances of humbug. Some them are so mundane, so unworthy of notice, that you wonder, if that is worthy of being noted as humbug, what isn't?
The Great Work continues!
Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit.
