Explosions; or, Jokes and Lies
Into Nothing
As suggested already in chapter 1, a joke might be understood as a distortion or perversion of ordinary logical reasoning with the intention of inducing an agreeable, if also often malicious, sense of surprise. As such, jokes are like little morsels of condensed irrationality. If, again, a logical argument gives us, in its conclusion, the gradual confirmation that a robust expectation is in fact something, a joke gives us in its punch line, to cite Kant’s ingenious formulation, the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing.
Jokes are, at their best, truth revealing, yet they also share something with lies and deceit. Like sophisms, they seem to be perversions or, so to speak, curdlings of logical argumentation. Sophisms and jokes aim at the truth, but do so by flirting with mendacity. This is dangerous business. Yet jokes are also a shibboleth of intelligence, of the sort of freedom and playfulness of spirit that we often associate with societies or cultures that are organized on sound, healthy, rational principles. It is where unreason is most fully enshrined into social institutions, notably law and policing, that jokes are most rigorously suppressed. By contrast, figures who are most iconically associated with the Enlightenment, notably Voltaire, are praised, rightly or wrongly, for their embodiment of humor. We might be inclined to suppose that humor itself is irrational, and that Enlightened societies accommodate it rather as a matter of principle, as a healthy and manageable “release valve” for what strictly speaking is a residue of unenlightenedness, of irrational cruelty and carnivalesque chaos. But Voltaire is not cracking his jokes simply in order to get them out of his system. They are central to his persona and to his project, and the place of humor in the history of Enlightenment cannot be relegated simply to a formal tolerance as a matter of principle.
We have seen in recent years a growing intolerance of offensive humor broadly construed, and a growing readiness to denounce humorous publications and entertainments that had previously been seen as beacons of the Enlightenment commitment to freedom. The tenuous bond between the liberal center left and the illiberal far left has often appeared ready to unravel entirely upon the snag of humor and its public expression. Where has reason gone in all of this? Is it with the old-guard jokesters, who enjoy making clever little digs at the jihadists and the bishops? Or is it with the stern new left, prepared to tell us, purse-lippedly, that whatever is offensive is ipso facto not funny?
One senses one is losing one’s grip on the subject. While they have served as extremely potent fuel for the rise of irrationalism as a political force in the Western world over the past few years—particularly in the form of memes, as discussed in the previous chapter—at the same time jokes have long been held, and continue to be held, as central to the form of life envisioned by the Enlightenment, as the supreme expression of freedom and individual self-expression, in contrast with rigid piety and conformism.
Charlie Hebdo and After
The question of the limits of humor in a healthy society was thrust into the center of public debate in Europe and the United States in 2015, after a group of humble caricaturists in France were murdered for their work. That year I myself engaged in an extended and diffuse jeremiad, arguing to whomever I could get to listen that humor is the highest expression of freedom and the thing most to be defended in society. The tirade culminated in my delivery of the annual Pierre Bayle Lecture in Rotterdam, in November of that year, titled “The Gravity of Satire.”1 I had been invited to speak in the same forum that had hosted such defenders of freedom as Adam Michnik and Léon Poliakov, and I chose to focus on humor. This turn of events gave me new impetus and motivation to begin writing on humor as a serious philosophical and political problem.
At the time, my view of the semantics and ethics of humor, a view I had taken to calling my “gelastics” (from the Greek gelos, “laughter”), was roughly the following. I cited and insisted upon the august genealogy of Charlie Hebdo, invoking the venerable tradition of French satire, going back to Alfred Jarry, Honoré Daumier, and of course Voltaire. It is a mistake to assess the purpose and function of satire, I argued, in strictly political terms, as a lowly but necessary part of the functioning of a free society. Critics of Charlie Hebdo from the left and the right, ranging from Jean-Marie Le Pen to the dissident members of the PEN American Center writers’ organization, did just this. Le Pen called it an “anarchist rag” and stopped just short of thanking the Kouachi brothers for murdering its most prominent contributors.2 Critics on the left, in turn, were often unable or unwilling to distinguish its cartoons from racist propaganda, the overt intention of which was, they held, to drum up hatred of an enemy group in preparation for war or pogroms.3
In 2015, when I came out in defense of Charlie Hebdo, I did so not just in defense of its formal right to exist, but in defense of its content and its spirit. I maintained at the time that the only adequate defense is the one that considers satire from a distanced perspective, and that seeks to understand it as a rhetorical mode with special rules governing it, rules that are different from those that govern straightforward political speech. A Nazi propaganda cartoon that depicts Jews as rats is not satire. It has a straightforward purpose: to dehumanize Jews in the minds of readers. Satire, by contrast, takes up the voice of its intended target, in order to reveal the inherent moral baseness or logical incoherence of this voice. It might say “Jews are rats,” but when it does, its target is not Jews, but rather those who would nonsatirically say such a thing. Satire is thus a sort of ventriloquy, and as such it is inevitably in constant danger of being misinterpreted. Critics of satire will often complain that it has “gone too far,” but what they really ought to say in such instances is that it has done its job too well, and has discomforted the critics themselves in its ability to reproduce satirically language that originates in straight-faced literalness.
It may be that there is no other way for satirists to proceed than to perpetually court condemnation. Perhaps they should simply accept that society will heap its scorn on them, as if they were the earnest evil ones, just as the jester in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1966 film Andrei Rublev is abused and debased by the local prince’s men for the simple fact that he lives in order to make people laugh—which is to say, to remind people of the absurdity of human social life and the illusion of power it grants, for example, to local princes. But this does not mean that we as analysts and critics should aspire to join in the abuse. We should rather seek to understand how this particular category of speech functions: it says what it means by saying the opposite of what it means, and, by lying, exposes the lies on which society is built.
One of the lies, or at least conceits, on which society is built, is, as Mary Douglas has brilliantly shown, the one that conceals the functions of the body. By holding in expulsions and ejaculations, not just of fluids and gases, but also of certain words, we become properly social beings; to let these demons out is precisely to challenge and to threaten the social order. In this way vulgarity becomes one of the most powerful weapons in the satirist’s arsenal, and also one of the elements of satire that makes it easiest for polite society to distance itself from the lowly work of the satirist, even while weakly affirming satire’s formal right to exist. Thus, in the weeks after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, did we often hear prim liberals insisting that, while they are of course against extrajudicial assassination, vulgar cartoons are “just not their cup of tea.” But the vulgarity is not gratuitous; it is essential. As already mentioned in chapter 3, when Aristophanes has his fictional version of Socrates deny the existence of celestial divinities by comparing the thunder of the clouds to farting, he is not just telling “fart jokes” for their own sake; he is, rather, undermining the reigning vision of the order of nature, which perceives divine intention in great and lofty things, by instead accounting for this order in the same terms as lowly and undignified things. This is, in Douglas’s sense, the intrusion of the body where it does not belong, and it is dangerous indeed.
The right to intrude in this way is undoubtedly an important formal freedom, gained in the West with the rise of liberalism’s commitment to liberty of expression and of the press. Charlie Hebdo emerges directly out of the period that saw some of the final obstacles to these liberties falling away, with the decline of laws against vulgarity and sacrilege in France and other democracies in the latter half of the twentieth century. Yet many left intellectuals today (in contrast with the 1960s) tend to see vulgarity as at best a formal freedom to be tolerated, rather than a dangerous force to be tapped into. They have ceded vulgarity to the alt-right, which has not been slow in using it to construct unprecedentedly powerful stink bombs. Meanwhile Eliot Weinberger, writing in the London Review of Books, scoffs that Charlie Hebdo is nothing but a bastion of “frat-boy humour.”4 As if France had “frat-boys,” and as if vulgarity were not also central to the aesthetic and moral vision of Cervantes, Boccaccio, and Rabelais.
All good humor that is cruel is also self-cruel, and always remains aware of the fact that whatever is being said of the other loops back, at least potentially, upon oneself. To laugh at, say, the unattractiveness or illness of others, or to laugh at it wisely, is, it might be suggested, to do so in a way that recognizes that the person who is laughing may just as easily take the place of the joke’s butt. It is thus to recognize our shared humanity, and indeed an equality that is so total as to amount to interchangeability. Just before the death of the French rock-and-roll icon Johnny Hallyday, a Charlie Hebdo cover showed him in a hospital bed, hooked up to various machines that were making “bzz” and “bip” sounds. The headline suggested that the old rocker had unexpectedly made a late-career turn to techno. It is extremely cruel to make fun of someone who is dying. But is it so hard to imagine one of Hallyday’s own loved ones visiting him in the hospital and making the same joke in his presence? Is it so hard to imagine Hallyday himself making it? And are we really expected to suppose that the cartoonist has no awareness that he himself could end up in a similar predicament soon enough? Reconsidered in this way, the joke now almost seems sweet, loving, the heavy stuff of life and death being processed among intimates. I laughed when I saw the cover at a newsstand, and then spent the next several days thinking about it, and feeling far more sympathy for the French adoration of Johnny Hallyday than I ever had previously. I had always found him mediocre, repulsive even, and yet it was a supposedly cruel joke that first caused me to see him in a different light.
It is this element of self-reflexivity that makes the dialogues some years ago between Donald Trump and the “shock jock” radio host Howard Stern so remarkable.5 Both often boasted of their sexual rapaciousness and their contempt for ordinary people and ordinary morality. But Stern cut his big talk with running asides on his own ridiculousness, on the vanity of these pursuits, on his tragic awareness of where it is all headed. Trump knew only one register. He wanted to impress Stern, to convince him that he is no less a bad boy than his host. It was painful to listen to him, and it is part of Stern’s comic genius that he knew how to inflict this pain on us, the listeners, by playing on Trump’s infantile perception, or hope, that he and Stern are creatures of the same nature.
The comic mode is one in which our humanity can be most fully expressed, by playful use of the imagination, and by its twin tools of vulgarity and cruelty, in the aim of capturing, expressing, and somewhat relishing our common plight as human beings. It is also inherently dangerous, inherently unstable, always threatening to “go too far.” When it does go too far, the common reaction from those who are offended is that the humorist had been doing something he should not have been doing at all—telling a joke about a certain subject—rather than that he was doing something perfectly worthy and legitimate in itself, but that he did it poorly, that he misfired. The offended parties pretend to want, or imagine that they in fact really want, a world in which jokes of the same species as the one that misfired are simply never told. But they do not grasp or acknowledge quite how much of human inventiveness and playfulness would have to be purged in order for this to happen. They do not grasp or acknowledge that there really is no settled, stable, acceptable future scenario in which we have purged any inclination to say things that might hurt others, and yet are perfectly at peace with this strange new quiet. If they think they are imagining such a scenario, this is only by fastidiously avoiding the specifics.
The unquiet, precarious balance between offensiveness on the one hand, and dreary self-censorship or oppressive community or state censorship on the other hand, of course looks a good deal like the precarious balance we have discerned in other chapters, on at least apparently unrelated matters. One must, for example, try to allow the faculty of the imagination to thrive, without lurching into hallucinatory madness, and also without allowing fear of madness to become an impediment to imagination’s full flourishing. And one must strive to allow social disorder—carnival, revelry, mosh pits, the American radio genre known as “morning zoo”—to have its place, without permitting the erosion of ordinary civility. And one must strive to allow the fantasies and myths of communities to find their expression, without becoming enshrined into official ideology and leveraged for the oppression or extermination of nonmembers of those communities.
These, in broad outline, were my views in 2015. The events of the following year, however, forced me to reconsider many of my most basic convictions. In 2016, I, a latecomer and a normie (that is, an outsider to the various internet subcultures that generate memes, and that would surely mock any attempt at defining this term), was finally made to understand the new political force of humor, when I came upon the meme stashes of the alt-right. They scared me. Nor could I ignore the evident fact of their evolutionary lineage: they were not of an entirely different genus from the expressions of ribald, offensive, and playful humor I myself had spent much effort defending: Charlie Hebdo, Howard Stern; even Seinfeld, as already mentioned, would soon be implicated, as an early influence on the white nationalist and anti-Semite meme-monger Mike Peinovich. Perhaps the scolds were right: there is no safe release valve for nihilism, for cruel delight, no space for these in society that will not soon enough be filled up by sheer evil. By August of 2016 I was scouring the dirtiest parts of the internet trying to understand Pepe the Frog—whom Hillary Clinton had called out that same month, to the delight of Pepe’s supporters, as the mascot and avatar of the alt-right—and knowing, in my heart, as I witnessed the ebullience of his followers, that Donald Trump was going to win this cursèd election.
As Emily Nussbaum observed in the New Yorker, Trump’s victory was in no small measure the victory of jokes. “Like Trump’s statements,” Nussbaum wrote of the armies of online “shit-posters,” “their quasi-comical memeing and name-calling was so destabilizing, flipping between serious and silly, that it warped the boundaries of discourse.”6 Nussbaum cites Chuck Johnson, a troll who has been banned from Twitter: “We memed a President into existence.”7 With his election, for the first time in my life I found myself echoing the scolds I used to despise, who would conflate offensiveness and unfunniness every time they judged of something, “That’s not funny!” It turned out they were right: the enormous, singular joke of our epoch was not funny. Trump’s victory amounted to a conquest of reality by satire, and so by forces that naturally and fittingly ought to be confined to the playing fields of the human imagination. Trump was a joke, in other words, but to the extent that he was now being taken as something else, as “president,” he was truly, literally, not funny.
The liberal humor industry that had sprung up purportedly to counter and combat this new regime seemed, moreover, fundamentally unsuited to the task: palliative rather than combative, part of the smoothly functioning machine rather than a wrench thrown in to disrupt it. Durable authoritarian regimes have always carved out a space for jesters. Nazi Germany had Tran and Helle, a comedy duo whose mild political satire enabled them to squeak through with official acceptance for much of the regime’s duration, while also managing to convince admirers, and perhaps themselves, that this approval was not incompatible with true subversion. In retrospect, it is not hard to see that their comedy sketches were hardly what was needed in that historical moment. By contrast, as Rudolph Herzog comments in his Foreign Policy article “Laughing All the Way to Autocracy,” “It is hard to imagine Claus von Stauffenberg, the one-eyed war veteran [and would-be assassin of Hitler], ever cracking trivial jokes.”8
But still, I continued to tell myself even after Trump’s election, the playing field of the imagination is infinite, and this is an advantage it will always have over the finite bounds of reality, including political reality, however dreary this may become. Even though humor forces us back into our heavy bodies—and even though, therefore, we can never mistake a gelastic experience for an aesthetic one—nevertheless in the gelastic mode too we experience a variety of freedom. When this freedom is the only sort available, as in the thriving Soviet circulation of underground anekdoty that gave us Rabinovich and so many other delightful characters (Soviet census-taker: “Does Rabinovich live here?” Rabinovich: “You call this living?”), it is merely palliative. It should not for this reason be condemned, but we must nonetheless do what we can to hold on, by political means, to a form of freedom more concrete than palliation.
It will always be a difficult matter, based on a million subtle contextual facts, to determine when humor merely functions as autocracy’s built-in pressure valve, and when it is the dynamite autocracy fears. One and the same comedy sketch might devolve from confrontation into palliation if it is drawn out too long, and the regime finds a way to adapt to or even co-opt it. There are no easy rules for determining which role humor is playing in society at any given time. Jokes are, in the end, entirely dependent on context. (“Finally, something warm,” legend has Winston Churchill saying when he was brought a glass of champagne after a meal.) Jokes can even degenerate into nonjokes, as circumstances change, or indeed bold and revolutionary humor can become normalized to the point where it helps to maintain tyranny rather than challenge it.
The balance to strike, then, is one in which we do not take the palliative humor of the late-night talk shows for political resistance, but in which we also do not underestimate the potential political power of a humorist’s voice that cannot be bent to the purposes of the regime. Stephen Colbert is no Isaak Babel, and we may be sure that he is in no danger of being rubbed out. By the same token, in the darkest moments of our political present, we may find more power for political liberation in going back to The Odessa Tales than the late-night talkers can ever offer.
Pseudologia Generalis
That Donald Trump is a liar is a proven fact, like sexual dimorphism in anglerfish or the orbit of the earth around the sun. But are we really dealing here with a case of morally culpable mendacity, or is there something about his cognition that compels him to lie, distort, and fantasize without, generally, realizing it? For the Greeks this would be a distinction without any real difference: they did not punish wrongdoers only on the condition that the wrongdoers could have done otherwise; they punished based on the nature of the act itself, not on an interpretation of the moral condition of the actor. But we are different, and we generally want to know whether misdeeds are done with mens rea, a guilty mind, or, rather, committed by someone who is so deficient or impaired as to be unable to be judged truly guilty at all. Living permanently in a fantasy world of one’s own making, not sharing in the common world, yet not being aware of the distinction, may itself exculpate a person such as Trump from the morally far more charged accusation of lying.
In a letter to the New York Times of March 2017, the prominent psychiatrists Judith L. Herman and Robert Jay Lifton described Trump’s “repeated failure to distinguish between reality and fantasy, and his outbursts of rage when his fantasies are contradicted.”9 They predicted that “faced with crisis, President Trump will lack the judgment to respond rationally.”10 The physicians were only expressing what was by then common wisdom, but the statement was significant nonetheless for its rupture with a long-standing prohibition among American psychiatrists against venturing clinical diagnoses, from afar and in public, of political figures. Diagnosis of political enemies, of course, has a long and disgraceful history. But in these extreme circumstances some clinicians believed they found themselves forced to weigh the danger of repeating such past crimes against what they had come to think of as a duty to warn.
Political warnings—that this candidate does not have America’s interests at heart, that he has no intention of making America great again—had not done the trick, and so some perceived the need to move to the level of expert diagnosis, and to present as scientific fact the case for the unfitness of a president, a case that has been repeatedly dismissed when it is made not as scientific fact but as political opinion. Those who are aware of the history of psychiatry, and of science in general, will understand that this movement to the level of purported fact is in truth only pursuit of the same public-discursive end at a different register. It is a continued push in defense of an opinion, in a culture that takes opinions as private possessions to be cherished, rather than to be weighed against other opinions and perhaps traded in. To complicate matters, however, this is a culture that values the facts that others might deliver to us even less than it values their opinions, and so Lifton and Herman are paying to deliver their case in what is in effect a deflated currency—the currency of scientific expertise, which will in any case be rejected as mere political partisanship by those who are not inclined to believe what they have to say. Our political opinions are not having any effect on those on the other side, say the exasperated opponents of Trumpism. So let us move to the level of scientific fact, they say, only to discover that their opponents are having none of that either.
Unlike, say, dreaming or fiction writing, to lie is to do something of incontestable negative moral import—though, as we have seen, even dreaming and fiction writing are often judged to be at least morally questionable. If one is not fully conscious of the fact that one is lying, then the act seems to descend back into that shady but not plainly morally culpable realm of standard-run irrationality, as when one claims falsely that dinosaurs and human beings walked the earth together. Conscious lying is, or almost always is, a short-term solution to a problem that will fail in the long run to solve that problem, and that will likely generate new problems of its own. As in the satisfaction of other short-term desires, to get away with lying will likely provoke in the liar a mixture of satisfaction and regret, and it is likely, as well, that the latter sentiment will outlive the former. Folk wisdom about wicked webs confirms these general observations.
And yet, other folk wisdom tells us that it is good to deny to the SS that we are hiding Jews in our attic, and it is good to affirm to our elderly aunt that we appreciate her Jell-O recipe. These lies, if they are successful, do not entail regret; on the contrary the regret comes only if they are disbelieved by their hearers. But which other people are in relations to us sufficiently analogous to that of the Nazi soldiers or of our aunt to warrant our lying to them? This is a question that obviously can have no easy answer, and so we are left each with our own complex interpersonal ties, to determine for ourselves the moral valence of dishonesty. Kant was an exceptional philosopher in his insistence that no one ever has a right to lie, under any circumstances, even those I have just adduced as examples. This commitment was grounded in his deontological ethics, an ethics that squarely rejects utilitarian considerations of the consequences of our deeds, and focuses entirely on the moral character of the deeds themselves. Utilitarians would say, of course, that the moral quality of an act cannot even begin to be measured without consideration of the effects it brings about. But if you assume at the outset that the two moments, act and effect, are distinct, then the blanket rejection of a right to lie in some circumstances becomes more comprehensible.
“Determination is negation,” Spinoza writes in a 1674 letter to his friend Jarig Jelles, an idea that would later be taken up by Hegel.11 To specify what a thing is, is also, necessarily, to deny infinitely many attributes of it, to exclude infinitely many other possibilities. To affirm that a shirt is red is to deny that it is blue. Some properties can inhere in the same subject together, of course; to affirm of a shirt that it is red is not, obviously, to deny that it is long sleeved. Much ordinary reasoning consists in determining whether two or more properties are opposed, like “red” and “blue,” or merely different, like “red” and “long sleeved.” I can recall being small and responding to the banal claim of credulous adults that “you can be whatever you want to be” that, well, I would like to be a brain surgeon and an astronaut and an Olympic athlete … Obviously, the adults were not including conjunctive career paths under their idea of “whatever.” We might be able to conjoin at most two remarkable careers within a single lifetime, but for the most part to determine what it is that one wants to be is to exclude the possibility of becoming something else. We ordinarily take it as a sign of maturity when a person comes to terms with this inevitable exclusion and allows herself to just be one thing, while perhaps granting to one’s earlier hopes the etiolated status of “hobbies.” But even the fact that we must demote in this way the things to which we had once hoped to devote our lives, simply in order to respectably engage with them at all, serves as a constant reminder that Spinoza’s dictum was not just about our descriptions of ordinary things like shirts—it also applies directly to our own lives.
The dictum may be adapted to make sense of the philosophical complexities of lying. In legal contexts we are sometimes asked to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” To tell something other than the truth is straightforwardly to lie, and so the meaning of the last element of this three-part phrase is obvious enough. But can one tell the whole truth? And is it possible to tell both the truth and the whole truth together? Or is there already something about the determinations one makes as to what one is going to say that excludes the possibility of saying an infinite number of other things—things that are not, for their part, lies, but that are nonetheless implicitly negated in the course of our determinations? Every act of telling, whether providing testimony on the witness stand or spinning out a story by the campfire, is an act of sculpting, of choices made as to what to include, and what to leave out.
There are both pragmatic and moral choices that tell us where to chip, what to include and what to leave out. If we wish to explain to the jury that we were in the bathroom when a crime occurred in the kitchen, we will not go into unnecessary detail about the condition of our bowels. Simple discretion prevents us from telling the whole truth. We will also avoid what has been called “truth dumping,”12 for more serious moral reasons. Honest criticism of another passes over from being morally edifying to being simply cruel if it goes on for too long, even when the points of criticism that might be made after a given cutoff point are not of a different character, or any less accurate or true, than the ones that preceded it. And similarly for truth and history. The truth about the Vietnam War, and our duty to tell the truth, surely involves, for example, an up-frontness and sobriety about the My Lai massacre.
But what level of graphic detail must we reach in the name of honesty? And after what point does the detail become gratuitous, even transforming from what was initially intended into its very opposite, an invitation to revel in the horrible spectacle? In 2017 it became very common, one might say fashionable, to share video images of policy brutality against black American men on social media. Most who did this were proceeding in a spirit of honesty, of telling “the whole truth” about racism in America. As often happens in social media—where earnest “hot takes” are followed by a wave of contrarian attempts to shame those who arrived on the scene first—there was soon enough a sharp reaction to this practice. Some felt that, particularly when done by white Americans, sharing such footage revived, however unintentionally, the atrocious old practice of making and selling postcards on the occasion of lynchings, with the dumb grinning faces of white yokels posing in front of the dead black man’s body.
How then do we tell the whole truth? How do we face up honestly to racism or to war crimes without crossing over into base titillation, not to mention serving the propaganda efforts of forces that assuredly could not care less about truly fighting against the social problem the aspiring truth-tellers are seeking to keep in the public eye, for example the chaos-promoting bots that, while agreeing that black lives matter, insisted no less fervently that blue lives matter too? It seems, again, that telling the moral truth necessarily means not telling the whole truth, but rather crafting a compelling account of the truth—where this is derived from one’s moral sensibility rather than imagined to be a simple reportage upon the facts—that leaves quite a bit out, that involves far more exclusions than positive determinations.
I want, for example, to make the case, before a group of doubters, that racism in America is a grave problem. The case I am able to make will be one that hits just the right register, that responds to the subtle hints about what they as listeners are prepared to hear. The case I am able to make will also be determined in no small measure by who I am, what my own racial identity is perceived to be, what my own interest in establishing this case is perceived to be, and so on. It is by no means every context in which the most gruesome and atrocious images or descriptions of lynchings will be the most effective vehicle of truth. Yet it is true that racism is a grave problem in America, and it is true that countless lynchings have occurred and continue to occur. But the most effective way to impart this truth may well be to abandon the expectation that one must always tell the whole truth.
The whole truth would be an infinite concatenation of mostly irrelevant facts, with an occasional dose of, in textspeak, “TMI,” too much information—when, for example, you ruin the case you were making against factory farming by going into such detail about how painful de-beaking is for chickens that your listener simply shuts you out and struggles to think about something else. So we do not tell the whole truth; we tell carefully crafted stories, and we do this even when our moral purpose is to tell the truth. It is for this reason, perhaps, that “story” and “history” are identical words in most European languages, and that until recently history writing was unproblematically thought of as a variety of storytelling. This commonality of ends remained unproblematic, in fact, until Rankean positivism came to dominate in academic history (see chapter 6), and the impossible ideal of giving an account of things “as they actually were,” and doing so exhaustively, came to dominate as the exclusive desideratum of the historical discipline. But this simply cannot be done. To acknowledge as much, however, is not to give up on the truth, but only to acknowledge that the aspiration to the truth is a moral aspiration, and not a cognitive or evidential task of simple enumeration.
In the preface to the 1999 edition of her book Lying, Sissela Bok cites a few cases in which people plainly speak falsehoods, but just as plainly do not intend deceit, as, for example, when Alzheimer’s patients engage in “confabulation”: spinning out stories that are entirely disconnected from reality, but in a way that seems grounded in some real part of their characters, to reflect some real aspect of their inner lives.13 She also mentions those who are diagnosed with the condition of Pseudologia fantastica, which is, she says, to lying what kleptomania is to stealing.14 Pseudologues spin so many falsehoods about their own lives that they no longer seem cognitively able to separate truth from falsehood.
Bok believes, however, that it is possible to distinguish the true liars (among whom she places pseudologues, but not Alzheimer’s patients) from those who do not intend to deceive, and she is interested in her investigation only in true liars.15 But it may be more appropriate to envision a continuum on which there is no clear boundary separating the people who enjoy telling tales from the pathological deceivers. In other words, there may be no clear boundary between fiction and lies, and the morally charged dimensions of the writing of literature, of spinning out worlds, may indeed—as Cervantes understood but we seem to have forgotten—be worthy of investigation together with more mundane and more obviously reprehensible instances of lying.
Something akin to nontruthfulness of this sort, playfully spinning out worlds that we know not to exist, seems to be centrally, ineliminably involved in our individual developmental histories, in the way we forge our own characters through a mixture of aspiration and pretending. If you are not yet the sort of person you would like to be, as no one ever is at the outset, then part of the path to getting there seems to involve behaving, deceptively, as if you already were there. “Fake it till you make it” is the formula to which folk wisdom reduces this insight. Of course the deception is not fooling anyone, and yet it is tolerated or even encouraged, often by elders who have already made it, because they understand that it is a necessary part of the process of maturation.
Life is imitation, and therefore not really the thing it is pretending to be, for as long as it is aspiration. Once it arrives at the goal, it is authentically what it is, and can no longer be otherwise, but when this happens it comes to seem, if fully honest, also something like a living death. Life is in the pretending. Or, to anticipate an idea developed more fully in the following chapter, our experience of life is something like that of a cargo cult, worshipping and duplicating the scarcely understood, mysterious cargo that has been dropped in our midst, or into whose midst we ourselves have been dropped—until one day we do understand it. Then the charm disappears, and we find ourselves removed from the cult that worships the cargo, and now, from here on out, placed in some dreary night watchman’s job, overseeing the cargo for minimum wage. The high school football players at their homecoming put on ties, and it is obvious to anyone who wears a tie as a central feature of his daily identity that these boys are not really wearing ties, but have only appended a foreign element to their ordinary high school attire, to their ordinary high school selves. They put on the tie in order to give the appearance, on a special day, of being more important than they are, and to this extent the tie is a lie.
Children play at getting married, struggling to master the concept of marriage by acting out the few elements of it they understand, and fantasizing about the parts they can only vaguely limn. Many in their teens and twenties continue to play in this way in their dating lives, imitating in certain respects, to the extent that it is pleasurable, the ideal form of the monogamous couple, but without the deep lifelong commitment or the eternal promises. And then at the end of this process many find themselves actually, literally married, and they find, often to their surprise, that they have traded in that spirit of play for what we often hear described as “hard work.”
And Trump plays at being president, in the way that a child might who is impressed with the evident bigness of the idea of that office, but who is not cognitively or emotionally ready to appreciate all that it involves. Most American presidents surely had childish fantasies at some point about that position, but they were aged and ripened by the work of getting there, and by the time they arrived they have seemed, for the most part, to grasp that it is a real-world responsibility—that it is “hard work” and not simply a matter of the rest of the world accommodating itself so that they can continue to play within a sort of full-immersion fantasy.
In this respect Trump’s presidency is a lie, and one that occurs far past the age where the lying can be rationalized as make-believe, as play. This dimension of mendacity is combined with his propensity to confabulation, to saying things that simply and verifiably are not true, even though these things often seem to be sincerely felt by him. Whether the confabulations have as their etiology something like what Bok describes in Alzheimer’s patients, or whether rather it is a case of Pseudologia fantastica not connected to any cognitive or neural degeneration, is a matter of speculation at present. But that he is a liar, and that his presidency is a lie, is certain to any honest onlooker.
Trump’s mendacity is a venomous species of a genus that also includes kinds that are beneficial and necessary to our human lives. Lying is continuous with fantasy, with storytelling, with the free play of the imagination, while these in turn are the capacities that make us human and that make our lives worthwhile. Trump is eminently human, and his presence might be appreciated at a family reunion, an old uncle installed on the couch, full of passably funny, offensive quips that cause his younger, more with-it relations to roll their eyes and laugh knowingly. But that is not where Trump has ended up.
The structural irrationality that allowed Trump to end up where he never should have ended up, is one that in part channels the irrationality of individual members of society, brought together by irrational ideology, by fantasies that make sense only for as long as they are not submitted to rational scrutiny. But he ended up there in part, also, as a result of a poorly designed system, by disorder in the way things are set up: gerrymandered voting districts that have no plausible justification in the language of democracy; an electoral college that trumps popular will; and mass media that make it effectively impossible for the low-information voter to apprehend what the relevant political issues in the campaign are. This long-developing failure of the media in turn metastasized with the surge of social media as a factor in political campaigns, and the inability of the directors of the new social-media companies to recognize their new role and to assume the responsibility that they had stumbled into, to assure the survival of deliberative democracy in the era of digital hyperconnectedness. Instead, they allowed secret algorithms to produce, in individual newsfeeds, the appearance of a custom-made fantasy world, one that strangely mirrors at the microlevel of the individual citizen the fantasy world inhabited by the president. In this respect, the irrationality is externalized, into the systems of information flow and of the social processing of individual actions such as voting, rather than being internal to our individual minds (see chapter 2 for an extensive discussion of this distinction).
It is not that in order for deliberative democracy to function, a “liberal” American needs to be exposed to, and to engage with, the fringe ideas that have taken over the mainstream of the Republican Party. Rather, it is in large part the prior absence of reciprocal exposure and engagement that has caused fringe ideas to appear legitimate at all. I am certainly not going to engage, on its merits, with the idea that Democrats have been running a pedophilia ring in a Washington, DC, pizza restaurant, or with the QAnon conspiracy theory that has more recently bubbled up out of the darkest corners of 4chan. I will not take these ideas seriously, and in this refusal I do not believe that I am in any way failing to do my part to maintain or revive a healthy deliberative democracy. The structural irrationality, the failure of the algorithms to ensure serious political debate, has contributed to a situation in which the ideas that inform the political camps, that give life to the objectives of political communities, are no longer worth discussing; they can be addressed only as symptoms of a vastly larger problem.
Croaking
Donald Trump has a sense of himself: in fact he appears to be a pure bundle of unfettered will and assertion. But this is not the ennobling sense that is sometimes said to have accompanied “the discovery of the self” in ancient Greek thought, or again in Renaissance authors such as Michel de Montaigne. It is rather the sense of self that Emily Dickinson so wisely rejects in one of her most celebrated poems (already referenced above, but worth citing more fully here):
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog.16
The name in the case at hand is what has been aptly described as a Dickensian characternym, accurately epitomizing the character to whom it is attached.17 To “trump,” in card games, has come to mean “to have a better hand,” but this in turn is rooted in a deeper, older meaning, still expressed by the French cognate tromper, which can mean, variously, “to pull one over on one’s adversary,” or, simply, “to deceive.” During the 2017 French elections, a common slogan on placards was Ne vous “trumpez” pas, which is to say, “Do not fool yourselves” (by voting for the extreme-right candidate Marine Le Pen), but also, thanks to the phrase’s slight and intentional misspelling, “Don’t ‘Trump’ yourselves.” The fact that this usurper’s very name spelled out so unambiguously what he was up to should have set off alarm bells. Yet liberal Americans, who like all Americans are generally indifferent to etymology conceived as the science of truth—for this is the etymology of “etymology”—preferred the utterly toothless mockery they thought they would be able to extract from his ancestral German surname, Drumpf. But what is wrong with Drumpf? It is a perfectly average German name. And meanwhile here was this reality-TV actor turned politician, screaming his real name to his bog: his real name literally meant “to deceive,” and no one cared. And he was elected.
St. Paul wrote in the First Letter to the Corinthians that “knowledge puffs up, but love builds up” (1 Corinthians 8:1). Trump lacks both knowledge and love, and what he is inflated with, one suspects, is something much more like that miasmatic air by which the bullfrog asserts its existence in the middle of the bog. Paul’s letter, however, brings us back to something fundamental that has been central to our concerns: even if we are filled with knowledge of a sort, including knowledge of who we happen to think we are (white working-class Americans, Jews, Romans, people who put “PhD” after their names), we are only in fact inflating ourselves, out of the same sort of crude pride of which even a frog is capable, when we put this knowledge, or this semblance of self-knowledge, on display, and this inflation would occur in just the same way even if we didn’t have knowledge at all.
The book of Psalms tells us, “All men are liars” (Psalm 116:11) or, more profoundly, as it is rendered in some translations, “Every man is a lie.” This sounds extreme, but if we supplement it with the insights of Dickinson and St. Paul together, we get a richer sense of what is at issue: to the extent that we take our status as “somebody”—our individual distinctions, the knowledge we have gained, the titles we have in some sense earned, the approval ratings we receive on television or in office—we are mistaken about who we are, and whence we derive our value, and our proclamations about ourselves amount to mere croaking. Our value is derived, rather, from our recognition that we are “nobody,” or at least nobody in particular. In other words, whatever it is that is true of us, that gives us a share of the truth, is something we share equally with everybody, and thus we are in every respect that matters perfectly interchangeable with our neighbor. This recognition is in turn the basis of what St. Paul has in mind by “love.”
And yet can we not at least strive to know things, and speak them, in the name of truth? Or is all knowing and speaking mere puffing and croaking? In a stunningly desolate poem of 1968, responding to the brutal termination of the Prague Spring by Soviet forces and their servants in Czechoslovakia, W. H. Auden introduces the figure of the Ogre:
The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master Speech.
About a subjugated plain,
Among the desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.18
“Speech,” in the elevated sense in which the poet intends it here, might properly be read as a translation of logos, a term introduced at the beginning of chapter 1. Gustáv Husák, the secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in the period of “Normalization” following the Prague Spring, was in some sense of course able to speak. Trump can still speak too, though his syntax and syllables are ever diminishing.
But neither can speak truth, and in the sense of “Speech” that Auden is evoking, this is as much as to say that they cannot speak at all. “The Word,” to return to the New Testament rendering of logos, is necessarily true, or else it is not what it claims to be. To put this another way, human reason as articulated in “Speech” reflects the real order of the world, or it is not what it claims to be, but rather drivel. And the only way in which drivel can be passed off as Speech is by subjugation, whether with tanks, massive disinformation and de-education of the populace, or some combination of these two.
Since we have brought together such a motley crew of thinkers and nonthinkers, it is worth noting that St. Paul, like Donald Trump, is in his way an anti-intellectual. But his rejection of knowledge in the First Letter to the Corinthians is precisely not a rejection of truth. It is, rather, motivated by the idea that worldly knowledge is an impediment to apprehension of the only sort of truth that ultimately matters, a transcendental truth about God’s love and the possibility of sharing in it. Thus the “knowledge” (γνώσις) that Paul rejects could not be said to share in logos. In Platonic terms, this so-called knowledge would not be knowledge at all, but mere opinion.
Knowledge of trivial, worldly things, even when “true” in a strict sense, is nonetheless, on a certain understanding, when put on display for vain or venal reasons, a lie. And this in turn is how a man can be, in himself, as the Psalms put it, “a lie,” even if he sometimes tells the truth. Studies show that Trump at least sometimes tells the factual truth, but not in any way that flows from truthfulness of character or provides any evidence that he is anything other than a lie. Facts may be mixed into drivel without changing its character, just as fresh vegetables may be sprinkled into bog water without making it soup.
To fail to “master Speech,” in the sense in which Auden understands it, is not simply to be functionally illiterate or relatively inarticulate. It is to be unable to speak the truth, which is to say, to speak in a way that accords with the order of things. This order has since antiquity often been identified as logos, and the failure to harmonize one’s speech with it has been held to be the very definition of “irrationality.” Such irrationality is as much a moral matter as a cognitive one.