Outrages and Musings -The Open Society and Its Enemies Today

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Outrages and Musings

Wednesday, January 07, 2009
The Open Society and Its Enemies Today
The term 'open society' connotes personal liberty, tolerance, transparency, and democracy. It was employed by the French philosopher Henri Bergson to describe political cultures that are non-authoritarian and based on the twin pillars of personal liberty and human rights. But it was another European philosopher, Karl Popper, who gave the term its popularity when he chose it as the title of a two volume study of the roots of totalitarian and fascism that he wrote during the Second World War.



When his book, The Open Society and Its Enemies (OSE), was published in 1945 his primary target were the "closed societies" of the time, the totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Popper's main goal in this work, and in his Poverty of Historicism (1957), was to trace the historical roots of these totalitarian ideologies in the history of western thought. In the first volume of OSE he argued for a heterodox interpretation of Plato's Republic which Popper portrayed as the source of the idea of utopian social control. In the second volume he attempted to show that influential nineteenth century thinkers, particularly, Hegel and Marx, adapted Plato's dangerous ideas and set them loose on the world in the form of utopian holistic historicism. While Popper vigorously opposed these systems of totalitarian control, he was emphatic about the need for open societies not not to tolerate intolerance and warned repeatedly that in order to safeguard liberty we must be constantly vigilant about forms of social control and intolerance that would subvert the possibility of openness. We must, he argued, "claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant" (OSE vol.1, p. 265).




More than sixty years after OSE appeared we live in a much more open world. Nazism was defeated and forever discredited; the totalitarian regimes the former Soviet Union and its planned economy has likewise fallen and has been replaced by a market economy and somewhat greater tolerance of dissent. The Chinese are this year celebrating twenty five years of economic liberalization that has ushered in an era of unprecendented economic growth and prosperity for the most populous nation on earth. There are only a handful of totalitarian societies left today. One can mention the regime in North Korea, the military dictatorship in Burma, as perhaps also al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other religious extremist groups who seek to create an Caliphate that will enforce an orthodox form of Islam.



But we should also understand that there are enemies of the open society in our midst. These foes of freedom and reason employ more subtle means of silencing dissent, sowing division, and promoting intolerance and bigotry. These enemies employ forms of propaganda and thought control designed to control what people think and believe in democratic societies, and unless we learn to recognize their tactics, we can fall prey to the threat of closing our minds to new ideas and frustrating the process of inquiry.



The idea of a open society is based on tolerance of difference and indeed the celebration of diversity of race, of religion, of politics, of culture, of taste, of values. Open societies value plurality and oppose homogeneity and above all purity. But a culture of tolerance of openness is vulnerable to various forms of lies, deception, and manipulation. By being open such societies are vulnerable to attack from elements within the society that seek to close it, not in the crude way of earlier forms of totalitarianism, by excluding people or ideas from full participation in it, but rather by sophisticated techniques of thought control and manipulation of public opinion. These techniques have gotten out of control in American politics and have created a culture of deception, in which every kind of lie and deception is tolerated and indeed celebrated as "spin".



Noam Chomsky was among the intellectuals to clearly understand this threat. Writing in the 1980s in books like Necessary Illusions and the Manufacture of Consent, he identified the forms of thought control in democratic societies that are used by the enemies of liberty and democracy to maintain their power and privilege. They employ sophisticated techniques of public relations, advertising, and propaganda to manipulate public opinion. They use the "big lie" favored by Hitler and Goebbels; they engage in revisionist historical myth-making; and they distort language in ways that Orwell would have recognized so as to make things appear other than they are. In an age of mass media and mass communication, these techniques are even more potent because those who employ them are able to use the media as an electronic megaphone to pour their poison into the ears and eyes of millions.



The the recently deceased playwright Harold Pinter was another voice who warned us about the dangers of lies and deception particularly by politicians. He contrasted literary truth, which is in his view multifaceted, and partly subjective, with factual truth:
Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.
He used the occasion of his receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature to denounce in not uncertain terms the way in which, in particular, the United States government lied about its reasons for invading Iraq saying that:
The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading -- as a last resort -- all other justifications having failed to justify themselves -- as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.



But exposing lies can be a challenging enterprise. In order to prove that someone is lying one must first show that the statements he or she made are factually false, then one show that the speaker believed that these statements were in fact true, and finally, one must prove that the speaker intended to deceive his or her audience by claiming certain things to be true that he or she believed to be false. Because politicians can easily conceal what it is they believe to be true and their intention to deceive, our political culture is rife with lies. But it is also awash with something else that may be even more common and more insidious --- bullshit.
I am using the term "bullshit" here in a precise, philosophical sense identified by Harry Frankfurt in his small book of the same name. In this work Frankfurt defines bullshit as speech that has no regard for the truth, but is chosen because it is likely to influence people's perceptions of reality. Lies and bullshit are closely related, in that they both involve misrepresentation: in order to lie, one must believe that something is true and then speak with the intention to make one's audience believe the opposite of what one believes to be true. Both the honest person and the liar must therefore have some regard for the truth. The bullshitter, on the other hand, "does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose" (p. 56). As Frankfurt further explains the distinction between lying and bullshit:



What bullshit essentially misrepresents is neither the state of affairs to which it refers nor the beliefs of the speaker concerning that state of affairs.... What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise.... Both he and the liar represent themselves falsely as attempting to communicate the truth. The success of each depends upon deceiving us about that. But the fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know that he wants us to believe something that he supposes to be false. The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it. (pp. 53-55)
Frankfurt's analysis of bullshit allows us to distinguish between bullshit and fiction. When a writer of fiction, such as Pinter, or any other novelist or playwright, writes without regard for the truth, we do not call it bullshit because there is no attempt to deceive us into thinking that the speaker is attempting to tell the factual truth -- he or she is asking us to willingly suspect our disbelief and play along with the fictional premises of the work of art. Writers of fiction aren't interested in reporting the truth or concealing it, but neither are they trying to conceal that fact. But bullshitters are; they are trying to make us believe they are speaking truthfully when in fact they have no regard for the truth at all.



There is no better example of bullshit than "Joe the Plumber" from last fall's presidential campaign. Here is a guy, Samuel J. Wurzelbacher by name, who asked then candidate Barack Obama a question about the implications of his tax policies by portraying himself as a licensed plumber who was planning to buy his boss's business which he claimed was worth $250,000. In fact, as we later found out, Mr. Wurzelbacher does not have a plumber's license, his bosses' business is only worth $100,000, he himself makes $42,000 a year and owed back taxes on that amount. "Joe the Plumber" represented himself as a hard-working and successful small businessman, but in fact he was a fraud and what he said was total bullshit. He did not care whether the premises of his question were true or false, all that mattered to him was that he thought he could get Obama to admit that under his proposed tax policies he would be subject to an increase in his marginal tax rate. He just made up facts to suit his purpose.



So what happened to this bullshit artist? Instant meida celebrity and, at least among the Republican faithful, Joe to Plumber became a symbol for the notion (also bullshit) that Obama is a socialist because he favored having rich people pay a modestly higher marginal income tax rate. Rather than being ridiculed and publicly shamed, Joe the Bullshitter was lionized.



Our media culture is awash in bullshit. It is full of speech that does not even attempt to communicate truths or make claims whose veracity can be rationally assessed. Most people no longer seem to be interested in truth; what matters is someone's ability to lead his audience to accept something, or as Stephen Colbert says, to believe things on account of their "truthiness". We are suffering from "truth decay" that is rotting our ability to determine what to accept as true and worthy of belief.



The key question for defenders of open societies is how best to respond to this brown tide of bullshit that is polluting our public discourse? The financier George Soros, who was a student of Popper's, and whose main philanthropic foundation is named the Open Society Institute, wrote an interesting editorial commentary that identified the reason why lies and bullshit are threats to an open society:

Popper failed to recognize that in democratic politics, gathering public support takes precedence over the pursuit of truth. In other areas, such as science and industry, the impulse to impose one’s views on the world encounters the resistance of external reality. But in politics the electorate’s perception of reality can be easily manipulated. As a result, political discourse, even in democratic societies, does not necessarily lead to a better understanding of reality.

Soros argues that, "the separation of powers, free speech, and free elections alone cannot ensure open society; a strong commitment to the pursuit of truth is also required." He suggests that we need to have new ground rules for political discourse, that we need to inoculate the public against various forms of deception by exposing them to public scrutiny, and that we need to name and shame those who use them. Likewise, Pinter concluded his Nobel speech with these words, "I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory."
If in order to protect an open society we should not tolerate intolerance and bigotry, then neither should we tolerate lies and bullshit. In traditional closed societies, the pursuit of truth is frustrated by techniques of social control that limit dissent and critique of current orthodoxies. But in democratic societies such as our own, the pursuit of truth is under an even more insidious attack. By tolerating and rewarding bullshit we indicate that the truth does not matter; that one need not consider it as relevant at all. All that matters in a society that tolerates so much bullshit is that people come to believe what the bullshitters want them to believe, at least for a while.



What is to be done about the bullshit storm? I suggest that our first line of defense is to put our bullshit detectors on high alert and be prepared to recognize it and name and shame those who use it. I see some evidence that this kind of response to bullshit and deception is beginning to appear more frequently in the mainstream American media. As a long time reader of such publications as the Nation, the New York Review of Books, and Salon.com (not to mention Chomsky and Pinter), I am used to learning that the things reported in the mainstream corporate new media are lies and bullshit. But I have recently been amazed that correspondents from these liberally biased news media have begun to become regular guests on cable TV news shows such as Keith Olberman's Countdown and on the Rachel Maddow Show. What I appreciate about these cable new shows is that their hosts, Olbermann and Maddow, are not afraid to name and shame the liars and bullshitters. The other night, for instance, in talking about the flap over Pastor Rick Warren claiming that he never compared gay marriage to incest and pedophilia, Maddow simply showed a video clip of Warren saying that he is opposed calling relationships between brothers and sisters, men and children, and men with multiple wives "marriage" and that he believes that gay marriage is comparable to them. She nailed him in a lie and he was even a finalist for the "Denial is not just the name of a river in Egypt" award for the most barefaced lie of the year (Sen. Ted Stevens won that one).



Olbermann and Maddow are, of course, using humor and political satire as defenses against bullshit; a technique pioneered by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on their wildly popular late night shows on Comedy Central. Using comedy to convey political criticism is a great anti-bullshit technique because comedy, like fiction, is not supposed to be taken seriously as an attempt to speak the truth. However, like fiction, one can invert their assumption by mocking and making fun of those who lie for a living -- what Olbermann calls professional prevaricators -- and with tongue in cheek, outing their deceptions. While seeming not to be pursuing the truth, one can speak truthfully about what others are lying and bullshitting about.



The Blogosphere is, of course, also full of bullshit, but it is sometimes a good place to go to find bullshitter detectors doing their duty. The You Tube effect, shown, for instance, with the "macaca" episode involving the Virginia politician George Allen, came from blogs that posted the video showing exactly what Allen had said. Politicians no longer have plausible deniability when there are video cameras on everyone's mobile phones.



To be continued....






Posted by Morton Winston at 6:50 AM
Labels: bullshit, Chomsky, Colbert, deception, Frankfurt, Joe the Plumber, Maddow, Olbermann, Open Society, Pinter, Popper, Soros, Stewart, tolerance
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About Me

Morton Winston
I am Professor of Philosophy and Chairman of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at The College of New Jersey. I also have a long career as a human rights activist with Amnesty International and Social Accountability International.
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