Discourse Wars

According to @kevinroose, one of the most popular posts on Facebook yesterday was a story about a Vietnam War memorial supposedly vandalized by BLM protesters. Except that the photo was from 2016, the vandals weren't anything to do with BLM, and the story had been debunked weeks ago.

Someone called Jeff responded on Twitter, claiming that Kevin and others were missing the point. Yes the picture is incorrect but doesn't subtract from all the other memorials the BLM movement did vandalize. And someone called James argued that BLM is still a group that doesn't give a damn about America and that is trying to destroy everything that it stands for. So it wouldn't have surprised me in the least if they had done that since it's in keeping with who they are and how they think.


Jeff and James don't seem bothered by the fact that the story is fabricated, because in their eyes it confirms some deeper truth. A truth in which one memorial is the same as another memorial, in which an act in 2016 described by locals as ignorant, having no sense of history is conflated with a series of acts motivated by an acute sense of historical injustice, and in which any attack on the symbols of this historical injustice counts as destroying everything America stands for.


Michel Foucault argued that each society had its regime of truth.

The possibility exists for fiction to function in truth, for a fictional discourse to induce effects of truth, and for bringing it about that a true discourse engenders or manufactures something that does not as yet exist. Foucault

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Michel Foucault, “The History of Sexuality,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–77, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, JohnMepham, Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 193

Daniel Funke, Vietnam memorial was not vandalized by Black Lives Matter protesters (PolitiFact, 4 June 2020)

Daniele Lorenzini, What is a Regime of Truth? (Le Foucaldien, 1(1), 1. 2015) http://doi.org/10.16995/lefou.2

Related post: The Habitual Vice of Epistemology (June 2019) 

The Habitual Vice of Epistemology

In his recent polemic on #ClimateChange, Bruno Latour writes

But these rational sorts are just as caught up as the others in the tangles of disinformation. They do not see that it is useless to be indignant that people believe in alternative facts, when they themselves live in an alternative world, a world in which climate mutation occurs, while it does not in the world of their opponents.

It is not a matter of learning how to repair cognitive deficiencies, but rather of how to live in the same world, share the same culture, face up to the same stakes, perceive a landscape that can be explored in concert. Here we find the habitual vice of epistemology, which consists in attributing to intellectual deficits something that is quite simply a deficit in shared practice. Down to Earth, p25

Bernard Harcourt adds

A true fact cannot stand on its own, autonomously, independent of social relations, of who tells it, or finds it, or proves it—and where and how it is established. There may well be facticity, but in order for facts to stick, they have to properly form part of social life. And when our shared social life has been scarred by betrayal and exploitation, it will no longer be fertile ground for the trust necessary to maintain truths.

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Bernard E. Harcourt, Bruno Latour on Truth and Praxis (Critique and Praxis 13/13, 16 December 2018)

Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (Polity Press, 2018).

The Pursuit of Truth

As @PennyRed said last month, after the election of Donald Trump: "It turns out that you cannot stop fascism by turning off Facebook and doing some deep breathing."

The other day, I was arguing with a woman who told me about some recent atrocities in a politically torn part of the world. She was clearly upset by these atrocities, which she framed in a particular way, and used to support some fairly extreme political conclusions. I disagreed strongly with her conclusions, and I was not minded to take the reports of the atrocities at face value.

When I looked on the internet later, I found a Facebook page that carried the same reports, in similar language. Presumably that was the woman's source. I also found a Wikipedia page on the conflict, which framed things in more neutral terms, based on a number of apparently independent sources. Although there were some unpleasant incidents reported by the mainstream news media, these were neither as drastic nor as one-sided as the Facebook material suggested. So while I don't have sufficient evidence to disprove the atrocities completely, I cannot see enough evidence to take them as seriously as she does.

Many Facebook pages use dramatic images to increase circulation. There have been images of billboards supposedly encouraging criminal behaviour. Snopes shows that a fake billboard, supposedly displayed in Finland to encourage rape by migrants, was actually based on a genuine billboard displayed in Liberia to offer support to rape victims. Georgina Guedes finds another version of the same billboard in South Africa, this time supposedly promoting violence against white farmers.

And both sides are now using the fake billboard tactic. Today someone tweeted a picture of a billboard advertising some Trump property development, which was supposedly displayed in an Indian slum, with people sleeping on the street below. A few hours later, the same person deleted the tweet and apologized for the fake.

Many people find it harder to apply the same critical eye to material that they are instinctively sympathetic to. But as I said in my earlier piece on The Purpose of Truth (November 2016), the more I want to believe something (because it fits my preconceptions), the more I should doubt it.

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BBC Guidelines - things to ask yourself before you share a claim

• Have I heard of the publisher before?
• Is this the source I think it is, or does it sound a bit like them?
• Can I point to where this happened on a map?
• Has this been reported anywhere else?
• Is there more than one piece of evidence for this claim?
• Could this be something else?

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How to spot a fake US election claim (BBC News, 2 November 2016) Fake news in 2016: What it is, what it wasn't, how to help (BBC News, 30 December 2016)

How to verify photos and videos on social media networks (The Observers, France 24, 10 November 2015)

Dan Evon, You Can't Do That in Finland (Snopes, 11 January 2016)

Georgina Guedes, The ANC is not encouraging black people to kill whites (eNews Channel Africa, 10 March 2016)

Laurie Penny, Against Bargaining: On not taking leave of your senses (The Baffler, 18 November 2016)

Wikipedia: BBC News, eNews Channel Africa, France 24, Snopes, The Baffler

Related post: The Purpose of Truth (November 2016)

The Purpose of Truth

The more I want to believe this (because it fits my preconceptions), the more I should doubt it.

Presented without comment. pic.twitter.com/UaPNVHBw8o

— Ed Button (@edb87) November 10, 2016

I don't know whether this is genuine. If these tweets even exist, do they represent the views of a real Trump supporter. And even if this is genuine, does it matter that one Trump supporter looks dangerously inconsistent? What conclusions, if any, am I justified in drawing from this? Should I be comforted because my low opinion of Trump supporters in general is corroborated? What should I now feel?

I know how I might go about resolving some of these doubts.  But can I be bothered? I could spend all day fact-checking, but I have a proper job.

The point is that the 2016 US election was dominated by this kind of material, on both sides. Of course we are all sometimes tempted to take some of this material seriously, and to scorn the material from the other side. But if you want to propagate some controversial material, you have a moral duty to hesitate - am I being seduced into fanning some false flames?

This morning, for example, I wanted to tweet something about President-Elect Trump's phone call with South Korea. But I wasn't prepared to trust the first story I saw, so I didn't tweet anything until I found a Reuters story that confirmed it. Of course, it may still be untrue, but I'm glad I checked.

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See also Daisy Christodoulou, How Fake News Spreads (Twitter 14 August 2020)

 

Related Post

The Pursuit of Truth (Dec 2016)

Delight in Giddiness

@roygrubb praises @HPluckrose for clarity.

We need you to define 'Islamophobia' very clearly by 7th May @Ed_Miliband. Will such statements be criminalised? pic.twitter.com/moStkDYcD7
— Helen Pluckrose (@HPluckrose) April 25, 2015

Perfect. Couldn't be stated more clearly. https://t.co/YI2reCO7Ed
— Roy Grubb (@roygrubb) April 26, 2015

Helen says we need something. But is this really a clear statement of requirements? What exactly is she demanding here? Does she expect politicians to provide precise definitions of all the cliches and platitudes and vague promises in the manifesto or on the hustings? If benefits are going to be directed towards "hard-working families", do we need this term to be defined as well? (See Terry Eagleton's criticism of the party manifestos.)

Supposing it to be possible to legislate about "islamophobia" (or "hate crime"), the term would need to be defined properly, so that the legislation is fair and workable. My initial reading of Helen's tweet was that she believed that a meaningful definition was not possible, therefore legislation would not be possible, therefore the promise to legislate would be either foolish or in bad faith. However, instead of stating this belief directly, she expresses her challenge in the form of a case that may demonstrate the impossibility of producing a fair and workable definition.

Of course, this form of challenge is quite legitimate, but I should like to quibble with Roy's assertion that it is the clearest (most explicit) way of posing such a challenge. The fact that I initially misread Helen's tweet (as affirmed in the comment below this post) reinforces my concern about clarity. I'm not blaming Helen for this - it is rarely possible to express one's complete meaning in a 140 character tweet.  

Helen wants Ed Miliband to reassure us that any legislation would be drawn narrowly, to avoid restricting legitimate intellectual debate. However, there is a precedent for ill-defined and over-generalized terms being coded into legislation, as shown in the absurd laws on "glorifying terrorism", and we may have little confidence that the legislators will apply the appropriate rigour in coming up with a proper definition of anything.

The example quoted by Helen is interesting because it could be used to generate further examples. Firstly, the word "Islam" could be replaced with the word "Christianity". Secondly, the word "Islam" could be replaced with the phrase "Islam-or-Christianity". Could someone who wished to attack Islam and/or its adherents evade the Islamophobia laws by including a token attack on other religions and their adherents? And how would the law regard someone who claims to attack all religions indiscriminately but is accused of devoting a disproportionate amount of his bile for one religion in particular?

The example quoted by Helen is also interesting because it attacks the notion of truth embedded in the phrase "True Islam", using a correspondence notion of truth, which Richard Dawkins and other scientists take as the epistemological "gold standard". But I think many people would interpret "True Islam" in terms of some (subjective) notion of authenticity, and regard the opening statement as either begging the question or deliberate provocation.


What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. Certainly there be, that delight in giddiness, and count it a bondage to fix a belief; affecting free-will in thinking, as well as in acting.

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Hamed Chapman, Labour would outlaw Islamophobia, says Miliband in an exclusive interview (Muslim News, 24 April 2015)
S. Abbas Raza, Richard Dawkins, Relativism and Truth (3Quarks Daily, December 2005)
Francis Bacon, Of Truth (Essays)
Terry Eagleton, Which party’s election manifesto is the best written? (Guardian 24 April 2015)

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Correspondence Theory of Truth
Wikipedia: Terrorism Act 2006. 
POSIWID blog: Glory Glory Knockdown Argument (October 2005)


Update 14:20 UK time following Helen's comment. Clarified that this was my initial (but incorrect) reading of her tweet. Reworded from "attack Islam" to "attack Islam and/or its adherents".

Purpose of Denial 3

The more the American mainstream media deny that President Obama is a Moslem, the more Americans choose to believe that he is.

Apparently this belief is more prevalent among college-educated Republicans than the rest of the population. How Republicans Learn That Obama Is Muslim (New Republic, 27 August 2010) This raises some intriguing questions about the relationship between education and knowledge.

Jeff Poor suggests that the media are to blame. "By consistently using questions about Obama's faith and his citizenship as fodder to demean conservatives, specifically the Tea Party movement and thereby creating a general mistrust by saying vile things, have the mainstream media perpetuated the very allegations they are abhorred by (sic)?" (Newsbusters, 19 August 2010) At least on this point, Charlie Brooker seems to agree. "Seriously, broadcasters, journalists: just give up now. Because either you're making things worse, or no one's paying attention anyway."  'Ground Zero mosque'? The reality is less provocative (Guardian 23 August 2010). Brooker complains that the terms of the debate are grossly misleading, and grudgingly admires right-wingers for their ability to create snappy-but-misleading nicknames – like fun-size chocolate bars and the Ground Zero mosque. Buzzwords for blowhards (Guardian 30 August 2010).

Jeff Poor quotes CNN political analyst James Carville, who describes himself as "flummoxed" by this result, and claims that "the quality of information to people today is exponentially higher than it was in 19th century England". Now I wouldn't necessarily expect a political journalist to know what the word "exponential" meant, but I wonder whether the quality is higher at all.

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Once upon a time, some people were bothered whether Disraeli was Christian or Jew, and some people were uncomfortable about electing Kennedy as a Catholic president. But they are now mainly remembered for what they achieved while in office, not their religious affiliation. Meanwhile, Mrs Thatcher's legacy is not feminism but Thatcherism. Obama will not be remembered for his birthplace, or the religion of his forefathers, nor even for being the first black president; he will be remembered for the successes and failures of his presidency. And perhaps one day, people will wonder why anyone cared whether he was a Moslem or not, and moderate Moslems will be as accepted in mainstream American politics as Catholics are now. (Let it not be forgotten that large sums of money were once raised from American Catholics to support Irish terrorism.)

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John T. McGreevy and R. Scott Appleby Catholics, Muslims, and the Mosque Controversy (New York Review, 27 August 2010)

Adam Serwer, Build More Mosques (American Prospect, August 26, 2010)

The Power of Projection

@snowded @rotkapchen @euan #history #texas .

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Dave Snowden saw Euan Semple's tweet Texas Conservatives Win Vote on Textbook Standards (original story NYTimes.com) and commented "Depressing HandMaid's Tale here we come".

When Paula Thornton said "Yes we did", Dave replied "deepest sympathies, do you need to emigrate?". Paula corrected him "Perhaps you missed my intent -- I'm proud of the action and was backing in. We believe in the pursuit of truth."

This vignette is interesting at many levels. Dave appears to have formed a negative judgement about the Texan vote, possibly based on little more than a somewhat unsympathetic report in the New York Times, and seems to have expected Paula to share his view. It can be extremely tempting to project our own opinions onto other people, especially those we consider intelligent and well-informed on other matters, and it is often a surprise to discover someone we like and respect turns out to have opinions that strongly clash with our own. Perhaps that's why we often avoid discussing politics and religion with work colleagues in the first place.

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As for the pursuit of truth, political battles between liberals and conservatives over American history will probably reveal more about historical truth than any amount of imagined objectivity on either side, for those who understand how to interpret it, but I just wonder how many Texan schoolchildren will get this.

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Following further debate on Twitter, Dave identified two positions: direct political/populist control and going with the academics. His appears to side with the latter option.

If we look at this in terms of Lacan's Four Discourses, "going with the academics" is what Lacan called Discourse of the University. I guess populism counts as Discourse of the Hysteric, because the Texan vote appears to be a response to a Master Discourse perceived as being controlled by the "liberal establishment". But where is the Discourse of the Analyst?

Conceit of Hindsight 2

The first chapter of Richard Dawkins' book The Ancestor's Tale is called The Conceit of Hindsight.

"It is a conceit of hindsight to see evolution as aimed towards some particular end point, such as ourselves."

(As comments to the Brothers Judd Blog remind us, the same point was made by Steven Jay Gould. See also my earlier post on The Conceit of Hindsight.)


Robin Wilton finds ironic illustration of this point in the curious natural history of the tree shrew, recently reported by the BBC News - Tree Shrew is Heavyweight Boozer. Robin calls this The Shameful Truth, notes that the tree shrew is much better adapted than humans to the consumption of large quantities of alcohol, and concludes

"we don't represent the culmination of evolutionary improvement at all... we're just the ones who couldn't stand the pace".

(As further evidence of anthropocentricity, I note that the BBC News omits the coy inverted commas it would "normally use" when reporting any "human scandal". So much for "journalistic balance" then, huh?)


But it is a distortion to view evolution from a human-centric position - as if the purpose of evolution is to produce a few billion ill-adapted mammals, rather than say a few trillion excellently adapted insects. Given that insects (and bacteria and other creatures) outnumber and outmanoeuvre us so successfully, we can perhaps conclude that our evolutionary purpose (POSIWID) is to provide food for creatures like these that are higher up the food chain.

(There is no virtue or intelligence in being at the top of the food chain, by the way. Many parasites, like mosquitoes, fleas and head lice, feed upon humans and other useful mammals. “Big fleas have little fleas upon their back to bite ‘em, and little fleas have smaller ones and so ad-infinitem.” See http://www.albawest.com/midges.html. See also Bill Bailey on the Insect Nation.)

A simple version of Darwinism suggests that evolution is all about superior adaptation. But what marks humans out from other species is our singular lack of adaptation. Aha, says the Conceit of Hindsight, but our lack of adaptation to any specific unchanging environment means we are supremely adaptable to a wider range of alternative and fast-changing environments. Therefore the purpose of evolution is to produce, not adaptation but adaptability (Bateson).

But what this does is apply POSIWID at a higher logical level (to the second-order effect rather than the first-order effect) in order to preserve our notion of human superiority and the upward progress of evolution (the Ascent of Man). Isn't this just cheating?

Disaster in Iraq 2

Following Tony Blair's admission (to David Frost on al-Jazeera) that the Iraq invasion was a disaster, the Washington administration (having finally dumped Rumsfeld) has started to make similar noises.

Someone once said that the first casualty of war is truth. (For various theories about the origin of this phrase, see Guardian Notes and Queries.)

So what does it mean when statesmen finally admit something that most people already knew? What is the purpose of a belated truth?

One popular excuse for telling lies in wartime is to keep up morale. We must support our troops, therefore we must pretend that they are doing well even when they aren't.

Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive! One falsehood leads to another, and it becomes harder and harder to abandon the deceit. The deceit becomes self-perpetuating. The first falsehood may have had some plausible purpose (effect) - support the troops, dishearten the enemy - but the purpose of the 50th falsehood is merely to provide cover for the previous 49.

When we realise someone is lying to us, this generates a hostile feeling. And when the lying SOB suddenly starts telling the truth, it is such a relief that it is sometimes tempting to forgive him everything. That's where it starts to get Machiavellian ...

See earlier posts: Disaster in Iraq, Real Audience.

See also Joan Didion "Cheney's Fatal Touch" (New York Review, October 5, 2006). Mark Danner "Iraq: The War of the Imagination" (New York Review, December 21, 2006).

False Intelligence

For those of us who don't (knowingly) have daily contact with the security forces, the idea of military/security intelligence generally only surfaces when there is a problem with it. Tony Blair had a little difficulty with a "dodgy dossier" not long ago; and now the White House is faced with similar political problems, apparently of its own making. In a blog posting The Lies that Lead to War, Rodger produces some historical parallels from the Vietnam War, and asks

Did the administration distort the evidence? Or, were the intelligence agencies completely and horribly wrong? A third possibility also exists: did some intelligence sources knowingly distort the evidence?

These questions rely on a central premise - that the purpose of intelligence is to deliver some kind of knowledge or truth. False intelligence then represents a betrayal of this purpose - either the relevant agency is incompetent (root cause: poor management, chronic underfunding and/or excessive reliance on surveillance technology?) or someone has distorted the evidence.

But this bureaucratic account of intelligence cannot be squared with the view from popular fiction, where spies dabble in grey half-truth and deception. So which is correct - the bureaucratic view or the fictional view? Must we choose between these two?

Perhaps it is the premise that is wrong. What intelligence does (and therefore in POSIWID terms its purpose) is not to produce knowledge or truth, but to support action. Those who wish to call the administration and/or the intelligence agencies to account are attempting to separate their criticism of the intelligence from their criticism of how the intelligence was used, but arguably this separation doesn't make sense. If the intelligence doesn't stand up, then the military action doesn't stand up, and vice versa.

In an adversarial legal system (such as the one in which Tony Blair qualified as a barrister) the purpose of evidence is to stand up in court. Justice is achieved by a kind of boxing match between two bodies of evidence - the winner is the one whose evidence stands up the longest. (The writer Adam Mars-Jones wrote an excellent long story Bathpool Park, based on a legal case presided over by his father, that illustrates the failure of this adversarial system to deal with the complexities of the case.)

Thus the purpose of intelligence is not to be true (what is Truth? asked jesting Pilate) but to stand up. Not quite the same thing.

Protective Lies

According to Seth Godin, lies protect the status quo. This is evidently a primary purpose of lying. (Seth offers ten good examples, of which number 10 seems the most popular: Kirsten calls it Invitation Block. DesertLight Journal adds one about domestic violence.)

Scott Duffy asks the Cui Bono question - who benefits.

The question you need to ask is, who stands to gain from perpetrating these myths? Some of the richest companies in America. Drug companies, movie companies, brokerages, oil companies, agri-business... the list reads like a list of George Bush campaign donors.

LuiZ sugggests that these are not lies, simply half-truths (Quasi-Wahrheiten). (But isn't truth itself under the control of the Status Quo?)

Paul Short suggests that the "Status Quo" is getting boring and repetitive, and how it's time for a change. How the people who think outside the box will be the next shining stars in whatever field they're in ... atach suggests that the purpose of innovation is to rebel against these protective lies.

The purpose of innovation is rebellion. If a primary purpose of lying is to protect the status quo, a secondary purpose of the protective lies is to ensure that most attempted innovation/rebellion is off-target - because that's certainly what it does!