On Humbug, Bullshit and Hot Air — Notes from Max Black and Harry Frankfurt

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On Humbug, Bullshit and Hot Air — Notes from Max Black and Harry Frankfurt

Claptrap, hot air and counterfeit

Humans are noisy creatures. We engage in so much babble and gabble as to make the monkeys in a rainforest seem quaint. I am sure you have experienced this firsthand, perhaps at some corporate retreat or networking event or political convention. When it comes to avoiding plaintalk, our inventiveness knows no bounds. 

The philosopher Max Black defines humbug as a “deceptive misrepresentation… [of] somebody’s own thoughts, feelings, or attitudes.” He proffers colorful synonyms like “balderdash”, “claptrap”, “hokum”, “drivel”, and “quackery” to go with it. The philosopher Harry Frankfurt agrees, but suggests that there is more to the “essential character” of bullshit that pervades society to this day. 

In the first instance, Frankfurt likens bullshit to hot air: “Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutritive has been removed.” Their utterances are devoid of substance and disconnected from reality. If you pack bullshitters into a room, what you’ll get is not a conversation between well-meaning adults but an overlay of monologues.

The need to talk

“The essence of bullshit”, Frankfurt explains, “is not that it is false but that it is phony.” Where liars must first know the truth to lie, bullshitters do not care about the facts. They have no regard for representation or accuracy. Frankfurt likens bullshitters to knockoffs and counterfeit wares. They may look the part at first glance. But when you inspect them closely, you soon realize that their manufacture is pure gimcrack.

As George Orwell similarly observes in Politics and the English Language: “Modern writing [and speechmaking] at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words… and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way… is that it is easy. It is easier—even quicker, once you have the habit.”

But why is bullshit so commonplace? Why can’t we dispose of it as we do with rubbish? While bullshit is most certainly a product of ego, pretence, incentive, and other motivators, Frankfurt points to a common theme: “Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.” Indeed, the fear of being perceived as incompetent compels many politicians, executives, consultants, and critics to abandon intellectual honesty for charismatic babble. It is hard to hold your tongue when you are worried about your impressiveness and place among others. 

Prisons and pilots

As I see it, the problem is also related to the prisoner’s dilemma. We can agree, for instance, that the populace would be better served if candidates on the political trail made less disingenuous promises. But if a modicum of bullshit allows the politician to appeal to an undiscerning audience, he or she may lack the self-control to abstain from it. The other candidate, in fear of losing the election race, may compromise his or her values to keep up. What you get in turn is a lot of babble and bullshit. You might even end up with a candidate who only knows how to do just that. 

More than that, bullshitters lack tangible skin in the game. They carry a cloak of confidence and invincibility because they know their words can travel without repercussion. Politicians make promises they cannot keep because their voters are partial amnesiacs. Consultants proffer snake oil because their clients cannot smell the difference. Bankers, likewise, call their toxic assets financial innovation because they will be long gone with their yachts and commissions when the market inevitably implodes. Pilots, on the other hand, cannot afford to be a phony. Natural selection has a knack for finding bullshitters in the sky.

Clever-me-isms

Such “clever-me-isms”, Max Black notes, are most common in academic writing and corporate-speak. For an especially egregious example, he points to the “pretentious verbiage” of the economist Thorstein Veblen and his book The Theory of the Leisure Class. I feel it necessary to include the excerpt here. Can you tell me what Veblen is trying to say?  

“The anthropomorphic cult, with its code of devout observances, suffers a progressive disintegration through the stress of economic exigencies and the decay of the system of status. As this disintegration proceeds, there comes to be associated and blended with the devout attitude certain other motives and impulses that are not always traceable to the habit of personal subservience. Not alI of these subsidiary impulses that blend with the bait of devoutness in the later devotional life are altogether congruous with the devout attitude or with the anthropomorphic apprehension of sequence of phenomena… In many ways they traverse the underlying norm of subservience or vicarious life to which the code of devout observances and the ecclesiastical and sacerdotal institutions are to be traced as their substantial basis. Through the presence of these alien motives the social and industrial regime of status gradually disintegrates, and the canon of personal subservience loses the support derived from an unbroken tradition. Extraneous habits and proclivities encroach upon the field of action occupied by this canon, and it presently comes about that the ecclesiastical and sacerdotal structures are partially converted to other uses, in some measure alien to the purposes of the scheme of devout life as it stood in the days of the most vigorous and characteristic development of the priesthood.”

Thorstein Veblen. (1899). The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions.

Unearthly language

Such Veblenisms continue painfully for some three hundred pages. While he may be the father of institutional economics, it does not excuse his verbosity and humbug. Black points to the satirist Henry Louis Mencken, who charges Veblen of thinking in an “unearthly” language before “clawing” it into “copious” English: 

“Well, what have we here? What does this appalling salvo of rhetorical artillery signify?…  I studied the whole paragraph for three days, halting only for prayer and sleep, and I came to certain conclusions… To say what might have been said on a postage stamp he took more than a page in his book… A cent’s worth of information wrapped in a bale of polysyllables. In “The Higher Learning in America” the thing perhaps reached its damndest and worst. It was as if the practice of that incredibly obscure and malodorous style were a relentless disease, a sort of progressive intellectual diabetes, a leprosy of the horse sense. Words were flung upon words until all recollection that there must be a meaning in them, a ground and excuse for them, were lost. One wandered in a labyrinth of nouns, adjectives, verbs, pronouns, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and participles, most of them swollen and nearly all of them unable to walk. It was, and is, impossible to imagine worse English, within the limits of intelligible grammar. It was clumsy, affected, opaque, bombastic, windy, empty… The professor got himself enmeshed in his gnarled sentences like a bull trapped by barbed wire, and his efforts to extricate himself were quite as furious and quite as spectacular.”

Henry Louis Mencken. (1949). A Mencken Chrestomathy. In Max, Black. (1983). The Prevalence of Humbug.

Sensitivity, sincerity, and the Shavian probe

So is there anything we can do to wall against the buildup of humbug and bullshit? Frankfurt believes it is possible with a good dose of sensitivity and sincerity. The former requires a nose for hot air and an ability to see through fluff to find intent. The latter requires a shared desire to represent ourselves and the world more honestly. This is easier said than done.

Black similarly stresses the importance of “plain and clear” language. He recommends we learn from “anti-humbuggers” like Samuel Johnson, George Orwell, Anton Chekhov, E.B. White, Vladimir Nabokov, and Adlai Stevenson. He also encourages us to employ the “Shavian probe”, which prompts us to ask a simple question: “Do you really believe that?” The response you get can be telling because bullshit is vacuous. Follow-up questions act as a sieve for meaning.

Of course, the Shavian probe should apply not only to others, but to ourselves as well. The line between wishfulness, hyperbole, and bullshit can be rather murky. As Richard Feynman writes in an address to Caltech scientists, “the first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that.” 

Black would agree, noting that “the constant practice of self-deception may produce a character that cheats as effortlessly as a bird sings: the mask eventually becomes ingrown.” Indeed, “humbug [and bullshit] might well be as ineradicable as degeneration and death”, he adds, “but that is a poor reason for indifference or complacency.”

Sources and further reading