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In an essay entitled “Complete Bullshit” philosopher G.A. Cohen gives his own spin on Harry Frankfurt’s concept of “bullshit.” According to Frankfurt, people produce bullshit when speaking with a disregard for the truth. They don’t lie. They simply don’t care if they speak the truth or not, and so they end up saying some bullshit. Rather than focus on the one speaking, Cohen’s interest lies in the bullshit itself. According to Cohen, bullshit statements lack clarity, and any attempt at clarifying bullshit actually changes what’s being said. Cohen’s bullshit is “that which is found in discourse that is by nature unclarifiable,” and “not only obscure but which cannot be rendered unobscure, where any apparent success in rendering it unobscure creates something that isn’t recognizable as a version of what was said.”
Cohen focuses on the proliferation of this unclarifiable unclarity in French philosophy, and he claims that this particular type of bullshit prevails more in the academy than in everyday use. I actually think the unclarifiable unclarity type of bullshit is quite pervasive throughout our institutions, churches, universities, corporations and the like, and that this bullshit serves a specific purpose. “Leadership” is typically the way bullshit makes its way into and through our institutions.
For years, I’ve noticed it in churches when people talk about poverty. The solution is always “giving a handup, not a handout.” The phrase “give a handup and not a handout,” is bullshit. It’s bullshit because any attempt to clarify what it says results in something that looks almost unrecognizable to what was originally said.
First, what do we give that provides the hand-up? Money? Time? A car? Food? Diapers? Mentorship and accountability? Education or training of some kind? An exercise partner or a monthly pass to the YMCA? Tickets to a professional sporting event? It’s not at all clear what constitutes the “handup” as opposed to the “handout.”
In my experience, what differentiates a “handup” from a “handout” seems to be some measure of expectation. Those giving a handup hope that the recipient will move from one state of being to the another while a handout does not carry those expectations. Again, unclarity creeps in.
What movement do we hope the recipient of the handup makes? Long-term, full-time employment? More stable income? A raise? A reliable place to sleep at night? Access to social services that moves them more rapidly to receiving government benefits? All of the above? The statement “we ought to give a handup instead of a handout,” provides no clarity about any of this. In fact, the only clarity it does provide clear is the prohibition against “handouts.”
If we clarified the statement “we should give a handup, and not a handout,” we’d come up with something close to the following. “Individuals or churches ought to provide resources of time, money, labor, and material to people whose income falls below the poverty line in such a way as to increase the recipient’s income through full-time employment that pays a wage above the poverty line. We ought to do this rather than directly giving what recipients need, things like a car, housing, or food.” Ya know, a handup not a handout.
If that’s what we mean by the statement, then it seems we’d all be better off just saying that instead of the bullshit “we should give a handup, not handout.” We could then begin devising a plan for accomplishing those goals using what we have available. Using resources to help those whose lack of income puts them and their household below the poverty line is a fine thing to do. What that would entail, the steps to get there, and working towards measurable results are all obscured by the bullshit “we should give a handup and not a handout.”
Anyone with a clear vision of what to do about poverty or wages or any number of matters of the use of power and resources finds bullshit absolutely maddening. There’s something about the way people nod along. “Hmm. yes. We do need strategic strategies for institutional innovation.”
I thought about Cohen’s essay recently while reading a Janet Malcolm profile of fashion designer Eileen Fisher. On the several occasions the two spoke, Fisher arrived flanked by several executives from her company. Malcolm took a keen interest in how the company’s leadership structure changed over time and why they no longer had a C.E.O. One of the executives said, “What we’re trying to do with this different kind of leadership is to have the leader facilitate the process, so you get the team or the craft team in the room together, to ideate together, to generate the ideas together, and then figure out who’s going to hold what, who’s going to move what forward, so it’s less of, it’s more about kind of again the holding the space for the team to find.”
What’s fascinating to me reading this statement is not that it’s obviously, laughably bullshit, but how familiar it feels. It reminded me of the many times I’ve spoken like this. I’ve used bullshit to get something done. I’ve tell a congregant the church would no longer support their most cherished ministry without hurting their feelings. I’ve used it just because I’d been asked to speak and had to say words that sounded like something a leader would say.
That executive sounds like every Christian leadership conference I’ve ever been to. It reminded me of the bullshit I’d heard when I spoke with deans and administrators of my grad school about the morality of students taking out $45k in debt to get a degree to work in a church. It reminded me of Howard Schultz running for President. It’s all just so much bullshit, and we know it.
What purpose does all this serve? Why is there so much bullshit?
I think bullshit serves to protect us from the truth. But with the kind of bullshit I see in in our institutions, it’s a particular kind of truth it protects us from. It’s the truth that the C.E.O., the pastor, the university president, doesn’t deserve anything more than anyone else and that if we took a truthful look at our institutions we’d realize there are intractable conflicts between the few at the top and the masses at the bottom and the former don’t want to make even the smallest of sacrifices for those at the bottom.
We protect ourselves with bullshit in order to avoid sacrifice, to avoid having to give of ourselves or our money for another.
Without bullshit, a C.E.O. or politician might have to take a moral, divisive stand. People might get mad. Congregants might leave the church, donors might not give anymore. They coat themselves in bullshit to avoid being pinned down. In another essay, Cohen writes, “The chief problem, in politics as in personal life, is a sound choice of sacrifices, and there is damage to both thought and practice when people imagine that sacrifice is avoidable.” Bullshit fosters just such an imagination, one without sacrifice.
It’s no longer possible to look at our institutions and believe that a smooth, conflict-free transition to a better future remains tenable. Any vision of a better future places us in direct conflict with so much of the already depressing present. Those that benefit from it don’t want change. Any vision a future person, church, or society, different from the present will require us to reconcile with the frightening proposition that we might lose something as we struggle to bring it about. We might lose ourselves. Bullshit allows us to delay that inevitability, to cushion its blow.
In her book Tough Enough, Deborah Nelson writes, “If facts alone could lead us to the promised land—facts about climate change, gun violence, terrorism, war, racial prejudice, economic inequality—then we already live in a paradise of facts. The problem is not that we do not know what is happening but that we cannot bear to be changed by that knowledge.” Bullshit allows us to recreate the problem of knowing what is happening. Fearing the sacrifice necessary to change things, we obscure the problem by turning it into bullshit. We reduce convictions to opinions, concrete visions of a future without poverty to platitudes about opportunity.
It’s far easier to use bullshit to claim ignorance about poverty’s solution, decry divisive politics, or lament the complexity of student debt than admit their solutions demand more political courage and personal sacrifice than we can bear. Bullshit frees us to carry on, but it also diminishes us. Bullshit muddies the clear sightedness necessary for hope, and people without hope aren’t truly people.
Bullshit allows us to say something, and leaders know they must say something. At the same time, bullshit releases us to imagine that we can say something without having to sacrifice. It frees us to make statements and commitments so obscure that they aren’t worth living for because they aren’t worth dying for. They aren’t even worth getting off the couch for. Bullshit frees from the commitments the truth might place on us. Without a commitment to truth we avoid failure, risk, and conflict, but in so doing we also give up the conditions for beauty, grace, and redemption.
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