So is Sam-I-Am’s friend trying to deceive Sam-I-Am? We should note that actually deceiving someone is an insufficient and unnecessary condition of intending to deceive someone. I can try to deceive and fail, and I could accidentally deceive someone without meaning to do so. In order to claim lying in this case, Sam-I-Am’s friend would need to know, or at least believe, that he in fact does like green eggs and ham, as he repeatedly insists that he does not. But we know that he learns something new when he finally tries the dish, i.e., that he would eat it and would even do so with a fox, unless he is just pretending to love green eggs and ham at the end of the book to get Sam-I-Am off his back! In that case, he is outright lying, but we don’t have much of a reason to think this was Seuss’s intention.
So Sam-I-Am’s friend is probably not lying. Considering that he freely admits that he does not like “that Sam-I-Am” at the start, it is more likely that he is bullshitting. The bullshitter uses propositions, or claims, without regard for their status as true or false and is not directly concerned with the recipient’s belief of those propositions. A bullshitter is using those propositions simply to promote her agenda, without a care of whether they are true or false. Sam-I-Am’s friend just wants to be left alone and so is making a claim about not liking green eggs simply to shut Sam-I-Am up. Indeed, Sam-I-Am’s persistence, acting like the Socratic gadfly, brings this driving desire to the forefront since the friend is finally willing to try the eggs just to be finished with the nagging. Similarly, my daughter wasn’t concerned much with the truth status of her claim; she just didn’t want to stick those green eggs in her mouth.
If bullshitting is understood as using claims for some purpose other than representing or misrepresenting the truth, of conveying information or misinformation, we can fairly quickly recognize that we are often engaged in bullshit as both generators and recipients. This occurs any time we have desires that drive us to use propositions without a concern for their veracity. As such, engaging in bullshit is a constant threat to our intellectual integrity, which we can see by considering its effect on the five aspects I listed previously. First, it can reinforce already accepted ideas without warrant, undermining aspect (1). Second, bullshitting skews considerations of the genuine support for those ideas being true, undermining aspect (2), and clutters our minds and conversations with too many conflicting ideas, making it more difficult to attend to aspect (3). Most importantly, it devalues the honesty required within intellectual integrity, highlighted in aspect (4). Completely refraining from bullshit may be practically impossible, but complacency with regard to it completely deteriorates our sense of intellectual integrity. Philosophy provides the tools of rigorous critical thinking and the concern for the truth to purify our minds of such fecal matter.
Delusion Ain’t Just a Sport in D’Olympics
Just as we can lie to ourselves as we lie to others, we can also fall victim to our own lines of bullshit. Sometimes we say things without caring about its truth because we are really just managing other people’s reactions; sometimes we care a lot that what we say is true, but we do so in a way that is not itself truth-oriented. Rather than wanting to say only those things we think we have good reason to believe are true, we believe as true those things that we really want to be true. This is when we delude ourselves.8
The most straightforward example that Seuss provides is in “The Big Brag.” The poem starts with a rabbit, feeling self-important, exclaiming aloud that he is the best of all animals. An offended eavesdropping bear calls the rabbit ridiculous and claims the title as his own. Attempting to prove his superiority, the rabbit has the bear witness him use his long ears to hear the cough of a fly on a mountain ninety miles away. The bear in response smells a smell six hundred miles beyond the mountains. In a nest in a tree on a farm by a pond are two hummingbird eggs, and the one on the left smells a little bit stale. So which is the best of all animals?
Well, each has an ability that surpasses the same capacity in the other, and both capacities seem important. So it is difficult to judge, even if we take the issue as seriously as they do. We can immediately recognize, however, that the question itself is a bit silly and that we should question the framing of their inquiry, as Socrates would. First, it is vague. Something is always only “good” in some respect and so can only be “the best” in some respect, and that respect is not specified here. Or, if we take it that it is specified, then “being the best animal” would mean “being the best at being what an animal is.” Since neither smelling nor hearing are necessary to being an animal, both rabbit and bear are barking up the wrong tree (if you can forgive mixing in the canine imagery). Second, neither rabbit nor bear is in a position to verify the claims of the other. Bear can’t hear the cough, and rabbit can’t smell the egg. If we assume they are being truthful, Mr. Bear should be able to smell the fly, which would corroborate the rabbit’s claim; Mr. Rabbit, on the other hand, has no easy means to check the bear’s claim (unless he seriously underplayed his hand . . . or ears, as the case may be).
Third, and perhaps most importantly, establishing the claim of who’s the best animal doesn’t seem to serve a purpose, except to inflate the egos of our braggarts. Show-offs will say whatever it takes to reach the conclusion they desire and are not really open to the possible validity of their opponent’s replies. It’s their self-importance that motivates them. Socrates often took the opportunity to humble those who professed great knowledge simply to promote their own importance. In the Euthyphro, for example, we find Socrates suckering a bold and self-righteous, self-proclaimed religious authority into a line of inquiry that ultimately reveals his ignorance with regard to the nature of piety, a topic of which he considers himself an expert. Both Seuss and Socrates are inviting us to examine how often we spout off because our ego is on the line.
It’s the little worm who pops up and plays the role of Socratic gadfly in order to settle the debate and set the two braggarts straight. The worm says that he can see farther than either of the two can smell or hear. He looks straight ahead and all the way around the world right back to where the three are gathered to see “the two biggest fools . . . who seem to have nothing else better to do / Than sit here and argue who’s better than who!” (Brag). With that, the worm dived back to his hole to get back to something better to do. The rabbit and bear are taken off guard by the worm, and the worm leaves them with surprise in their eyes. He has no reason to stay longer, since what happens next is not up to him. We don’t see what happens next, but the two braggarts have a choice: they can recognize that their present endeavor to prove superiority is intellectually bankrupt and driven by insecurity, or they can ignore the worm’s critique, remaining oriented on their egos instead of truth.
The worm’s critique of the braggarts is reminiscent of Socrates’ own critique of the alleged experts in Athens. He does not despise the speculation of natural philosophers but prefers to ask the questions of ethics and politics, which are more vital to living well. Natural philosophy, at least in Socrates’ time, seemed as unverifiable as Mr. Bear’s claim to smell that stale egg. And it was at least less important than issues about the good life. And of those Sophists who profess knowledge about living well, Socrates finds them fuller of themselves than full of knowledge. Like the practical worm, he exposes them for their lack of intellectual integrity and shows them to be braggarts wasting the time (and money) of their students.
The braggarts lack intellectual integrity because they embrace beliefs that are vague, unverifiable, and unimportant. They each want it to be true that they are the superior animal, and so they believe it to be true. Further, they won’t be content until their superiority is accepted. But Seuss recognizes that this temptation doesn’t simply catch those poor ignoble characters of whom we expect no better. Even noble desires for certain states of affairs can seduce us. Seuss invites us to indulge in just such a fantasy in Horton Hatches the Egg.
Mayzie, a lazy new mother bird, wishes to get a break from sitting on her e
gg. She begs Horton to take over and promises to return shortly, but she soon decides not to return, preferring her stay in Palm Beach to the burdens of motherhood. Good-hearted Horton sits through storms and seasons, through ridicule and even the threat of death. His resolve to stay sitting has him being hauled over mountains and across the ocean and then around the country in a circus until he reaches Palm Beach. Mayzie, breaking from her sunbathing, swoops in to see the circus that has come to town, only to find Horton still on her egg. At just that moment, the egg begins to hatch. Wretched Mayzie screams that she wants her egg back, accusing Horton of stealing it, and Horton brokenheartedly withdraws. But when the eggshell breaks open a winged little elephant flies over to Horton. Seuss ends the poem with an emphatic “IT’S AN ELEPHANT-BIRD!! And it should be, it should be, it SHOULD be like that! Because Horton was faithful! He sat and he sat!” (Hatches). Horton, unlike Mayzie, upheld his word, and the humans deliver Horton back home with his new child.
Here Seuss is moved by the moral worthiness of Horton compared to the undeserving, lazy bird mother, Mayzie. Adult readers recognize that Seuss’s repeated insistence, based on moral appropriateness (i.e., “it should be, it should be, it SHOULD be . . .”), implicitly acknowledges that outside the world of the poem such an egg could not really house an elephant-bird. We want it to be so, though. And it seems implausible that the same humans who would hunt an elephant to kill it, then decide to capture it to exploit it as a circus act, would suddenly opt to release it. An elephant with a winged offspring would fetch more attention than an elephant sitting on an egg, after all. Yet we would like things to end well for Horton, wouldn’t we? We want it to be the case that virtue is rewarded in the end, and vice punished. This is a noble desire to have, but it may lead us to deny the sometimes harsh realities of our lives and leave us unprepared to deal with them when they inevitably strike. Beyond self-esteem, insecurity, or even a desire for meaning and purpose, there may also be aesthetic reasons for deluding ourselves, as Marco clearly illustrates.
In And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, we find Marco, a young boy who would prefer that he have an interesting story to tell about what he sees on his walk home from school to the drudgery of what he actually encounters. He knows his father instructed him not to tell outlandish tales and not to exaggerate the truth, but his creativity and urge to embellish the facts of the matter have his mind overflowing with possibilities. He continuously revises the plain horse and wagon he saw into more and more fanciful visions, until he has dreamt up a parade, complete with a Rajah on an elephant, a six-piece brass band, an airplane dropping confetti, a police escort, and the mayor.
In our desire to make things more interesting, we can fabricate and exaggerate the truth. How often do we massage the truth to make the story more entertaining? To make ourselves appear more articulate, reasonable, or innocent? To make others appear in our retelling of events more obviously how we interpreted them to be? More importantly, how easily do we begin to believe the retelling we’ve fashioned? In the beginning of Mulberry Street, the boy informs us that he only tells his father what he thinks he has seen, suggesting that the boy lets his imagination get the better of him. At the end of the book, the boy reports to his father only the plain horse and wagon he actually saw.
The father serves as an external check on the boy’s tendency to abandon the truth, just as the worm did for the bear and rabbit, and Socrates may for us. The more familiar we become with the character of Socrates, the more comfortable we will become playing the role of gadfly to ourselves. Let’s return to Euthyphro for an illustration. If we settle for a rather unexamined view of some matter, as Euthyphro does with respect to his definition of piety, Socrates will help us test our definition. Being pious is doing what is dear to the gods? If the gods disagree, then this definition generates an inconsistency, since the action is both dear and hated by some god or other. Further, such a definition leaves unresolved a fundamental issue: why are some things dear to the gods, and so some actions pious to perform? If there is some reason, then that reason is what really makes some action pious. If there is none, then the virtue of piety rests on the fickleness of the gods, and it is unclear why one should strive to be pious except to appease the mighty.
It is important to recognize what we want to be true, since this is a reflection of our values. Only once we register these desires can we determine which desires reflect misplaced values and which reflect noble ideals. The bear and rabbit can begin reforming their conceited characters, all of us can reaffirm our appreciation of virtues like Horton’s, and the boy can find a nondeceitful venue for his creative fabrications (say, in truth-oriented children’s illustrated poetry). Equally, it is important for us to recognize the extent to which our desires for certain claims to be true might interfere with our own intellectual integrity. How can we say that we are oriented toward the truth when we only care to define the truth as we see fit? If bullshit is indifference toward the truth, self-delusion is valuing the status of truth but not the reality of it.
Walking in Another Man’s Pants
We have seen how an agenda or a deep-seated desire might make us less careful about how we represent the way things are, leading us to make and accept assertions even without evidence simply because they are efficacious or comforting. Sometimes our drives and desires get us to gather evidence but interpret it in a biased way. Examining emotions like fear can easily illustrate how this can happen, and Seuss gives us an example in “What Was I Scared Of?”
The narrator, who is self-reportedly not prone to fear, finds himself in a deep, dark wood one night when he encounters a pair of pale green pants with nobody inside them. He stands curiously, not scared, until the pants move. Then he runs, heart thumping. Again he tells us he wasn’t scared; he just didn’t care for pants that move by themselves. Later those pants race around a corner, almost knocking him down, and still later they row out toward him on the river while he was fishing. He runs and hides for a couple of nights, until he has to do an errand. At least now he admits that he is scared: “I said, ‘I do not fear those pants with nobody inside them.’ I said, and said, and said those words. I said them. But I lied them” (Scared). His fear ironically forces him to recognize he deluded himself earlier by believing he was fairly fearless. But it also made him misinterpret what he was seeing.
As he reaches into a Snide bush to pick a peck of Snide, he touches the pale green pair of pants. Face to face, they both react with extreme fear. It is only by seeing how afraid the pants are that the narrator understands his mistake: he was “just as strange to them / As they were strange to” him (Scared). The pants weren’t racing by on a bike to knock him down. The pants came down the wooded path and later came out on the river not even knowing he was there. The narrator interpreted the actions and motives of the pants according to his own construction of the pants as a spooky, ill-willed stalker. What he needed to do to align himself to the truth of things was to imagine the range of possibilities that might explain what he saw, to explore the potential motives and perspectives of another person by stepping into his shoes (or pants) for a while.
In this case, there was evidence supporting the belief that the pants were out to get him, but the evidence was interpreted through a lens of prejudice, created and perpetuated by fear. Emotions like fear pressure us to accept a view since we run the apparent risk of making the object of our fear a reality by ignoring fear. If I don’t listen to my fears about that approaching lion, I might just become its dinner, as I was afraid might happen. Although the fear is sometimes warranted, fear always places a high burden on our external reality to prove to us that there is no risk, even when there was none to begin with. This can close us off to the possibility that the view being promoted by our fear is in fact incorrect. Consider our narrator: He was so disturbed by the sight of the unfamiliar that he could not recognize the humanity of those pale green pants. The pants were only doing things that the narrator himself was doing: taking a walk i
n the woods, strolling through town, rowing out on the lake, and picking Snide.
The narrator allowed fear to dominate his perspective of the pale green pants, even though he originally boasted to be a brave sort of fellow. Fear is a strong poison to truth-orientation. That’s why we see so much fear-mongering in politics. Fear reinforces our ideologies and assumptions. It also can explain why someone might accept Euthyphro’s definition of piety, as mentioned previously. I might simply accept out of fear of punishment that some action is pious when I am told that some deity desires it. Trying to understand why such a thing should be desired, so that I can actually test the claim that the action belongs to the category . . . well, that is beside the point. When I am afraid of a bad fate at the hands of the gods, why should I bother challenging the legitimacy of the claim? My fear has distracted me from a concern for the truth.
Remember the aspects of intellectual integrity I offered at the beginning of this chapter. Since I am now not open to alternate views, as in aspect (1), I am unable to genuinely take up the tasks that require such openness for success. I cannot carefully consider the strength of the support for those differing ideas (2), since my fear has defined only one alternative as possible and significant. I cannot genuinely draw out the implications of those ideas, including their coherence with other plausible ideas (3), again because of my narrowed perspective. Finally, I cannot reflect on the limits of my ability and methods to carry out the previous two tasks (4), at least until I begin to master my fear. Insofar as I am merely reacting to my fear rather than recognizing it so as to gain perspective on it, my fear is going to govern me and destroy my intellectual integrity and my chances at living a successful, examined life.
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