Image via WikipediaJohn ArbuthnotIn 1713, Arbuthnot continued his political satire with Proposals for printing a very curious discourse... a treatise of the art of political lying, with an abstract of the first volume. As with other works that Arbuthnot would encourage, this systemizes a rhetoric of bad thinking and writing. He proposes to teach people to lie well. Similar lists and systems are in Alexander Pope's Peri Bathos and John Gay and Pope's Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus.Arbuthnot---and Swift---stood at the very heart of power in their day and knew what power was. Many features of modern political life first took shape in the years around the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries. The Tory writers were deeply concerned with the nature, technology, and effect of propaganda and publicity. It is to their credit that they used this skill (that has by now acquired such a bad name) to end a useless and wasteful war and make a peace that satisfied all sides.
art of political lying
EPISTLE TO DR. ARBUTHNOT,
BEING THE
PROLOGUE TO THE SATIRES.
Alas, he never completed his great work, or even started it, but nevertheless left very useful hints to governments, opposition parties, and managers in the NHS. I would recommend a copious reprint and its dissemination to all those interested (or do I mean stakeholders?)—at public expense, of course. The work is very short, and even with all the necessary feasibility studies, pilot projects, inevitable overruns, and so forth, the cost wouldn't be more than a few millions. It would improve the quality of political lying in this country no end.
The Proposals treat several important philosophical matters, such as “Whether the right of coinage of political lyes be wholly in government.” The author concludes, very sensibly, that “as the government of England has a mixture of the democratically in it, so the right of inventing and spreading political lyes is partly in the people” and that “the abundance of political lying is a sure sign of true English liberty.”
Arbuthnot, an experienced physician after all, has much to say on the rules of what he calls Pseudology. He suggests that lies should be either miraculous (in modern terms, the promise of eternal life through genetic engineering) or terrifying (in modern terms, the elimination of the whole human race by a new virus).
“Terrible objects,” says Arbuthnot, “should not be too frequently shown to the people, lest they grow familiar.” He says “it is absolutely necessary that the people of England should be frighted with the French king . . . once a year,” but that the too-frequent resort to scares “has produc'd great indifference in the vulgar of later years.” Here is a valuable lesson for epidemiologists.
A treatise of the art of political lying which asks a question which still worries politicians:-
... whether a lie is best contradicted by truth or another lie.
THE CHORUS AND THE CASSANDRA: A RESPONSE
Hitchens notes that Chomsky was criticized for suggesting, in 1972, that a Khmer Rouge victory might lead to "a new era of economic development and social justice." This comment, according to Hitchens, appeared in "Dr. Malcolm Caldwell's collection of interviews with Prince Norodom Sihanouk." Hitchens clearly never bothered to read the book: it is not a collection of interviews with Sihanouk, but a history of events leading to the Cambodian civil war, written by an avowed Communist. By misrepresenting the content of the book, Hitchens imbues Chomsky's preface with an aura of apolitical neutrality.
Hitchens argues that his own position has never changed, and that Chomsky and others on the far left had become so determined to resist American domination that they were willing to overlook the true nature of America's official enemies. Hitchens' essay on this topic ("Stranger in a Strange Land," http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/12/hitchens.htm) makes this point effectively. The only thing Hitchens has wrong is the date. The phenomenon did not occur after September 11. It was already apparent in the Left's reception of the Khmer Rouge, nearly twenty-five years earlier. There is no difference between Hitchens' dismay at the rationalizations of al Qaeda's brutality, and the Jean Lacouture's dismay at the rationalizations of the brutality of the Khmer Rouge. Like Hitchens, Lacouture was "an honorable man of the left." Chomsky's reaction in both cases was identical: he claimed that his critics simply did not truly hold the beliefs that they claimed to hold.
OBSERVATIONS ON POLITICIANS
Politicians are predisposed not to see spending Other People’s Money as a problem, because spending Other People’s Money is what politicians do for a living. If politicians thought there were something wrong with it, they would be in a different line of work.
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy."
"The problem with political jokes is they get elected."
It is truly a triumph of rhetoric over reality when people can believe that going into politics is 'public service,' but that producing food, shelter, transportation, or medical care is not
Friends of liberty do their cause no favors by exaggerating the moral shortcomings of politicians or by portraying them as inherently stupid, fiendish, or sinister.
A Return to ‘The Age of Scandal’
I cite three examples, each the authors of works too easily dismissed as children’s literature. What they crafted was great and important, though carefully constructed to be appreciated simultaneously on many different levels. And for their popularity they paid a price: being consigned to the waiting room, never fully accepted into the literary canon. I am thinking of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and T.H. White. Incidentally, if there was a fourth member of this group, I’d name Eric Arthur Blair – known to the world as George Orwell. His wife Eileen was one of Tolkien’s favorite students. And in both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Blair is playing their game in a sense – a very downbeat, dark and brooding version of it.
The Age of Scandal describes the period using the tools peculiar to it: letter-writing, journal entries, wit, ridicule, gossip,agrémens, the domestic comforts of the buskins and orange peelings, the Portugal water, the stimulus of a good pot of tea. And for good balance and the inescapable end-note of the prurient, White concludes his account with the sordid life history of the Marquis de Sade, that perpetual ink-blot upon the chronology of the Enlightenment.
Scandal reflected a spirit of engagement on the level of intellect, but importantly also of wit. The greats of the period were required to ascend into the æthereal, and never to take themselves too seriously, either. The vilest insults and attacks were matters of entertainment. Heaven forbid the weighty, self-important man.
Think of Alexander Pope, the towering scribbler of the period, taking a bribe of £1,000 (the equivalent today of perhaps a quarter million sterling, or a half-million dollars) not to publish his send-up of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough – and then publishing it anyway.
The Age of Scandal is also the crucible of modern partisan politics in the English speaking world; the rise and definition of the Whig and Tory parties, the development of something akin to party programs. The parties became the focus of political discussion, and scandal evolved as a tool of partisan warfare.
not only the pamphlet but also the sermon, lyric poetry as well as other literary forms and genres were made to serve the purposes of political discussion
The validity of any argument can be determined by its structure rather than its content. A classic example of a valid argument is his syllogism: All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal. Given the structure of this argument, as long as the premises are true, then the conclusion is also guaranteed to be true.
A Theologico-Political Treatise By Benedict De Spinoza
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