That feeling when you discover how a
magic trick works, that sense of utter disappointment to realise how
easily we can be duped, or 'misdirected' as the professionals call
it. These days that same feeling is popping up in a few other places:
politics, philosophy, higher learning, literature and art.
A recent trick was played on a bunch of academic publications when three people wrote (or generated) a series of essays pretending to be Leftist diatribes on various issues. It turned out the writers were doing a kind of Ern Mally on the unsuspecting publishers. One of the hoax essays borrowed swathes of Mein Kampf and simply exchanged Nazi terms with Feminist or post modernist terms. Another proposed a situation where young privileged students should be made to wear chains in class to simulate a feeling of oppression. Sadly, many of the articles received positive reviews and a few were actually published in journals such as Hypatia, a feminist journal. The tricksters - James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Bighossian - all academics themselves (two from the US, one from Britain ) are not from the Right of politics. One can assume they were exposing the lack of rigour and blinkered obduracy of a particular group of thinkers and writers, mostly from the feminist Left.
But what have they really achieved? Helen Dale who won a Miles Franklin award for her book The Hand That Signed The Paper, and did so by pretending she was Helen Demidenko, thus fooling the literary world, has crowed gloriously at their hoaxing. "Conservatives and classical liberals" writes Dale in the Weekend Australian, "have been saying for decades that academic humanities and chunks of the social sciences are intellectually bankrupt." She also stamps her political seal upon the issue by saying of feminism, "I think it's an important civil society movement but doesn't belong in the academy...no one in a developed liberal democracy is oppressed. But then, I'm a Tory. I would say that." Dale worked as a senior adviser to senator David Leyonhjelm, the man accused by Greens senator Helen Hanson Young of slut-shaming her in parliament. So Dale is clearly flying her conservative colours in her crowing.
The business, and it is a business, of hoaxing is big in comedy, from Sasha Barron Cohen and his many victims to The Chaser mob who famously, and near fatally, drove a fake limo into there restricted security zone of the 2007 APEC summit. But how clever is it, really, to play a trick, to lie, and what does it prove? That people are gullible? Obviously we are, else sales people, shysters, banks and evangelists wouldn't exist. Their livelihoods depend on it. Apart from that, is there a point to the hoaxing?
Satire, in its essential form - as a means of holding an idea up to ridicule and then exposing it as pointless, futile, morally repugnant or downriver dangerous - is a great thing. Jonathon Swift's Modest Proposal is the quintessential example. The idea of eating poor Irish children certainly put a rocket up the establishment. Since then satire's been all over our screens and in some great novels, in magazines and on theatre and comedy stages. The thing about satire though, is that when you read Swift or Heller, the Onion, Punch, or you watch Saturday Night Live, you know it's satire; it's obvious and that's why you enjoy it. You also know its political base.
But hoaxing is different. It's actual lying. It robs the reader of what I like to call grounded context: the simple knowledge of who's writing and what their motive is, or might be. When we read articles on social media, the first thing we do is look for the author then check the web site and it's affiliations before allowing our minds to 'fly' as it were into the complexities of the piece. When the contextual grounding is a trick, it loses its place amongst good satire. If Pope had decided to use a pseudonym for Rape Of The Lock, it may have been published but without any of the gravitas Pope's name could give to it.
A recent trick was played on a bunch of academic publications when three people wrote (or generated) a series of essays pretending to be Leftist diatribes on various issues. It turned out the writers were doing a kind of Ern Mally on the unsuspecting publishers. One of the hoax essays borrowed swathes of Mein Kampf and simply exchanged Nazi terms with Feminist or post modernist terms. Another proposed a situation where young privileged students should be made to wear chains in class to simulate a feeling of oppression. Sadly, many of the articles received positive reviews and a few were actually published in journals such as Hypatia, a feminist journal. The tricksters - James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Bighossian - all academics themselves (two from the US, one from Britain ) are not from the Right of politics. One can assume they were exposing the lack of rigour and blinkered obduracy of a particular group of thinkers and writers, mostly from the feminist Left.
But what have they really achieved? Helen Dale who won a Miles Franklin award for her book The Hand That Signed The Paper, and did so by pretending she was Helen Demidenko, thus fooling the literary world, has crowed gloriously at their hoaxing. "Conservatives and classical liberals" writes Dale in the Weekend Australian, "have been saying for decades that academic humanities and chunks of the social sciences are intellectually bankrupt." She also stamps her political seal upon the issue by saying of feminism, "I think it's an important civil society movement but doesn't belong in the academy...no one in a developed liberal democracy is oppressed. But then, I'm a Tory. I would say that." Dale worked as a senior adviser to senator David Leyonhjelm, the man accused by Greens senator Helen Hanson Young of slut-shaming her in parliament. So Dale is clearly flying her conservative colours in her crowing.
The business, and it is a business, of hoaxing is big in comedy, from Sasha Barron Cohen and his many victims to The Chaser mob who famously, and near fatally, drove a fake limo into there restricted security zone of the 2007 APEC summit. But how clever is it, really, to play a trick, to lie, and what does it prove? That people are gullible? Obviously we are, else sales people, shysters, banks and evangelists wouldn't exist. Their livelihoods depend on it. Apart from that, is there a point to the hoaxing?
Satire, in its essential form - as a means of holding an idea up to ridicule and then exposing it as pointless, futile, morally repugnant or downriver dangerous - is a great thing. Jonathon Swift's Modest Proposal is the quintessential example. The idea of eating poor Irish children certainly put a rocket up the establishment. Since then satire's been all over our screens and in some great novels, in magazines and on theatre and comedy stages. The thing about satire though, is that when you read Swift or Heller, the Onion, Punch, or you watch Saturday Night Live, you know it's satire; it's obvious and that's why you enjoy it. You also know its political base.
But hoaxing is different. It's actual lying. It robs the reader of what I like to call grounded context: the simple knowledge of who's writing and what their motive is, or might be. When we read articles on social media, the first thing we do is look for the author then check the web site and it's affiliations before allowing our minds to 'fly' as it were into the complexities of the piece. When the contextual grounding is a trick, it loses its place amongst good satire. If Pope had decided to use a pseudonym for Rape Of The Lock, it may have been published but without any of the gravitas Pope's name could give to it.
To trick people in order to prove a
point, one will always leave a bitter taste in the mouths of the
tricked. The old social experiment in prejudice practised by many a
school teacher in the seventies is a good example. Begun by US school
teacher, Jane Elliott in 1970, it became a popular method of
demonstrating the effects of discrimination. Over a number of lessons
the teacher would separate blue and brown eyed children and treat
them differently, eventually exposing the trick in order to begin a
discussion. In my case, when a teacher tried this in our class of
fifteen year olds in urban Western Australia, some of us went home
and asked our parents about it. Some of those parents knew of the
original programme and thus explained what the teacher was attempting
to do. Feeling somewhat miffed that we were being manipulated, a
small group of us decided to form a break away section of blue eyes
(the 'oppressed' group in that circumstance) who were happy to be
treated badly. When told to stay back and clean the class room we did
so with glee, and we went further by asking the teacher if she could
give us even more onerous tasks. Although our undermining didn't
entirely destroy the experiment, it certainly brought it to a close.
Mind you, the original demonstration was done with far less reactive
eight and nine year olds.
The Lindsay, Pluckrose and Bighossian
hoaxes, referred to above, achieved an outcome of sorts: exposing the
lack of academic rigour in certain publications, and pointing out a
kind of reverse bigotry that exists amidst sections of the Feminist
Left. It certainly riles me when I see language limited due to
perceived upset; when people decide to be offended on behalf of
others, we have a problem.
But why not argue one's case without
trickery and deception? The obvious answer is to do with publicity;
trickery gets attention, it makes news. Given the mighty storm of
argument bouncing around the internet and social media, a drastic
measure such as hoaxing is one way to stand out. There are other
means though. Cartoons still do the job of using irony to convey
messages; satirical sites are still popular, and TV has any number of
channels using comedic forms to make points. And when Ali G comes
back to us via U Tube to trick yet another hard Right politician into
exposing their bigotry, it doesn't really have any sensation or
reaction other than a yawn followed by 'Oh that again. Yeah, we knew
that.' In fact, watching or reading about someone being tricked has
become pretty well tedious these days.
When people wrote under nom de plumes
in the 19th Century, there were a whole lot of reasons
other than deception: women felt they'd have more chance of being
taken seriously; others were protecting their standing or reputation;
and in some cases the invented name became famous exactly for its
invention. But when Helen Darby (Darvil?) won a Miles Franklin on the
very basis of deception – by fooling the judges into thinking this
story was coming from the heart of a young Slavic woman – that
feeling of being manipulated, the very same feeling we teenagers had
when our teacher played her psycho/social game on us, left everyone
feeling disappointed, cheated, tricked. And Darby was never taken
seriously again by anyone who actually has a heart. It will be
interesting to see if Lindsay, Pluckrose and Bighossian's careers
head down the same sink hole.
