Monday, November 5, 2018

Hoaxing, is it still a thing?


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.

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.