Hype Versus Truth
by Tibor R. Machan
Let’s admit it, most of us indulge in hype. If you’ve ever said, walking in from a cold outdoors, "My hands are freezing," you’ve done hype. Hype is just exaggeration—hyperbole. It has its point, namely, to call attention to something you regard important, like your cold hands and to plea for sympathy, perhaps.
Advertising is often hyperbolic, but then ads aren’t about truth at all but about promotion. Sure, when they include lies, that’s a flaw but they include a whole lot more than truth. Gimmickry, for example, which is quite OK. Any reasonable person would expect that when people try to promote their wares, services, they are going to hype them up a bit. So one is on guard, takes a careful look before jumping into a purchase.
Trouble is that much hype is paraded as truth or as information, rather than as unabashed exaggeration. When politicians lay out their plans, their promises, they aren’t supposed to but do in fact produce hype. Their constituents should not depend on these promises so as to evaluate them, for which one needs to get accurate information, not a bunch of baloney. But in fact voters get hardly anything but hype and vague hype at that, lest the candidate may have to answer for breach of promise. (This ignores the issue of whether these blokes should really be in the business of making promising to various groups, which of course they shouldn’t.)
Hype, however, appears now to be the norm in many areas. Do those who champion the better treatment of animals really believe that these beasts have rights? That they understand our language? That they have moral sensibilities? I doubt it but saying such things, even writing books arguing for them, would appear to be the exaggeration that advocates think is necessary to accomplish their more reasonable, modest objective of getting animals treated more humanely. If you shout out, "The chimp is so like us," which isn’t true, then perhaps the fact that the chimp is a bit like us will get noticed. If you demonstrate in front of a fur shop with placards calling "Murderers" those who wear fur, then perhaps the idea that furry creatures might best be treated more kindly will get some consideration from those who otherwise have different concerns. Just like that bit about your hands freezing.
The 20th century English philosopher J. L. Austin, a leader of the movement that was dubbed linguistic analysis and ordinary language philosophy, made a good deal of how when we say things, we are not always aiming to tell what is the case, the truth. We are often doing things like warning, chiding, alerting, promising, threatening and so forth. His book How to do Things With Words (Oxford, 1962) was very famous for a while for having made those points and many others about how misguided it is to believe that all talk is about making assertions only.
Perhaps that is how we should be looking even at the so called documentaries that are so popular these days, ones that are really not conveying what is true but urging upon us certain attitudes the makers wish we shared with them. For example, Michael Moore’s several movies, not just Fahrenheit 9/11(2004) but, also, Bowling for Columbine (2002) and the much earlier Roger & Me (1987) fall under this description. (There was, actually, a counter-documentary produced by some Dick Morris, titled Fahrenhype 9/11 [2004] that was much more of a documentary than Moore’s own product.)
Moore’s work is pure hype, with what I assume Moore could defend as a perfectly justified purposes, namely, to scare people, to get them to hold his own sentiments and ideas about his various topics. That, however, isn’t what a documentary is supposed to do. All of Moore’s work—as well as George Clooney’s recent Oscar nominated docudrama, Good Night and Good Luck (2005)—commits the informal fallacy of pleading the case, of presenting only such facts and ideas that support Moore’s position, kind of what the attorneys do in court, expecting their opposite numbers to produce the balancing facts and ideas. It’s only that Moore wasn’t in court but pretended to be telling the whole truth, not just what favored his side. And that is hype, not truth.
If one recognizes that these efforts aren’t about telling the truth but about highly partisan championing of a cause, then they can be appreciated better. Those, in turn, who are interested in the truth about the topics of these exercises in hyperbole will know to turn elsewhere to seek for it.
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