Among other things, one of the courses I teach is designed to introduce my kids to some seminal ideas about democracy, and especially the relationship between democracy and reason.  It's not a rigorous intellectual history course.  I'm not an especially rigorous kind of guy.  Rather, I like to link kernels together in the hope that the emerging idea is valid and interesting.   Every so often, an idea bounces into my awareness, and I wind up shuffling some of those kernels into a new combination.  TheraP has done it again with a brilliant exposition on Systematic Deception and the Breakdown of Civic Trust.  I'm feeling a need to run a riff on the idea of deception, with the general question, "what responsibility for deception fall to the deceived?" at the center.  It's going to be a long one...I've office hours till five and so far students are finding much more interesting things to do with their time.

TheraP's discussion of advertising recalled to mind one of my favorite scenes from Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.  If I can make it work, I'll post it, it not, I'll link to it.
Blandings (Cary Grant) is an advertising account executive whom we catch in the process of deciding to build a home in suburbia (timely, huh?).  It's a great film, dare I say

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It worked.  Now just be patient until you get to Miss Stellwagon. 

Deception, and especially political deception predates advertising by a couple of millennia.  Think of the Trojan Horse, or Ulysses deceiving the blinded cyclops.  In fact, a good deal of literature celebrates tricksters.  How many of Aesop's Fables are based on a trick.  Loki, the Norse god is a trickster, as is Coyote in the folk tales of the Southwest and Mexico.  So why do we laud and even worship deceivers?  In some cases, because the deceived is nasty guy, we can cheer when he gets his.  In others, perhaps it is because the butt of the trickster's deception is powerful and we rather enjoy seeing the powerful get their comeuppance.  But in the middle of these tales I think there's a little sense that if those persons who are tricked are tricked because of their own greed or character faults or sheer stupidity, well, good for them.

So let me weave together a few observations, which suggest that we occasionally need to admit that The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, . . .  I begin by going back to old Cicero, who reminds us that we have two interrelated tools, reason and rhetoric (which in his view includes observable behavior).   Reason, which he says connects us to the Divine Mind...allows us to think our way to right behavior.  We don't need laws against rape, murder, or lying to know these behaviors are vicious.  From this, I think, comes the idea that Ignorance of the Law is No Excuse.  But today I'm more interested in what he says about rhetoric.

    With respect to man this same bountiful nature hath not merely allotted him a subtle and active spirit, but moreover favoured him with physical senses, like so many guardians and messengers. Thus has she improved our understanding in relation to many obscure principles, and laid the foundation of practical knowledge; and in all respects moulded our corporeal faculties to the service of our intellectual genius. For while she has debased the forms of other animals, who live to eat rather than eat to live, she has bestowed on man an erect stature, and an open countenance, and thus prompted him to the contemplation of heaven, the ancient home of his kindred immortals. So exquisitely, too, hath she fashioned the features of the human face, as to make them symbolic of the most recondite thoughts and sentiments. As for our two eloquent eyes (oculi nimis arguti), do they not speak forth every impulse and passion of our souls? And that which we call expression, in which we infinitely excel all the inferior animals, how marvellously it delineates all our speculations and feelings! Of this the Greeks well knew the meaning, though they had no word for it.

    I will not enlarge on the wonderful faculties and qualities of the rest of the body, the modulation of the voice, and the power of oratory, which is perhaps the greatest instrument of our influence over human society. These matters do not belong to the occasion of our present discourse, and I think that Scipio has already sufficiently explained them in those books of mine which you have read.

I like that he talks about our senses as our guardians, which seems to indicate that he thinks our senses should guard us from being deceived by the rhetoric of others.  How can we achieve this?  By becoming adept rhetoricians ourselves.  This knowledge should give us a good BS detector.

Cicero's mention of guardians takes me to Immanuel Kant and his essay What is  Enlightenment?  Kant discusses two things which may contribute to our being easily deceived:  cowardice and laziness. 

    Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a portion of mankind, after nature has long since discharged them from external direction (naturaliter maiorennes), nevertheless remains under lifelong tutelage, and why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians. It is so easy not to be of age. If I have a book which understands for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a physician who decides my diet, and so forth, I need not trouble myself. I need not think, if I can only pay - others will easily undertake the irksome work for me.

Kant continues to explain that our "guardians" may indeed be very well intentioned...they really are afraid we might hurt ourselves with what we know and keep us from dangerous knowledge therefore.  They also convince us to be afraid to think for ourselves, either out of fear of being hurt, or out of fear that we'll be excommunicated from the crowd, be disliked, shunned, and so on.  It is the appeal of advertisement to this particular vulnerability that causes the most harm, in my humble estimation.  Once we get over this fear, however...

    After the guardians have first made their domestic cattle dumb and have made sure that these placid creatures will not dare take a single step without the harness of the cart to which they are tethered, the guardians then show them the danger which threatens if they try to go alone. Actually, however, this danger is not so great, for by falling a few times they would finally learn to walk alone. But an example of this failure makes them timid and ordinarily frightens them away from all further trials.

So, if Kant has the truth of it, I bear at least some responsibility for being deceived, not all, certainly, but some. 

    Can I conclude with a soupcon of John Milton?  My students get a hearty hunk of Areopagitica tossed on their plates.  They groan.  I plead.  They roll their eyes.  I cajole, and say that reading this in college changed my life.  Some shrug and plow through it, and some actually read it carefully.  Anyone who wants to read a masterpiece of rant needs to read this.  Nothing will convince a person of his/her responsibility to value language and struggle to master its use more effectively.  And to master its use means to use it responsibly and in the public arena.    We simply cannot exercise our reason on information we do not know-information deliberately withheld from us.  Here, we're not so much deceived as betrayed:

     I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness.

Whiteness like birdpoop, perhaps?  But to the point, Milton believes that we need neither cozening nor protection in our quest for the truth.  Moreover, Truth (yup, capitalized) doesn't need our protection, either:

    When a man hath been labouring the hardest labour in the deep mines of knowledge, hath furnished out his findings in all their equipage: drawn forth his reasons as it were a battle ranged: scattered and defeated all objections in his way; calls out his adversary into the plain, offers him the advantage of wind and sun, if he please, only that he may try the matter by dint of argument: for his opponents then to skulk, to lay ambushments, to keep a narrow bridge of licensing where the challenger should pass, though it be valour enough in soldiership, is but weakness and cowardice in the wars of Truth.

    For who knows not that Truth is strong, next to the Almighty? She needs no policies, nor stratagems, nor licensings to make her victorious; those are the shifts and the defences that error uses against her power. Give her but room, and do not bind her when she sleeps. . .

So people are going to try to deceive us, individually and as a society.  Milton would have us get in their face and fight back-not with lies but with truth as we conceive it to be.  If we're proved wrong-good for us, we now have a better truth than we had before. 

Sometimes I think Milton may be lurking in the aether here at TPM, and I'm sure he chuckles at what he sees.  After all:

    Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making. Under these fantastic terrors of sect and schism, we wrong the earnest and zealous thirst after knowledge and understanding which God hath stirred up in this city. What some lament of, we rather should rejoice at, should rather praise this pious forwardness among men, to reassume the ill- deputed care of their religion into their own hands again. A little generous prudence, a little forbearance of one another, and some grain of charity might win all these diligences to join, and unite in one general and brotherly search after truth; could we but forgo this prelatical tradition of crowding free consciences and Christian liberties into canons and precepts of men.

and

    Next, it is a lively and cheerful presage of our happy success and victory. For as in a body, when the blood is fresh, the spirits pure and vigorous, not only to vital but to rational faculties, and those in the acutest and the pertest operations of wit and subtlety, it argues in what good plight and constitution the body is; so when the cheerfulness of the people is so sprightly up, as that it has not only wherewith to guard well its own freedom and safety, but to spare, and to bestow upon the solidest and sublimest points of controversy and new invention, it betokens us not degenerated, nor drooping to a fatal decay, but casting off the old and wrinkled skin of corruption to outlive these pangs and wax young again, entering the glorious ways of truth and prosperous virtue, destined to become great and honourable in these latter ages