On "An Essay On Wank"

On "Wank"

Everyone on bsky, and elsewhere even, seems to have loved Iris Meredith's essay on "wank", but I—you'll never have guessed—did not! It is, I think, at best just kind of all over the place; it's not that it fails to make good points, it's that the good points are scattershot and not necessarily related to its announced topic. It's telling, I think, that there are very few specific examples and none that are worked through. (It opens with an anecdote which is immediately described as an "early type example", despite being, as best I can tell, not even remotely an example of the phenomenon the essay is putatively concerned with.) The nominal topic of the essay is a certain kind of speech act in which someone says something that seems to be intended to descriptive and answerable to the world, but whose actual importance for the speaker has little to do with truth; the official definition of this kind of speech act is:

Wank is a speech act directed first and foremost at helping the speaker feel better about themselves, stated as an objective claim about the state of the world, that we are expected in discussion to treat with the epistemic authority of a claim about identity, but [to ignore] the content of the actual claim.

All sorts of ills are laid at the doorstep of "wank" thus defined, including ineffectual left-wing organizing in favor of short-term actions that enable one to feel good (eg poasting rather than the grind of organizing), and just being ineffectual in general: one of the remedies she suggests is prioritizing, in an organization, people who are effective at getting concrete things done rather than, I guess, saying the right thing, which, well, yes. King Lear would have been well advised to follow similar advice. The connection between being ineffective at whatever thing the organization might need done, and indulging (sometimes? often? always?) in this particular kind of speech act is allowed to remain pretty opaque. That's not surprising, though, because despite its official topic being a particular kind of speech act, discussed on the model of, and in opposition to, Frankfurt's famous discussion of "bullshit" in contradistinction to lying, it seems clear that its actual topic is just a certain kind of intellectual dishonesty or bad hygiene in which one allows oneself to believe certain things for reasons not having to do with their truth or likelihood and to retain those beliefs without regard to, or in willful disregard of, countervailing reasons, specifically because doing so allows one to retain a comforting image of oneself (the comforts can be fairly varied). If, however, we follow this line—taking it to be about structures of belief—we lose what seem to be the more novel elements of the definition, the idea that we're supposed to actually ignore the manifest content of the statement and that we treat it with "the epistemic authority of a claim about identity" (which I'm not actually sure how to understand in this context, to be honest).

This confusion I think helps explain why even some of the examples that are straightforwardly about specific concrete instances of speech don't seem to have much to do with her definition, even when the example is supposed to motivate the definition; thus one example concerns an "overtly … political position, and one that passes for objective", as she says: I certainly have no desire to uphold a stringent fact/value dichotomy but I'm not sure that something acknowledged to be an expression of one's political values is a paradigm case of "an objective claim about the state of the world", and one can understand, perhaps, why someone would feel personally affronted by a sharp dismissive challenge to such an expression even without their being guilty of an intellectual sin.

At any rate, it does seem to be the intellectual sins she's really on about, which is why she resorts to such otherwise confusing locutions as "wank-statement" (sometimes "strongly held wank-statement") and "wank-purveyor". A "wank-statement", as near as I can tell, is a belief held for rationally disreputable reasons; a wank-purveyor, meanwhile, is as far as I can tell not necessarily someone who goes about uttering the statements but simply someone who holds comforting beliefs because they're comforting rather than because they're true. The dangers listed in the section "the epistemic dangers of wank", too, are more concerned with this flawed process of belief formation and retention than they are with occasions of speech, which is too bad, because the dialogic scene in which such statements would be made are worth attending to.

I have a cranky idea for why the topic drifts so much and "wank" becomes so expansive almost immediately, and it is that "wank" is simply a bad name for what the official definition is supposed to encompass. "Wank", and "wanker", alas, already have a pretty strong set of associations as terms of abuse for someone we dislike engaging in something we dislike, and so it's easy to proceed, once the name is in place, as if we pretty much know what's going on. Yes, masturbation is an act aimed at providing pleasure to oneself, so it's not exactly off the wall as a name, but "wanker" is just too general. We all know what a wanker is, right? We've all met wankers. ("Bullshit" of course predated Frankfurt's essay as a term of abuse, but what he names with the term is, happily, much more plausible as a precisification of already-existing usage than Meredith's "wank" is.) Devoted readers will know that I stand with Lichtenberg (in aphorism K19):¹

It seems to me that the immeasurable advantage that language brings to thinking consists in the fact that words are signs for things rather than definitions. … If all of the names in chemistry were Hebrew or Arabic, such as alkali etc., then the less one understood of the names, the better one would fare.

If instead of "wank" Meredith had called this speech act "flargle", I hypothesize crankily, it would not have been so easily so labile, since it would be impossible to think one knew what it was on the basis of the name. On the other hand, even given the definition, by its nature it is easy to apply to an opponent one doesn't think all too highly of, especially if one allows the latter two elements to drop out; Meredith, aware that "what [she's] discussed is almost all about internal state", gives some pointers for diagnosing it, which are supposed to help avoid over-eager accusations. Let us look at these tips, and also at a few examples.

Examples & tools for the diagnosis

The first real example is of an adherent of an apparently rather simplistic form of anarcho-primitivism,² who (because, recall, we're officially talking about speech acts!) "says all of this [sc. a concise statement of the anarcho-primitivist program], feels good about themselves for taking a morally superior position, and doesn't think about it further." Faced with a challenge ("what about the disabled, then? what will they do in the coming utopia?") the primitivist gets defensive, shuts down, and generally does not cover themselves in glory. This is actually, I think, already a somewhat odd scenario, for a couple of reasons. For one thing, while of course it is better to speak thoughtfully than thoughtlessly, sometimes one does simply express long-held opinions and does not "think about it further", because one has thought about it before. Thinking about one's political speech after speaking politically is getting it the wrong way around! Chalk this up to the unclarity already indicated in what the topic really is. The scenario is really simply that someone is revealed to be an anarcho-primitivist: nothing really requires that the anarcho-primitivist has said anything; it could just as well have been that person A points out person B as a committed anarcho-primitivist.

Diagnosticians of the features of speech acts do well to attend, as Austin advised, to "the total speech act in the total speech situation". If, as Meredith says, "the effect [of the speaking] is almost entirely on the feelings of the person", that is if speaking this way reassures them (and a challenge to it unsettles them), why might that be the case? One possibility is this: this person is just insecure in whatever social context this speech is taking place, and thinks that this is the sort of thing one says among these people—this will lead to greater acceptance by demonstrating that one can talk with the in-crowd—and so producing the speech more or less fluently brings a sense of satisfaction—I've got it, I even understand it (even though probably I do not understand it). The challenge elicits a feeling of being attacked both because it shows that one did not understand it and because it shows that one is not actually a member of the group and didn't understand one's place in it. Is this wank? I'm not sure: it doesn't have the expectation of deference on the basis of identity, and I'm not sure that we're expected to ignore the content (aren't we expected to commend it?), but it is a speech act one engages in because of some comforting effect. It doesn't, however, seem enlightening to call it "wank" rather than attributing it to insecurity more specifically. This is not presumably the speech situation Meredith has in mind, but what is?

I think we ought, also, attend to the reason for the challenge. Meredith speaks of the

uncomfortable, slightly disorienting feeling that wank creates when you're subjected to it, wherein you're expected to speak about and think about the statement as though it says what it facially does, but also not push too hard or at all, because challenging the factuality or other face-value elements of the statement is a personal attack on the person saying it and their identity.

and says "I'm sure we've all been in such situations", but what is this situation in which we are supposed to think about a statement as if it says what it literally says and also not do so? What is the situation in which one challenges it? When I think about the situations I've been in in which I've felt as if someone is saying something somewhat absurd or at least questionable, which I feel some hesitation about challenging because I suspect it's not really comme il faut to make such challenges, well, often those have been situations in which I am among strangers, and on the one hand I wonder if they might be speaking in a sort of hermetic shorthand, and on the other they might have reason to look askance at a newcomer with what may well seem to be uncharitable skepticism. (It's a hazard of having been trained in a reasonably combative largely analytic philosophy department. You'd never guess it but really I'm a sweetheart.) If I'd stuck around, perhaps I would be able to get my questions in subsequently. Perhaps not: it's not as if this kind of thoughtless defensiveness based on the psychic importance of a mantra doesn't exist at all. But the reason I dwell on this at all is, well, let's think about this poor anarcho-primitivist, a bit of a shallow thinker perhaps, who reacts so badly to the question about the handicapped:

challenges to the statement are then treated, unconsciously, as an attack on the self. … Even the most simple request for clarification or the most reasonable question … is treated as an attack on the whole value system and the person carrying it …

Let us be real. Nine times out of ten if an anarcho-primitivist encounters someone just asking questions about the fate of the handicapped, that is an attack on their value system and on the person (themselves) carrying it. They have expressed their political values and goals and get for their troubles a question which is not literally, but generally is in fact, asking little other than "but aren't those the political values and goals of a complete idiot?". People can often tell when you're genuinely interested and when you're trying to score points.

One might go so far as to say: the person asking this question, while facially inquiring about the real world (the details of someone else's proposal), in fact has no interest in the answer and is engaging in a speech act which enables them to feel good about themselves—canny and sharp and sitting loftily above others. That is: we are expected to ignore its actual content. Indeed, "the effect is almost entirely on the feelings of the person", giving them the frisson of demonstrating for all to see how lofty they are and how lowly the anarcho-primitivist. Don't you dare suggest that that's what they're doing, though! How offensive—they're merely a rational inquirer—if the anarcho-primitivist can't handle the heat of free-spirited debate, perhaps they should get out of the kitchen which they don't believe should exist anyway. (This is my attempt to shoehorn the clause about identity into the asking of a question.) This putative "most reasonable question"? Why, it's textbook wank. Even here, I'm not sure that this generic identification is of much interest, in part because it seems more abusive than analytical and offers little which "bad faith" doesn't already give you.

Here are two more potential cases. One of my beliefs, which I will express in speech given half a chance, is that academic hiring is a capricious affair, in which on the one hand the race is certainly not to the swift, and on the other hand most people are plenty swift enough to finish with a respectable time. If you have a tenure-track or tenured job, then while it is not incorrect to say that you deserve it in the sense that you do not fail to have the merits required of such a job—almost certainly you are capable of doing the work of teaching, research, and service the job calls for—it is incorrect to say that you deserve it if that is taken to mean that you specifically, rather than anyone else (or rather than all but a few) who applied for it deserve it—that you were simply the best candidate. If you removed all the candidates who just wouldn't be able to do the job, there would still be a boatload left over, and if you tried to sort them into equivalence classes of candidate quality the classes would be few and populous.

As it happens, I applied for tenure-track jobs and got nowhere. One might well suspect that I accept what's described above not primarily as a result of a sober-minded investigation into academic hiring practices but as a salve to my wounded ego; that Mandy Rice-Davies applies; that I might get a little more wound up during a spirited discussion of its validity than I would in one of other topics (true!); that I expect to be greeted primarily with sympathetic noises when I evince this belief; that, in other words, it's classic wank. (I'm not sure how to work the identity clause into this one, but I'm not sure how Meredith thinks that one works in many of her briefly given examples either.) Maybe so! On the other hand, if it is, it seems relatively harmless; it lets me prop myself up a bit and maybe it's not exactly hygienic and not something I should get accustomed to in general but I don't think it spills over into the rest of my life, or the world of action, all that much. It's not as if the domain the belief concerns, academic hiring, lies within my power to affect.

I've also heard the following belief expressed by folks who fared better in what I naturally regard as something of a lottery: actually, you do see people even at the campus visit stage reveal themselves as unsuitable (at least for this campus, whichever the instant campus may be), and hiring committees in their striving to do right by the department and the candidates actually do have an experience as of a range of candidate quality that admits of fine distinctions, and that when they offer a position to their top choice candidate and that candidate accepts the post actually has gone, in general and for the most part, to someone reasonably among the best.

At least sometimes, these people, those expressing that belief, also don't love to hear it vigorously challenged, and one can easily imagine why! If they distribute their offers justly then it's so much easier to believe that the offer distributed to them was done so justly in (previous) turn, dissolving the difficulty of having to accept that your privileged position is unmerited (again, not in the sense that you can't acquit yourself in it perfectly well, but in the sense that you do not merit it specially, and that you lucked out in having it). Quelle surprise, basically, that someone who has such a gig thinks that those who have such gigs deserve their gigs. W a n k. Here one can more easily make out a story about why it's harmful to have such beliefs. (On the other hand, one can also make out a story about why it's beneficial to have such beliefs—something about how having an earnest if irrational and self-protective belief in the justice of the process will tend to make one make an earnest effort to carry it out justly, while someone with my belief might be tempted to act unjustly if it's all such a toss-up anyway.)

"Signs of wank"

I do think that in each of these cases it's at least possible that it's justifiable to conclude that a speaker speaks and believes as they do for the self-preservative reasons identified in the definition of wank-speech and that if they recoil from collaborative discussion of the topic over-defensively that they do so because they wanted to be deferred to and confirmed in their comforting, identity-ratifying belief. Concluding that that is what's going on in any given case, assuming one isn't simply given indiscriminately to the hermeneutics of suspicion, seems like a delicate matter. The diagnostic criteria Meredith offers seem by contrast to be somewhat crude, if not simply irrelevant:

1. The first major indicator is excessive, black-and-white moral language. [Wank] is the language of the moral panic. "Protect the children", in particular, is a feature of an awful lot of wank: an excellent example of this is the current push for age verification and IDs on the internet to access social media and such. This is, simply put, a terrible idea …

2. Relatedly, excessive saccharine sentimentality is a strong indicator of wank. Sentimentality is a seeking of safety, security and the dissolution of the self into something uncomplicatedly easy and unchallenging …

3. The idea that certain things are easy, obvious or common-sense is another strong tell. … wank-purveyors actively believe … and act on the idea that their statements are actually common sense. … Listening for people asking why you're questioning something immediately obvious, then, is a good way of catching wank-speech.

4. Finally, look for inconsistencies between stated aims and values and behaviour.

One hates to be a bore, or to demand boring writing, but one would have appreciated in each of these "signs of wank" an explicit reminder of the working definition of wank and an explanation of how the sign is related to the phenomenon, since they seem to me to be neither sufficient nor necessary, individually or in any combination, for wank as defined to be on the scene, nor even to be reliable indicators. Here, for instance, is how she fleshes out the fourth sign:

Wank-speech, as we've already established, is primarily emotional, and far more than both lies (where the appearance of consistency is required) and bullshit (where while you can be inconsistent between statements, but each individual statement still needs to hold together), it can be aggressively inconsistent internally. Obviously, liars and bullshitters are quite capable of lying about their values and aims, but that's usually weakly held and a pretty thin facade. If you have someone strongly expressing values around equity and kindness while equally strongly acting in ways and supporting positions that... don't do that, and pointing that out triggers distress and hostility, however, that is a very strong indicator that wank is afoot.

Is the idea that since lies are "weakly held", no one would lie about holding a belief strongly? That since lies are usually a "thin facade", lies are usually easily seen through? A not-so-smooth talking liar might become hostile when their inequitable behavior is pointed out: confrontation is unpleasant and upping the ante could well work to evade exposure. I simply do not see how this diagnostic tool connects at all with what it's supposed to indicate. Sometimes people sincerely believe that the solution to a problem is just "common sense" because they aren't very thoughtful or knowledgeable about what they're talking about. Is that bad? Yes! But it's something else. Is it bad if someone simply refuses even to contemplate reliable testimony to the effect that what they think is just common sense is actually all wrong? Also yes. Is that refusal a sign that they only said whatever it is they said in order to soothe themselves? That's quite a leap. Attributing the specific, specifically blameworthy, irrationality that "wank" is supposed to describe to someone on the basis of their being sentimental and shallow, or pigheaded and suspicious, or deceptive, is simply dishonest.

A tangent about practicality

"This is, simply put, a terrible idea", writes Meredith of internet age-verification nonsense. Certainly correct. She also, again correctly, points out that actually implementing her anarcho-primitivist's ideas is somewhere between impossible and monstrous on an unimaginable scale. These facts seem to her to be signs that the speaker is wanking, though, which is quite unaccountable to me. ("This pattern consistently comes up when looking at wank." She hasn't really shown us why the person hell-bent on "protecting the children" is wanking, though.) The suppressed argument might be something like the following, though I'm really not sure:

1. You propose some plan or goal
2. this plan won't work or this goal is unachievable
3. This fact is pretty obvious if you think about it at all
4. Therefore, you haven't thought about it at all
5. Therefore, you can only be proposing it for some ulterior reason
6. That reason is that proposing it lets you feel better about yourself, and you expect us in discussion to treat your expression of the plan/goal with the epistemic authority, and to ignore the content of the claim

This line of thought does not strike me as all that cogent; it basically inflates being wrong or thoughtless into engaging in this particular kind of bad-faith speech,³ and flattens out all the other potential reasons for someone's irrationally holding on to an impracticable idea.

Dangers & responses

I'm skipping over part of the essay, the "case study" to proceed directly to the final two sections, on the purported "epistemic dangers of wank" and what to do about wank in one's midst, which might seem like an odd thing to do given that I've complained about the lack of worked examples. My justification for doing this is that I find the section somewhat scattershot, mixing what seem to be genuine examples of the phenomenon (soi-disant whiz kids who are desperate to have known about the next big thing before the great unwashed and who spout a lot of nonsense that makes them feel oh so smart) with descriptions whose connection to the topic I genuinely can't make out, and which seem to be descriptions of specific things with the details scrubbed off, more than illustrative examples of the phenomenon under discussion.⁴ And much of the discussion in that section pertains to its dangers, even if not its epistemic dangers; for instance, it is bad if a hiring manager cannot accept disagreement from an interviewee or employee, though one must admit, I think, that the badness of that state of affairs is somewhat independent of the precise reason the manager requires assent. It's not great in general to close one's eyes to countervailing evidence for one's beliefs (or "deeply held statements"), whether that's because one is paid to ignore it or because paying attention would require revising one's sense of oneself as among the morally upright or whatever.

The epistemic dangers, narrowly construed, of "wank" would seem to be twofold: first, insofar as it describes a structure of difficult-to-dislodge irrationally held beliefs, the believers blind themselves to the true states of affairs (with all the potential for downstream practical dangers that implies); second, insofar as it describes a kind of statement, it is corrosive to trust and dialogue in a group (certain topics are verboten, you can't tell how to take certain statements), with further consequences for the self-understanding of the participants, and how they're understood by others. It is not clear to me that in either case the practical consequences lead to bullheadedness ("the iteration and the action drop out") or to prioritizing short-term thought or comforting actions ("actions that feel right, easy or emotionally cathartic (large rallies, online posting and so forth) get prioritised heavily over the harder, less gratifying work of organising, building effective structures of power, more in-depth analytical work and advocacy").

Sometimes, as in the case of my beliefs about tenure-track hiring, there's little question of action anyway, and the danger really is that I will simply refuse to accept that there's a range of candidate quality and that committees can pick up on it even when presented with compelling testimony to that effect. Sometimes the "wank-statement" is a goal and not a belief about the present constitution of the world anyway; we could imagine that the anarcho-primitivist is aware that he's got a tough row to hoe and of the obstacles in the path of achieving his utopia while still working toward it, more or less effectively; the problem isn't that he has no sensitivity to the conditions on the ground but that he has no sensitivity to his goal's being a bad one. The political commentator best exemplifies the dangers; when Ezra Klein is so committed to his emotional support bipartisanship that he both cannot accept that those days are long gone and bases his advice on the illusion that they're here to stay, that advice is going to be pretty bad, and woe to him who heeds it. This wouldn't stop Klein from "iterating" when each new bit of advice fails, if he can accept that it was heeded; it's just each new iteration is still built on a bad foundation. That is: it's not true that "you can't see when things aren't working"; you can see that, you just have a bonkers theory of why they aren't working. All of this will also be true if the reason Klein can't quite understand the way the world is is that his salary, rather than his self-esteem, depends on his not understanding it.

My use of Klein as an example follows Meredith's, but others have also claimed that Klein's pathologies as a thinker stem from his intense and sincere ideological commitment to bipartisanship. Meredith's diagnosis (which doesn't dispute his sincerity!), that Klein has an "emotional attachment [to] being above the political struggle and effortlessly able to synthesise the ideas of the left and right", contains an element of psychic gratification that mere ideological commitment to bipartisanship doesn't (it also contains an element of rebuke, beyond that implicit in "wank", since being above-it-all is bad). The commitment to bipartisanship without the element of psychic gratification, it seems to me, can generate the same epistemic pathologies as the more obviously gratifying superciliousness of Meredith's Klein. Certainly if Klein is merely sincere, but wrong, about this matter, he would find it upsetting to contemplate his potential error, would try to find ways to salvage it, etc, without his ever falling into the state of expressing, or holding, his beliefs in order to feel better about himself. I am not well placed to judge what is actually going on with Klein; I think that's a call that only someone who knows him could make. At a minimum, I do not think Klein expects us to ignore the content of his claims: I believe it is very important to him that we heed his claims. (If I were to pick a centrist avatar of wank, it would be Thomas Chatterton Williams.)

The fact that the observable effects of this kind of self-deception are similar to those of many other kinds of internally or externally motivated irrationality, or even to what we might expect in the case of important but not irrationally persisted in sincere belief, is part of the reason Meredith wanted to offer "signs of wank". I suspect that the judgment that someone is indulging in it can't really be referred to such signs (certainly not the signs that she identifies) and will always remain a site of case-by-case situated understanding. The same should go for the remedies. Meredith identifies a few, both to be applied to oneself (try meditation!) and more general. The idea that the study of literature will lead to fewer irrationally held beliefs, held because they shore up one's sense of self, is, I'm afraid, tosh, albeit tosh which is much beloved both of humanists (some of whom have thought a lot about it, admittedly) and non-humanists who, like the anarcho-primitivist, identify this one weird trick and just don't think about it further. So too with looking for those who do things rather than who want to be things. Someone who (cf. ⁴) loves React because they were an early adopter and won't hear a word in favor of other frameworks because they might then have to admit that there's more to learn can, in fact, still be productive (in React); the hypersensitive anarcho-primitivist might not be the best choice to get others on board at events but could be perfectly capable behind the scenes; the person who believes that in the main people get their jobs based on merit and therefore they got their job based on merit might well be able to do their job just fine.

What is missing from the section entitled "countering wank effectively", and really much of the section on dangers, is anything to do with the scenario of wank as defined: a conversation, or at least an utterance. Is it dangerous if someone goes on LinkedIn and posts some nonsense about career success, thereby assuaging their fears? Perhaps: this is not a healthy way to cope with career-related fears; someone might take it seriously, which would be bad because it's nonsense; on the other hand, people might take it unseriously and post along similar lines, gradually coming loose from reality (LinkedIn does seem to be a parallel world). The lattermost exemplifies the epistemic dangers not so much of wank, because only some, or one, of the participants might have that emotional need, but just of delusions, or of mock beliefs that gradually come to be real. If someone posts like that on LinkedIn, what should you do? How might you address this? You can't counter this by looking for people who do things, because this is (let's stipulate) your friend or former co-worker, not your employee, and even so, you wouldn't be countering this instance of wank so much as sidelining it if your reaction were to discount the poster for a potential promotion. As with the diagnosis in the first place, what to do here seems to require a great deal of local sensitivity.

If you're talking to someone and you come to realize that they're saying things seemingly about the world, or about their ends, not with an eye to getting the world right, or what those ends might actually mean if accomplished, but with an eye to propping themselves up, what then? The situation here might actually not be as hopeless as the one in which a person's opinion on a subject depends on who's paying their salary; people do manage to change their self-conceptions (sometimes they do so with the aid of a new false belief that they actually haven't changed). But what should you do? How can you convince them that you aren't being hostile or attacking them, but are interested in the content of what they said? Odds are good this will require slow-walking your criticisms—taking baby steps and whatnot. It helps if you actually are not attacking them, of course. I don't really have much specific to say about this and do not think I'm all that good at it, even, not being an especially sensitive, skilled interpersonal interlocutor. But I do think that if "wank" as defined by Meredith is a real and analytically useful phenomenon, then it's worth taking it seriously, both in furnishing detailed examples, and in discussing its dangers and remedies.