Does Propaganda Bypass Rationality?

In How Propaganda Works, philosopher Jason Stanley describes a key feature of the classic conception of propaganda. On the classic conception, it is central to propagandistic communication that it aims to "bypass rational deliberation" (p. 12). Propaganda "makes the state move as one, stirred by emotions that far surpass the evidence for their intensity. It is in this way that all propaganda unites citizens as one. Propaganda is manipulation of the rational will to close off debate" (p. 48). How does propaganda bypass rational deliberation? On Stanley's view, what he calls "supporting propaganda" (roughly, propaganda that tends to increase support for a political ideal) "does so not by directly providing a reason that increases the probability of the truth or virtue of the political ideal. It does so indirectly by seeking to overload various affective capacities, such as nostalgia, sentiment, or fear" (p. 53). In sum: propaganda plays on sentiment, not rationality (although, Stanley agrees that the impact of propaganda can lead people to reason on the basis of their newly formed/reinforced ideals).

I suspect that this isn't true of all propaganda. Propaganda does not always bypass rationality. Sometimes it deviously engages rationality. In the ante-bellum U.S., for example, Confederate currency sometimes contained imagery of enslaved persons who appeared happy working in cotton fields. The propagandistic message was, roughly, that slavery was not so awful and that enslaved people enjoyed it. Whatever impact this propaganda had on people's affective states, it seems to me that it also was intended to function as a form of evidence. It was a snap-shot of plantation life, a perceptual glimpse at an enslaved person's condition. That is, it was evidence––evidence about the conditions of enslaved persons, and it was meant to support of inform people's judgments about the nature of Confederate slavery. Rather than bypassing rational considerations, the propagandistic message was, in part, meant to engage rationality by being evidential in nature. 

But, on my view, even if propaganda can have evidential dimensions, it can only ever be evidentially devious. At a minimum, it is evidentially devious either because it (a) distorts the evidence (e.g., by offering misleading evidence, offering unrepresentative evidence, portraying the evidence as stronger than it is, offering weak evidence that, paired with the affective force of the propaganda, appears strong, etc.) or because it (b) counts on the errant evidential standards of the "listeners" to enhance the relevant piece of evidence. Confederate currency was evidentially devious in this disjunctive sense. 

A final insight is in order. I suspect that propaganda also functions to normalize certain errant epistemic standards (i.e., errant ways of reasoning about and weighing the evidence). It's not that errant epistemic standards are merely a consequence of propaganda. Rather, sometimes, the recommendation to use certain (errant) standards is a constitutive feature of propagandistic speech (it's part of the illocutionary force of the speech). This proposal might be underwritten by features of speech-act theory. Roughly, speech-act theory tells us that speech does not merely report or express propositions; sometimes, it does things, or it enacts things (the illocutionary, rather than semantic, aspect of speech). Following Mae Langton and Mary Kate McGowen on oppressive speech, propaganda might function like an exercitive (Langton, "Beyond Belief: Pragmatics in Hate Speech and Pornography"; McGowen, "Oppressive Speech"). Specifically, propagandistic speech attempts to enact certain rules for evaluating the relevant issue and invites listeners to adopt those rules in their own evaluation. The image of happy slaves on Confederate currency not only communicates a racist message ("slavery isn't so bad! Look at these happy slaves"), it tacitly recommends and attempts to legitimize a way of reasoning about slavery (namely, judge the moral and social significance of slavery on the basis of these sorts of images). Consider another example: in response to Congressional debates about increasing welfare assistance, certain media outlets might present racialized images of "welfare queens." These forms of communication not only convey a certain message ("increased welfare will lead to more welfare dependency in Urban Black communities"), they also enact and attempt to normalize certain ways of evaluating the welfare debate ("lend a lot of weight to these images and stories in your deliberation of welfare policy"). Propagandistic speech-acts invite hearers to share in a set of epistemic standards and, according to those standards, the information expressed by the speech-act (e.g., the image of the Black single mother living on welfare) is given enhanced epistemic power. In sum: propagandistic speech sometimes enacts (errant) standards of rationality and invites listeners to deploy those standards as they deliberate about the topic at hand. 

On the view I'm suggesting here, then, propaganda does not necessarily bypass rationality. Sometimes it deploys distorted or truncated forms of rationality in order to increase the realization of certain political aims. 

Photo by Sinitta Leunen from Pexels