The furtive fallacy

Some years ago I wrote here about “the fallacy of the universal man,” the assumption that all people everywhere are “intellectually and psychologically the same.” The term and definition come from David Hackett Fischer’s 1970 book Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought. I concluded that post by mentioning “the furtive fallacy.” Here’s Fischer on that error:

The furtive fallacy is the erroneous idea that facts of special significance are dark and dirty things and that history itself is a story of causes mostly insidious and results mostly invidious. It begins with the premise that reality is a sordid, secret thing; and that history happens on the back stairs a little after midnight, or else in a smoke-filled room, or a perfumed boudoir, or an executive penthouse or somewhere in the inner sanctum of the Vatican, or the Kremlin, or the Reich Chancellery, or the Pentagon. It is something more, and something other than merely a conspiracy theory, though that form of causal reduction is a common component. The furtive fallacy is a more profound error, which combines a naïve epistemological assumption that things are never what they seem to be, with a firm attachment to the doctrine of original sin.

There is a little of the furtive fallacy in us all . . . And when there is much of it, we are apt to summon a psychiatrist. In an extreme form, the furtive fallacy is not merely an intellectual error but a mental illness which is commonly called paranoia.

History afflicted with the furtive fallacy is warped by the endless search for the ulterior motive and the hidden hand.

This is not a new problem. Fischer names as one of the earliest practitioners Algie Simons, a socialist reporter who was possibly the first to spin the Constitution as a conspiracy of the wealthy to exploit and disenfranchise.

But furtive history’s greatest and most influential example is certainly Charles Beard, whom Fischer investigates in some detail. Beard made his name by imputing purely economic motives to the framers of the Constitution (“Beard . . . several times insisted that his thesis was misunderstood. But in fact it was misconceived.”) and ended his career with a book arguing a thesis popular among the latter-day furtive: that FDR had deliberately maneuvered the United States into participation in WWII.

Interestingly, Fischer notes that the same paranoid-leaning mindset at work in critics of Beard, namely the conservative historian Forrest McDonald, whose account of the drafting and ratification of the Constitution deliberately targets Beard’s and provides instead “a rum and strumpet history” of backroom deals and smoke-filled rooms different in degree—and political angle—but not in kind. Whether left-wing, right-wing, or politically indiscriminate, in history marked by furtiveness “[r]eality is reduced to a set of shadows, flickering behind a curtain of flimsy rhetoric.”

As Fischer notes near the beginning of this section, the furtive fallacy is not the same thing as a conspiracy theory, but conspiracy theories seldom lack this hermeneutic of paranoia. Put another way, you can be paranoid without drifting into conspiracism, but not vice versa. Understandably, since if you already believe all true motives are base but hidden, it’s not a difficult step to find spectral evidence for these assumptions everywhere.

In fact, it was Fischer’s description of furtive history, driven by “causes mostly insidious and results mostly invidious” that caught my attention and reminded me of one of my favorite short documentaries: “The Umbrella Man,” a six-minute film by Errol Morris. In this film, private investigator Tink Thompson, himself a JFK conspiracy theorist, tells the story of a mysterious man spotted in film and photographs from Dealy Plaza. He wore a suit and stood holding up an open umbrella—despite the brilliant fall weather—as JFK’s motorcade passed by.

Thompson summarizes the suspicions surrounding the Umbrella Man thus: “The only person under any umbrella in all of Dallas standing right at the location where all the shots come into the limousine. Can anyone come up with a non-sinister explanation for this? Hm? Hm?”

I don’t want to give the documentary away—seriously, take six minutes and watch the film—but Thompson does tell the satisfactory but wholly, totally unexpected story of who the Umbrella Man was and why he did what he did that day, a solution “just wacky enough it has to be true!” Thompson concludes:

What it means is, if you have any fact which you think is really sinister, that is really obvious a fact which can only point to some sinister underpinning, hey, forget it man, because you can never, on your own, think of all the non-sinister, perfectly valid explanations for that fact. A cautionary tale.

Food for thought and a useful rule of thumb, especially given that even much of the non-conspiratorial history produced today revels in and even demands the furtive perspective.