[Rhodes22-list] Bill, I need more info - Politics

[brad haslett]

Bill,

In what sense did you mean bullshit?  Please put in
context after reading the following article.

Brad

--------------

Defining Bullshit
A philosophy professor says it's a process, not a
product.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Wednesday, March 2, 2005, at 7:37 PM ET



"We live in an era of unprecedented bullshit
production," observes Laura Penny, author of the
forthcoming (and wittily titled) Your Call Is
Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit. But what is
bullshit, exactly? By which I mean: What are its
defining characteristics? What is its Platonic
essence? How does bullshit differ from such precursors
as humbug, poppycock, tommyrot, hooey, twaddle,
balderdash, claptrap, palaver, hogwash, buncombe (or
"bunk"), hokum, drivel, flapdoodle, bullpucky, and all
the other pejoratives* favored by H.L. Mencken and his
many imitators? The scholar who answers the question,
"What is bullshit?" bids boldly to define the spirit
of the present age.

Enter Harry G. Frankfurt. In the fall 1986 issue of
Raritan, Frankfurt, a retired professor of philosophy
at Princeton, took a whack at it in an essay titled
"On Bullshit." Frankfurt reprinted the essay two years
later in his book The Importance of What We Care
About: Philosophical Essays. Last month he republished
it a second time as a very small book. Frankfurt's
conclusion, which I caught up with in its latest
repackaging, is that bullshit is defined not so much
by the end product as by the process by which it is
created. 

Eureka! Frankfurt's definition is one of those
not-at-all-obvious insights that become blindingly
obvious the moment they are expressed. Although
Frankfurt doesn't point this out, it immediately
occurred to me upon closing his book that the word
"bullshit" is both noun and verb, and that this
duality distinguishes bullshit not only from the
aforementioned Menckenesque antecedents, but also from
its contemporary near-relative, horseshit. It is
possible to bullshit somebody, but it is not possible
to poppycock, or to twaddle, or to horseshit anyone.
When we speak of bullshit, then, we speak, implicitly,
of the action that brought the bullshit into being:
Somebody bullshitted. In this respect the word
"bullshit" is identical to the word "lie," for when we
speak of a lie we speak, implicitly, of the action
that brought the lie into being: Somebody lied.

Is "bullshit," then, a synonym for "lie"? Not exactly.
Frankfurt asks us to consider an anecdote told about
Ludwig Wittgenstein wherein the great philosopher
phones a friend named Fania Pascal who's just had her
tonsils removed. How are you, Wittgenstein asks. Like
a dog that's been run over, Pascal answers.
Wittgenstein then replies testily, "You don't know
what a dog that has been run over feels like." In
effect, Frankfurt argues, Wittgenstein is suggesting
that Pascal is spouting bullshit. (A more reasonable
person, Frankfurt concedes, would reach the charitable
conclusion that Wittgenstein's friend is merely
expressing herself through the use of allusive or at
worst hyperbolic language.) Wittgenstein's grumpy
outburst seems so absurd that very possibly the real
bullshit here is the anecdote itself. But Frankfurt
asks us to assume, for the purposes of this
discussion, that the anecdote is true and that
Wittgenstein's objection is rational and sincere.

So: Wittgenstein thinks Pascal is bullshitting him.
But why, Frankfurt asks,

does it strike [Wittgenstein] that way? It does so, I
believe, because he perceives what Pascal says as
being—roughly speaking, for now—unconnected to a
concern with the truth. Her statement is not germane
to the enterprise of describing reality. She does not
even think she knows, except in the vaguest way, how a
run-over dog feels. Her description of her own feeling
is, accordingly, something that she is merely making
up.

Is Pascal lying? No. She isn't trying to deceive
Wittgenstein about how she really feels, and she isn't
trying to deceive Wittgenstein about how a dog would
feel if run over. Her error, Frankfurt concludes,
isn't that she conducted a faulty inquiry into how a
dog would feel if run over, but that she conducted no
inquiry at all (in this case, because none is
possible)."It is just this lack of connection to a
concern with truth—this indifference to how things
really are—that I regard as the essence of bullshit."

Frankfurt's definition is provocative because it
allows for the little-recognized possibility that
bullshit can be substantively true, and still be
bullshit. Last summer, the Financial Times reported on
evidence that the infamous war-justifying "16 words"
in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address
("The British government has learned that Saddam
Hussein recently sought significant quantities of
uranium from Africa") may have been true after all.
Previously, a consensus had dismissed the Bush
administration's charge that Iraq had sought to buy
yellowcake from Niger (implicit in Bush's use of the
word "learned" rather than "concluded") as outright
bullshit—a lie, even. Did the FT's stories mean that
the 16 words might not be bullshit? No. They meant the
16 words might be true, but still didn't legitimize
the shoddy White House research that had led to their
inclusion in the speech. When those words were written
into the speech, the president and his staff lacked
the evidence needed to support them. They were
bullshitting. The 16 words therefore remain bullshit,
and will continue to remain bullshit even if the
charge is eventually proved true.

More often, of course, bullshit is not true, in the
same sense that a stopped clock is wrong 1,438 out of
1,440 minutes per day. Is bullshit as bad as a lie?
Frankfurt thinks it's worse:

Both in lying and in telling the truth people are
guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are.
These guide them as they endeavor either to describe
the world correctly or to describe it deceitfully. For
this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a
person for telling the truth in the same way that
bullshitting tends to. ...The bullshitter ignores
these demands altogether. He does not reject the
authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose
himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By
virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the
truth than lies are.

Bullshit, Frankfurt notes, is an inevitable byproduct
of public life, "where people are frequently
impelled—whether by their own propensities or by the
demands of others—to speak extensively about matters
of which they are to some degree ignorant." But
politics is not a creation of the modern era; it's
been around for centuries. 

Why should bullshit be so prevalent now? The obvious
answer is the communications revolution. Cable
television and the Internet have created an unending
demand for information, and there simply isn't enough
truth to go around. So, we get bullshit instead.
Indeed, there are some troubling signs that the
consumer has come to prefer bullshit. In choosing
guests to appear on cable news, bookers will almost
always choose a glib ignoramus over an expert who
can't talk in clipped sentences. In his
underappreciated book Public Intellectuals: A Study of
Decline, Richard Posner found a negative correlation
between media mentions and scholarly citations for the
100 public intellectuals most mentioned in the
media—and these 100 accounted for 67.5 percent of all
media mentions! 

The Bush administration is clearly more bullshit-heavy
than its predecessors. Slate's founding editor,
Michael Kinsley, put his finger on the Bush
administration's particular style of lying three years
ago:

If the truth was too precious to waste on politics for
Bush I and a challenge to overcome for Clinton, for
our current George Bush it is simply boring and
uncool. Bush II administration lies are often so
laughably obvious that you wonder why they bother.
Until you realize: They haven't bothered.

But by Frankfurt's lights, what Bush does isn't lying
at all. It's bullshitting. Whatever you choose to call
it, Bush's indifference to the truth is indeed more
troubling, in many ways, than what Frankfurt calls
"lying" would be. Richard Nixon knew he was bombing
Cambodia. Does George W. Bush have a clue that his
Social Security arithmetic fails to add up? How can he
know if he doesn't care?

Correction, March 4, 2005: An earlier version of this
article mistakenly described these words as
adjectives. In fact, they are nouns. Return to the
corrected sentence.

Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.


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