POSTED FOR OUR KEV;

Worse than lying
11 June 2005

AS well as all the bull in politics, there's even more in our metaphoric and colloquial language. People are bullish, bull-headed and take the bull by the horns. A Hereford herd of bulls at the gate also wrecks china shops and thunders down Wall Street – to lock horns with the Angus, Longhorns and Brahmins that provide bullshit, bulldust and bullshit artists.

And now bullshit is the subject of serious philosophical inquiry in a little book called On Bullshit, published by the highly respected Princeton University Press. To the surprise and delight of the author, it's stampeding out of bookshops all over the world.

The words of wisdom on this improbable subject come from a 76-year-old moral philosopher, Harry G. Frankfurt. Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at Princeton University in the US, he has been studying bullshit for more than 20 years and has come to the conclusion that bullshitting is at least as bad, and probably worse, than lying.

When we chewed the cud about it, Frankfurt pointed out that a liar has some respect for the truth. Otherwise he wouldn't feel the need to lie about it. Whereas a bullshit artist doesn't care about the truth. What he cares about is what you think about him.

To demonstrate, Frankfurt cited the example of a humbugging politician giving a Fourth of July address. (You may like to transpose what follows to Australia Day, Anzac Day or any other national celebration.) He drones on about "our great and blessed country" and how the founding fathers enjoyed God's guidance in providing the world with "a new beginning for mankind". But he doesn't really care what the audience feels about founding fatherhood or God or manifest destiny. First and foremost, he wants to make the right impression, to be seen as a patriot.

Frankfurt agreed that echoes of such humbuggery could be found in almost every speech given by an incumbent or would-be president. It's only when the humbugger starts making claims for, say, WMDs that we move from bullshit into lying.

But bullshit is bad enough.

The bullshitter does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does. "He pays no attention to it at all," says Frankfurt. "By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."

"It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth," says the professor. Thus the liar and the honest man are linked by a common, if not identical, regard for it – for both, the truth is a real concern. But not for the bullshitter.

Yet while the liar is disapproved of, even despised, the bullshitter is effectively forgiven. He gets away with it. And profits from it. The professor agrees that it's because the bullshitted are often complicit. Though people insist they can pick it a mile off, they hunger for it. The audience for a political stump speech knows it's bullshit but claps all the louder; the audience for some ranting buffoon of a televangelist sends him donations; and women viewing nonsensical cosmetics commercials run straight from the telly to the chemist's shop.

While bullshit is hardly a new ingredient in personal and social lives, it seems to be growing in magnitude and stench with our communication technologies, and the public can't get enough.
We probably take it lightly because we know the bullshitter knows he's talking bullshit and he probably knows we think it's bullshit.

So what's the harm?

Trouble is, says Frankfurt, that it gets harder and harder to "know how things truly are".

Matters of substance become impoverished and tawdry. At least lying has its standards.
So Frankfurt believes that the bullshit artist can be, already is, a threat to democracy.

We talked of pre-war speeches by Bush and Blair, how bullshit crossed the line into lies but was bad enough without them. Frankfurt factors in contemporary views – postmodernism comes to mind – where truth and falsity dissolve, where nothing can be claimed as a certainty. Is this is an environment that encourages, or at least tolerates, bullshit?

What was it that Marx said about everything solid melting into air?

On one level, Frankfurt's book is a great entertainment. But that doesn't entirely explain the way it's selling. Readers, it seems, share the good professor's anxieties about the problem.

Writing without resorting to jargon, Frankfurt has a reputation for trying to get "to the bottom of things" and has struck a chord by examining something that we've taken for granted, something short of a sin and outside the Commandments, that nonetheless undermines our public lives. "Even the most basic questions about bullshit," he says, "are not only unanswered but unasked."

He's right. And bullshit is getting thicker and thicker in our public and political lives. Before we get bogged in it, let's fight fire with fire.

There's only one antidote.

Whenever and wherever you hear it, call out . . . "BULLSHIT!"


http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/