The Cowpies of Authenticity
A pathology of flung feces.
Hi everyone,
Whew, well, that was interesting.
In a moment of gravitationally Jungian Lagrange point self-censorship, I inadvertently deleted the entire post I had ready to go for this week. And just like that, I was left staring at the very helpful “Your post has been deleted” pop-up. I was attempting, consciously anyway, to save the post when my attention drifted, taking my mouse with it, over to the Big Red DON’T CLICK THIS UNLESS YOU WANT TO DELETE YOUR POST button.
Which I clicked.
I’m going into too much detail here because I suspect that, subconsciously, I wanted to delete the post. My internal sensors are telling me I might be uncomfortable with this week’s content: i.e. on the dangers of bullshit. You might’ve noticed this too, but whenever anyone writes about “bullshit” there’s a good chance that their analysis of bullshit might, itself, turn out to be bullshit.
We’ll see how this goes. You’ll have to let me know.
I've recreated what I took to be the most trenchant bits rattling around in memory and added back the crazily appropriate AI generated illustrations.
See if these observations about the Digital Herd haven’t shown up in your own life.
Ahem. Where were we…. oh yeah.
I've been thinking a lot about bullshit lately … um, I mean, “the excessive and deceptive use of technical jargon you can hide behind to make yourself look smart — when you aren’t”. There’s been a lot of it lately.
Many of you might recall Harry Frankfurt 's little book of the same name (On Bullshit, Princeton University Press, 2005) which wasn't very good, by the way. It contained roughly one paragraph of relevant analysis packaged for sale and marketing and topped off, in many ways, with the very bullshit it purported to analyze. Why would anybody buy such a book, a book about bullshit with extra actual bullshit added in order to reach 67 pages?
Because it was written by a well regarded professor of philosophy at Princeton and published by his own home press.
— which is exactly what I’m talking about.
The use of obfuscatory jargon to hide the fact that you 1) don’t really have much to say or 2) are trying to convince someone you’re right by baffling them with bullshit, or, more likely 3) that you’re trying to say something you don’t really understand yourself and have figured out that if you use enough technical terminology you’ll sound smart enough to sneak by while remaining ignorant. Usually, this sort of thing is designed to fool others but sometimes people can even fool themselves into thinking they know what they’re talking about.
You have probably found yourself in a situation like this, listening to someone drone on and on, filled with self certainty and self importance, their words tangled and spilling out in a layer too dense to unpack and to such a depth that nothing can grow through it — even if you try to convert it to compost. Most annoying.
The rhetorical power in this Aegean Stables of manure is that the amount of effort it takes to flush all that crap out of the way — to see if there’s anything meaningful hiding in it (yes, like a pony) — is magnitudes greater than the effort it took to produce it. You need Hercules. The speaker might be doing it deliberately or accidentally. It doesn’t matter since the smell is the same. Oh, and it turns out there’s a name for this tactic — actually, two names!
The Gish Gallop and Brandolini’s Law.
[Trust me, click the links and then save ‘em for later. They’re a fun thing to know and I promise they'll come in handy.]
The Digital Herd is well fed on this kind of diet. Consider the weaponization of critical race theory, a kind of specialized flung-feces that is neither critical nor about race theory. The Herd is fed back their own fears through the right wing media trough, like a tasty and addictive diet of jimson weed mixed with crack cocaine.
Like that.
And like this.
Once properly prepared, the Herd is then stampeded off into school board meetings across the country where they can moo and stamp their feet and create the political conditions required by their handlers. Other recent variations include Fear of Drag Queens, Fear of Trans-folk and, of course, Fear of “The Gays”.
Horse Hockey in the media is no surprise. These days the internet provides bridges to every kind of information, knowledge, and advice but under each one is a forest of trolls ready to spread poison over anything that grows.
No surprises. And no surprises if you live in the business universe.
Have you had to attend those mandatory management training workshops where you’re exposed to soporific “wellness seminars,” “work flow analysis consultancies,” “disruptive innovation training,” “leadership team building exercises,” etc?
<Ouch, it actually hurt to write those down>
That particular brand of feces is designed to produce the illusion that management is doing something — without the annoyance of actually, you know, doing something. Remember those panel sessions?
Still, the trip is reimbursed, you got to fly business class, and the hotel usually has a minibar.
Oh, and here’s the where the political gets personal. It’s not even a surprise to discover mountains of manure in those zones of 21st century intellectual culture where you might hope to escape it. It’s everywhere.
Mostly I’m irked, and increasingly so lately, because this is somewhat personal. I confess there are people inside the Academy who have created entire careers, and shelves of publication, by playing Cat's Cradle with technical jargon.
It’s personal because I wrote an entire doctoral dissertation on Hegel's natural philosophy, categorizable — easily, famously, and historically — as the most technically dense and impenetrably obtuse jargon ever created in western civilization. No, really, it’s that bad. [Don't believe me? Here, go have a look.]
Yeah, I’m bragging a little bit.
It’s just that while I was writing this rascal I was not allowed, under any circumstances, to use Hegel’s technical jargon — and the whole damned thing is technical jargon. My mentors, committee members, advisor and supervisor were all of a mind that any student who falls easily into the habit of using too much technical jargon might be using that jargon to mask their own lack of understanding. It’s easier to learn how words can be put together in a sentence than to understand what the sentence means.1
They were right. You can pretty easily pick up the technical lingo of a discipline and deploy it. Think about people who drop phrases like “quantum singularity” into conversation or, ahem, self-help books when they don’t have enough math to know what quantum physics actually is? There’s a name for that, too: Quantum flapdoodle, which is easily the nicest way to call something bullshit ever devised.
We have this happen in philosophy all the time. The technical terms found in Hegel, Marx, and all kinds of contemporary philosophy are… well, dangerously technical, but easy to use — and to use in ways that will make you look brilliant because nobody will understand what you’re saying. Theodor Adorno even wrote a provocative and, for some, an antagonizing book about the whole problem of jargon — The Jargon of Authenticity — targeting (mostly Heidegger but also) those intellectuals, and pseudo-intellectuals, who had weaponized philosophical jargon in order to hurl their verbal assaults, like cobblestones chucked by 60’s vintage French student protesters, at the police squadrons of intellectual propriety.
I’ll leave you with a few of my favorite critiques of intellectual bullshit. They are all worth a look.
Leszek Kolakowski’s wonderful article from the ancient days ago called the Theory of Not-Gardening.
I’ll be taking up film theory in the next Weekly Moo.
hiho
I can still remember, too vividly, dragging the bloody stumps of my ego out of Graeme Nicholson's office after meetings about a latest chapter. Graeme was adamant that I should be able to explain these concepts in plain and simple English and that any failure to do so indicated that I was relying on the difficulty of the technical jargon to bullshit my way through the process, as an indication that I didn't really understand the material. And, as Emil Fackenheim once said to me, as kindly as he could, “Mr. Peterson, if you can't explain it to a 5 year old, do you really understand it yourself?”
The only correct answer to this question is “No.”
Nowadays when I read academic articles, I always ask the same question.
I think you are absolutely right. Black Friday has in fact floated entirely free from Thanksgiving, and in fact I get as many Black Friday come-ons from merchants in my inbox from Canada, where they celebrate Thanksgiving in October, as from the US. Don't need to eat turkey with family in order to shop.
I flatter myself in thinking I actually have the intellect to fully appreciate this stuff, but I love it and feel good about myself if I get it even a little bit. I'm impressed with the research, the annotations and the earthiness overall. Thank you!