Dedicated to George Carlin I: The deconstruction of bullshit
July 22nd, 2008 by Alan
“There are scores of human insects who are ready at a moment’s notice to reveal the will of God on any possible subject.”
George Bernard Shaw
I have often referred to George Carlin as the finest, most insightful non-academic linguist in the English language.
Fun stuff
Mostly all the public sees of linguistics is what I call “fun” or “schoolmarm” linguistics.
Yes, there have been very insightful books on verbal self-defense by Suzette Haden Elgin, as well as much useful language study by Deborah Tannen. Other than that, linguists are silent, except for the irrepressible Chomsky, one of the most overrated minds of all time (though I agree with much of his criticism of American imperialism).
What we see in “fun” linguistics is not serious pursuit of the truth via the tools of linguistics…but cocktail party chatter. Fun linguistics is preoccupied with questions such as…
– Which of two expressions is correct (or “more correct”?)
– Where did this word or expression come from?
– What is the trajectory of the current cliché or buzzword?
– What slogan or saying has this or that celebrity made popular (e.g., throw under the bus)?
– What are the many meanings of this word or phrase?
That’s all I ever see. It’s fun stuff, doesn’t hurt anybody or ruffle any feathers. William Safire has made a second livelihood out of it, and more power to him. But he is not the only language maven in the land.
George Carlin did his share of fun linguistics and language oddities, but he went way beyond that. Again and again he skewered dishonesty and hypocrisy in language.
Path to truth
What about linguistics not as a source of cocktail party chatter… or as a way to play linguistic “gotcha” games of correctness and one-upmanship — but as a legitimate branch of knowledge, as the search for truth?
What do the facts of language tell us about ourselves and the way we shape our world and manipulate each other? If the subjects are never discussed, then all the bullshit and manipulation can continue unquestioned, and for some people that is unquestionably a good thing.
It is good to keep certain kinds of knowledge from people.
Three of the properties of language to which most people are quite blind (they will be considered in future posts) are:
the ability to talk about things that are not there;
the ability to assign multiple labels to the same reality;
and the ability to comprehend multiple realities under one label (i.e., have different meanings), depending on one’s feelings and perspective.
Let us first consider our ability to talk about things that are not there, one of the key differentiating factors between human and animal communication – and the one that enables us to traffic in BULLSHIT, hereafter BS.
Comic/magic masters Penn and Teller say it right out – bullshit. In fact, it’s the title of their TV show. They’re hard-core skeptics, secular humanists, and libertarians. My kind of guys. But I’ll mostly go with the acronym, if only for brevity, because I’ll be referring to it a lot.
Numerous linguistically and rhetorically sophisticated people have tried to define this familiar but elusive form of linguistic behavior. A quick Web search will help you find these other sources. My purpose here is to provide an original formulation.
BS defined
Hence my definition of BS: Bullshit is song passed off as fact. It may be deceptive, if the purveyors don’t believe their own BS. But it may be innocent, in cases where they actually do believe it (or try to, encouraged by group pressure like religious services and political rallies). Either way, it’s BS.
Facts
A fact, for purposes of this discussion, is word or a set of words that can be conventionally applied to a specific thing or situation. The key word here is “conventionally.” A statement – such as the commonplace “Humans breathe air.” — can be a highly conventional if not universally accepted fact. Without a background of agreed-upon facts, we would not be able to conduct daily life.
However, many of our worst cultural, religious, and political disagreements are founded on disagreement about the manner in which a word or words should be applied to a particular reality. A recent example, involving an increase of troops in Iraq, is all the discussion about the avoidance of “escalation” and the use of “surge.”
Either way, more soldiers. But the one is what we did in Vietnam, so we must not do it again, even though the word could be applied to the same reality.
Scientific disagreement is also a disagreement about the facts: which statements are facts, which facts are relevant, and so on. The truth, although slippery and approachable, is defined in terms of the facts that we can agree on.
Some areas of science seem a little fact-mushy, e.g., cosmology and physics. Sometimes I don’t know if the scientists are taking their metaphors as reality — as with string theory — or talking about realities that, although they can be represented mathematically, are beyond the everyday mind’s conception, like the notion of other dimensions or some of the concepts of quantum physics.
Song
A song, on the other hand, is language — usually very nice-sounding language — about things that are not real: things that we would like to be real, things that the right people are recommending to us, things that we can dream or daydream about, things that might have been imagined by other people whom we (in the case of religion, inappropriately) revere.
I might have used the word “fantasy,” but a fantasy is something clearly unreal. Songs may seem to be real. Perhaps we want them to be real. They have, to use a current buzzword, “truthiness.”
The most obvious examples are, well, songs. Also poetry, drama, and fiction. People like to draw a nice, bright line between fact and fiction, but the line is regularly crossed, as with the roman a clef or the memoir that turned out to be part fictionalized.
Also qualifying as song are: the language of political campaign speeches and most political rhetoric in general; almost all the language of religious services; and most of the language of marketing and advertising (insofar as it does not factually describe product attributes).
BSers
Now we are in a position to take another look at BS: when somebody takes a product of his/her imagination, be it a politician making a vague but high-sounding speech, an advertiser with a message that appeals to one’s deepest insecurities, or a cleric trading in mythology and the promise of an afterlife, the person is passing song off as fact. He/she is exuding BS.
New Age BS
It’s amusing the way some people shed their Judaeo-Christian roots and place their faith in other mythologies, as if by being different, these are somehow “better.” Nancy Grabowski becomes Something-ananda.
New Age belief and practice, from healing touch to crystals, simply stretches the bounds of BS farther and wider (full disclaimer: a few practices have worked for me, notably breathwork). Penn and Teller could do a whole season on its varieties. I know a woman who has the gall to make money by providing people with “past life regression.”
It gets weirder and weirder. Any kind of coincidence that reinforces people’s irrational beliefs is accepted as true, just because it sounds as if it ought to be true.
If one is really lucky, one will find, forwarded into one’s in-box, a communique from someone who believes God’s nutritional plan included making vegetables and fruits look like the organs they benefit!
So a cross-section of a carrot looks like the eye…a tomato has four chambers and is red; the same is true of the heart, and tomatoes are heart-healthy. There are color pictures of the fruits and veggies.
As Penn might say, “Put on your bullshit masks, folks, it’s flyin’ thick and fast!”
Huge numbers of people believe this stuff, without subjecting it to a moment’s scrutiny. Bananas look like penises, so should I eat them for my virility?
Criteria of truth
After all my years in the speechifying and rhetoric, the best quote on the subject is still the observation of Paul Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, that “The truth is that which most people believe. And they believe that which is repeated most often.”
Goebbels knew that under the right conditions, a song may become fact (although a subjective fact) for many people, e.g., loyal Democrats and Republicans; devout God-believers; people who wear corporate logos on their T-shirts — and, of course, people who believe that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with 9/11.
The price of trust
It must be so nice to be able to trust the government, to trust God, to trust Hugo Boss. But the price is way too high. You have to park your wits at the door and put your faith in people who are no smarter than you, and possibly not even as smart.
BS as fertilizer
It’s not money that’s the root of all evil. The root of all evil is the human mind and the horrendous behavioral decisions it’s capable of making. The fertilizer for that evil is bullshit: the invitation to turn off your thinking mind and let someone else decide how you should live.
Just because some BS merchant said so, people do things as ridiculous as refusing to push elevator buttons on the Sabbath…or as appalling as persecuting and killing other people.
Bullshit is the music of mindless conformity. Without bullshit, we would not have governments of psychotics taking over countries and leading them to ruin. Without bullshit, we would not have centuries of religious atrocities, which continue to this day. Without bullshit, we would not have our frantic hyper-consumptive (and probably unsustainable) culture.
Just think of the possibilities.
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Alan M. Perlman is a secular humanist speaker and author — most recently, of An Atheist Reads the Torah: Secular Humanistic Perspectives on the Five Books of Moses. For information, go to www.trafford.com/06-0056.