On Bullshit

On Bullshit is the title of a book by Harry Frankfurt. Since my last post, about Kevin Williamson’s bizarre assertion that Romney will win women voters because having daughters makes him look like a wimp, the book (or at least the excerpt I’ve read in PDF) has been running through my brain.
Frankfurt’s key insight is that bullshit is different from lying. Liars care passionately about the truth in the sense that they want you to believe something that isn’t the truth. Bullshit artists don’t care either way: They’ll fling any argument, true or false, consistent or mutually contradictory, as long as they think it might work.
Supply-side economics for example. Both my local paper (the Northwest Florida Daily News) and the Wall Street Journal jumped on the idea that slashing taxes boosts government revenue when the Reagan administration proposed it in the 1980s. In the 1990s, when government was running a surplus, both papers announced that we needed to slash taxes because it would lower revenue.
W. made the same point before his election—he wanted to slash taxes because the surplus proved they were too high—but now that the surplus is gone, conservatives are back to explaining how tax cuts always, always boost government revenue.
That’s bullshit. All that matters is that rich people get their taxes cut: The rationale changes to whatever makes sense at the moment, even if you contradict what you just said.
Likewise, Newt Gingrich’s claim a couple of years ago that if Christians don’t win the fight for American government, we will end up with a secularist atheist government controlled by radical Muslims. Because, as we know, radical Muslims love to impose atheism.
At the link, I sketch out why I think that made sense to the audience—but to Gingrich? I admit I’m not a mind-reader, but I’m betting he’s throwing bullshit. If he had actual evidence secularism or atheism were bad, he’d have used it, but he didn’t.
The same thing, I think, applies to arguments like Williamson’s: Never mind that Bush and Clinton both had only daughters and both won re-election, he’s just throwing out whatever he can think of that will affirm the traditional Repub position that they’re the manly ones and Dems are wimpy. Which also explains the emphasis on how easily Romney could get laid, as that’s part of manliness for a lot of guys.
In the same vein, we have the NRO columnist who declared he was highly offended by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotamayor because she actually corrected someone on how to pronounce her name—how dare some foreigner come to this country and tell us how to talk! Never mind that Sotamayor is a New Yorker born and raised and that Latino names aren’t “foreign” in any sense—the point was to emphasize Sotamayor’s foreignness (for those conservatives for whom the creeping threat of nonwhites in positions of power is a Bad Thing) and to throw up some reason to find her objectionable. As one blogger put it, it almost certainly isn’t a position the writer ever held until about five seconds before he started writing.
Or Jonah Goldberg claiming that even though veggie burgers have no meat, vegetarians are hypocrites for eating them!
Or Sarah Palin asserting that Americans can’t mention God’s name in the “public square” … while discussing a Supreme Court decision defending the rights of a church to picket funerals.
Frankfurt argues the bad thing about bullshit—over and above being not true—is that it corrodes even respect for the truth. And maybe he has a point. Almost nobody suffers for bullshit (or lies): Goldberg started out as a National Review writer, now he’s a published author and national columnist despite the bullshit, despite his numerous errors. The Washington media still treat Gingrich like a deep thinker and elder statesman rather than a pompous, hate-spewing, nonsense-spouting hack (my wife compared him to Baron Harkonen in Dune: “The bullshit must flow!”).
It’s also a problem that with all the challenges facing America, we have to take time out to combat the bullshit artists and point out they are, indeed flinging bullshit. We can’t let the lies go unchallenged … but it sure is frustrating.