The mysterious and provocative Dr. Ink burst onto the American journalism scene in 2001 and wrote more than 300 columns for Poynter’s Web site. He appeared — and then disappeared — in a flash, leaving his legion of fans distraught and confused. Poynter is happy to report that the Good Doctor has emerged from seclusion. He clearly has something on his mind. He has become too reclusive and mercurial a character to predict his future actions. But we are always pleased to offer him a platform for his unconventional ideas.
Dear Readers:
Dr. Ink visited his favorite bookstore when his eyes locked on a tiny volume on the best-seller rack. The title of this elegant 67-page volume was “On Bullshit” and the author was Harry G. Frankfurt. More surprising than the scatological title was the name of the publisher — Princeton University Press — and the background of the author, described as a “renowned moral philosopher,” the author of works such as “Necessity, Volition, and Love” and “The Importance of What We Care About.”
The book’s brevity and title have elevated the work to best-seller status. It is being given as a sarcastic gift, no doubt, to many a notorious bull slinger.
The book’s title has exposed the continuing fastidiousness of certain family newspapers. While some used the full title in reviews and listings, The New York Times blanked out the objectionable syllable. Doc’s favorite newspaper, the St. Pete Times, decided not to run a review because its standards will not permit publication of a perceived obscenity.
Whoa unto those who would expose impressionable young minds to paragraphs such as this one:
One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted much sustained inquiry.
That is the book’s first paragraph, and the most graphic. The rest is neither obscene nor gratuitous. Instead, it comes off as simultaneously dry and salty, as if written by the illegitimate love child of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Cloris Leachman. The author acknowledges the influence: “Wittgenstein devoted his philosophical energies largely to identifying and combating what he regarded as insidiously disruptive forms of ‘nonsense.'”
In the end, Frankfurt’s dissertation on BS betrays the promise of its title. On the linguistic level, we get little more than quick visits to the Oxford English Dictionary along with examples of usage in literature. Although the term seems to have been born during the First World War — possibly among Army troops railing against military bureaucracy — analogues go back at least to Chaucer and other medievalists who often used scatological humor to prick the pretensions of windy and self-important speech. Frankfurt seems oblivious to such precedents.
The author also missed an opportunity to link his analysis more directly to the intentional misuse of political language in our time. Here he could have advanced the argument made by Orwell after World War II that language abuse leads to political abuse, and vice versa. Frankfurt gets close to the mark when he describes a culture in which many people are moved to communicate opinions, even if uninformed.
“Closely related instances arise from the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything, or at least everything that pertains to the conduct of his country’s affairs. The lack of any significant connection between a person’s opinions and his apprehension of reality will be even more severe, needless to say, for someone who believes it his responsibility, as a conscientious moral agent, to evaluate events and conditions in all parts of the world,” wrote Frankfurt.
Dr. Ink cannot read that last paragraph without thinking of the proliferation of humbug and claptrap brought down upon us by the gasbags of cable television and talk radio. The Doc remembers a description by Hemingway that good writers — that includes journalists — have built-in bullshit detectors, sensors that allow them to sniff and expose half-truths, lies and evasions.
Perhaps a quick journey through this text will remind us of the value of such practical skepticism and of the power of straight talk, a precise word, a truthful phrase.
Sincerely,
Dr. Ink
