I toil, like many others in my generation, in a corporate world. There I seek illusory glory, and bear unnamable sufferings.

I suppose, if completely submitted to its culture, one could indeed be happy and successful and well-fed. But one would drift away from one’s true self, and interact in chary manner towards people with similar guises, and be a team player in a machinery that exists solely to profit its shareholders.

Yet it would be far-fetched to call this “suffering” when we consider the magnitude of upheavals in our era.

To those who were dying of hunger in China in 1960s, it would be a divine blessing to be working in a corporate world. But to those who studied Renaissance in college, it is only natural to regard Excel spreadsheets with contempt.

It is with this sense of ambivalence, an irresolution between feeling grateful and feeling entrapped, that I conduct my professional life.

To relieve my petty sufferings, I try to emulate the qualities of J Alfred Prufrock:

no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

At times, alas, I also bullshit.

*             *             *

I read Harry Frankfurt’s little book, at the right time, in the right place. While exhausted by a busy working week, trapped in a small seat of a restless aeroplane, elevated above the glittering city landscapes, I started reading On Bullshit.

“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.”

Harry Frankfurt, Professor Emeritus of Princeton University, starts his book with such observation and seeks a clear definition of bullshit. He tries to identify its characteristics, analyzes its uses, and explains why there are so much bullshits in our world.

Different kinds of bullshit exist…

The first kind of bullshit corrupts the ideal of craftsmanship. The book offers a systematic and whimsical explanation:

Excrement is not designed or crafted at all: it is merely emitted, or dumped. It may have a more or less coherent shape, or it may not, but it is in any case certainly not wrought.

The second kind may even be well-crafted, but it violates objectivity and discipline. Consider, for example, how politics and advertising use advance techniques of statistics and psychology in order to craft nonsense.

The third kind can be found in idle talks and bull sessions, in which people try out different attitudes and viewpoints without committing to a certain belief, especially in controversial topics such as religions and politics.

The forth kind is hot air, elaborate yet empty talks. The book quotes a poem by Ezra Pound (Canto LXXIV), in which the person, apparently after enduring a load of religious mumbo-jumbo, demands thus:

Hey Snag wots in the bibl’?
Wot are the books ov the bible?
Name ‘em, don’t bullshit me.

How does bullshit differ from lying of bluffing? Professor Frankfurt had a remarkable insight. A liar must know what truth is in order to invent a lie, but a bullshitter is indifferent to truth and falsehood. A bullshitter has a different mode of creativity:

It is more expansive and independent, with more spacious opportunities for improvisation, color, and imaginative play. This is less a matter of craft than of art. Hence the familiar notion of the “bullshit artist.”

Bullshit is unavoidable when we need to say things we don’t fully understand. Therefore bullshit is unavoidable in our world, where truths and values are often considered relative, and every field of knowledge is almost unfathomable except to its specialists.

Professor Frankfurt believes that because of this loss of confidence in objective inquiry, we retreat from the ideal of correctness to an alternative ideal of sincerity. Unable to fathom the truths about reality, an individual seeks to be true to his own self instead.

This may sound like a noble goal, until one reads the last sentences of the book —

Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial — notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.

Posted on August 23rd, 2006  | RSS 2.0 |