Recently my next door neighbor moved out, having failed to be accepted into the graduate program of her choice at the University of Colorado here in Boulder. I thought of her as The Swiss Miss, though I never said this aloud in her presence. Once, while helping her to edit the later-failing proposal (now, would I do that? Shame on you for even thinking it!) she referred to people of color as "other species." Just prior to her return to the Alpine canton that produced this peculiar mentality, I ran into her and a few friends as they were readying a garage sale, so I got the jump on the best stuff for way cheap. Among my scores was a small bookcase that I installed in my downstairs bathroom -- a furniture placement I highly recommend.

Granted, you didn't need to know all that. Just the usual warmup rhetorical filler.

What I was just noticing, and what I had intended to convey before that first paragraph intruded itself, is that most of the titles on those three short shelves come from university presses. If you've been reading CBO for a while, you'd certainly recognize many of these books, as I've been using screen snaps of their covers as cheap-thrill graphical embellishment on these very pages. Among the presses represented are those of Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Cornell, Duke, the University of Chicago, the Universities of Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, the State University of New York. And, of course, how could we forget Princeton.

I favor (and savor) these kinds of resources because the issues I'm researching for my own book (to be released sometime later this decade by some lucky publisher) are so politically charged and culturally thorny -- Oprahesque "spirituality," breathy-babe "feminism," triumphalist TechÜberAlles "new media," etc. -- and I want to be sure to remain fair and balanced in my treatment. Of course I've also been collecting quite a number of primary sources by various pointy-headed New Age numskulls.

But the credentialed professoriat is crucial to establishing my objectivity and critical distance from such highly popular and hugely sensitive themes as channeling, vision quests, spirit guides, do-it-yourself shamanism, and all manner of "quantum" hoo-hah. For this reason, I was quite excited to stumble across the following slim volume published just this last January (though it's been around for awhile) by Princeton University Press. It appears to be the definitive reference on the subject. Here's a clip...

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.

In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, we have no theory. I propose to begin the development of a theoretical understanding of bullshit, mainly by providing some tentative and exploratory philosophical analysis. I shall not consider the rhetorical uses and misuses of bullshit. My aim is simply to give a rough account of what bullshit is and how it differs from what it is not--or (putting it somewhat differently) to articulate, more or less sketchily, the structure of its concept.

Before I shell out for this marvelous sounding book, I'll check the reviews on HighBeam, see how it's been received by a jury of its peeers (two syllables, not a typo). Ah, here's one now...

from: Whatever ("On Bullshit"), book review by Jonathan Lear
source: The New Republic, 21 March 2005
via: HighBeam™ Research

The run-of-the-mill bullshitter goes through the motions of hiding his indifference to the truth or the falsity of what he is saying, but the bullshit artist revels in the fact that he can put his indifference on display. Since nothing is hidden -- the bullshit has in effect been declared to be bullshit -- the only thing that can sustain it is the bullshit itself. I am surprised that Frankfurt overlooked this phenomenon, since instances of it are not all that difficult to find in the academic world. Frankfurt reports that he originally wrote this essay to present at a humanities center. It begs credulity to think he was not trying to confront his colleagues with an exercise in collective self-criticism. But he seems to have blinked at the crucial moment.

Oh yes, that's rich. But read on, it gets even better...

This is all the more surprising since Frankfurt gets right to the nub of the problem: "The contemporary proliferation of bullshit ... has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality, and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things really are." Actually, skepticism is not the same thing as bullshit. There are genuine and deep ways of wondering about the reality and the possibility of objective truth. Skepticism can be an honorable calling. But in the contemporary world it often degenerates into a received attitude, a hip pose, a rhetorical ploy, a kind of academic party trick. Imagine such a skeptic coming to the humanities center: what kind of paper is he or she going to give? An earnest argument that there really is no such thing as truth? Of course not. Such a paper would lack "irony," which is these days the great validator of intellectual authority. (I put "irony" in scare quotes because the current version has almost nothing in common with real irony.) So the paper will inevitably be an "ironic" performance that the truth simply does not matter to the speaker. This is not skepticism, it is bad theater. And the point that the "ironists" are making is that in their bullshit-artistry they can get away with it.

The author of the article, philospher-cum-psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear -- who is no less than "the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor at the Committee on Social Thought and in the Department of Philosophy" at the University of Chicago -- has also (not surprisingly, given the above review) written a fascinating sounding book called Therapeutic Action: An Earnest Plea for Irony. Hmmm, I think I'll order that one too. I like to keep an open mind.