A Canticle for Leibowitz

Now that the first semester of grad school is over (whoop whoop!), I thought I'd rejoin the conversation, too. Yesterday while I was sitting in the airport for seven hours thanks to a canceled flight to Oklahoma, I read A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller. It's a bleak futuristic novel set in a post-nuclear apocalypse North America. I generally don't read science fiction like this, but Dr. S recommended it when I was working on my senior project, so finally thought I'd give it a go.

The book is quite well-written as far as science fiction goes. It takes place in three sections, separated by time, over the course of which the human race repeats is nuclear mistake and blows itself up again. On the whole the book is quite grim. Humans carry not only their individual sins but the sins of the whole human race; the human race is doomed to repeat its futile search for perfection, becoming more and more jaded with the results of the pursuit of wealth and power until it destroys itself and starts over again.

Despite this pessimism, the book has a strong but very complicated thread of Christian theology. Its main characters are monks, dedicated to the preservation of human culture and learning through fallouts, wars, and plagues. Because of that, there's a lot of Latin in the book, and some of the story's most beautiful moments center on Christian imagery of crucifixion and redemption. At one point, the author makes the statement that humans can never be divine: we may have infinite power and wisdom, but we can never have infinite love, the third quality that makes God who He is (thankfully!).

Yet it's hard to know exactly what the author's position is toward Christianity. Does Christianity offer valid hope for a world full of human monsters? Or is it merely foolish idealism in the face of humanity's proven tendency toward evil? What's the use of hope if we're just going to blow ourselves up again anyway? Is the human race worth saving? The story doesn't provide easy answers to any of these questions, and on the whole I was left thoughtful but depressed.

On Bullshit

Since I was the one who insisted on reawakening this comatose blog, I'll be the one to break the ice, starting with a short, easy, and entertaining classic: Harry G. Frankfurt's On Bullshit.

If writing stuff like this is his job, then I want to be a philosophy professor at Princeton, too. This philosophical essay on bullshit traces the origins of the word, and words related to it, in the Oxford English Dictionary. It includes an amusing anecdote in which Wittgenstein ostensibly calls out a Cambridge college friend on her bullshit. He also referenced Augustine's essay, "Lying," which outlines eight different types of lies, none of which qualify as bullshit. (Frankfurt quotes Augustine to strengthen a distinction between lies and bullshit, but I mention it here because Augustine's essay sounds interesting in itself.)

According to Frankfurt, "the essence of bullshit" is a "lack of connection to a concern with truth" and an "indifference to how things really are" (33-34). The most memorable and important point he makes is his distinction between lies and bullshit: "The bullshitter...does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are" (61). [emphasis mine] Another defining element of bullshit is the purpose for which it is used-- to get away with something, or to convey a certain impression of oneself (23, 18).

Frankfurt leaves us to consider "the problem of understanding why our attitude toward bullshit is generally more benign than our attitude toward lying" (50).

Since bullshit is nearly as ubiquitous as the air we breathe, it would be difficult to take much offense to it. When exposed, a lie arouses a sense of betrayal and anger in those who were misled, whereas bullshit is just somewhat irritating. I think it's possible that all the bullshitters in the political realm exploit this to their advantage, scapegoating the liars so they can continue getting away with their bullshit.

Any thoughts on Frankfurt's question?