Author: Ophelia Benson

Joshua Knobe notes a complicated question:

How is one to know which aspect of a person counts as that person’s true self?

The philosophical tradition says

that what is most distinctive and essential to a human being is the capacity for rational reflection. A person might find herself having various urges, whims or fleeting emotions, but these are not who she most fundamentally is.  If you want to know who she truly is, you would have to look to the moments when she stops to reflect and think about her deepest values.

Which sounds right, in a way. But…

But when I mention this view to people outside the world of philosophy, they often seem stunned that anyone could ever believe it.  They are immediately drawn to the very opposite view.  The true self, they suggest, lies precisely in our suppressed urges and unacknowledged emotions, while our ability to reflect is just a hindrance that gets in the way of this true self’s expression.  To find a moment when a person’s true self comes out, they think, one needs to look at the times when people are so drunk or overcome by passion that they are unable to suppress what is deep within them.

That’s interesting. The last bit seems slightly odd to me. Those times are extreme, and rare, so it seems odd to think they reveal the true self. Surely the duller homeostatic self that eats breakfast and picks fights on the internet is just as real as the one who is drunk.

Then again, there is another kind of being “overcome” or caught up, which is Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi’s flow. I used to be unsure whether I sometimes got that when concentrating on a piece of writing or not, until one day I worked on a piece for Comment is Free on a flight to San Jose and was literally incredulous to look out the window and see we were almost over San Francisco. I had thought we were maybe crossing the Oregon border. Maybe that’s the real self. But that’s the opposite of being drunk, in fact – it’s thinking in such a focused way that time gets swallowed.

Anyway; Knobe thinks neither is right.

But it seems that the matter is more complex. People’s ordinary understanding of the true self appears to involve a kind of value judgment, a judgment about what sorts of lives are really worth living.

Well yes. I choose writing over being drunk.

I have a new project. My new project is to convince people on the left that they must work together with Tea Partiers.

This may seem like a difficult thing to do, but I like a challenge. There are many urgent problems in the world, such as countless people who still have the wrong kind of light bulbs, and the only way those problems can be solved is if I – yes I, I alone, I personally, I bravely yet gently yet determinedly yet lovingly – build a bridge between the left and the Tea Party. The division between the left and the Tea Party is divisive, and when there is divisiveness, problems don’t get solved, because people don’t work together, so it is urgent and vital and very important to heal this tragic divide by telling the left to forget about all the things they disagree with the Tea Party about. It would be pointless to tell the Tea Party to reciprocate, of course, and besides, the left is…well you know. So the work is to tell the left how to heal the divide, while not telling the Tea Party anything, because it already.

This is my healing work that I plan to do. I believe in love and reaching out and bridges and unity. I hope you all wish me luck and every success with my work, which I will be working on in many ways for many weeks to come, and which I will be reporting on via Twitter, Facebook, the New York Times, the Washington Post, People, USA Today, the Huffington Post, Tikkun, First Things, Christianity Today, my seven blogs, some of my friends’ blogs which I haven’t counted yet, and CBS News. In spite of all this fame and exposure I remain impressively humble and kind of bashfully surprised by all the success and approval I report daily via Twitter, Facebook, the New York Times, the Washington Post, People, USA Today, the Huffington Post, Tikkun, First Things, Christianity Today, my seven blogs, and some of my friends’ blogs which I haven’t counted yet.

Once I’ve got the left and the Tea Party squared away, I’ll get to work on getting feminists and sexists to work together, then unions and the governor of Wisconsin, then the Taliban and the women of Afghanistan. As I mentioned, I like a challenge. Thank you, god bless you, and god bless the United States of America.

Stephen Law has an excellent (and entertaining) new book, Believing Bullshit. It discusses eight “intellectual black holes” that can yank people into various delusional convictions. He names them “Playing the Mystery Card,” “‘But It Fits!’ and The Blunderbuss,” “Going Nuclear,” “Moving the Semantic Goalposts,” “I Just Know!,” “Pseudoprofundity,” “Piling Up the Anecdotes,” and “Pressing Your Buttons.”

They’re all good, but I think my favorite was “Pseudoprofundity,” maybe because it reminded me of my old Guide to Rhetoric, which alas disappeared in the transition from the old B&W to the new one. The subheads are very reminiscent: State the obvious; Contradict yourself; Deepities; Trite-nalogies; Use jargon; Postmodern pseudoprofundity.

He’s good on Karen Armstrong (in the “Moving the Semantic Goalposts” chapter). He points out that she deals with the problem of evil by saying God isn’t that kind of god.

“God,” says Armstrong, “is merely a symbol of indescribable transcendence,” which points “beyond itself to an ineffable reality.” [p 117]

No room for an evil god there, of course; a symbol can’t be evil; what a silly idea.

However, reading through Armstrong’s book, it becomes apparent her God is not quite so mysterious and ineffable after all. Indeed, Armstrong says that “God” is a symbol of “absolute goodness, beauty, order, peace, truthfulness, justice.” Not only does Armstrong appear here to be effing the ineffable, it seems she also thinks she knows things about this indescribable transcendence of which God is the name. [p 118]

Exactly. It’s a popular move though, so the many faith-huggers clutch it to their bosom while only the few faith-teasers notice that it’s a case of having it both ways.

And that’s how to believe in bullshit.