Skip to main content

Pseudo-profundity and Intellectuals - I'm on BBC Radio 3 tonite

I will be on BBC Radio 3 The Verb Tonight discussing "intellectuals" and pseudo-profundity. I had a right old punch up with Prof Paul Taylor (Communications Studies, University of Leeds). But we made up afterwards over cake.

You can here it live tonite 10pm and on the website for a week after that: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006tnsf

Here is a quote from Baudrillard that Paul chose for the programme:

For ethnology to live, its object must die. But the latter revenges itself by dying for having been "discovered", and defies by its death the science that wants to take hold of it. Doesn't every science live on this paradoxical slope to which it is doomed by the evanescence of its object in the very process of its apprehension, and by the pitiless reversal this dead object exerts on it? Like Orpheus it always turns around too soon, and its object, like Eurydice, falls back into Hades ... the logical evolution of a science is to distance itself ever further from its object until it dispenses with it entirely: its autonomy evermore fantastical in reaching its pure form.

I suggested this quotation was a combination of a banal observation and a falsehood, tarted up with a reference to Greek mythology. I read out an edited bit from my book Believing Bullshit: How Not To Fall Into An Intellectual Black Hole:


PSEUDO-PROFUNDITY

Pseudo-profundity is the art of sounding profound while talking tosh. Unlike the art of actually being profound, the art of sounding profound is not particularly difficult to master. As we’ll see, there are certain basic recipes that can produce fairly convincing results – good enough to convince others, and perhaps even yourself, that you have gained some sort of profound insight into the human condition.

State the obvious

To begin with, try pointing out the blindingly obvious. Only do it i-n-c-r-e-d-i-b-l-y s-l-o-w-l-y and with an air of superior wisdom. The technique works best if your pronouncements focus on one of life’s big themes, such as love, money and death. So, for example:

We were all children once
Money can’t buy you love
Death is unavoidable

State the obvious in a sufficiently earnest way, perhaps following up with a pregnant pause, and you may find others begin to nod in agreement, perhaps murmering “Yes, how very true that is”.

Contradict yourself


A second technique is to select words with opposite or incompatible meanings and cryptically combine them in what appears to be a straightforward contradiction. Here are a few examples:

Sanity is just another kind of madness
Life is a often a form of death
The ordinary is extraordinary

If you’re an aspiring guru, why not produce your own contradictory remarks? The great beauty of such comments is that they make your audience do the work for you. Their meaning is not for you, the guru, to say – it’s for your followers to figure out. Just sit back, adopt a sage-like expression, and let them do the intellectual labour.

None of this is to say that such seemingly contradictory remarks can’t convey something genuinely profound. But, given the formulaic way contradictions can be used to generate pseudo-profundity, it’s wise not to be too easily impressed.
Sadly ( it’s not just lifestyle gurus etc  who use language in this way)  some corners of  academia are dominated by intellectuals whose writing amounts to little than pseudo-profundity. Strip away the academic jargon and pseudo-scientific references from their impressive-sounding pronouncements and you’ll find there’s precious little left.

Those thinkers often referred to as “post-modern” include more than their fair share of such jargon-fuelled poseurs. So easy is it, in fact, to produce convincing-looking post-modern gobbledegook that a wag called Andrew Bulhak constructed a computer programme that will write you your own “post-modern” essay, complete with references.
I just did and received an essay that begins:

The primary theme of Cameron’s model of neostructural Marxism is the common ground between society and culture. Sontag’s analysis of Debordist situation states that society has objective value. However, Marx promotes the use of Marxist socialism to analyse class. Debordist situation holds that the goal of the observer is deconstruction. Therefore, the subject is interpolated into a neostructural Marxism that includes art as a paradox. Several materialisms concerning semanticist subdialectic theory may be found.




Comments

Galactor said…
Here's a profound comment derived from your reconciliation with your adversary:

You can have your cake AND eat it.
Stephen Law said…
Yes indeed. That expression always puzzled me. Why can't you have your cake and eat it. You can hardly eat it if you have not got it. Took me till I was late forties before I figured out what it meant.
Galactor said…
By the way Stephen, small spelling mistake - "here" should be "hear" (unless you are being profound of course)
Michael Baldwin said…
Well clearly you can no longer just keep the cake as your possession if you eat it :)
You have to choose between consuming it and keeping it, and hence you can't have your cake and eat it too!
Anonymous said…
That was fucking profound
theObserver said…
Have you come across the Postmodern Generator ? :-
http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

Refresh the screen and it randomly generates post-modern sounding gibberish. I just tried the generator and got this :-

"The characteristic theme of the works of Joyce is the role of the artist as participant. Therefore, the without/within distinction prevalent in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man is also evident in Ulysses. Baudrillard uses the term ‘predialectic theory’ to denote the difference between society and sexual identity.

And of course, there's cases of intellectuals deliberately writing gibberish to prove a point and having it accepted and published and praised in prestigious in post-modern journals.

Popular posts from this blog

EVIDENCE, MIRACLES AND THE EXISTENCE OF JESUS

(Published in Faith and Philosophy 2011. Volume 28, Issue 2, April 2011. Stephen Law. Pages 129-151) EVIDENCE, MIRACLES AND THE EXISTENCE OF JESUS Stephen Law Abstract The vast majority of Biblical historians believe there is evidence sufficient to place Jesus’ existence beyond reasonable doubt. Many believe the New Testament documents alone suffice firmly to establish Jesus as an actual, historical figure. I question these views. In particular, I argue (i) that the three most popular criteria by which various non-miraculous New Testament claims made about Jesus are supposedly corroborated are not sufficient, either singly or jointly, to place his existence beyond reasonable doubt, and (ii) that a prima facie plausible principle concerning how evidence should be assessed – a principle I call the contamination principle – entails that, given the large proportion of uncorroborated miracle claims made about Jesus in the New Testament documents, we should, in the absence of indepen...

The Evil God Challenge and the "classical" theist's response

On another blog, FideCogitActio, some theists of a "classical" stripe (that's to say, like Brian Davies, Edward Feser) are criticisng the Evil God Challenge (or I suppose, trying to show how it can be met, or sidestepped). The main post includes this: In book I, chapter 39 , Aquinas argues that “there cannot be evil in God” (in Deo non potest esse malum). Atheists like Law must face the fact that, if the words are to retain any sense, “God” simply cannot be “evil”. As my comments in the thread at Feser’s blog aimed to show, despite how much he mocks “the privation theory of evil,” Law himself cannot escape its logic: his entire argument requires that the world ought to appear less evil if it is to be taken as evidence of a good God. Even though he spurns the idea that evil is a privation of good, his account of an evil world is parasitic on a good ideal; this is no surprise, though, since all evil is parasitic on good ( SCG I, 11 ). Based on the conclusions of se...

Sye show continues

I was sent a link to this , for those interested in the never ending saga of Sye TenBruggencate and his "proof" of the existence of God. Hit "sinner ministries' proof of the existence of god" link below or on side bar for 30+ earlier posts on this topic that I wrote during an extended interchange with him last summer (check the literally many hundreds of comments attached to these posts if you really want to get into how Sye thinks and argues). Sye's amazing intial "proof" is available here . PS. For those interested, my own "presuppositional" proof, parodying Sye's proof by his principle "the impossibility of the contrary" (which turns out to be the key to Sye's proof) is: My claim: Sye's mind is addled and his thinking unreliable because he was hit on the head by a rock. Prove this is false, Sye. Try to, and I will say - "But your "proof" presupposes your mind is not addled and you can recognise a pr...