Ivy League Prof Sifts Through BS

Prudishness prevents us from using the word, but it is one that is familiar to almost everyone, and almost everyone engages in spreading it around at one time or another.

For propriety's sake, we'll call it BS. It could be defined as hyped-up, boastful, insincere or pretentious talk. And it's so prevalent in American life that it's caught the attention of our deepest thinkers.

There is a bestseller on the stands, a phenomenon of sorts, by a leading American academic. It is called "On Bull----," and it's a serious work by a serious man about a subject that seems to inundate us at every turn. reports.

"I think there is, in the population at large, a yearning for living in an environment in which you can really believe what people tell you, and in which people who hold responsible positions or who are aspiring to responsible positions can be trusted to tell you the truth, and not try to fool you and not to try to pull the wool over your eyes and not to try to manipulate your beliefs," says Frankfurt.

Was he surprised or shocked by the success of this book?

"I am surprised by the response, and I attribute it to a couple of things," says Frankfurt. "First of all, there's a certain titillation in the fact that an Ivy League professor is writing about a topic which is designated by this barnyard term. But I think also people are starved for the truth. And I think people are fed up with being fed bull----."

With hundreds of TV channels running 24 hours a day, with thousands of new products to be advertised each year, with political rhetoric, lobbyists, PR, spin, and phony news reports put out by the government, and with the trivialities of a celebrity-obsessed culture, BS rules the world.

"If there's so much more mass communication going on, one would assume there is a corresponding increase in BS," says Safer.

"I think that's probably true," says Frankfurt. "Any time you put people in the position where they are obliged, or feel obliged to talk about things that they don't really know very much about, you're bound to get a lot of bull----. And that happens very frequently in our culture."

A great provider of BS is drive-time radio. But your very own cell phone can send and receive as much as Howard Stern or Rush Limbaugh. And since one person's BS can be another's gospel truth, defining it is tricky.

In Frankfurt's book, he makes a very clear distinction between lying and BS. "I think the distinction is that the liar believes that he knows the truth and is concerned to substitute for the truth something that he himself believes to be false," says Frankfurt.

But the "BS-er," like the classic Jon Lovitz character on "Saturday Night Live," doesn't really care if something's true or false. All that matters is closing the deal.

"It's a more insidious threat to the truth than lying is. Because the liar, after all, recognizes the difference between true and false," says Frankfurt. "And he's concerned about that difference. The bullsh---er is just not interested in that. That's not his program. He's interested in selling his product or whatever that is."

Frankfurt's book comes from the Princeton University Press, which routinely puts out such snoozers as "Kierkegaard's Concept of Despair," the kind of title that usually sells in the high three digits. "On BS" has sold an unheard of 175,000 copies, and publisher Walter Lippincott says that's no BS.

Who's buying the book?

"I don't know. I think that there's a lot of impulse purchase," says Walter Lippincott. "When you go into a store and you see a little book that says 'On Bulls---' and you say, 'I just know who I'd like to give this to.' And I would expect that not everybody that buys it, reads it."

"It's fairly dense," says Safer.

"It's a serious bit of philosophy," says Lippincott.

Frankfurt is the Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Princeton, where he walks the same paths on campus that Einstein once trod. He now shares the philosophical landscape with other best sellers like Jane Fonda and Jack Welch.

"Were you ever tempted to use … a more elegant title?" asks Safer.

"What could be more elegant?" says Frankfurt.

"And there isn't a decent euphemism for it, is there?" asks Safer.

"I don't think so," says Frankfurt. "There are a lot of comparable words like humbug and balderdash and that sort of thing. But they lack the same pungent rhetorical force that bull---- has." And as his book crept up the bestseller list, Frankfurt has joined the great American BS celebrity parade, makeup and all, for his first live TV interview about the subject. The setting was Jon Stewart's "Daily Show," on
Comedy Central, which is owned by the same company that owns CBS News. The show takes aim nightly at the rising tide of BS, a commodity without which he would have no show.

Jon Stewart: Have you seen it ebb and flow, or does it keep piling?

Frankfurt: I think it keeps piling.

When Safer interviewed Stewart, he asked, "Has it reached a point, for example, in advertising and marketing, or Hollywood, where a BSer doesn't even know he's doing it?"

"Oh, sure. I don't imagine that, you know, they go, 'Another day at the BS factory,'" says Stewart. "I mean, one of, I think, the properties of BS is you live in it long enough and you begin to think it's grass and sidewalks. You don't realize that that's the fuel you're running on."

"What the worst BSer you've ever dealt with? Who is?" asks Safer.

"Ari Fleischer was the press secretary for Bush, is, and I don't say this pejoratively, but a professional Bser," says Stewart. "His job was basically to use it to deflect any queries, like Wonder Woman."

"He was an artist. And sitting here for six minutes, I'd buzzed around him, you know, and for him it was batting practice," adds Stewart. "You know. 'Do you think you're gonna try that?' You know, 'Oh really, you're gonna throw it up around the eyes? Huh. Bang!'"

Picking their way through a blizzard of ads, come-ons and pitches, most people like to think their own BS detector is highly calibrated. For those who aren't sure, however, there's yet another academic who's studied BS and is here to help.

She's Laura Penny, a Canadian university teaching fellow, whose own forthcoming book is titled, "Your Call Is Important To Us: The Truth About BS."

Phone Machine: We appreciate your patience. Please do not hang up. Your call is important to us.

"It's an example that everyone has heard about 30,000, at least, times over the course of their lives. So it spoke to me as kind of, you know, an exemplary piece of BS. Surveying pop culture, Penny has concluded that North Americans are so inundated with BS that, like fish in water, they don't realize it's there.

"Paris Hilton's dog has a book. It's bad enough that someone like Paris Hilton gets a book, but when her Chihuahua gets a publishing deal?" asks Penny. "I mean, we're not in the language of Shakespeare any more."

Her own BS detector works overtime, sounding the alarm at drug commercials, where you're never sure if the BS is in the claim, or the disclaimer.

And she finds BS aplenty on Wall Street, where, after all, the resident symbol of hope is a bull, where the once mighty are sometimes led off in handcuffs, and where manias like the boom in dot-com Internet stocks periodically go bust, burying many a hapless investor in the bull's-you-know-what.

"If you've ever had the pleasure of seeing a business plan from the Internet boom, you will see that what they planned to do was 'incentivize synergy paradigms,'" says Penny. "Now, I have no idea what that means. These fantastically un-understandable business plans, which were impressive because people couldn't understand them. That's why people are impressed by jargon, because they don't get it."

"What about the news business? A big BS factor?" asks Safer.

"Well, you've been in the news business longer than I've been alive. So you know, you tell me," says Penny, laughing. "Does it seem fluffier to you? Does it seem flashier to you? Does it seemed dumbed down to you?"

Penny is especially scornful of the way the 24-hour, all-news-all-the-time phenomenon thrives on meaningless public spectacles starring the likes of Scott Peterson, Robert Blake and particularly, Michael Jackson.

"You have thousands of reporters from all over the world standing in front of that courthouse every day for the two minutes when he comes in with his parasol handler," says Penny. "And they shoot that. And then for the rest of the day they talk about, 'Oh, it's a media circus. It's a circus!' It's like, well, who made it a media circus?"

But in the pantheon of BS, Penny and Frankfurt agree that the excesses of Hollywood and Madison Avenue pale by comparison to Washington, a place where BSers come in all stripes, but mainly pinstripes.

"The one that springs immediately to mind, just because he's the most important one, would be the president," says Penny. "I think he's an incredible BSer because he pretends not to be a BSer."

The mission-accomplished example, with all its stage management, may have ended up as a BS blunder, but it served at least a momentary purpose. And it's a truism that all politicians, regardless of party, have BS as part of their DNA.

"How would you rate the BS artistry of Bill Clinton?" asks Safer.

"Oh, one of the greats," says Penny. "One of the greats."

Which brings us to a central question about BS. Why do some get away with it, while others don't?

"I think that one of the things BS runs on is confidence," says Penny. "Both in the sense of seeming sure about yourself and also in the good old sense of, you know, the confidence man, the trickster."

"But someone who is bad at it, would that not indicate that this might be a pretty worthy person because he can't get those words out convincingly?" asks Safer.

"Sure. But unfortunately, you know, that's exactly the sort of person that our current political system is gonna exclude. Right?" asks Penny. "I mean, this is the sad thing, is that BS has become not just an occupational hazard, but pretty much a job description."

"There is an alternative, of course, which is just to keep your mouth shut," says Frankfurt. "If you can't tell the truth, you don't have to indulge in bull----, you can just be quiet about such things."

Well, lots of luck with that one. The times we live in are far from quiet, and sometimes even the enemies of BS find themselves willingly spreading it, too.

Stewart: "I'm excited. 'Garfield' is in theaters everywhere on Friday."

Jennifer Love Hewitt: You're excited? He's so excited!

"[Here's one case] When you have an actor sitting here on this couch, and he's telling you about this great movie that you both know is terrible," says Safer.

"Yes," says Stewart. " That's exactly right. Or I'm saying, 'And I saw it and you were magnificent. I think you took 'Garfield' to the next level!' You know, it's absolutely bull----."

Professor Frankfurt's little book just keeps on selling. There's now a British edition and negotiations are in progress for French, Spanish, German and Korean editions of this book whose name we dare not speak.