How Not to Talk Garbage
How Not to Talk Garbage
There is a new type of speech act in the marketplace—the talking of garbage. Philosophers and others have identified several species of defective speech act: falsehood, lies, nonsense, bullshit, hate speech, etc. Each of these needs careful study, and has received it. But speech garbage is in a class of its own, and it is on the rise. What is it? The first point is that it is not easy to say; this allows it to pass unnoticed and to prosper. Roughly, it is a mixture of falsehood, bias, innuendo, confusion, and tendentious ambiguity. You know it when you hear it. Trump is the master of it, if it’s possible to be a master of garbage. It isn’t trash talk, though it may include trash talk. It’s like shoddy, defective, badly made clothes: it masquerades as quality stuff but will fall apart as soon you put it on. It may be shiny but really it’s shitty. It is irredeemable. Quantifier ambiguity is a sure sign of it: not being clear how many things are said to be thus and so. Do you mean some or do you mean all? As in: “People are saying…” or “They are murderers, rapists, and drug dealers”. Grievance is never far from it. It is always false, but slyly so. It is important that it be complete rubbish—it belongs in a linguistic trash can. It stinks. It isn’t just wrong; it is meant to be wrong. Politicians produce a lot of it, especially on the right; but university administrators (a type of politician) are also prone to it. It is manipulative, dishonest, often rife with buzz words and memes (“diverse”, “safe”, “toxic”, “woke”). The only way to deal with it is to call it what it is, but this violates social norms of politeness and hence is discouraged.
But how is it to be avoided? How does one not talk garbage? Now that is a difficult question, because it isn’t always obvious what is garbage and what isn’t. The essential point is that garbage is generally intended to promote someone’s interests over someone else’s—where the promotion is unjust. It denigrates some and elevates others—unfairly. But this requires us to know what is fair and unfair, just and unjust. We need to know the facts and appreciate the moral situation. This is why linguistic garbage is so hard to root out. It trades on ignorance in the audience, not always culpable ignorance. It is why fact checkers are important. Absent fact checkers, discourse is apt to turn to garbage quickly. Other than that, we have to resort to immediate signs of garbage talk—overconfident tall-tales, unproven theories, omissions, oversimplifications. The garbage-talker is invariably someone who resists cross-examination; he or she won’t answer questions. The thing with garbage is that it is easily exposed as garbage, so it is necessary to keep away from rational scrutiny; it thrives on lack of time to probe and question. The garbage talker tends to run away when the questions start coming. But it isn’t easy to combat it, which is why it is in the ascendant—shamelessly, unstoppably. At least we can name it and recognize its occurrence. The phrase “talking points” performs a useful service in alerting us to a certain sort of verbal activity; likewise, the phrase “garbage speech” can alert us to a type of speech act that is becoming increasingly common and is too much tolerated (“Everyone must have their say”). I recommend using the phrase as often as possible (compare “word salad”). But beware of being guilty of it yourself.[1]
[1] The words “Am I talking garbage?” should always be on your mind.
Timely thoughts on the subject that is both very old and exponentially snowballing. I disagree with one point although nothing substantial in the article depends on its validity: “The thing with garbage is that it is easily exposed as garbage”. Unfortunately some such garbage is produced and package by true masters of the art who present the interests of their masters as scientific facts and, in parallel, suppress actual empirically sound observations as well as scientific and logical findings. No single individual, unless he dedicates his entire time to this stuff, can sift through the piles of “quality disguised” garbage thrown upon unsuspecting people from the army of professional manipulators, including, by the way, many “fact checkers”. Biden’s mental health or origins of COVID are just two examples. The former was easily exposed when it came to scrutiny (just like you said), but the second is quite complicated and it is not over yet. It took years of collective effort of many open minded and truth seeking scientists and statisticians to parse the enormous pile of garbage generated by powerful cliques determined to conceal the role of Wuhan Labs and US government agencies who funded the potentially lethal research.
I rather agree with you about those cases, but I see many instances of obviously false statements that can be exposed very quickly–though people don’t seem to care. I think many politicians and pundits saw that Trump could talk utter rubbish and get away with it, even benefit from it; so they decided to follow suit.
In my analysis, “garbage” is enabled by a disconnect between sense and reference; when discourse has no proximate or distal connection with some tangible reality, it becomes Freudian dream drivel- as in Trump et al.
It is a kind of dream-fantasy-speak, a muddy stream of semi-consciousness, which doesn’t even purport to be connected to the real world. It is the drivel of the unconscious.
Further, not to sound too sociological; but the instant connection of modern media obviates the need for any kind of ideology; straight from the mouth of the idiot God; wiser than the Delphic oracle. It’s popular because it’s so antiintellectual, it’s for people who resent having to learn their abc’s or Roman Numerals
It is the outright rejection of rationality, wallowing in ignorance and confusion, exactly what Mr. Spock despised in humans (sub-cortical, pre-logical).
Trump’s “people” the dumb masses just “know” that the system is “rigged” just as the dumb German masses “knew” the November criminals lost WWI. It requires no proof like Moore’s “this is a hand” These so-called human beings ought to be tarred and feathered bipeds like their zero brains hero Trump. Everything he touches goes bankrupt or turns to crap.
Indeed.