Think Small

Caring about the truth is a radical act.

Small Fishes

I have a small office, and I have filled it with thoughts.

The office isn’t anything special: 140 square feet, built in a renovated woodshed, with rugs for carpet and just enough room for all my needs. The thoughts, however, are quite special — Montaigne and Mengzi, Bulgakov and Butler, Aristotle and Arendt are all stacked together on my shelves.

On nearly every philosophical topic, not to mention theology, history, or politics, I have some book that speaks to it. This is one of the blessings of the modern world of information access. But there is a danger to it, too. Because we can quite easily read about anything, we tend to think about a great many things, and we tend to want to speak or write about a great many things.

As I have been working on my book – and I hope to be able to share some news with you about that soon – this has been on my mind lately. I am aiming to write a short book, the sort of nonfiction book that doesn’t scare anyone away due to its page count, but my reasons for this are more personal. I think a self-imposed limit will constrain my thoughts in a useful small. I’m not able to write everything that I might want to write about in this book, nor am I able to go on too many tangents and digressions. I must remain focused.

This is becoming apparent even in these fairly early stages, where most of the book exists as an outline. I’ve eliminated sections, even whole chapters, in the pursuit of a more focused book.

In my journal, I have one command I have repeatedly given myself: think small. It is a reminder to myself to stay focused, to speak on matters I have adequately researched, and to hone my thoughts on this one subject in order to say something worth saying.

This morning as I made breakfast – a grilled cheese for my son and I to share – I was listening to PJ Vogt’s Search Engine, one of the few podcasts I still listen to. This week’s episode’s focus is Alex Gibney, a documentary filmmaker. Gibney tells a story of talking to some studio, or maybe some streaming service, about a documentary he would like to produce about a man in the Soviet gulag. The studio declined to fund the project, saying that they did not want to offend Russia.

Because media is now so global, and so you cannot rely on a single market to make a project commercially viable, the studios have to consider the sensibilities of every nation when making their decisions —or at least the nations where citizens have enough discretionary spending. So it is not just the scolds of America who get to have a say in what art gets made, but the scolds of every single moderately wealthy country on the planet.

This is an example of not thinking small. The studios are thinking on the largest scale currently available, the global, and the decisions they are making are less interesting; the art is going to be worse. There won’t be a documentary about the Soviet gulag, or human rights abuses in Chinese factories, or lead-poisoned water in the United States if we have to consider every possible market and every possible objection. We’ll get broad, mild-mannered art that talks a lot but always fails to say something.

For all of us plebeians who do not do big movie deals with Netflix and Warner Bros, this won’t be a personal loss. We’ll suffer as consumers of art, and that is a real harm, but it won’t be a loss in what we get to say. Yet I do think we’re also experiencing this loss; it is mostly a self-imposed harm.

Owl Mocked by Small Birds

There is tremendous pressure to always have something to say about everything. Some of this pressure is external – I am sometimes emailed and asked why I have not spoken out on some political issue, usually from a viewer or reader who has decided that this will decide if they continue supporting me – but much of it comes from within. We see others talking about everything, so we want to talk about everything. Like the documentary made with the sensibilities of every market in mind, we end up with nothing to say.

But we have to say something, and what we say is bullshit.

‘Bullshit’ is actually a technical term, at least how I use it. I get the term from Harry Frankfurt’s book On Bullshit, in which he explores the concept. Last year, I posted an excerpt about Frankfurt, bullshit, liars, and gadflies; I still like the way I summarized Frankfurt’s view here:

Central to Frankfurt’s theory of bullshit is that there is a lack of care. There is no appeal to authenticity, and there is no care for the truth. The liar does care about the truth; he just has decided that falsity is better given his interests. And in fact, lying requires knowledge of the truth. The liar knows the truth but says the opposite. The bullshitter makes no distinction between truth and falsity — he just does not care whether or not he is speaking truly. He may not even know what is true or false about the matter. He simply speaks, with no motivation to correctly or incorrectly represent the world. ‘The essence of bullshit,’ Frankfurt says,’is not that it is false but that it is phony.’ 

Another word for all of this, more popular in certain corners of the internet, is vibes. We’re not thinking about the truth when we’re speaking; it is all just vibes. Claiming that you’re vibing (or bullshitting) provides you with a layer of protection against criticism. Why are you taking me seriously? we ask. I don’t even take myself seriously!

I used to be angry about bullshit, and when I spotted it in my own speech (and there’s plenty of it!) I would turn that anger inward. The bullshitter is harming me, I would think. And if I’m bullshitting, I’m harming someone else. But now I have a more considered view of the matter, informed by how the Stoics and other Greek philosophers speak about harm.

“Any transgression is a transgression against oneself,” Marcus Aurelius writes, “A wrongdoer harms himself by making himself a worse person.” When I wrote my commentary on this passage earlier this summer, I wrote:

One consequence of acting viciously is that we become used to it. Our perception of the world, even our ability to discern good from bad, becomes warped as we allow ourselves to act viciously. Eventually, our viciousness becomes the default, and virtue itself can begin to look like vice.

I think a similar story can be told about bullshit. If you let yourself bullshit, you stop caring about it, and eventually you stop caring about the truth. People who care about the truth – amassing evidence, looking into the details of arguments, checking citations – begin to look like the weird ones. And they are the weird ones, because bullshit is so widespread. Caring about the truth is a radical act.

The Calm Sea

Thinking small is a prophylactic against bullshit. If you stay in your domain, and you really make an effort to understand your subject matter, then you’ll care about what you have to say. You’ll be careful and considered. You’re showing that you actually care for your reader — and for the truth, and for yourself.