Beware of The Deepity!
One of the roads that bullshit walks on
I love a passage from Stephen Law's book on Bullshit, where he talks about what he calls "Trite-Nalogies". Basically, it is the practice of taking a few fairly trite observations about the human condition (his words), such as life is often surprising, life is ever-changing, life is a journey, life is about embracing opportunity, etc. and wrapping them in an analogy.
Some of his examples are:
“My momma always said life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get.” - You know who said that
“Life is like a taxi. The meter just keeps a-ticking whether you are going somewhere or just standing still.” - Lou Erickson
“Like life is a grindstone, whether it polishes us up or grinds us down is up to us.” - Unknown
That stuff can be very deep-sounding. But it is what would is sometimes called a "deepity." So, Douglas Adams, as ever, recognizing the bullshit in these "life is like" statements, said:
"Life...is like a grapefruit. It's orange and squishy, and has a few pips in it, and some folks have half a one for breakfast."
One of my favorite such such a trite analogies is "Even if you fall on your face, you're still moving forward."
The Deepity Explained
Think about the statement “love is just a word.” It’s a classic deepity. Now, substitute another word for love. How about “chair is just a word.”
The term ‘deepity’ was coined by philosopher Daniel Dennet to describe sentences that seem deep and meaningful or even profound but are actually silly, trite, and sometimes logically malformed. Love is just a word is his favorite example of a deepity.
As I’ve already pointed out, if you see the statement from one point of view, it’s true, but completely trivial. Love is a word. Chair is a word. Acnestis is a word. Ordinarily, if you are talking about a word you would use quotation marks: “Love” is just a word.
Seen from another point of view, love is a word seems profound but is meaningless. Words are symbols far much broader and sometimes quite profound things, concepts, ideas, etc. The word love stands for a concept but it is NOT that concept. Love is defined as an emotion, a feeling, and more. However, even if love is nothing more than a mirage, it still isn’t “just a word.”
As Dennet said, a deepity has two meanings and balances precariously between them.
Words are found in the dictionary, but those things themselves are not found in a dictionary.
Daniel Dennet was a famous atheist and he used his concept of deepities to attack religion as religion is full of just these kind of trivial drip-drops that mascarade as profundities. But it’s not my purpose to take up his mantle here as the same type of drivel is often uttered by atheists.
Deepak Chopra, who conveniently has deep in his name, is the king of deepites. Many deepities are the same as what some people call “New Ageisms” or what I would call New Age Bullshit. There are even deepity generators on the internet.
It does seem that more “spiritual” pursuits are full of more than their fair share of deepities. But, Dennet was an unabashed materialist. He steadfastly rejected anything that couldn’t be established as cold, hard, scientific fact. That may be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Another Type of Pseudoprofundity: The Grand Contradiction
On other similar type of statement that sounds profound but is in reality complete and utter bullshit is the grand contradiction. These are easy to generate. You just take two things that seem incompatible or at odds with one another and combine them. Here’s a famous one:
“Pain is just weakness leaving the body.”
Tell that to a person who just broke every bone in his body falling off a building.
George Orwell made great use of these as part of the propaganda machine of the party in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The party used slogans like these:
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.