Drivel’s Advocate: Why Nonsense Is Necessary

“To us it should be plain that bad information accompanies the good: that it is (as death is to life) the necessary dark background against which one might see any light at all.”

Just when journalists had forgotten about Joseph James Rogan (the affable, apelike bruiser of a kind with which they had not been obsessed since President Theodore Roosevelt Jr. first allowed them into the White House); just when all scowl and spotlight had been focused elsewhere, on distant Eurasia, the man fell for the notion that Steven Seagal—guitarist, lawman, sensei—had joined the Russian special forces circling Kyiv. Laugh all you like, but it was in that same week when men with fewer excuses than Rogan genuflected before the invisible Ghost of Kyiv and the thirteen islander Spartans who, it turns out, might have never declared a Ukrainian version of “come and get them.” Here is W.H. Auden in August of 1968, as Soviet tanks crawled into Czechoslovakia:

“The ogre does what ogres can,

Deeds quite impossible for Man,

But one prize is beyond his reach,

The Ogre cannot master Speech:

About a subjugated plain,

Among its desperate and slain,

The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,

While drivel gushes from his lips.”

As information has become limitless and its distribution unrestricted, journalists naturally fear that their privileged vocation is turning mundane. How else could they be tempted to think that the public suddenly needs protecting from too much of it? After all, to say that information is incomplete or imperfect has always been redundant; and though they might have recently adapted a Russian word and begun calling it disinformation, lying is not novel either. But it is the illiberal character, as Auden knows, that seeks to be sanitized of the muck and mire of free exchange and that is inevitably left with ogrish drivel—sterile propaganda and officious cliché, of which we cannot be rid in any case. To us it should be plain that bad information accompanies the good: that it is (as death is to life) the necessary dark background against which one might see any light at all.

The less celebrated corollary of J.S. Mill’s case for claptrap is that a preponderance of piffle is a sign of a habitually—and not merely de jure—liberal society.

The circulation of nonsense has practical and diagnostic value. The first is obvious: The more one is exposed to wildly disparate attitudes, or “experiments of living,” as John Stuart Mill puts it in the unimprovable On Liberty, the better one can deliberate about one’s own. The flawed beliefs others hold and the sordid behaviors to which they are led because of them, their missteps and misfortunes, are forewarnings in dramatic enactment. Mill is not concerned with state suppression of the unorthodox (which was improbable in Victorian England) but rather with the tyranny of accepted opinion—the social penalties imposed on quirk. Mockery and hatred and contempt can be appropriate and satisfying, but to pursue these until their subject is ostracized destroys the practical value of nonsense for those on whom it has not yet been inflicted. Take a doctoral candidate writing in The Washington Post that “one’s entitlement to freedom is a key component of White supremacy”: scrap paper to rekindle one’s reverence for liberalism. Or consider David Brooks calling the invasion of Ukraine “the continuation of identity politics by other means.” Once our eyebrows have regained their original position, we should feel better off having read this sort of twaddle. Encountering continuous, copious, and obvious rubbish is the surest means of catching our cognitive biases in the act and of exercising the virtues of discernment and verification (not to mention vindication—it would be a shame if one were to have fewer occasions for being proven right).