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But spin – the pronouncing on things from an interested angle – is not a regrettable and avoidable form of suspect thinking and judging; it is the very content of thinking and judging. No spin means no thought, no politics, no debating of what is true and what is false. The dream of improving mankind through a program of linguistic reform – a dream that dies hard and probably never will die – looks forward to a world in which everything is always and already “unspun.” There is such a world; it is sometimes called heaven and it is sometimes called death. It is never called human.
-- Stanley Fish for The New York Times
I suppose it can also be called Utopia.
Mr. Fish is discussing a new book by Brooks Jackson and Kathleen Hall Jamieson titled "unSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation". He points out the long and proud history of attempts to separate the bare facts of life from that rhetoric which is politicized and seeks to lead us down the primrose path, going back to Aristotle's "Rhetoric" and including such famous works as George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language". And Mr. Fish points out that especially when it comes to poltics there is no such thing as the objective truth. What is partisan spin to one is the truth to another, and what is truth to you is spin to an other. That, of course, is not to say that there is no point in becoming more versed in how the other side spins their language, if only to make yourself a better spinner.
xXx
But spin – the pronouncing on things from an interested angle – is not a regrettable and avoidable form of suspect thinking and judging; it is the very content of thinking and judging. No spin means no thought, no politics, no debating of what is true and what is false. The dream of improving mankind through a program of linguistic reform – a dream that dies hard and probably never will die – looks forward to a world in which everything is always and already “unspun.” There is such a world; it is sometimes called heaven and it is sometimes called death. It is never called human.
-- Stanley Fish for The New York Times
I suppose it can also be called Utopia.
Mr. Fish is discussing a new book by Brooks Jackson and Kathleen Hall Jamieson titled "unSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation". He points out the long and proud history of attempts to separate the bare facts of life from that rhetoric which is politicized and seeks to lead us down the primrose path, going back to Aristotle's "Rhetoric" and including such famous works as George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language". And Mr. Fish points out that especially when it comes to poltics there is no such thing as the objective truth. What is partisan spin to one is the truth to another, and what is truth to you is spin to an other. That, of course, is not to say that there is no point in becoming more versed in how the other side spins their language, if only to make yourself a better spinner.
