G.K. Chesteron

After heeding the Surgeon General’s statutory warning that lives, bridges and sermons are not to demise on the reprise of this theme, shall we visit the premise of charlatanism and test its truth and troth. Charlatans are contextual chameleons who can hold a conversation about any topic without having a deeper insight into definitions or knowing whether or not their claims are based on factual grounds. I am hard pressed to meet a Christian or sober-­minded secular intellectual who will sanctify this concept. A few years ago, an eminent philosopher wrote a masterful essay On ####; an expression that has been bowdlerized into Bovine Scatology for our more august audience. Harry Frankfurt makes a careful distinction between a liar and a person who specializes in the craft of the second letter of the English Alphabet in juxtaposition with the nineteenth letter in majuscule form. A liar seeks to intentionally mislead, while the person who practices the afore-­mentioned ineffable craft of which one shall dare not speak, is informally speaking, phony. On a personal note, I have been to a few wine-­tasting events without knowing the first thing about wine. Obviously, there is an element of phoniness at play here, an appearance of connoisseurship sans savoir or connaitre. Even so, sommeliers and avocation-­seeking amateurs are not the only ones granted entrance into these nose-­rubbing spaces of snobbery and shallow conversations. Even a die-­hard puritan is more inclined to pronounce a dire indictment on the ‘diabolical’ art of pressing dead grapes and the attendant ‘evil’ enzymes involved in fermentation rather than anathematize the innocuous act of gathering for conversation. [Read more…] about An Apologia for Charlatanism – On the art of reading much and knowing little