April 07, 2025

Disinterest v. Uninterest

April 07, 2025/ Jay Heinrichs

More than just a quibble, it’s a reason we elevate the greedy and destroy the planet.

NOTE: I copied this from my Substack newsletter, ARISTOTLE’S GUIDE TO SOUL BENDING. Subscribe for free to receive posts on rhetoric, writing, and the power of words.

The perfect reputation contains a delightful mix of Craft, Cause, and Caring:

Problem-solving chops (see this post on Aristotle’s phronesis);
Righteous beliefs and behavior (arete or virtue in A-man’s book); and
Disinterest.

Since I’m our household IT guy, my wife thinks I have Craft aplenty—until she has to remind me to load the dishwasher. She also thinks I’m Cause-worthingly virtuous, thank the stars. (As a regular church goer, though, she wouldn’t be keen on having me thank stars.)

Now, as for Caring…

While most people easily grasp the first two traits of ethos, the word “disinterest” (Aristotle’s eunoia) stops them cold. That’s because we tend to confuse disinterest and uninterest.

Lest you think I’m getting all grammatical on your bored self, I genuinely believe that this confusion is ruining everything. It destroys the planet, undermines republics, rips off consumers, and even wrecks marriages.

I say all this with the purest disinterest.

First, the definitions. My favorite source for this sort of thing, other than the Oxford English Dictionary, is Bryan A. Garner. His Modern English Usage is a word paradise of authoritative, witty analysis. Disinterest, he writes, means “impartiality or freedom from bias or from chance of financial benefit.”

Uninterest, on the other hand, is “lack of concern or attention.”

Garner implies that using disinterest to convey apathy or inattention isn’t wrong, exactly. It’s just confusing. Suppose I say:

“When it comes to climate change, that candidate is entirely disinterested.”

Do I mean the candidate has divested himself from all carbon-industry stocks, or that he just doesn’t give a hoot?

Well, does it really matter that much? Marcus Tullius Cicero, the Roman Republic’s greatest leader, seemed to think so. The motto he used in evaluating legislation or pursuing a criminal investigation was…

Cui bono? Who benefits?

The Romans’ passion for disinterest—and their jealousy of any selfish leader—lay behind the white togas worn by political candidates. It symbolized their sparkling eunoia, the purity of their interest only in the People and the Republic. Candidus means “white” in Latin, which is why candidates and candy (made of white sugar) share the same candid root.

Candid, in fact, used to mean openminded: free from prejudice, disinterested. In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Hay refer often to the “candid reader.” (Candid happens to be one of the five lost words I lamented in one of my first posts.)

Today the word means almost the opposite. When I’m candid with you, I’m telling my own personal frank truth; I’m not listening disinterestedly to your ideas.

This change in our language, from unbiased and unprejudiced to inattentive and solipsistic, reveals how much of our culture has turned upside down. Teachers once occupied the pinnacle of respect. Now this selfless profession is grossly underpaid, insulted, and openly attacked.

Share this post with teachers. It might cheer them up.

When the President of the United States launched a crypto meme coin, $TRUMP, several days after taking office, most Americans shrugged, uninterested. Trump himself? Deeply interested.

Meanwhile, the federal Civil Service is threatened with destruction. While an argument can be made that this vast bureaucracy could use trimming and reform, few people remember its original purpose. Congress established the Civil Service in the nineteenth century to replace the corrupt spoils system in which every new administration would fire office holders and insert their own pals, toadies, and donors. The literal trigger for the legislation was the assassination of President James Garfield by a disappointed office seeker.

In other words, the purpose of the Civil Service was to swap interest with disinterest.

Our current failure to condemn interest even lies behind humanity’s greatest existential threat. We burn more and more carbon in the happy pursuit of our own fossil-enabled lifestyles, along with our patriotic belief in the right of every billionaire to make more money in the even happier pursuit of self.

He’s rich, so we love him.

If you remain uninterested in all this (and somehow kept reading, bless your apathetic heart), the failure to understand the power of disinterest is disappointing adolescents across the land. When a high school junior tries to convince her reluctant parents to let her apply to colleges out of state, her best argument should be based on what the parents desire and fear. Instead, the girl whines about how much she really really wants to go to Bigcity U. Meanwhile, the parents themselves fail to realize that their overprotective attitude may itself constitute a form of selfishness.

Personally, I always felt loved by my parents; but I was only one of four kids—a typical household back in the Fifties. I felt loved but somewhat replaceable. If God forbid something happened to me, I knew they would grieve, but they could always make more. I felt from them…not uninterest, not at all. Instead, I basked in the liberating glow of disinterest. While my engineer father couldn’t understand my nerdy love of books, it never occurred to him to push me toward a practical profession. His disinterest—his freedom from bias toward my future—gave me freedom in return.

Which leads, candid reader, to the moral: By restoring the distinction between disinterest and uninterest, we just may liberate us all.

March 04, 2025

To tell a story, put a camera on a cat.

March 04, 2025/ Jay Heinrichs

Write these special effects to yank your audience into the scene.

NOTE: I copied this from my Substack newsletter, ARISTOTLE’S GUIDE TO SOUL BENDING. Subscribe for free to receive posts on rhetoric, writing, and the power of words.

In any story—the narration part of a speech, or a fictional tale, or the proofs in an essay—you want to put the scene right before the audience’s very eyes. Ancient rhetoricians called this quality enargeia. While the word literally translates as “visibility,” I prefer “before their very eyes.”

Here are a few ways to create virtual reality in a reader or listener.

1. Be all cinematographer.

Especially in the beginning of a scene, think of shooting a movie. You’ve got your establishing shot, locating the scene in space. Then try other shots: wide, close-up, tracking, etc. Peruse a list of camera techniques, then write cinematographically.

2. Put a camera on a cat.

I mean, try showing the scene through the eyes of a stray animal or person. Mick Herron, author of the wonderful Slough House novels, uses random witnesses to explore the seedy spy headquarters.

In Slow Horses, he uses an imaginary rider on the upper deck of a London omnibus. In Dead Lions, he actually employs a cat. It sneaks from floor to floor, observing each character and scoping each messy, sad space. A couple of the characters respond to the intrusion, revealing their personalities to both cat and reader. Here the animal reaches the office of middle-aged Catherine Standish:

Standish gets introduced in the novel by a cat.

“Catherine Standish ignores cats. Cats are either adjuncts or substitutes, and Catherine Standish has no truck with either. Having a cat is one small step from having two cats, and to be a single woman within a syllable of fifty in possession of two cats is tantamount to declaring life over. Catherine Standish has had her share of scary moments but has survived each of them, and is not about to surrender now. So our cat can make itself as comfortable as it likes in here, but no matter how much affection it pretends to, how coyly it wraps its sleek length round Catherine’s calves, there will be no treats forthcoming; no strips of sardine patted dry on a Kleenex and laid at its feet; no pot of cream decanted into a saucer. And since no cat worth the name can tolerate lack of worship, ours takes its leave and saunters next door. . .”

P.G. Wodehouse, on the other hand, prefers snails. In some of his stories, snails and slugs provide witness to the scene or add a bit of atmosphere.

“It was one of those still evenings you get in the summer, when you can hear a snail clear its throat a mile away.”

3. Slide in a simile.

Wodehouse’s snails work overtime, offering neat analogies that bring the reader right into the scene. Here he describes a woman’s facial expression with an “as if”:

“She was gazing at me in a divinely pitying sort of way, much as if I had been a snail she had happened accidentally to bring her short French vamp down on.”

4. Get real in the details.

Note that Wodehouse doesn’t have the woman accidentally step on a snail. He makes a very specific shoe, worn by a woman with clearly fashionable taste, do the squashing. Dan Okrent, a legendary editor, told young writers that he didn’t want to read how a good time was had at the luncheon. He said something like (I wish I could find this quote!), “I want to know the crisp mouthfeel of every stuffed radish.” Unless the menu included snails, obviously.

5. Use the present tense.

A small boy tiptoed down a dark hallway toward the strange sound.

Well, that happened. Whatever mystery or horror that the boy will discover has already occurred. Instead, let’s live in the now!

The small boy tiptoes down the dark hallway toward the sound.

Besides the present tense, note that it’s no longer a generic boy. It’s the boy. And the sound. Specificity brings the reader closer.

6. Try the second person.

Even more reality-bending, let’s turn ourselves into the boy!

Still wearing your dino pajamas, you tiptoe down the dark hallway toward the sound.

The second person is tricky. It’s hard to sustain through a story, and the reader may resent having to wear dinosaur-print PJs. Still, try to yank the reader into your tale. While it rarely works, it gives you a better instinct for effective enargeia.

7. For efficiency, make a catalog.

The children’s book Goodnight Moon is a catalog with pictures. (See my previous post on the book’s rabbity argument.) But the catalogue champion of literature is James Joyce. In Ulysses, he introduces a character with a you-are-what-you-eat description:

“Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.”

8. Don’t forget the smell.

Mmm, that faint urine scent! Writers tend to ignore olfactory description, which is a pity. To bring someone into a scene, don’t forget to follow your nose. I just looked up the number of times smells enter a novel I published some years ago, and lost count at 20. The main character, a 14-year-old girl, actually explains her sensitive nose:

“Chemicals are like a mysterious alphabet, coming together in endless ways to make smell-words.”

Smell-words, cinematographic words, cats-eye words, simile-words, detail-words, now-words, you-words; and, of course, the catalog…all these words let your story come to life. As Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster put it (referring to his attempt to stir the emotions in a young woman while misquoting a Longfellow poem about shipbuilding):

“She starts. She moves. She seems to feel/ The stir of life along her keel.”

Exercise: Don’t Show & Tell

Rhetorician David Landes and I worked this up some years ago:

Pretend you’re supposed to present one or more of the following objects in front of an audience. The problem is, you forgot to bring them. Project the object like a hologram, using only enargeia, the skill of vivid description that makes a scene appear before your audience’s very eyes.