John Derbyshire shares one of his favorite quotes from Dr. Johnson, recorded by Boswell:
Says the sage: “My dear friend, clear your mind of cant. You may talk as other people do: you may say to a man, ‘Sir, I am your most humble servant.’ You are not his most humble servant….You tell a man, ‘I am sorry you had such bad weather the last day of your journey, and were so much wet.’ You don’t care six-pence whether he was wet or dry. You may talk in this manner; it is a mode of talking in society: but don’t think foolishly.”
The italics in that opening commandment are absolutely necessary, as the rest make clear. Johnson did not object to people speaking insincerely for the purpose of lubricating social exchanges. Most of us agree with him on this, and the few who don’t are annoying and unpersuasive.
Well, the other day I Googled “clear your mind of cant,” for some reason I’ve forgotten, and learned that it has been repurposed to a motivational motto. There are instances here, here, and here.
What’s happened there is that Johnson’s word “cant” has been mistakenly read as, or deliberately transformed into “can’t” with an apostrophe, making it motivational: “Clear your mind of CAN’T!”
Not a good advertisement for a “life coach” to get the quote wrong. And while I get the idea of not limiting yourself by fear of failure, the truth is that I “can’t” sing worth a damn, so I’m not going to try out for a dinner theater musical. My motto is know your limits (I like math, too). If, through experience, I know what things I can do and those for which my odds of success are tiny, I can plan my activities much better than by assuming that a more positive attitude will carry the day. (That theory didn’t work too well in the trenches of WWI; elan was not sufficient to successfully charge machine guns.)
And, while you’re at it, clear your mind of Kant.
“No: at all costs, it is to be prayed by all men that Shams may cease.”
It is not a good thing. But you can’t do anything about the fact that most are weaklings who can’t get through a social interaction without loads of cant.
On the other hand, novels. Lying is not the vice, deception is.