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(This post entirely Gabriel Duquette‘s fault. I totally made a resolution not to argue with idiots on my blog unless I have a point other than “idiot over there is an idiot,” but he asked nicely and I am incapable of not doing favors for friends.)
The New Statesman has no idea what Politics and the English Language was about.
First of all, if they believe that what Orwell was complaining about does not happen today, they clearly haven’t spent much time watching the news. “Democracy” is used to justify atrocities; “fascist” has no meaning other than “generic bad thing”; self-interested foreign policy is given the weight of myth through use of words like “destiny” and “freedom.” He wrote about how leftists use long strings of jargon that don’t actually mean anything– without having ever met a radical queer! (I have spent many an amusing evening trying to figure out how the hell you, oh, “center love and respect for women and femmes.” Does it involve putting a I ❤ Femmes sign in the middle of the room?)
In addition, “I am a plain-speaking bluff honest man calling it as I see it” was not an unknown rhetorical device in Orwell’s time. See Sinclair Lewis’s brilliant It Can’t Happen Here, which satirizes that sort of rhetoric, as well as “traditional American family values” and the rest of that rot. My point, other than “people should read more novels by pissy cynical thirties socialists,” is that maybe Orwell didn’t talk about the problems of plain speech because he’s actually making a completely different point.
Orwell’s claim is that unclear, vague, ugly, cliche writing is all too often used to make a shitty idea look better. If no one can tell what you’re talking about, then they can’t debunk your shitty ideas. If your writing is bad enough, even you might not be able to tell how bad your ideas are. Whether plain writing can also be used to make a shitty idea look better is completely irrelevant to the topic of the essay.
Not to mention that writing can be superficially “plain” and still be unclear, vague, ugly, and cliche. Bullshit peddlers are clever and can use a patina of plain-speaking bluffness to hide that they’re obfuscating the issue, but they’re still fucking obfuscating the issue. “Looking clear” is not the same thing as “being clear.”
The New Statesman criticizes Orwell for lacking evidence. This is unfortunate, because the New Statesman’s primary evidence is sheer Bardolatry. Iago was made up. Iago’s rhetorical techniques being persuasive in the play says nothing about whether the rhetorical techniques are persuasive in real life, because it’s fiction and the characters are persuaded if the author says they are. (I guess you could argue for Shakespeare’s closely observed psychological realism, but… Iago.)
Furthermore, The New Statesman does everyone’s favorite technique: quote a random sentence a Shakespeare character says out of context and then attribute it to “the Bard’s eternal wisdom.” I kind of wonder if five hundred years from now everyone will be talking about how Ron said not to trust Snape and that means that J. K. Rowling is teaching us not to trust people who have done evil things in the past. Well, at least the author isn’t quoting Polonius.
I am not saying that Politics and the English Language is perfect. For one thing, Orwell has a curmudgeonly dislike for the perfectly respectable rhetorical device litotes. But if you are writing nonfiction intended for a general audience, your writing needs to be understandable to that audience. If people cannot tell what you’re talking about, you’ve failed. If you’re not actually saying anything, you’ve failed. The fact that you can make a point that other people can understand and it’s also wrong is as relevant as saying that because cars can have wheels and a broken engine wheels are overrated.
Thing of Things 
>I have spent many an amusing evening trying to figure out how the hell you, oh, “center love and respect for women and femmes.” Does it involve putting a I ❤ Femmes sign in the middle of the room?
I may have accidentally left my Robin Hanson hat on too long, but I tend to assume that statements of this general form just mean “I feel these groups aren’t getting enough attention and praise”; or, more compactly, “pay more attention to me”; or, more compactly, “go me”.
Queer theory, like most cultural theory, is fond of subtle, highly value-loaded language. Sometimes the “value-loaded” totally overwhelms the “subtle”.
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Hypothesis: Every non-STEM field whose name ends in “theory” consists primarily of polspeakful* jargon arranged in elaborate ways.
*I was going to say “newspeakful,” but Newspeak, for all its wickedness, was at least terse.
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As far as I understand, “queer theory” and “feminist theory” are basically forms of literary criticism; and, in literary criticism, the word “theory” means something like, “a structured framework that one can use to interpret literature (and other such works) according to some specific set of ideological postulates”.
The confusion arises because there are other meanings of the word “theory”. In STEM fields, it means roughly something like, “a hypothesis that is expressed through math, and that could not be falsified despite repeated attempts to do so, and whose probability of being false is now less than 10^-X” (the value of X varies across disciplines). In common speech, on the other hand, the word “theory” means something like, “an unsubstantiated wild guess”.
I think it’s pointless to argue which meaning of the word “theory” is correct, since no one died and made anyone else the Language Pope; but it’s helpful to keep the different meanings in mind, and taboo the word whenever confusion arises.
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“a structured framework that one can use to interpret literature (and other such works) according to some specific set of ideological postulates”.
To what extent is that actually non-equivalent to what I said?
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@osberend:
You said, “every non-STEM field whose name ends in “theory” consists primarily of polspeakful* jargon arranged in elaborate way”, implying that it’s all nonsense. I agree with you that much of it probably is nonsense, but I am willing to be charitable and grant that some of it does make sense (as per my comment).
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I’m closer to Osberend on this one. My guess is that the jargon obscures that the fields are mostly (but not entirely) nonsense.
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I’m with you and osberend, jossedly.
I see this a lot in linguistics. There is a need for jargon – terms like “verb” and “tense/aspect” and “evidentiailty” are useful terms that are clear, with clear, concrete referents, and they save time. Others, like “merge”, are either so broad, vague and loose as to say basically nothing.
There is another function of jargon besides concision – in-group marking. This is where it gets intentionally obscure. The more counter-intuitive a term is, the more necessary it is to belong to the groups and learn its particular idiosyncratic usage.
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@jossedley:
> My guess is that the jargon obscures that the fields are mostly (but not entirely) nonsense.
I see what you’re saying, and, as I said before, I mostly agree; but I think this specific statement is too strong. For example, I was just talking to my coworker earlier, and I said something like, “Instead of putting all your code in one class, separate your business logic from data access; then all you need to do is just inject the right DAO. You can even mock out that DAO for unit testing”.
This sentence is full of jargon, but I believe that it does make sense — assuming you know what the terms mean. I could spell it out in plain English, but then it would take several pages of text, and who has that much free time on their hands ?
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@Bugmaster: That’s true, but not really a counter-example; there’s a reason I specified “non-STEM.” To a certain extent, programming jargon has to have some connection to reality, for the simple reason that you have to be able to go out and write programs that do things. The jargon of feminist literary criticism, on the other hand, has to have some connection to reality because . . .
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@osberend
…because people care about reality and want to say something important about it?
Oh, never mind. Of course we are rational, reality-based and awesome, and our jargon is always 100% necessary to encompass the profound depths of meaning our superior brains need to communicate to each other.
Meanwhile, those filthy non-STEM creatures in the corner are either pretending to communicate to enact their dirty, no-good, evil political schemes, or just plain deluded. After all, it’s obvious to any one of us that all their so-called “language” is meaningless babble!
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Sure, that’s a reason that the jargon of feminist lit crit might have a connection to reality. But it’s not a reason that it has to.
Not everyone in STEM is rational, but yeah, I think we’re on average significantly more rational than Humanities folk, because more rational people are more likely to go into STEM. Plenty of our jargon is unnecessary (this is more true the more social the field is ( e.g. social epidemiologists talking about “proxies for SES”), but exists in harder fields as well), but there are limits, because at the end of the day, we have to actual be able to run experiments and evaluate the results.
Well, except in pure Mathematics. But (a) they have rigorous standards of proof and (b) they’re not talking about reality anyway.
I think that’s the really destructive part, the proliferation of these fields that are kinda-sorta talking about reality, but with no actual pressure to be right. That’s what gives us shit like Sandra Harding being a “Distinguished Professor” at UCLA despite calling Newton’s Principia Mathematica a “rape manual,” or Susan McClary being a Professor of Musicology despite writing “The point of recapitulation in the first movement of [Beethoven’s] Ninth is one of the most horrifying moments in music, as the carefully prepared cadence is frustrated, damming up energy which finally explodes in the throttling murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release.”
There is another factor here, of course, which is the natural tension between academic love of obscurity and individual mediocrity. There are basically classes of things you can say in just about any disciple: Those that are straightforward, those that are deep, and those that look deep, but are bullshit. The first don’t get a lot of respect from journals and tenure committees*, and the second are hard to discover. The natural tendency in any field is for people to gravitate to the third to the extent that they can. Most STEM fields have good ways of preventing this; the humanities largely (as far as I can tell) do not. And so we get idiocies like Luce Irigary claiming that “E = mc^2 is a sexed equation” because it “privilege[s] that which goes faster.”
*Which is a pity. A more systematic version of TVTropes, focusing on those tropes that people frequently draw strength from and/or are triggered by, properly searchable, and with a listing of what works are confirmed not to contain various tropes, would probably be a greater service to humanity than the entirety of politically-motivated lit crit to date.
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Yeah — it’s easy to say, oh, we use jargon, they use jargon, so how can we really be sure that we’re using it to compress useful concepts into short words and make new insights possible, while they’re using it to compress distinct concepts into one word and make new equivocations possible? But then you look at the actual results, and the difference becomes pretty clear!
Like in science you have all the horror stories of the person who, whether through accident or arrogance, ignores the usual required caution and ends up somewhere seriously in conflict with in reality, meanwhile making a complete mess for everyone else. In math the only influential example I know of, where it’s not just “oops, I made a mistake in my proof but people accepted it anyway” — or, for that matter, living before the 20th century — but serious negligence causing a mess, is the “Italian school” of algebraic geometry. But still there is one.
And so I have to wonder what these are for other disciplines. Are there any?
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@osberend
Well, I had never heard of Harding, but I’ve taken a look now, and there’s hardly any jargon in her writing. Also, she does not call Principia Mathematica a “rape manual”.
She points out that we use metaphors, such as “nature is a machine”, to make intuitive sense of pure, value-neutral mathematical equations. And then she asks: on what grounds do we claim that these metaphors do influence us, while the less nice metaphors, such as “nature is a female beast to be hunted”, “nature is a woman to be made a servant / slave” or “nature is a woman to be tortured until she gives up her secrets”, have no impact on our minds?
“In what ways and to what extent can bias creep into rational inquiry?” is a very important rationalist question. And reading comprehension is a very valuable rationalist skill.
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Okay, so technically asking “why is it not as illuminating and honest to refer to Newton’s laws as ‘Newton’s rape manual’ as it is to call them ‘Newton’s mechanics’ [as everyone does]?” might not be quite the same thing as stating that they are a rape manual, but it’s pretty damn close. Mea culpa for imprecise language (borrowed from others, so perhaps a bit of mea culpa for that is appropriate as well), but the point stands.
More details on why that statement is crap to come when I have a chance to take a glance at the book itself, as opposed to limited excerpts (which are enough to make me certain it’s crap, but I should try to achieve greater precision in my denunciations).
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@osberend
Susan McClary’s branch of musicology is basically art criticism / interpretation. People interpret abstract art in various wacky ways? I don’t see how that’s shocking, or what alternative you want to propose.
And these are your examples of horrible jargon? I expected something like Derrida’s “différance” or Heidegger’s “Gestell“.
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I propose not doing that. There doesn’t need to be an alternative thing-to-do; it is quite sufficient to not do that thing. And if this means not declaring “interpretations” of abstract art to the public (often while being funded directly or indirectly by taxpayer money) at all, that does not strike me as any sort of loss to humanity.
Derrida is absurd, but it’s unclear to me whether his babbling about “différance” is wrong, because it’s not clear what, if anything, it means. I’ve never heard of Heidegger’s “Gestell,” and so have no established opinion on it.
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@sniffnoy
Mathematics wasn’t always what it is today.
Even Euclid’s Elements has issues. Euclid wasn’t using the axiomatic method as we know it — not because he was too dumb or lazy, but because he didn’t realize exactly how rigorous you have to be.
Everyone used to rely on what we today call “naive” set theory. Bernoulli and Leibniz argued about whether log(-1) was real or imaginary. Poincaré and Kroenecker said very nasty things about Cantor.
And all this — in a field that lends itself so well to rigor, unconstrained by any real-world messiness! Theoretically, it was possible for mathematics to be strict and correct from the very beginning. In practice, that didn’t happen — for psychological and social reasons.
So, what about fields where clean, rigorous definitions and axioms are impossible? In addition to the human factors plaguing even mathematics, they have the added difficulty of their objects of research being complex and ever-changing, even reactive to the research itself.
At this point in our development, social questions are inherently slippery and difficult. There’s no perfectly rigorous way to do it, and armchair “rationalists” are certainly even worse at it than the actual “soft” scientists.
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Oh, I’m well aware of that! There’s a reason I put “working before the 20th century” there; I explicitly wasn’t talking about mathematicians not being rigorous up to modern standards, but rather flagrantly ignoring those standards, which requires them to exist in the first place. The examples you talk about aren’t considered horror stories.
And yes, obviously as precision becomes harder deduction becomes less useful. But “it’s hard to be precise here” is a justification for conclusions that are imprecise or hard to apply, not blatantly wrong ones! Similarly, I don’t think it’s the social sciences people are complaining about here…
But it was probably wrong of me to join in with the “Their jargon is bad!” bit. I mean, as far as I know it largely is, but that’s not obvious beforehand. Jargon, I think, is rarely a problem — bad use of words is the problem; the failure modes of jargon are mostly just the failure modes of words. Sure, you can make up jargon for bad concepts, but ordinary language is already full of bad concepts; it’s implicitly loaded with folk theories, so making new words to get away from that is a useful tool — especially for the people in these more social areas we’re complaining about, who have very good reason to be wary of such things. So I have to approve of the motivation behind such jargon, even if I disapprove of the actual application.
(But there are some additional possible failure modes of jargon that they fall into. Like taking words with existing strong connotations and trying to repurpose them as value-neutral jargon. Bad idea. One possible remedy: Attach modifiers. Talk about “strong X”, “weak X”, “regular X”, etc., but not X, which is reserved as a common-language term and thus avoided. I think people will be more likely to accept these as value-neutral jargon.)
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@osberend
Well, good luck convincing the rest of humanity to fire and censor all abstract art critics who dare to express their interpretations.
On the other hand, the sentence you quote (although it was withdrawn from the next edition, 4 years later) has inspired rebuttals / alternative interpretations like this:
…which made me chuckle, so perhaps it’s a net gain for society.
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Who’s advocating censorship? My contentions are:
1. These fields are mostly crap.
2. The benefits of the bits that aren’t crap do not justify that detriments that result when people actually take the crap seriously.
3. Public money should not be spent on supporting these fields.
4. People should not take these fields seriously, and should actively discourage others from doing so.
None of that amounts to censorship.
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@osberend
Oh, I thought you wanted to prevent anyone from ‘declaring “interpretations” of abstract art to the public’ somehow. Now, I’m not sure how to interpret the “should”s in (3) and (4).
If you just personally disapprove of abstract art interpretation, like I said — good luck. I wish I could persuade everyone to defund and stop respecting the things I consider harmful, too.
By the way, do you have any real-life examples of negative consequences of people taking McClary’s article or similar stuff seriously?
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Bugmaster: In mathematics, excluding its technical use in logic, “theory” — well, the word generally isn’t used on its own. But “X theory” or basically just means “the study of X”, and “the theory of X” can mean either that or “known facts about X”. I’d say the word in general has the connotation of a tightly-interconnected set of statements. Like if I’m using a bunch of basic theorems about representations of fintie groups, I might just say “By the theory of representations of finite groups…” rather than citing particular theorems. I get the impression the use in other fields of science is pretty similar, except that that there it can also refer to a set of statements that isn’t necessarily true/verified (e.g. string theory).
So I don’t think the use being described where it means a point of view is really too different; it already means something like a framework. The difference seems to be that, in the more technical contexts, it’s a framework that deals in facts (by which I mean, statements with a truth value, not statements that are true).
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Oops, replied to the wrong comment. Sorry.
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“If people cannot tell what you’re talking about, you’ve failed.”
I can see this quote coming back to bite the author on the arse.
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The author fails a lot! The author has a little “fail again, fail better” button on their bag to remind them of this fact!
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The author succeeds brilliantly quite often as well, and has been since back in the NSWATM days.
And seriously, the reader has a responsibility to shoulder a certain burden of effort too.
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I think that depends on the context, tbh. Like… I think that every piece of writing should be easy to understand for its intended reader, but it’s different if your intended reader is an intelligent layperson, a developmentally disabled person, a member of your political organization, or someone with a PhD in the field you’re studying. (Assuming that the difficulty isn’t part of what people are getting out of the writing.)
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I keep thinking of Ozy’s earlier post about the meaning of “fetishization”, which seems like the opposite of this. Ozy basically denies that “fetishization” is used in the vague and jargonish ways that “democracy” or fascist” is often used.
I also keep thinking of a certain medieval castle comparison that we can’t really talk about. Ozy is basically describing motte-and-bailey under anotther name; the motte is that fascism is a particular political view with particular elements, and the bailey is that fascism is “any politics I don’t like”.
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“Not to mention that writing can be superficially “plain” and still be unclear, vague, ugly, and cliche.”
No lie. This is Fox News’ whole schtick.
Superficially plain = simplistic. And actually it is not plain, it’s obfuscatory.
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