The humanities and social sciences are sinking into linguistic obscurity. This complaint is largely the province of conservatives, who relentlessly parade excerpts from current scholarly books and journals and ask, “Is this English?”
“Can an educated person ever hope to understand the author’s intent?” moans Roger Kimball of the New Criterion as he heaps contumely on the “jargon- laden opacity” infecting much of modern literary studies. Charles Sykes’s Profscam offers a virtual catalogue of prose tortured in the name of science. Jacques Barzun of Columbia University argues that much of contemporary historical analysis is unreadable. In political science, my own field, the norm of jargonistic incomprehensibility is so entrenched that graduate methodology seminars are informally described as training to decipher journal articles (“professional literacy”). The Ivory Tower and the Tower of Babel are becoming indistinguishable.
Such criticisms assume, of course, that obscurity and incoherence are evils. After all, the purpose of writing is to communicate, and if sentences and paragraphs cannot be decoded, what purpose do they serve? Even worse, opaque, tortured writing can corrode clear thinking, much as alcohol may destroy judgment. Eventually, the argument continues, reasoned intellectual discourse itself becomes impossible. And, in the language of economics, “work force quality” will decline, since only fools will master obscurantism, and nobody – – save the deranged — will extract value from these scholarly labors. Libraries will spend fortunes warehousing unreadable books and articles that will, justifiably, remain unread. It would be as if academics returned to Latin (and bad Latin, to boot). Bad prose is ushering in not a new Dark Ages, but a new Opaque Age.
I think that conservatives protest too much. The “jargon-laden opacity” infecting academic writing may actually be a pretty good deal, both politically and culturally. This is not to say that defenders of righteous thinking should celebrate it or even moderate our grumbling. Rather, a little reasoning demonstrates that matters could be far worse. More importantly, incomprehensibility serves as a benign and ethical censorship device. In an ironic, perverse way, impenetrable, convoluted jargon is an ally in the political war of ideas. Let us praise high-sounding gibberish.
Our defense of academic obscurantism begins with the simple observation that reform is probably impossible. Collecting and displaying snippets of academic and literary babble is a therapeutic hobby, not a practical effort at amelioration. Gloat as we may over compulsory clear-writing workshops for our harebrained colleagues, this will not happen. Centuries will pass before professors worry about textual harassment or offending verbs, adjectives, and nouns. Compulsory workshops on teaching for senior faculty will come before we see a graduate-level Elements of Style. Nor will our hectoring and ridicule have an impact — they’ve heard it all before, probably starting with fifth-grade English. Their likely rejoinder to charges of premeditated bad prose is that their messages would blaze forth if the reader took a few good courses in multidimensional scaling, econometrics, deconstruction, feminist theory or some other literary vice du jour. For the career purveyor of mumbo jmbo, a reader’s lack of understanding reflects a failure “to keep up with the latest developments in the field.”
Seizing control of graduate education to breed a new generation of clear- writing academics is equally hopeless. We are outnumbered. More important, as most of us know from personal experience, a version of Gresham’s Law governs academic publication. Clearly written, jargonless articles shamelessly displaying a beginning, middle, and end are almost always dismissed as ” journalistic.” Opacity is a badge signifying acceptance of professional norms. To commit good writing brands one an untrained outsider. Thus, imploring graduate students to write clearly imperils their careers. Not to instruct in the art of talking in tongues is irresponsible teaching; for bad writing defeats good writing in vita building.
Kimball strongly suggests a link between radicalism and opacity in his study of literary criticism. The days when Proletarian-wannabe lefties wrote straightforward prose to woo the working folk are over. Today’s champions of the oppressed prattle to each other, not the oppressed. A visiting Martian would surely conclude that the purpose of much leftish scholarship is to cloud minds. Try to imagine liberal academics criticizing one another for their inability to communicate (such criticism is easily dismissed as ” elitism” and endorsing “arbitrary standards of language”).
By contrast, conservative academics seem to make a decent effort at clarity. The works of Charles Murray, Thomas Sowell, James Q. Wilson, Walter Williams, and even Milton Friedman are complex and scholarly, yet generally accessible to the educated reader. Almost every article in The Public Interest is readable, even though its editors do not view themselves as journalistic popularizers. Conservatives rarely dress up analysis with abstruse terminology, methodological digressions, unnecessary equations, computer- generated graphics, a twisted vocabulary, and other impediments to understanding. Indeed, books like Losing Ground and The Bell Curve go to great lengths to domesticate statistical complexity.
This difference in style, I believe, is rooted in different desires to communicate. Those caring deeply about informing their readers will generally try to write clearly without an esoteric vocabulary. Contemporary conservatives, for the most part, would rather convince than impress. They are on a mission, and missionaries must deny themselves the facile pleasures of talking high-sounding cant to the savages. In a sense, the contemporary conservative occupies a position held by the pre-1960s liberal-left writer. The battle is to be won by argument; clear prose and reason prevail over the urge to blurt out fancy long-winded nonsense.
It follows from all this that the subversion of clear writing is not an accidental technical shortcoming. It occurs because the ideas themselves cannot survive scrutiny if they are sharply stated. Gibberish is necessary, akin to a chemical additive to enhance food or hide an odor. The liberal academic venturing forth to discuss, say, racial differences in scientific accomplishment resembles a 50-year-old wo-man going to a singles bar: flaws must be carefully covered with expensive make-up, well-placed jewelry, and fashionable clothing. Whereas the young competition can dress in a revealing tee-shirt and jeans, our 50-year-old must painstakingly construct the illusion of beauty by drawing attention away from substance. Indeed, the young competitor knows full well that clarity of exposure gives the advantage.
The message should be evident: Exhortations by conservatives for academics to communicate better are unneeded, if not dangerous. Let the professional obscurantists continue to issue unreadable articles and books. Think of this infatuation with gibberish as a form of self-imposed quarantine. Indeed, we may have discovered how society’s immune system works: Scholarly rubbish is captured by invisible jargon antibodies, made unintelligible to all but the rubbish carriers, and then shipped off to toxic waste dumps located in major research libraries. To be blunt, compulsive obscurantism is society’s natural immunity mechanism A cure for compulsive talking in tongues would inflict on society a small army of clear-talking, straight-thinking, persuasive deconstructionists, feminists, Marxists, and other species of the tenured left. Far better to encourage their continuing assault on clear writing until their ability to communicate atrophies completely. In the meantime, conservatives can experience all the joys of shamelessly flaunting their naked ideas in public.
Robert Weissberg is profssor of political science at the University of Illinois-Urbana.
