Against Orwell

Eric Posner — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 16:16:00 GMT

The Urtext of Rick's pseudo-anti-intellectual anti-pseudo-intellectualism is, as he notes, Orwell's famous essay "Politics and the English Language," possibly the worst thing Orwell ever wrote, which, depending on how you read it (it's not very well written), argues:

1. People should write clearly rather than badly. —Thanks for that.

2. Bad writing conceals bad ideas. —Perhaps, but if so, it is self-limiting. No one who starts reading the five examples of bad writing provided by Orwell could possibly finish them; so, what have their authors accomplished? We should instead condemn people who by writing excellent prose make bad ideas sound good. The prototype here is Leni Riefenstahl, not Harold Laski. People with bad ideas who can't express themselves persuasively also can't have any influence.

3. People will support brutal military actions and other acts of injustice if the government uses bureaucratese ("a pacification campaign") rather than plain language ("slaughter of innocents") to refer to it. —The trick here is to insist that governments that believe they have good reasons to choose a policy that is regrettably but unavoidably brutal speak as if they are delighted by the brutality. This has nothing to do with clarity in the use of language, nor would any reasonable government engage in such self-defeating conduct.

Jargon, stale metaphors, empty rhetoric—all serve important purposes even if they can be misused. Politicians can rarely speak clearly because they must keep together diverse coalitions in a heterogeneous society. They avoid certain words and redefine others to avoid legal categories or moral taboos that interfere with good policy. Government officials, academics, and other specialists improve communication among themselves by using technical words with stable definitions. That these words, through repetition, lose their emotional impact is hardly surprising and probably beneficial, for it allows experts to maintain emotional distance when pondering sensitive issues of great complexity.

If politicians, bureaucrats, and intellectuals always spoke plainly, would the world be a better place? Would we all choose wiser policies if we said fetus-killing for abortion, war against radical Muslims for war on terror, and employment advantages for minorities for affirmative action? I doubt it. The contrary view depends on a sentimental, un-Orwellian (not in that sense of Orwellian) assumption that we'd all agree on everything if we just spoke plainly. Not until the revolution! Bad writing is bad, and bad politics is bad, and someone who puts bad writing to the service of bad politics commits a double offense against ethics and taste, nothing more than that. And they should at least get points for weakening the force of their own arguments.

Anti-Intellectuals and Anti-Anti-Intellectuals

Eric Posner — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 14:14:00 GMT

In the course of explaining why he is an "anti-intellectual," Rick Hills invokes Martha Nussbaum, Immanuel Kant, Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, George Orwell, Pierre Bourdieu, and Socrates—all in a short blog post!—which raises the old question of whether there are certain positions that cannot be refuted without self-contradiction. (In a subsequent post, Hills cites Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson, Hannah More, William Godwin, Gouvernour Morris, Hegel, Heidegger, Searle, Quine, Derrida, Hamilton, Jefferson, Sartre, Kojeve, Putnam, Kripke, Davidson, Pirandello, Claudel, and Arendt.) Only an intellectual can understand the arguments of intellectuals, and so one cannot criticize intellectuals without destroying the basis of one's own credibility—like the Cretan who says "all Cretans are liars." Hills is really attacking a certain type of intellectual (the deliberate obscurantist) but confusing a subset of the class (to which he does not belong) with the class itself (to which he does belong). Then it becomes clear that Hills, an intellectual, is attacking a certain different type of intellectual: one who deliberately writes in an obscure way in order to conceal the weakness of one's argument while intimidating potential critics. We need a term for his error: how about (for lack of any other) synecdochic literalism—mistaking the part for the whole.

This error is common. People resent lawyers, politicians, and doctors because some lawyers, politicians, and doctors act badly. But self-refutation occurs only when the speaker belongs to the class that he confuses with the subset. Consider Obama, Clinton, and McCain—all members of the elite—claiming to be anti-elitist, in much the same way that Hills claims to be an anti-intellectual. Indeed, intellectuals belong to the elite. These synecdochic literalists can't be anti-elite without being anti-themselves. But they can oppose a type of elite, the type who uses financial, social, or (like the type of intellectual Hills criticizes) intellectual resources to shore up his position while claiming to speak for the masses that he secretly despises. So, why don't they just say this rather than making themselves vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy?

It's not so simple. In America, you can't claim to be a member of the elite—even the "good," public-spirited elite—without instantly losing all credibility, even though it is as plain as day that there is a tiny elite class that calls the shots within the very broad constraints imposed by the system of popular elections. (A zillion years ago this problem was debated by John Dewey and Walter Lippman.) Everyone wants to belong to that class, but no one wants to admit it, for it is a class that one can join only by denying that one belongs to it. It is this strange little fiction that keeps our democracy from falling apart. Rule by the people really means a kind of civility on the part of the elites.

Convictions : intellectuals

Against Orwell

Anti-Intellectuals and Anti-Anti-Intellectuals