Tag: intellectuals

Working at a university has made my vocabulary worse

Posted on Posted in culture, intellectuals, writingTagged , , , , , ,

Working at university has made my vocabulary worse. I now wage my own vendetta against jargon, gobbledygook, and sentence structures that would make my sixth-grade language arts teacher cry.

Sure, I could blame the pedantry of the ivory tower or the posturing of men and women trying to outdo each other with words rooted in Greek and Latin. They tie their identity to these flashy displays of learning: Their words and sentence structures are signals that after a decade in post-secondary schools, indeed, they belong.

To be an intellectual elite is to believe that out of seven billion humans, you alone own the infinitesimal fraction of knowledge that will save humanity from itself.

In academia, identity is attached to superiority. To be known is to be better than the rest, to have your papers more cited, more read. To be an intellectual elite is to believe that out of the seven billion humans on the planet, you and you alone own the infinitesimal fraction of knowledge that will save humanity from itself. And what better way to prove that than to hide your ideas beneath concepts and language so convoluted, so abstruse that you may be the only human being who truly understands what you mean?

Words Without Meaning, Without Truth

As Frederic Nietzsche points out, those who conceal their ideas behind jargon and gobbledygook often do so deliberately. Ever the linguistic magicians, they trade truth for illusion. He writes: “The essential element in the black art of obscurantism is not that it wants to darken individual understanding, but that it wants to blacken our picture of the world, and darken our idea of existence.”

Nietzsche wrote this in 1878. He was a hundred years ahead of his time, anticipating critical postmodernism before it became an academic rage. The postwar generation scribbled pages of unintelligible, useless prose that earned the ire of intellectuals ranging from far-Left linguist Noam Chomsky to conservative political theorists Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss.

Postmodernists deny reality and reject the possibility of reliable, objective knowledge. For them, there is no answer just as there is no spoon. Morals are relative. Existence is futile. Aesthetic standards for art and beauty are impossible. Everything is viewed with skepticism and irony. Nothing is what it appears—even language itself. Think Fight Club. Think Matrix. Darkened ideas of existence, indeed.

Postmodernism in three words: There is no spoon.
Postmodernism explained in three words: There is no spoon.

The Danish sociologist Jürgen Habermas observes the irony behind all this there-is-no-spoon nonsense: Anyone asserting language has no meaning must use language with meaning to defend their position. Habermas calls it a paradox. I call it dishonesty.

Bad Writing: A Simpler Explanation

During my graduate education, postmodernism and Marxism were easy targets to blame for bad writing. These approaches allowed professors to justify their hatred for capitalism and Western civilization while simultaneously collecting paychecks for teaching students to question all truth but their own.

Managing proposals for astrophysicists and virologists, I’ve had to re-evaluate my earlier position. As the medieval theologian William of Ockham reminds me, I need not come up with a complicated explanation for a phenomenon when a simple one will suffice. In other words, academics may simply be bad writers.

Researchers learn how to be a great researchers without learning how to explain their research to both academic and lay audiences. Quality writing is neither rewarded in peer-reviewed journals nor considered in the promotions and tenure process. After all, why waste time cogently articulating results and ideas when you can let your data and neologisms talk for you?

Those not taught how or encouraged to write well at the last minute string together convoluted passive sentences that recall the words of English novelist George Orwell: “The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not.”

The Curse of Knowledge

Academics spend almost all of their time with their own ideas in their own disciplinary monocultures. To fit in, they use the same jargon and awkward sentence structures. They forget the rest of the world has no clue what their forced acronyms means or that words like parthenogenesis could easily be rewritten as virgin birth.

Academics simply cannot imagine what it is like to not know what they know.

Much like country clubbers disconnected from the other 95 percent of income earners, academics have an impossible time appreciating and communicating with outsiders. They simply cannot imagine what it is like to not know what they know. They suffer from what Steven Pinker terms “the curse of knowledge.”

Thanks to obscurantism, to postmodernism, to the curse of knowledge, over the past few years, my writing has become less florid, more direct, more plain. I write with clarity. I strive for brevity. To be read is to not to have eyes fixed on your work; to be read is to be understood.

To be read is to be understood.

The promise of 2019—and all the years to come

Posted on Posted in culture, economics, history, intellectualsTagged , , , , , , , , ,

Even though 2019 will seem just as crazy, backward, and obscene as every other year people claim to loathe, ultimately, like 2018, we will not just survive; we will be better off by its end.

Many people, myself included, wished good riddance on 2018.

Yet, with 2019 still emerging from the neonatal intensive care unit, pundits and economists are already predicting doom and gloom. Trump’s trade war is expected to slow the U.S. gross domestic product through 2021. Inflation is expected to rise.

Of course, all economists are notoriously bad at forecasting recessions—and they have been for centuries.

Intellectuals have mostly been wrong about the future

English cleric turned soothsayer Thomas Malthus predicted in 1798 we would never produce enough food to feed a geometrically growing population. Limited food supplies would lead to society’s ruin. Today, Earth is home to more than 7 billion human beings. Farms worldwide produce over a quadrillion kilocalories—enough food to feed 10 billion people.

Looking at what he considered the capitalist exploitation of labor, Karl Marx prophesied the proletarian revolution and the coming of a communist utopia. Though his fervent disciples continue to insist on his accuracy—and continue to wait for a non-totalitarian version of their utopia—most intellectuals agree he was dead wrong.

His theory of exploitation was disproven in theory in the nineteenth century by Austrian economists Carl Menger and Eugen Böhm-Bawerk and in reality in the twentieth century by the survival of capitalist institutions. Regimes based on his ideas fell as fast as they rose and killed 100 million people.

Contemporary cynics operate largely on Malthusian and Marxist ideas.

As Todd Buccholz explains in New Ideas from Dead Economists, alt-right talkingheads stomping their feet for border walls and trade tariffs are the intellectual descendants of Malthus. So too are environmentalists who year after year change their predictions of when humankind will eventually destroy ourselves and our Earth.

Today’s progressive clamoring about an unjust world run by greedy white, male sexual deviants is yesterday’s Bolshevik bitching about a bourgeois society ripe for revolution. Trump supporters combating cultural Marxism with their own brand of identity politics are merely buying into the Marxist narrative that capitalism is a zero-sum game.

Todd G. Buccholz makes the history of economic thought accessible, useful, and fun. He reminds us ideas, even bad ones, rarely die; they adapt. No doubt intellectuals will try to ruin your 2019 by resurrecting Malthus and Marx’s thoughts.

Lessons from trying to predict the future

The lessons from Malthus, from Marx, and from your resident Facebook doomsayers are:

Predicting the future is fraught with peril. Controlling the future is impossible.

Don’t let people who profit from fear make you deranged. If you’re reading this, you’re still alive. You’re not starving. You’re probably healthier than me.

Utopias cannot be planned and rushed. Let progress unfold in its own time.

The world is never as bad as those in power would have you believe. Violence, as Steven Pinker demonstrates, is the lowest its ever been. Europe has not seen war since 1945. Per capita income between 1960 and 2016 rose 183 percent throughout the world. Less than 10.7 percent now live in poverty, down from 42.2 percent in 1981. Never in our history have humans expected to live so long.

Don’t blame your current misfortune on the sitting president, on Congress, on the system, on the economy.

The president is a power-obsessed egomaniac stuck in Freud’s phallic stage who prides himself on his encounters with models and porn stars. He will be gone in a few years.

Congress is so out of touch with twenty-first-century reality they don’t understand how Facebook works. Humor columnist Dave Barry called the senators investigating Facebook’s role in their re-elections the “Senate Committee of Aging Senators Who Cannot Operate Their Own Cell Phones Without the Assistance of Minions.”

Economics are the study of human choice. Until Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, or some senate committee has you starving in a locked cell, you control most of your choices, however constrained. You are the author of your own story. You own yourself.

Don’t let people who profit from fear make you deranged. Don’t be these people. If you’re reading this, you’re still alive. You’re not starving. You’re probably healthier than me.

Humans have steered our course upward for centuries. Even though 2019 will seem as crazy, backward, and obscene as every other year people claim to loathe, ultimately, like 2018, we will survive; we will be better off by its end. The story of humankind has a happy ending. So too will 2019.