Why can’t academics write properly? Why can’t they express themselves in language that normal people can understand? These are questions that have echoed through the ages, and ones that still resonate today – so much so that even academics are starting to ask them.
In an address to the Hay Festival this week, Professor Kehinde Andrews of Birmingham City University lamented how the work of so many of his peers is written in ‘devastatingly bad’, ‘mind-deadening’ and ‘over-convoluted’ prose. Taking one book as an example, he asked why it ‘kept using the word “quotidien”. What does “quotidien” mean? “Everyday”. Why not just say “everyday”?’
While many will welcome this intervention by Professor Andrews, and many have for decades groaned at the tendency of academics to lurch into gobbledygook, this misses the point. Academics in the humanities today don’t write in order to be understood by the public, or even by their students. They write the way they do primarily to signal fealty to an ideology. Indeed, gibberish is intrinsic to that purpose.
This has been especially the case ever since the advent and dissemination of postmodernism in the 1960s, one that was reliant on giving new meanings to old words – with Foucault talking of ‘epistemes’, meaning unspoken rules which govern knowledge – or just making words up, famously with Derrida and his neologism différance (look it up).
If professors and students at universities couldn’t understand what these philosophers were actually talking about, then at least they could repeat the voguish words to give the appearance of intelligence, or parrot them to indicate tribal affiliation to an elite. These two base human compulsions have been the motors in the what the late Sir Roger Scruton called ‘the nonsense machine’ in academia, one that set off in the 1960s and subsequently went into global overdrive.
Scruton was not afraid of difficult ideas or demanding prose, being an authority on Immanuel Kant, a thinker notorious for his difficult style, so he could well recognise when perplexing prose served not to illuminate fresh ideas, but to mask their absence. He saw it in Derrida, Foucault and in their countless contemporaries whom he wrote about in his 2015 work Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of The New Left.
It is in his assessment of the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser that we see Scruton elucidate most concisely the true function of meaningless words and bewildering syntax: ‘His constant laps into nonsense is not, in the eyes of his disciples, a fault, but a deep proof of his intelligence. He provides a way of writing in which political allegiance is all that there is, but which also has the form of intellectual enquiry’.
Scruton, a philosopher who was a master of prose and languages (he who would have read his antecedents in the original German and French), had inserted the word ‘disciple’ quite deliberately here. He knew that strange-sounding ideas can bewitch and entrance people, working in conjunction with a yearning to belong to a tribe imbued with a sense of mission.
This is why wokery, that off-shoot from academia, is so fond of bizarre-sounding words and neologisms that the man in the street doesn’t understand. Hyper-liberalism represents a continuation of the same, elitist, tribal mindset. It’s no coincidence that the guru of woke, the transgender writer Judith Butler, is notorious for her opaque prose, a style in which ‘obscurity creates an aura of importance,’ as the philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum has characterised it.
Today’s hyper-liberals use jargon and obfuscation for the same reason the dimmer type of postmodernist did: to signal affiliation to a class who appear to understand big words that you don’t. They have rolled out the likes of ‘intersectionality’, ‘heteronormativity’, ‘microaggressions’ not with the primary intention of making a point or changing your mind, but to make themselves look clever to their peers and superior to you.
This is why they are given to weaponising words, either by using neologisms to identify their enemies – ‘terfs’ – or keep changing the conventions of language in order to catch out those they would like to cancel. If you innocently use the wrong pronoun, be prepared for punishment. If you use a dated word, even one that was formerly meant as a polite euphemism, such as ‘coloured’, you will face the consequences. And don’t even think of curiously enquiring of a stranger: ‘where are you from?’ In Ivy League and Red Brick universities that is an invitation to social death.
Professor Andrews is on the right track when it comes to academic writing, but his lament side-steps larger questions that still need answering. Does higher education today teach you how to think, or what to think? And is the primary purpose of going to university to make you more clever, or make you appear more clever?
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