Long before the current crop of academics substituted ideology for scholarship, George Orwell observed: "In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning."
Perspicacious as Orwell was, and relevant as he remains, he hadn't seen anything yet. For today clarity is only a branch of thoughtcrime, and the Thought Police don't use truncheons or even Room 101s to enforce their ways. Now they use words, or what used to be words but now might as well be inchoate grunts to most of us.
Sometime in the mid-'90s, Denis Dutton started his bad-writing contest. But these days it's no contest at all between Bad Writing and Still Worse, each with its own unintelligible jargon. Consider, if you can stand it, this bowl of verbal slumgullion, which in the end tells us nothing, or rather less than nothing:
"Indeed, dialectical critical realism may be seen under the aspect of Foucaldian strategic reversal--of the unholy trinity of Parmedian/Platonic Aristotelian providence; of the Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm, of foundationalisms (in practice, fideistic foundationalisms) and irrationalisms (in practice, capricious exercises of the will-to-power or some other ideologically and/or psychosomatically buried source) new and old alike; of the primordial failing of ..." and so on to nowhere.
This school of wordslush goes by the pretentious if meaningless name of, get this, Critical Realism--though there is everything critical but nothing realistic about it. Language will tell, in this case nothing. Or even less than nothing. These days this meaningless lingo is now wielded by a bunch of cry-bullies on campus after campus of American colleges and universities.
What we have here may call not for verbal analysis, which would be futile in any case, but psychiatric treatment. Pity not just the poor reader but the poor proofreader, who has to laboriously copy multisyllabic nothing after nothing. While the medieval inquisitor knew what he was up to--a forced confession--today's word-torturers have no idea, or at least none that could properly be called an idea. Instead anyone who bothers to dig through much of today's academic jargon, or just a college catalog, may find at its center nothing but hot air. If it has a center at all.
To think, once upon an ominous time, language was language and not just a series of irritable verbal gestures. Many of today's "scholars" may know just enough to call for muscle to shut down anybody who would try to convey something as foreign to them as a genuine idea. Some assert that their students just wouldn't understand Shakespeare anyway, so why not drop him as a requirement for graduation? Isn't he just another dead white male?
As for Dante or Milton, they're being dropped from college requirements quicker than you can say Jack Robinson, whoever he was or whatever position he played in the infield. No wonder baseball, the thinking man's game, has lost out to brutish football as the national pastime. The infield fly rule remains far more intellectually challenging than any rehash of Marxist dialectics. Whatever the faults of Marxism-Leninism, and there were many, at least it could be spelled out in as many languages as there were once Soviet Socialist Republics between Brest-Litovsk and Novosibirsk. Those were the days, my friend, we thought they'd never end. But end they did, as sure as language did.
Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial on 07/17/2016