Author: Ophelia Benson

Here we go again, again, again. It’s odd that this argument never seems to do any work, it just keeps recurring. It’s like listening to someone with a car stuck in the snow late at night, somewhere far down the hill – you just hear that rrrrrrr, rrrrrrrrrrrr, rrrrrrrrr over and over, as the wheels spin and never bite.

Chris at Crooked Timber links to an article in the Financial Times (by far the best he’s read on the subject, he says) on the anti-Muslim backlash in the Netherlands after the Van Gogh murder. All eager for the treat, I hastened to begin reading. Alas, one problem with the article leapt out at me in the first paragraph, and then kept on leaping – to such an extent that I paused in my reading to go report the fact at CT, which meant criticising the article before I’d read a quarter of it. Well I’m an impatient bastard, always have been. But also that was kind of the point. It’s such a glaring problem and it’s so obvious right from the beginning – and yet people either don’t notice it or think it’s right and good.

Here’s that first paragraph:

Six weeks before he was gunned down in the street, the Dutch controversialist Theo van Gogh (pictured) sat on a panel in Amsterdam in a hall full of Dutch Muslims. The panel was organised by a group called “Ben je bang voor mij?” (”Are you afraid of me?”), which tries to bring together white and brown Dutch people.

And then here are a couple more quotes.

Suddenly many Dutch people see their country as a riven place, where Muslims and white people cannot co-exist, and which may be on the brink of disaster…Most of the 14m inhabitants of Europe’s most densely populated country were then white, but the Muslim population was growing fast.

Spot the flaw? Of course you do. ‘Dutch Muslims…white and brown Dutch people’ ‘Muslims and white people’ ‘then white, but the Muslim’. The guy seems to think that Muslim and brown are exact synonyms. Or, worse, he knows damn well they’re not but he writes that way in order to manipulate his less attentive readers into thinking they are. With, no doubt, benevolent intentions. Muslims in Europe (and the US) feel threatened and under attack, and racists can and do use criticism of Islam as a tactic. But obfuscation doesn’t help – or if it does it does so at the price of obscuring or concealing other problems. Religion is not race, race is not religion. Religion is a system of ideas which can and must be open to criticism. Race is not. Religions tell people what to do. Religions tell some people they’re entitled to rule and dominate others, and tell other people they are required to bow and submit to the dominants. Race doesn’t do that; it can’t; it has no ideational content, any more than hair colour or length of leg or shape of ear lobe has. That’s why one has to be kept permanently wide open to criticism and disagreement, and why the other can’t be. (What are you going to do, argue with someone whose legs are too short? ‘If they were longer you could run faster!’)

Kuper does make an attempt at dealing with some of the content-specific issues later in the article, but he does a very superficial job of it, leaving out the most crucial aspects.

According to multiculturalism, a society consists of blocs of ethnic groups each living happily within their own culture…Today the concept is going out of fashion in much of Europe. Critics say it locks people up in a fixed, imagined idea of what “Moroccan” or “Muslim” is.

It’s not just a question of fashion, and critics say a lot more than that (the best critics anyway). ‘[E]ach living happily within their own culture’ is a terrible oversimplification, or in fact simply inaccurate. Many women and girls don’t live all that happily ‘within their own culture’. Cultures are not monolithic; they don’t necessarily treat everyone equally; people within them don’t have identical experiences of ‘their own culture’. A culture may work in such a way that a dominant group lives happily while everyone else is subordinate and exploited. Pointing out that unpleasant fact is way more than a matter of ‘fashion’ – in fact if it were more fashionable, maybe reporters would do a better job of noticing and mentioning it.

Here’s the Economist getting into the act on the ‘US universities are leftist strongholds by a factor of 9 to 1’ issue, and like a lot of journalism that discusses the subject, leaving some important aspects out. At least I think so.

Evidence of the atypical uniformity of American universities grows by the week. The Centre for Responsive Politics notes that this year two universities—the University of California and Harvard—occupied first and second place in the list of donations to the Kerry campaign by employee groups, ahead of Time Warner, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft et al. Employees at both universities gave 19 times as much to John Kerry as to George Bush.

Yes but there might be reasons for that other than political allegiance. Surely. Come on, Econ – think. Think hard. What is it about people who work at universities that might make them prefer Kerry to Bush even if Bush were a Democrat and Kerry were a Republican? Can you really not think of anything? Because I can.

Which one, for example, has a well-known habit of ridiculing universities themselves? Which one chuckles fondly about the bad grades he got at Yale? Which one got into not one not two but three elite schools despite lousy grades, simply because of his family name? Which one had educational chances that other people would give an arm for, handed to him, and then squandered them? Which one got job after job after job despite a conspicuous lack of ‘value added’ because, again, of who his daddy is and nothing else? Which one, when asked how he can make decisions without knowing the facts, answers ‘My instinct’? Which one systematically makes a virtue of his own ignorance and lack of curiosity? Which one makes a virtue of making snap decisions and then refusing to think about them further? Which one ran on a campaign that seemed to delight in calling its opponent an elitist merely (to all appearances) because he’s knowledgeable and articulate?

Isn’t it blindingly obvious? Don’t academics (and journalists, public intellectuals, private intellectuals, nerds, bookworms, wonks, scientists, artists, teachers) have every reason to despise Bush and think he is destructive, even if they are Republicans? Not to mention people who are not sure they much want to live with a Christian-right agenda, despite not being either Democrats or liberals. The Economist article doesn’t breathe a word, not a syllable of all that. And it should. That’s a very important part of the subject.

And then there’s this:

Meanwhile, a new national survey of more than 1,000 academics by Daniel Klein, of Santa Clara University, shows that Democrats outnumber Republicans by at least seven to one in the humanities and social sciences.

Okay, but then why don’t you tell us what the numbers are in the business schools, science and engineering, medical school? If B-schools are mostly Republican, why is there never any hand-wringing about that? Maybe they’re not. Maybe they’re packed to the rafters with liberals too. But then why doesn’t someone say so?

I’ve been meaning to comment on Mark Bauerlein’s splendid article on ‘bad writing’ and ‘theory.’ I only have a few minutes right now, so I’ll just quote a little by way of marking my place and then return to the subject tomorrow.

The cheap partisan spirit reinforces the point made by Dutton, David G. Myers, Katha Pollitt, and others that the jargon and bloat of theory prose excludes every readership but other theorists—a damning claim given that the theorists purport to labor for social justice. The theorists counter that the writing they do isn’t bad; rather, it’s challenging, and that challengingness is precisely what makes it valuable to society at large.

Yup, that’s how the theorists counter all right. But (one wants to ask, sternly) have they never encountered any writing that is challenging without being jargony and bloated? Do they honestly think that jargon and bloat are an essential part of challengingness? Come on, now – I said honestly. Really? Really? You’re not pretending? You’re not just pretending to think the two are inseparable because you really really want to go on using the jargon because it makes you feel so clever and impressive and scholarly and, well, theoretical? Hmm?

Given their vulnerability to the bad writing charge, the theorists would profit from a dose of humility or, even better, humor. One reason for the popularity of the Bad Writing Contest was its antic nature. The very idea of a scholarly journal singling out one sentence for a mock award brought snickers from every adult who’d ever endured a semester with an ideologically-rigid, self-involved literature professor. Dutton solicited nominations on the Internet, consulted experts, and broadcast the final tally as if it were a Hollywood press release. This was in keeping with academic celebrity culture, recast in a dunciad mode, and observers got the joke immediately.

Snicker! ‘Academic celebrity culture’? Why, what can he mean? Nobody would be so silly as to think that academics – especially ‘theorists’ of all people! – could possibly be ‘celebrities’ – surely? Yes? You astonish me. Whatever next. Superstar checkout clerks? Celebrity chicken pluckers? World-famous dog sitters?

Non-academic intellectuals aren’t as easily cowed as are professors, and they will hold up every such accusation as evidence of the elitist, smug world of the ivory tower.

Maybe that’s why I get so irritated when people call me elitist. Because to me ‘elitist’ means people like the ‘theory’ crowd, who really are smug. I’m not like that! Honest, Auntie Em; I’m not. Or if I am, I’d better sign myself into a work camp for some drastic re-education through labour, right smart quick. Picking cotton with my teeth, perhaps, would be about right.

To be continued.

Update: A report on the nun study. It’s interesting.

Women who scored poorly on measures of cognitive ability as young adults were found to be at higher risk for Alzheimer’s disease and poor cognitive function in late life, according to a new report by researchers at the University of Kentucky. The ground-breaking study of nearly 100 nuns found that the complexity of the sisters’ writings as young women had a great deal to do with how they fared cognitively later in life. Of the nuns who died, 90 percent of those with Alzheimer’s disease confirmed at autopsy had low linguistic ability in early life, compared with only 13 percent in those without evidence of the disease.

And another.

Sister Nicolette’s autobiography, written when she was 20, was full of what Dr. Snowdon calls “idea density,” many thoughts woven into a small number of words, a trait correlating closely with nuns who later escaped Alzheimer’s. One sentence in Sister Nicolette’s essay, for example, reads, “After I finished the eighth grade in 1921 I desired to become an aspirant at Mankato but I myself did not have the courage to ask the permission of my parents so Sister Agreda did it in my stead and they readily gave their consent.” Compare that to the essay of another Mankato nun, who is in her late 90’s and has performed steadily worse on the memory tests. The nun, who sat quietly by a window the other day, wrote in her essay, “After I left school, I worked in the post-office.”

So all those people who try to claim that it’s actually better to be ignorant and incurious and that that’s why Bush is a better guy than Kerry, are not only being silly and anti-intellectual, they’re encouraging everyone to increase their risk of Alzheimer’s. So yaboosucks!

I know, I know. Don’t bother to say it. It’s chicken and egg, it’s causation and correlation. It’s not clear whether the cognitive ability and idea density are causative or just correlative, so it’s not clear whether anything we do deliberately will make any difference. I know. But still. It might. Why take that chance, hmmm?

I knew there was a reason. I knew it, I knew it. Right – the next time someone tells me I’m an elitist and pompous and pretentious and a show-off and generally horrible and intolerable, merely because I accidentally use a word that one might not find in a five-year-old’s vocabulary – the very next time, I say, I will have an answer ready. It’s because I don’t yet have Alzheimer’s. Surely that’s a good enough reason! Surely even the most dedicated warrior for populism will recognize that not (yet) having Alzheimer’s is quite a sensible reason to use words one was foolish and malevolent enough to pick up by accident at some point. Surely. I didn’t mean to do it, I didn’t mean to pick up pretentious words, but now that I’ve done it, well – it’s nice to know that the Alzheimer’s scenario is postponed for awhile.

Scientists have discovered the very first signs of Iris Murdoch’s final illness within the text of her last novel. Her vocabulary showed signs of damage at least a year before she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, they say…Murdoch’s husband, John Bayley, remarked: “There was something different about Iris’s last novel. It was moving but strange in many ways.” Now his suspicion that the degenerative disease had damaged her literary skills long before it became obvious has been backed by a statistical analysis. This reveals that while the structure and grammar of Murdoch’s writing remained consistent, her vocabulary dwindled and her language simplified.

There you are, you see. Her vocabulary dwindled. And joking aside, it’s actually quite interesting. Her vocabulary got richer as she got older, and then as she got older than that, it went in the other direction.

“The smallest number of word types occurred in Jackson’s Dilemma and the largest in The Sea, The Sea, and new word types were introduced at a strikingly higher rate in both earlier books compared with Jackson’s Dilemma,” he said. “Moreover, the vocabulary of Jackson’s Dilemma was the most commonplace and that of The Sea, The Sea the most unusual. “This suggests an enrichment in vocabulary between the early and middle stages of Murdoch’s writing career, followed by an impoverishment before the composition of her final work,” said Dr Garrard…”Her manuscripts thus offer a unique opportunity to explore the effects of the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease on spontaneous writing, and raises the possibility of enhancing cognitive tests to diagnose the disease.”

It’s not only interesting, it’s also useful. So you see, having a very slightly (accidentally, humbly) enlarged vocabulary is not something to shout at people for, it’s something to say ‘well done, you’ll help medical research if you become ga-ga as you almost certainly soon will’ for.

Joking aside again, it really is interesting. That nun study fascinates me. Mental activity does ward off Alzheimer’s – it is somewhat protective against it. Learning is protective against it, apparently. Which is quite good. Gives people an incentive to do something that they might then find of value for additional reasons. Somebody ought to suggest to George Bush that he might try it.