Many people accuse the major intellectuals on the political left of writing very poorly. Needlessly verbose, difficult and ugly left-wing writing is often seen as little more than a screen of obscurantist neologisms concealing a dangerous lack of substance. Naturally, a lot of this venom comes from conservatives, too many of whom have a mortal aversion to actually engaging with the complicated arguments of the other side. But the problem has gotten serious enough that socialist outlets like Jacobin and Current Affairs have committed to turning things around—to the point of taking pot shots at hallowed figures for crimes against the written word.
As a liberal socialist, I think the left is broadly correct in its principles and in how we apprehend the world. But there can be no doubt that the opacity of some of our prose has gotten us a bad reputation in some circles. As Thomas Piketty points out, one of the motivators behind the recent surge in right wing populism—itself a distinctly postmodern phenomenon—was a sense that that the left has cut itself off from its humble working class roots and evolved in a Brahminesque direction, spouting impenetrable wisdom about vaguely radical change on behalf of marginalized people in prose that requires ten solid years at graduate school to understand. This is a shame—both because decent prose should be valued in and of itself and because we could win hearts and minds if we were willing to make the more complex points of left-wing analysis available to many of the people we’re aiming to emancipate.
Simplicity, Clarity and Precision
Some of the key ambiguities here concern the distinctions between simplicity, clarity and precision. Simplicity refers to how accessible a piece of writing is. Clarity refers to whether both the writing and the thought behind it is clear and unambiguous. Precision refers to the analytical cogency of the writing. The ideal type of precise writing is found in the hard sciences, logic and mathematics, which, at their best, are models of clarity and precision, though they are rarely simple or accessible to anyone who is not an expert in the fields concerned. However, other fields are not always amenable to the rigid deductions such precision requires. Whether the freezing temperature of water is actually 0°C can be tested. Whether we should be deontologists or virtue ethicists, call Mrs Dalloway or To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece, support the political left or the political right cannot be settled with this degree of precision. But that does not mean that good political writing cannot aspire to be more precise.
A lot of political writing displays one of these three virtues in spades, but is deeply deficient in the others. Consider this sentence from Dennis Prager’s essay “The Left Ruins Everything”:
If what I am about to tell you is true, almost everything we most treasure—freedom, beauty, reason, the family, economic well-being, and even goodness—is in jeopardy. Who or what poses this threat? The answer is the most powerful ideology of the last hundred years: leftism.
This sentence is undeniably simple, accessible and even entertaining. It is also-superficially- clear, in the sense that Prager’s thesis and arguments are unambiguous. The “left” ruins everything, including “freedom, beauty, reason, the family, economic well-being and even goodness.” But the essay itself could not be more imprecise. Prager never specifies what the above concepts mean, why the left wants to destroy them or even what the left is beyond the most “powerful ideology of the last hundred years.” This is nothing but a rant, onto which readers can project their own presuppositions and biases in order to have them strengthened. So long as one sympathizes with the general tenor of what Dennis Prager is talking about, one is unlikely to scrutinize the argument too closely. The point isn’t to persuade or argue, but to aid in partisan affirmation. A reader may bring her anxiety that the left is a threat to capitalism, and come away frightened that it is also a threat to the arts, universities and even the boy scouts. Each new anxiety tends to ramp up the general atmosphere of fear, even if no individual threat is particularly well explained. So much for facts over feelings.
The Problem with Left-Wing Writing
Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one’s political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one’s aesthetic and intellectual integrity. What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, “I am going to produce a work of art.” I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience.—George Orwell, “Why I Write.”
When people criticize left-wing writing, their target is usually critical theory: a hotly debated approach to analysing social phenomena through a variety of disciplinary lenses. A lot of critical theory is written in such a (apparently) hyper-precise manner that it can neither be clear or simple. Indeed, no piece of left-wing theorizing would be complete without complicated technical terminology that seems deliberately uninviting even to the sympathetic. This can make it inaccessible in the same manner as the hard sciences, but without the ability to make empirical predictions that gives science its prestige. Indeed, left-wing theorizing can be impenetrable except to experts in the field (and often even to them). All this contributes to an elitist air that arouses so much disdain amongst opponents, with the most critical conservative commentators consequently mocking the left’s pretenses to speak for the marginalized. In addition, many critics claim that the highly technical language that poses such a formidable obstacle to clarity and simplicity is little more than a sham: a bunch of obscure neologisms—différance, dialectical, intersectional, deterritorialise, performative, etc.—meant to intimidate the reader into submitting to an ideological viewpoint out of a feeling of intellectual inferiority. The argument runs that because readers feel intimidated by the terminology, and therefore unable to criticize it, the arguments either go uncriticized or readers feel compelled to master the language and so unwittingly adopt the ideology associated with it.
A lot of these accusations are made in bad faith by critics who are unwilling or too partisan to actually work out what the other side is arguing. There is nothing inherently wrong with specialized terminology, if it actually increases precision—even at the expense of simplicity and accessibility. Indeed, the nice thing about terminological precision is that, even if it is initially unclear, once you learn it, things can be conveyed with a lot more clarity and economy than otherwise. Dialectical ontology may be a mouthful, but it packs in a lot of information more easily and quickly than a process oriented theory of social reality that focuses on fundamental contradictions that have to be resolved either in thought or material practice. But the question is whether this complex terminology is actually necessary or whether the same points could be conveyed as clearly in regular language.
They certainly could be—and without sacrificing much beyond excess syllables. There are some instances in which a specialized vocabulary may be helpful or necessary, but plenty of others in which it is a needless barrier to simplicity and even clarity. Often, the accusation is that progressive intellectuals are simply pretentious and deliberately obscurantist. But there are more obvious institutional and economic reasons for this.
Getting Out of the Academy
Part of the problem lies in the academic roots of a lot of left-wing intellectual life. Academic writing is intended to be read by specialists, who ultimately dictate the author’s professional future. This suggests that an academic shouldn’t waste time writing for a broader audience who, however appreciative, are unlikely to cite her work in a Harvard Law Review article anytime soon. Of course, this means that many of the people who should be inspired by left-wing arguments won’t be able to read them without significant effort and a hyperlink to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. But, for many left wing academics, those concerns quickly get side-lined by the more mundane need to put food on the table by impressing the right people in the right way.
A lot of the left-wing writing put forward for public consumption remains stamped by the academic aesthetics of critical theory. This aesthetics is so powerful that even commentators who don’t have a post-secondary education can feel compelled to play the game in order to be taken seriously. Meanwhile highly educated writers like Nathan Robinson who write more simply are attacked for being soft or even—God forbid—pseudointellectuals. As Michael Sandel points out in his recent book The Tyranny of Merit, one of the few remaining acceptable slurs—even among leftists who would shudder at being misogynistic, racist, classist or transphobic—is calling someone stupid. We live in a hypercompetitive neoliberal society in which education, intelligence and information are forms of capital. Portraying someone as intellectually lacking is a way of asserting social dominance. This is especially counterproductive among writers who are nominally on the same end of the political spectrum. And it’s a bad look for leftist egalitarians to be posturing over who deserves to be at the top of the pecking order.
To improve left-wing writing will require two changes. First, we should foreground better literary role models. Mary Wollstonecraft, James Baldwin, Mary Beard, Terry Eagleton and Cornel West all write about complex matters in a way that is simple, clear and precise. Second, we need to stop venerating academic aesthetics and the kind of high intellectualism associated with it. This doesn’t mean sacrificing intellectual standards, but it does mean not writing exclusively for an audience that has been primed to focus on technical issues and disputes. This could have the added benefit of distancing us from the interminable doctrinal conflicts that have proven such a barrier to left-wing unity since at least the French Revolution. If these shifts take place, we might be surprised to discover that there is a large audience out there hungry for smart progressive ideas, so long as they’re delivered in a more engaging package.
When I saw this article, I was expecting something that could explain to me why it is that so many things I’ve seen written by left-wing intellectuals skip so many steps in their reasoning, like John Berger (literally) out of nowhere (in the last 10 pages) in Ways of Seeing asserting that Democracy is impossible under Capitalism with no argument or justification for the claim beyond earlier describing his controversial take on the origins of art as pseudo-marxist, about 100 pages earlier. While the most obviously political leap of logic, in my opinion this was the least offensive one in the book. This one left me wondering how Marx’s intellectual offspring understood democracy, leading me to some disturbing realizations that I still find valuable today. The others were more central to his arguments, and thus offensive to me as someone who takes writing seriously. I have not read the book… Read more »
This article was well-written (even tho, by the headline, I already knew 90% of what you were going to say). And the discussion in the comments was better and more balanced than what I’ve come to expect from Areo (esp on their Facebook). My main criticism would be that you essentialize what left and right people are like, and assume right being more simple, less educated and less academic. And the left always being so. This is a general trend in modern US political discourse (less so in Europe, even less so everywhere else in the world). But it isn’t a pure fact of US political discourse. It’d be too much to address in a short article, understandably, but at the high level of discourse you work within, I think you should work more on defining these groups better and the diversity within them. At least for the US. I… Read more »
Left-wing academics annoy me for many reasons, but a big one is their complete lack of a sense of irony, which often stems from echo-chamber-induced ignorance. I see “Heike” comments about the Sokal affair in 1996. But, honestly people, the editor of the very magazine you are reading repeated the same thing a few years ago. From Helen Pluckrose’s Wikipedia item: Pluckrose is currently editor-in-chief of Areo Magazine … Alongside James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian, Pluckrose was involved in the 2017–18 grievance studies affair (also referred to as “Sokal Squared” in reference to the 1996 Sokal affair), a project which saw the group submitting a number of bogus academic papers to peer-reviewed journals in cultural, gender, queer and race studies, to see if they would get published. The authors stated their goal as highlighting poor scholarship and eroding criteria in some academic fields, particularly those influenced by postmodern philosophy… Read more »
I recently came across one blog on the topic of “interrogating” a text, idea, or argument that I thought concisely and classically summarized the reason for using that term instead of something like “analyze” or “examine.” It was an in an on-line article called “Interrogating Documents with 16 Questions” (January 22, 2018) by archives and records management consultant Margot Note, who advised her clients or students in reading documents to “analyze them like detectives” as “nothing should be taken at face value,” since its author might have certain “motivations,” a “bias,” or a “lack of knowledge.” “When I teach my Research Methods students,” she began her article, “I often ask them to interrogate their primary sources.” When “you’re working with documents,” she went on, “whether manuscripts from the 17th century or blog posts that were published minutes ago,” in either case “you need to analyze them like detectives. Nothing should… Read more »
“Ms. Goss’ remark about having always “thought of interrogate as what police do to suspects” ” is precisely on target and identifies why the word “interrogate” was coined as a substitute for “examine” or “analyze”. The users of the new word adopted it for its connotations, not for its denotation. Technical jargon usually comes into use to supply a more specific denotation, but folk on the Left, particularly, are in love with language for its connotations, which may be related to their education within traditions of literary criticism. The whole point of the new term was that its users were examining texts in search of evidence of their implicit, tacit, implementations of power relations, and the users saw themselves as like unto police officers, interrogating suspects, subjecting them to the third degree, compelling them to confess their sins against social justice.
Left-wing writing goes back and forth between hyper-complex academese and op-ed hit-pieces.
In her 25 years as a Northwestern University publications editor, “Retired in Chicago” blogger Marianne Goss had seen “plenty of academic jargon” that made her :wince,” but “interrogate” with an inanimate object, as by professors who “interrogate concepts,” especially stood out as she had always thought of interrogate as what police do to suspects.” Still, “at least it remained a verb,” she admitted in her August 4, 2017 installment “On academics using imaginary as a noun,” where she confessed having recently been initially surprised coming across “imaginary” used as a noun (instead of more normally as an adjective) in some freelance work she’d done for an old employer. However, “a bit of research revealed that academics have been employing imaginary as a noun for more than a decade.” St. Louis University professor Thomas A. Shippey, she found, had written, “In literary criticism, the word ‘imaginary’ is used as a noun… Read more »
Matt McManus’s problem is that instead of looking critically at his own picture of the world and comparing it with reality, he takes time to convince us that his picture of the world corresponds to reality.
Amazing dogmatism bordering on impassable stupidity
“…the interminable doctrinal conflicts that have proven such a barrier to left-wing unity since at least the French Revolution. If these shifts take place, we might be surprised to discover that there is a large audience out there hungry for smart progressive ideas, so long as they’re delivered in a more engaging package.” No indication here that Matt has the first clue why the doctrinal conflicts have so plagued the left since the term “left” was first used in this way. But here’s one: they’re aptly named “doctrinal conflicts” because they’re essentially forms of religious faith, that can’t be resolved by reason or evidence. Here’s another one: they’ve gotten worse in recent years — the years of so-called “postmodern” theory and “critical justice” theory — simply because the faith at its core is collapsing in on itself, no longer with anything meaningful to say to ordinary men and women, and… Read more »
“A lot of these accusations are made in bad faith by critics who are unwilling or too partisan to actually work out what the other side is arguing. There is nothing inherently wrong with specialized terminology, if it actually increases precision—even at the expense of simplicity and accessibility.” Negative. They are writing nonsense, they know they are writing nonsense, and it doesn’t even matter. In 1996, Alan Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the journal’s intellectual rigor, and specifically to investigate whether “a leading North American journal of cultural studies—whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross—[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.” The article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, proposed that… Read more »
Technical issues? Like Anarchist warnings about using the state as a tool of liberation, which were prophetic about Stalinism? Or how about the marginalization of the subaltern classes prior to the social movements of the late 1960s?
The left’s problem isn’t with writing, it is with reality. When equality is the sacred value, reality is the inevitable casualty.
What if a thinker wishes to criticise the ideas of simplicity, clarity and/or precision? Moreover, what if they wish to explore how such ideas have acquired meaning within a particular social context, or a series of such contexts? Anyone who wishes to undertake a task like this would need to be careful not to undermine their enquiry by presuming the meaningfulness of any of these terms. Furthermore, what about a philosophical exploration of the idea of meaning itself (such as that attempted, whether successfully or not, by Derrida)? Philosophy is perhaps the only field in which the question ‘what is the meaning of meaning?’ can be a reasonable question, inasmuch as it is almost exclusively an exploration of ideas and concepts. Secondly, what if a thinker wishes to do something complex and unusual and available terms/grammar doesn’t suffice? Thinkers such as Deleuze & Guattari, Foucault and Derrida are often cited… Read more »
I was a little surprised that while Matt McManus quoted from George Orwell’s “Why I Write,” he did not mention nor cite Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” where Orwell quoted numerous examples of pretentious, turgid political, academic, and journalistic writing from the 1930’s, and analyzed some of the typical characteristic vices of such writing. One of my own favorite examples from that essay, from his discussion of “mixed metaphors,” was a quote from a Communist publication describing the working class as “strangled by the iron heel of capitalism” (a phrase I may have been unconsciously echoing myself when I once drove a friend into wild gales of laughter when in conversation I remarked that “if so-and-so were still alive, he would be turning in his grave”). Orwell would have lots of fun in our own time dissecting our current verbiage of “discourse,” “”valorize,” “interrogate,” “hegemonic,” “subaltern,” “alterity,” “coloniality,” “precarity,”… Read more »
I think some of the poor writing is deliberate obfuscation, but too much of it is present in the writings of “woke” undergraduates’ demands and petitions for me to believe that is the entire reason. Some people mistakenly believe the use of long, complicated words and sentences make them seem “educated” or more “professional.” Heather MacDonald’s “The Diversity Delusion” contains several examples of such poor writing by student activists. Clear writing does not improve the ideas, however, as Derald Wing Sue’s book on microaggressions demonstrates. The book is well-written, but the ideas expressed reveal an unfortunate tendency to interpret what people say in the most negative way possible.