Obfuscatory Academic Missives
After spending most of this evening writing digests of Charles Hodge and Frances Turretin, I was amused by the following from Thomas Sowell on the hubris of academics who write “as if plain English is beneath their dignity and some seem to regard logic as an unconstitutional infringement of their freedom of speech. Others love to document the obvious and arbitrarily assume what is crucial.”
He first concocts a fanciful (but not far off the mark) example:
As surely as the world is round (Columbus, 1492), and as surely as what goes up must come down (Newton, 1687), when Ronald Reagan was elected President (Cronkite, 1980) and then re-elected (Rather, 1984), it signaled a change in the political climate (Brinkley, 1980–88). Since then, we have seen exploitation (Marx, 1867) and sexism (Steinem, 1981) on the rise.
But no attempt to parody academic writing can match an actual sample from a scholarly journal:
Transnationalization further fragmented the industrial sector. If the dominant position of immigrant enterprises is held to have reduced the political impact of an expanding industrial entrepreneurate, the arrival of multinational corporations possibly neutralized the consolidation of sectoral homogeneity anticipated in the demise of the artisanate.1
Whew. On second thought, Hodge and Turretin seem perfectly clear now.
(Incidentally, the article by Sowell linked above is an amusing–and painful–confessional of just how unglamorous the life of a professional writer really is.)
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November 29th, 2006 at 2:06 am
“These new convergences between mathematics and deduction brought with them a sense of the necessity of definitional clarity and logical rigor in philosophical analysis…. Under the meticulous scrutiny of the new Analytic Philosophy, the once respectable Idealism began to sound like so much careless, high-flown mumbo-jumbo.”
This was actually a passage from my modern age paper that I read to (or foisted upon) Karyn because i thought that it was witty. But Karyn’s knit brow and concerned look showed me that instead my writing was recondite and, alas, ironic.
November 29th, 2006 at 6:16 am
I dunno, David. Don’t be so hard on yourself. To me, your passage just sounds like so much careless, high-flown mumbo-jumbo.
That’s a good thing, right?