Excerpts from JUST WORDS

I owe my readers an apology. For some time ”Just Words – a sceptic’s glossary” has been sitting in my list of Ebooks – but, when clicked, drew a blank. I’ve now sorted this out. And by way of compensation let me offer some excerpts.

But first, let me explain the title – of which I’m rather proud. The title has two meanings – the first could be construed as half-apologetic, meaning these are mere words – some trifles. The second relates the title to the idea of justice and the 60 pages do offer a real treasure trove about how the literary world has challenged the powers-that-be – whether Jonathan Swift, Gustave Flaubert, George Orwell, Ambrose Bierce, J Ralston Saul or Anthony Jay. Apart from my own definitions of words commonly used by bureacrats and politicians (some 100) to deceive us, I’ve also found many other examples.

So here goes -

Assumptions; the things other people make – which cause problems. Parsed – “I think; you assume; (s)he fucks up”. Project management techniques do require us to list assumptions and identify and manage risks – but in the field of technical Assistance these are just boxes to tick. In any project, the best approach is to list the worst things which could happen, assume they will occur and plan how to minimise their frequency and effects.

Audit; something both overdone and underdone – overdone in volume and underdone in probity. A process more feared at the bottom than at the top as frequent recent scandals (Enron; global banking scandals have demonstrated). See also “Law”

Benchmark; a technical-sounding term which gives one’s discourse a scientific aura.

Best practice; one of the most dangerous terms of the English language – implying, aș it does, that the answer to our problems has a solution which fits all contexts.

Bottleneck; what prevents an organisation from achieving its best performance – always located at the top!

Capacity; something which other people lack

Communications; the first thing which people blame when things go wrong – parsed “I communicate; you misunderstand; he/they don’t listen”.

Consultation; the skill of bouncing other people to agree with what you have already decided.

Contract out; as in “put out a contract on” – to wipe out.

Decentralisation; creating local people who can be made scapegoats for deterioration in service.

Empower; a classic word of the new century which suggests that power can be benignly given – when in reality it has to be taken.

Evidence-based policy-making; a phrase which represents the hubristic peak of the generation of UK social scientism which captured the UK civil service in the late 1990s at the time its political masters succumbed to corporate interests and therefore were practising less rather than more evidence-based policy-making!

Evaluation; job-creation for surplus academics. An important part of the policy-making process which has been debased by it being sub-contracted to a huge industry of consultants who produce large reports which are never read by policy-makers.

Focus group; a supposedly representative group of voters who will give us a clue about what we should be doing.

Hubris; something which politicians and policy experts suffer from – ie a belief that their latest wheeze will solve problems which eluded the skills and insights of their predecessors

Human Resource management (HRM); treating staff and workers like dirt

Law; “the spider's webs which, if anything small falls into them ensnare it, but large things break through and escape”. Solon

Lobbyists; people who make the laws

Reform; to divert attention from core questions by altering organisational boundaries and responsibilities

Training; “surgery of the mind”. A marvellous phrase an old political colleague of mine used to describe the mind-bending and propaganda which goes on in a lot of workshops.

Trust; something which economists and their models don’t have and which, therefore, is assumed by them not to exist within organisations. As economic thinking has invaded public organisations, everyone has been assumed to be a “rent-seeker” – and a huge (and self-fulfilling) edifice of audits, checks and controls have been erected

Whistle-blower; a Jesus Christ figure who blows a whistle – but is subsequently crucified.

James Burnham has the last laugh

One of the central issues bothering the elite a century ago was that of how “the masses” might be “controlled” in the “new age of democracy”….Writers such as Walter Lippmann (Public Opinion 1922) and Ortego y Gasset (Revolt of the Masses 1930) conjured up frightening narratives about the dangers of the great unwashed masses. Lippmann’s full book can be read here…

The scintillating prose of Joseph Schumpeter’s (1883-1950) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1943) was a favourite of mine at University – with his theory of the “circulation of the elites” reassuring the elites of the post-war period that all would be well…. 

Of course the rebellious 60s got them worried – but a combination of the Trilateral Commission’s 1975 report on The Crisis of Democracy and, as Perry Anderson has recently and very usefully reminded us, the European Commission soon saw the plebs off...... 

But the populism evident since the start of the new millennium has sparked new anxieties about the masses amongst the liberal elites – and indeed raised the question anew as to whether capitalism is consistent with democracy…

One guy whose words are worth reading on that question is SM Wolin – whose book on the history of political thought - Politics and Vision - held me spellbound in the 1960s. In his 90s he produced this great critique of the US system – Democracy Inc – managed democracy and the specter of inverted totalitarianism (2008). And this is an interesting recent article, Why Elites always Rule which reminds the new generation of the significance of Pareto’s work….. 

In 1941 James Burnham produced his magisterial “The Managerial Revolution” against which George Orwell wrote in 1946 a devastating essay Second thoughts on James Burnham. Orwell clearly had some agreement with Burnham about the oligarchic direction in which political forces were pushing society and faulted Burnham more for his fatalistic assessment of the probability of Nazi success.

Not so well known was Burnham’s next book The Machiavellians – defenders of freedom (1943)  which examined the work of such theorists as Mosca, Pareto and Sorel

And also forgotten is a book he produced in 1964 - by which time he had turned from the fiery radical and "friend" of Trotsky to a full-blown liberal - Suicide of the West 

That sort of title has become a fairly common theme this past decade or so. In these myopic times, a bit of respect for long-dead writers is overdue!  

Words and metaphors

Thanks to Maria Popova of Brain Pickings, I found myself this morning enjoying the company of dead men… specifically George Orwell and Andre Gide.

Her website is a superb personal endeavour which offers extended excerpts from classic texts about the writing and creativity process – and also striking illustrations. In all the noise and hubbub that passes for civilisation, her site is a haven of tranquillity.

I don’t know why the novels of Andre Gide (1869-1951) appealed to me when I first read them (in French) in the 1960s. He certainly lived life to the full and was well-travelled - and must have written clear, taut French to make an appeal to me in the original. He was a great diarist and, reading, for the first time this morning, the volume of his journals starting (in Turkey) in 1914 made a powerful impression on me.

George Orwell is an even older friend whose Politics and the English Language ranks with the best of Shakespeare in its humanism and wisdom. The article lists the most prevalent of the “bad habits” responsible for what he argued (in 1946) was the “mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence” poisoning the English language: 

- Dying metaphors: A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically “dead” (e.g., iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.
Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgels for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, Achilles’ heel, swan song, hotbed.  

Verbal false limbs: These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry.
Characteristic phrases are: render inoperative, militate against, prove unacceptable, make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, serve the purpose of, etc., etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs.

 Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de-formations, and banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation.

Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, the fact that, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved from anti-climax by such refunding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion, etc. 

Pretentious diction: Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual basic, primary, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgments.
Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used to dignify the sordid processes of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on anarchaic color, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, trident, sword, shield, banner, jackboot, clarion. Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien regime, deus ex machina, status quo, gleichschaltung, Weltanschauung, are used to give an air of culture and elegance.

 Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g. and etc., there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in English. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, clandestine, subaqueous and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon opposite numbers.

The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, lackeys, flunkey, mad dog. White Guard, etc.) consists largely of words and phrases translated from Russian, German or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use a Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the -ize formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentatory) than to think up the English words that will cover one’s meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness. 

Meaningless words: 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. Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly even expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, “The outstanding feature of Mr. X’s work is its living quality,” while another writes, “The immediately striking thing about Mr. X’s work is its peculiar deadness,” the reader accepts this as a simple difference of opinion.

If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable.” The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.

Orwell’s most important point, however, is a vivid testament to what modern psychology now knows about metaphorical thinking. By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash … it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking.

Orwell concludes with a practical checklist of strategies for avoiding such mindless momentum of thought and the stale writing it produces: 

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:
What am I trying to say?
What words will express it?
What image or idiom will make it clearer?
Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even yourself.

writing for inspiration and conspiracy

As someone trained in the social sciences - and keen to know what its various disciplines had to contribute to social improvements - I have done my best to keep up with thinking and writing in relevant fields. At least insofar as I can penetrate the dreadful language in which so many social scientists write! Regular readers will know that I am dubious whether the various disciplines in fact deserve to be called “sciences” at all – most of the time they are a collection of hypotheses, opinions and downright ideologies. And the jargon and obfuscated style of writing is simply a stratagem to hide that basic fact. I find it significant that Stanislaw Andreski’s 1972 book Social Sciences as Sorcery has not been allowed a reprint! Here's one quotation which perhaps helps us explain its disappearance!

"The attraction of jargon and obfuscating convolutions can be fully explained by the normal striving of humans for emoluments and prestige at the least cost to themselves, the cost in question consisting of the mental effort and danger of 'sticking one's neck out' or 'putting one's foot in it'. In addition to eliminating such risks, as well as the need to learn much, nebulous verbosity opens a road to the most prestigious academic posts to people of small intelligence whose limitations would stand naked if they had to state what they have to say clearly and succinctly."

The years that students spend in these disciplines may teach them a particular jargon and way of looking at the world; but the more important thing it teaches them is the strange mixture of obedience and arrogance required of those who wish to join the elites of their society. I sometimes think that if we really wanted to change society for the better, we first need to teach people – academics, bureaucrats and citizens alike - certain simple skills of thinking, writing and communicating. I’ve admitted several times here that one of the reasons I do this blog is because the discipline of writing helps me identify questions I would otherwise not be aware of.

 
And I’m composing this particular post because, in the last couple of days, I’ve come across both good and bad examples of writing. First an example of the sort of writing I encountered a lot in post-Soviet countries – piling voluminous fact upon interminable statistic to subjugate the reader into unquestioning silence. It purports to be a study (more than 500 pages) of corruption in the public sector of EU member countries (funded by the EU) but seems rather to be a (very detailed) description of the relevant sections of the various laws which govern corruption. I say “seems” since I do not have the patience to persevere with it after looking at the conclusions on Austria – widely known as one of the most corrupt members – which are so facile and badly written they would not have been allowed into even a newspaper. They did, however, survive the editing process of the EU!

An example of good report writing – at least in terms of the structure of the report – is the Review of Impact and Effectiveness of Transparency and Accountability Initiatives published recently by the Institute of development Studies. I haven't had time to read it yet - but I like the way each section has a basic question as its heading. This gives me a lot of confidence - since everyone (writer, editor and reader) has a reference point by which to judge the text!

Thirty years ago I wrote a short book to try to explain in simple terms for the general public why some major changes being experienced by local government were necessary and trying to demystify the way the system worked. That made me realise how few books were in fact written for this purpose! Most books are written to make a profit or an academic reputation. The first requires you to take a few simple and generally well-known ideas but parcel them in a new way – the second to choose a very tiny area of experience and write about it in a very complicated way.

After that experience, I realised how true is the saying that “If you want to understand a subject, write a book about it”!! Failing that, at least an article – this will certainly help you identify the gaps in your knowledge – and give you the specific questions which then make sure you get the most out of your reading.

My first real publications were chapters in other people’s books and national journals – which described the experiences in community development and more open policy-making processes some of us had introduced into Europe’s largest municipality. I was “sunk”, however, when one journal then asked me to write one page every 4 weeks. I just couldn’t compress my thoughts that way. Although I was reading a lot, I couldn’t write in abstract terms – only about my own experiences, trying to relate them to the more general ideas. I did four pretty good pieces – but then had to pull out. The effort was just taking up too much of my nervous energy. How much I admired the talks of someone like Alaister Cooke – who each week would take a simple incident and weave around it an insightful essay on an aspect of the American political process! Julian Barnes is one of a few who seems to have this gift these days – although my October 2009 blog recognised what Malcolm Gladwell does.

George Orwell’s 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, however, remains my bible.
A rare blog on this issue of the construction of coherent writing can be found here
By the way - "inspire" is the breathe in (life) and "conspire" is to breath with (others). We need a lot more of the oxygen of clear expositions and collective action to achieve the decent life (which some of us have had the luck to experience from time to time).

travelling curiously

Yesterday I mentioned Wilkinson and Picket book on Equality. It’s called The Spirit Level and has caused such a stir that, when I saw it on offer on Amazon for 5 pounds, I decided it was time to buy it. The authors have also set up an Equality Trust website to promote its ideas. From which I take the following snippet. A couple of young guys have been so inspired by the book that they have organised a bike ride to Sweden to explore at a human level what it means to be living in a more equal society. They will chat with people they meet – recording and blogging about the interviews. Their journey has just begun and their blog can be followed at exploring equality
In this idea of combining travel and talk with treatise, they follow an honourable tradition – for example, William Cobbett’s Rural Rides in the 1820s; George Orwell’s 1937 Road to Wigan Pier and, in 1996, Robert Kaplan’s The Ends of the Earth: A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy

I have been stuck too long in the laptop and books. The weather has been steadily improving in the last few days here in the mountains and I must now get out, exercise the muscles and breathe the marvellous air into my lungs. But one last snippet – this time a reading list which one of the UK’s new Foreign Ministers apparently has for the summer!