Does being an outsider improve the quality of someone’s writing?

A rather rambling post a couple of weeks ago tried to explore the insights which can come from straddling worlds which are normally kept separate. This drew on material from 3 years earlier about Ways of Seeing and about Role Conflict.   

Indeed I now see there is a book whicih argues this - Rebel Ideas - the power of diverse thinking by Mathew Syad (2019)

I’m now shifting the focus to try to identify the qualities of a non-fiction book that make it “terrific” rather than merely “good”. I last tried that with Yanis Varoufakis whose books zing with zest….and only, I think, once before with detailed comments on a great book called Defending Politics

Perhaps this will allow me to add a further test to those I suggested in the famous post Why we need to ration non-fiction books.  

Like the good social scientist I am, I already have a hypothesis – namely that the feeling of being an outsider is a catalyst to identify and challenge “groupthink” and that writing is an effective way of exploring the multiple perspectives which subsequently open up…..

Clearly one can be a great writer without being (or feeling) an outsider - although I suspect that people who lack empathy won’t be great writers. But the weak point in my argument is the connection between creativity and writing. There’s no obvious reason why those with creative insights should be able to express them clearly in writing,,,,……

Or is there?    

I have already identified some of the people whose (non-fiction) writing I admire and the first column of the table below simply lists them – in the order in which they came to  mind. 

The second column is my own feeble attempt to label them….

The third will try to explain their “outsider” status which can relate to country, discipline, ethnicity or even gender…Significant that all but one are men? Adding Susan George, Polly Toynbee, Oriana Fallaci or Simone de Beauvoir at this stage is artificial….the point is that their names didn’t come to mind….

What do these great writers have in common?

Name	Status	Outsider in what sense?
Yanis Varoufakis	Globetrotting political economist	Spent first 20 or so years in Greece; European perspective
Theodor Zeldin	Writer, maverick Oxford academic	Came to UK as a child (Russian parents); strong French connection
Arthur Koestler	Central European journalist who made UK his home	Was a communist in Germany. Jailed in Franco Spain. Strong interest in science
JK Galbraith	Prolific Canadian/American economist and writer	23 when he left Canada – American civil servant handling rationing; Ambassador to India for JFK; attracted envy from academic colleagues
Robert Heilbronner	US economic historian	author of the famous “The Worldly Philosophers”; very much a generalist;
Charles Handy	Irish management writer and guru	changed his career every decade
Ralf Dahrendorf	German academic and politician; EC Commissioner, Director of LSE; and Lord	Straddled German and British academic and political worlds - for 25 years apiece
Richard Rose	Policy analyst, writer	had been a young journalist, Came to UK when 27
Roger Scruton	Maverick academic,	Often complained that his traditional brand of conservatism marginalised him
David Graeber	Anthropologist, activist, anarchist	Author of “Bullshit Jobs” Failed to have his academic position renewed by Harvard. Anthropology, almost by definition, means being an outsider
Jan Morris	Journalist	Change of sex certainly gives one a new perspective! And (s)he’s half English and half-Welsh – with this article explicitly referring to her felt “outsider”status
Jonathan Meade	Journalist and film maker – culture and buildings	His autobiography “An Encyclopaedia of Myself” makes it fairly clear he felt he was an outsider
Michael Pollan	Academic (Prof of Journalism), writer	He graduated in English; Generalist; jewish Author of “Cooked”, “In Defence of Food” etc
Alain de Botton	Pop philosopher	Early years in Switzerland
David Runciman	British political scientist; writer	Author of “How Democracy Ends” Son of a famous father, his case simply doesn’t fit!
Ha-Joon Chang	Development Economist	Graduated from South Korea; came to Cambridge for further studies and remained, Author of “23 things they don’t tell uoi about capitalism”
Yuval Harari	Israeli historian	Graduated Israel and now writes bestsellers like “Homo Sapiens”
Rutger Bregman	Dutch historian/journalist	Author of “Utopia for Realists”

Writing again

The issue of good writing has had me in its grip since my post on No Man’s Land 2 weeks ago....I confess that I have a folder on the subject - with a 100 page “commonplace” collection of comments and links  about the matter....

I’m glad, however, that I hadn’t released it on a unsuspecting audience - since I’ve just discovered a quite brilliant extended essay on ”Economical Writing” written in 1983 by one Donald McCloskey who underwent an identity change a couple of decades later and is now the redoubtable Professor Deirdre McCloskey.

I recommend the piece partly because it is so beautifully written and structured – a veritable exemplar of the advice it offers - with just one exception. Some of the references are dated or too American. Harry G Johnson, for example, may have strutted the globe like a Colossus in the 70s and 80s but, very sadly, only older economists will now recognise the name.

But the piece should also be read since it is one of the few which superbly captures the travails of writing    

That essay, in turn, alerted me to several important texts on writing style about which I was totally ignorant – not least one by the glorious English writer Robert Graves The Reader over your Shoulder which Graves and Alan Hodge actually published in the war years of 1944. The inimitable Paris Review had this to say about the book - 

Modestly subtitled “A Handbook for Writers of English Prose,” the book was never merely that. The Reader Over Your Shoulder has been called the authors’ contribution to the war effort. It would be too much to say that they thought good English could save the world. But to Graves and Hodge, clear and logical prose was not a mere nicety: “The writing of good English is … a moral matter, as the Romans held that the writing of good Latin was.”

The title sums up their theme, stated early in the book: “We suggest that whenever anyone sits down to write he should imagine a crowd of his prospective readers (rather than a grammarian in cap and gown) looking over his shoulder.” By imagining readers’ questions, the authors say, “the writer will discover certain tests of intelligibility.” These tests, outlined in part 1, consist of forty-one principles for writing, twenty-five devoted to clarity and sixteen to grace of expression. Each principle is carefully defined, then illustrated by snippets of writing that fail the test.

In part 2, Graves and Hodge reverse this process. They analyze more than fifty short passages by eminent contemporary writers, applying line by line the principles laid out in part 1. But they don’t just point out shortcomings. They actually rewrite the passages. This took a lot of nerve, considering that they were correcting people like T. S. Eliot, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, Ernest Hemingway, John Maynard Keynes, Cecil Day-Lewis, Ezra Pound, Stephen Spender, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw. (One of their friends suggested as a subtitle “A Short Cut to Unpopularity.”)

Their purpose was not to sneer at the mighty, but to show that occasionally even the best writers are careless or inattentive. In choosing their samples, the authors explain, they simply took up a book or article by each writer, then “read on at our usual speed until we found ourselves bogged in a difficult passage. This passage became the subject of our analysis.”

Each sample—whether from a prime minister or a popular novelist—is subjected to the same forty-one principles. There should be no doubt in the reader’s mind as to who, what, when, where, how much, how long, and so on. No word or phrase should be ambiguous or out of place. Sentences should be linked logically and intelligibly. Ideas should follow one another in a natural order. Metaphors should be handled with care. Nothing unnecessary should be included, nothing necessary omitted.

Another delight unleashed on me by McCloskey’s essay was Unended Quest – an intellectual autobiography; Karl Popper (1974 – updated 1992)

In the meantime I had resumed my reading here in Ploiesti of David Runciman’s little bombshell - How Democracy Ends (2018) whose references to other relevant texts reminds me a bit of Matt Flinders’ In Defence of Politics. Runciman's book has been nicely reviewed here  - and here

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One of my new subscriptions had an interesting take on the  new US radical mags

 If the intellectual at the think tank was the assistant to the legislator, here she has become the willing tool of the activist......Last year, in a report on “new public intellectuals,” the Chronicle of Higher Education referred to The Point as being the “least left-wing” of the intellectual magazines that had emerged in the first two decades of the 2000s. The phrasing consolidated a common misunderstanding.

What distinguishes The Point from the other magazines mentioned in the story (Jacobin, the Nation, n+1, Dissent, the Baffler) is not where we fall on the left-right spectrum, but rather how we picture the relationship between politics and public intellectual life—or, to use Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft’s helpful phrase, “thinking in public.” Whereas the other magazines have framed their projects in ideological and sometimes in activist terms, we have attempted to conduct a conversation about modern life that includes but is not limited by political conviction. This has meant, on the one hand, publishing articles that do not abide by the dictum that everything is “in the last analysis” political. (Some things, we believe, are in the last analysis poetic, some spiritual, some psychological, some moral.) It has also meant publishing a wider range of political perspectives than would usually be housed in one publication. This is not because we seek to be “centrists,” or because we are committed to some fantasy of objectivity. It is because we believe there are still readers who are more interested in having their ideas tested than in having them validated or confirmed, ones who know from their own experience that the mind has not only principles and positions but also, as the old cliché goes, a life. If the Jacobin slogan indicates a political truth, it inverts what we take to be an intellectual one: Ideas Need Resistance....

In our eagerness to advance what we see as the common good, we rush to cover over what we share in common with those who disagree with us, including the facts of our mutual vulnerability and ignorance, our incapacity to ever truly know what is right or good “in the last analysis.” This is the real risk of the strategic approach to communication that sometimes goes by the name of “political correctness”: not that it asks that we choose our words carefully but that it becomes yet another tactic for denying, when it is inconvenient for the ideology we identify with, what is happening right in front of our eyes—and therefore another index of our alienation from our own forms of political expression. The journalist Michael Lewis, embedded with the White House press corps for an article published in Bloomberg in February, observed that a “zero-sum” approach is spreading throughout political media, such that every story is immediately interpreted according to who it is good or bad for, then discarded, often before anyone has paused to consider what is actually happening in the story. 

The photo is of my village in the winter - just 200 metres from my house

Most of us are Pirates these days!

I am not a great subscriber….I tend to leach off the freebies

Recently, however, I took out digital subs for both LRB and NYRB. And the rates of a slightly more academic journal I have loved since the 70s – "Political Quarterly" – are so reasonable (15 euros for not only 4 quarterly editions but also the entire archives) that I was also seduced by them last year. 

For a few months even I managed to get the full daily edition of "Le Monde" – until they cottoned on to the fact that my payment had not actually gone through…

So it’s not altogether surprising that, these past few days, I’ve been looking again at the list (which was one of several annexes of To Whom it May Concern – the 2019 posts) of the journals I considered worth reading.

And that I actually took out yet another sub.

Have a look at the updated list below and see whether you can guess which new title I succumbed to!!

The list which I had compiled all of three years ago had started with a not altogether unjustified crack about the superficiality of newspaper coverage. That, in turn, raised the question of which (English language) journals would pass a test  with such criteria as –

- Depth of treatment

- Breadth of coverage (not just political)

- Cosmopolitan in taste (not just anglo-saxon)

- clarity of writing

- sceptical in tone

My own regular favourite reading includes The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian Long Reads and book reviews,  – and the occasional glance at the New Yorker; New Statesman; and Spiked.

Other titles which might lay some claims to satisfying the stringent criteria set above are -

Aeon; an interesting new (since 2012) cultural journal

Arts and Letters Daily; daily internet roundup from books and articles 

Book Forum; a bit too US centred for my taste…..

Brain Pickings; a superb personal internet bi-weekly endeavour which gives extended excerpts from classic texts about creativity etc. One of the best

Current Affairs is a fairly new American radical journal which looks to be very well-written eg this take-down of The Economist mag and this article on development

Dissent; a US leftist stalwart whose recent analyses of ecological issues have been exemplars of typology
Eurozine; terrific stuff from a European network of 70 odd cultural journals
Jacobin; a rather too predictable US leftist mag with a poor literary style

Literary Hub; a literary site with original selections and frequent posts

London Review of Books; couldn’t do without it!

Los Angeles Review of Books; great addition to book reviews from global cites (eg Boston, Dublin) 

Monthly Review; an old leftist US stalwart with well-written and solid analysis

Mother Jones; more journalistic US progressive

N+1; one of the new and smoother leftist mags

New Humanist; an important strand of UK thought

New Left Review; THE rather academic UK bi-monthly journal which I’ve dipped into ever since it started in 1960 

New Republic; solid US monthly

Prospect (UK); rather too smooth UK monthly

The American Prospect (US); ditto US

Public Books – an impressive recent website (2012) to encourage open intellectual debate
Quillette – a very new journal emphasising “free thought” whose pieces are very well-written 

Resurgence ; UK Green mag

Sceptic; celebration of important strand of UK scepticism

Slate; more right wing internet venture

Social Europe; a european social democratic E-journal whose short articles are a bit too predictable for my taste

Spiked; a very strange journal whose staff came from the "Living Marxism" group and adopt counter-intuitive attitudes to issues. See the useful http://www.lobbywatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=124 for more

The Atlantic; one of my favourite US mags

The Baffler; highly original leftist US bimonthly running for 30 years which I’ve only  noticed recently

The Critic - a new journal (since the end of 2019) opposed to the cosy “left-liberal consensus” it considers disfigures the british chattering classes. A bit parti-pris

The Conversation; a rare venture which has academics writing more journalistically 

The Nation; America's oldest weekly, for the "progressive" community

The New York Review of Books; a fortnightly I’ve been reading avidly for the past 30 years

The New Yorker; very impressive US writing

The Point – a relatively new venture (5 years) which advertises itself as “the magazine of the examined life”

Washington Independent Review; a new website borne of the frustration about the disappearance of so many book review columns

Wired; unpredictable - often has very good material

The answer to the question I posed earlier    is...... most curiously, The Point – as well, after a hiccup, as The New Yorker – the latter offering last week a 4 month internet sub (with archival material) for only 6 dollars. I have to declare, however, that - after a full week - I’ve still not been able to activate access to that delight. Serves me right for succumbing to an offshoot of the Conde mulinational!!!! 
But the digital version of “The Point” is already available - for only 31 dollars a year……..

I confess that I still have fond memories in the 1980s of "The Encounter" mag which was shockingly revealed later in the decade to have been partially funded by the CIA and which as a result shut up shop in 1990....I still have some copies in the glass-covered cabinet in the mountain house study (on the left of the pic).......

The entire set of 1953-1990 issues are archived here – and the range and quality of the authors given space can be admired. European notebooks – new societies and old politics 1954-1985; is a book devoted to one of its most regular writers, the Swiss Francois Bondy (2005) 

A generation of outstanding European thinkers emerged out of the rubble of World War II. It was a group unparalleled in their probing of an age that had produced totalitarianism as a political norm, and the Holocaust as its supreme nightmarish achievement. Figures ranging from George Lichtheim, Ignazio Silone, Raymond Aron, Andrei Amalrik, among many others, found a home in Encounter. None stood taller or saw further than Francois Bondy of Zurich.

European Notebooks contains most of the articles that Bondy (1915-2003) wrote for Encounter under the stewardship of Stephen Spender, Irving Kristol, and then for the thirty years that Melvin Lasky served as editor. Bondy was that rare unattached intellectual, "free of every totalitarian temptation" and, as Lasky notes, unfailing in his devotion to the liberties and civilities of a humane social order. European Notebooks offers a window into a civilization that came to maturity during the period in which these essays were written.

Bondy's essays themselves represent a broad sweep of major figures and events in the second half of the twentieth century. His spatial outreach went from Budapest to Tokyo and Paris. His political essays extended from George Kennan to Benito Mussolini. And his prime metier, the cultural figures of Europe, covered Sartre, Kafka, Heidegger and Milosz. The analysis was uniformly fair minded but unstinting in its insights. Taken together, the variegated themes he raised in his work as a Zurich journalist, a Paris editor, and a European homme de lettres sketch guidelines for an entrancing portrait of the intellectual as cosmopolitan.

Update; https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/april-2020/journal-de-combat-of-the-cold-war/

In Praise of the Outsider

Universities are a frequent whipping-boy in these posts…….mainly for the compartmentalisation of the social sciences; the obfuscating nature of the prose which results as they disappear up one another’s arses; for the dominance and unjustifiable arrogance of the economists; and for the managerialist grab of the past few decades

This, of course reflects the prevailing neo-liberalism - which threw the idea of “learning for learning’s sake” completely out of the window and turned, instead, to a clear and strong insistence on vocational relevance

I’ll readily confess, however, that my cheap shots conceal the mixed feelings I still have about my own (ultimately painful) 17-year experience of academia….

I never allowed myself the discipline of keeping my nose to the intellectual grindstone - I was too busy proselytising - but I’m always secretly delighted when someone calls me a “scholar” (which happens!)   

What I object to, however, is the narrowness of the world which not only envelops the normal scholar but is then automatically transmitted to post-graduates - who are forced to spend years on a sub-sub-sub field of a discipline. Little wonder that we are so badly served with books about key issues – such as the global financial crash..

I try, occasionally, to explore why specialists write such inferior books compared to those who have resisted groupthink and who approach an issue more creatively…..from a multidisciplinary point of view. I find myself using the metaphor of a bridge, border or network.

Perhaps “outsider” is a better term (??) since it better conveys the sense of not belonging to the group – of being on the periphery…..Indeed the word “periphery” better conveys the sense of the messages and pressures from diverse sources which help avoid "groupthink"…  

And I have probably been insufficiently sensitive to the system in which social scientists are trapped…Academics are now under pressure to publish - with their Departments rewarded financially for those who have high ratings from what’s called “peer-reviews”. 

Those who accept the “conventional wisdom” in their fields and write in jargon will generally score well in these ratings. 
But go off piste and/or write in plain language the (wo)man in the street can understand and you’re in trouble. 
One of the concluding chapters of The Econocracy – the perils of leaving economics to the experts by Earle, Moran and Ward-Perkins (2017) explains this very well.

Some exceptional people have not been prepared to accept this - and I want to pay tribute to those who have challenged the conventional wisdom and produced books written for the common (wo)man…..

The list starts with some ex-academics - David Korten, calling himself an “engaged citizen”, is the best known. I remember the impact his first book made when it first came out all of 25 years ago. The introduction is quite gripping – you can see for yourself

Then someone whose name is almost unknown - who decided to opt out completely from the academic rat-race….Harry Shutt is a freelance indeed “dissident” economist. That means someone with none of the institutional ties that break a man’s soul. Shutt earns his keep by project work - and writes books he actually wants to on subjects he chooses and in language he hopes will be understood by his readers. That shows in two of his books which have just come to my attention and which I incorporate into one of my famous tables…..

Titles which deserve more readers

Book Title	Status of author	Focus of book	comment
When Corporations rule the world; David Korton (1995 and 20th anniversary edition)	Free-lance writer Ex Harvard Business School Prof. One of world’s most respected ant-globalists	One of the first (and still amongst the few) books to explore the unusual aspects of the structure of the global company and analyse the damage it inflicts on us all	The link gives the complete book If you read nothing else read, the introductory chapter
The Trouble With Capitalism – An Enquiry into the Causes of Global Economic Failure; Harry Shutt (1998)	Free-lance economist	A wide-ranging book to help the general reader put contemporary events in a proper historical context - and to challenge what Shutt calls the “organised indifference” which ruling interests try to encourage	Still worth reading, 22 years on!
The Decline of Capitalism – Can a Self-regulated Profits System Survive? Harry Shutt (2005)	freelance Interview here with Harry Shutt	A short book (just 150pp) which focuses on events since 1990 and should be read in conjunction with his first book Google excerpts only for his 2 books	I would love to see a further update
Parecon – life after capitalism; Miichael Albert (2003)	Activist	The strange title word refers to “participatory economics”.	The link gives the entire book – which argues for an alternative way of thinking of economics
Inside Capitalism – an introduction to Political Economy; Paul Phillips (2003)	University economist	this is an rare intro to political economy which uses Canadian examples Google excerpts only	One of the clearest textbooks I’ve seen,
Supercapitalism – the transformation of business, democracy and everyday life; Robert Reich (2007).	University administrator who was US Cabinet member	One of the early books about the tension between capitalism and democracy – well summarised here	Link gives the entire book
The Crises of Capitalism – a different study of political economy; Saral Sarkar (2011)	Indian-german academic eco-activist	A book written by someone steeped in the critical literature and its activist circles whose background (presumably) allows him to pose questions and see things others don’t	Link gives the entire book
Global Capitalism and the crisis of humanity; William Robinson (2014)	prolific leftist activist sociologist	Google excerpts are unusually extensive The book is more academic than the others (certainly with denser references) but the opening pages “situate” the book nicely in the wider lit – always a plus for me	another clearly-written exposition..  read more about the author here