Postmodernist Essay Generator

In yesterday’s post I decoded the convoluted remark by a defender of dishonest journalism that “to let fact checking define the narrative would be a huge mistake.”

There are a lot of reasons for obscurity, but the big five are lazy thinking, lazy writing, intellectual snobbery, motivated irrationality, and covert signaling.  The lazy thinker can’t write clearly because he doesn’t know what he is trying to say or has nothing to say.  The lazy writer might have written clearly, but it would have been too much work.  The intellectual snob thinks turgid writing is a sign of subtle intelligence.  Motivated irrationality means the writer can’t write plainly because it would force him to face his own thoughts.  In the case of the person whom I quoted, the reason for obscurity was probably covert signaling, which means writing in a way that clues in the shills but keeps the suckers in the dark.

I teach my grad students that if they can’t translate obscure language into language the man on the street can understand, then they don’t understand it themselves.  The most lancingly funny example of decoding I know is in C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet.  It’s not his best novel, but the incident is worth the whole book.  Weston, an earthman, is trying to justify interplanetary genocide to the ruler of the Malacandrians, or Martians, whom he mistakenly takes to be savages.  Ransom, an earthman who knows the language better, is called upon to translate.

“Me no ...  no ...”  began Weston in Malacandrian and then broke off.  “I can’t say what I want in their accursed language,” he said in English.

“Speak to Ransom and he shall turn it into our speech,” said Oyarsa.

Weston accepted the arrangement at once.  He believed that the hour of his death was come and he was determined to utter the thing — almost the only thing outside his own science— which he had to say.  He cleared his throat, almost he struck a gesture, and began:

“To you I may seem a vulgar robber, but I bear on my shoulders the destiny of the human race.  Your tribal life with its stone-age weapons and beehive huts, its primitive coracles and elementary social structure, has nothing to compare with our civilization — with our science, medicine and law, our armies, our architecture, our commerce, and our transport system which is rapidly annihilating space and time.  Our right to supersede you is the right of the higher over the lower.  Life —”

“Half a moment,” said Ransom in English.  “That’s about as much as I can manage at one go.”  Then, turning to Oyarsa, he began translating as well as he could.  The process was difficult and the result — which he felt to be rather unsatisfactory — was something like this:

“Among us, Oyarsa, there is a kind of hnau who will take other hnaus’ food and — and things, when they are not looking.  He says he is not an ordinary one of that kind.  He says what he does now will make very different things happen to those of our people who are not yet born.  He says that, among you, hnau of one kindred all live together and the hrossa have spears like those we used a very long time ago and your huts are small and round and your boats small and light and like our old ones, and you have one ruler.  He says it is different with us.  He says we know much.  There is a thing happens in our world when the body of a living creature feels pains and becomes weak, and he says we sometimes know how to stop it.  He says we have many bent people and we kill them or shut them in huts and that we have people for settling quarrels between the bent hnau about their huts and mates and things.  He says we have many ways for the hnau of one land to kill those of another and some are trained to do it.  He says we build very big and strong huts of stones and other things like the pfifltriggi.  And he says we exchange many things among ourselves and can carry heavy weights very quickly a long way.  Because of all this, he says it would not be the act of a bent hnau if our people killed all your people.”

As soon as Ransom had finished, Weston continued.

“Life is greater than any system of morality; her claims are absolute.  It is not by tribal taboos and copy-book maxims that she has pursued her relentless march from the amoeba to man and from man to civilisation.”

“He says,” began Ransom, “that living creatures are stronger than the question whether an act is bent or good — no, that cannot be right — he says it is better to be alive and bent than to be dead — no — he says, he says — I cannot say what he says, Oyarsa, in your language.  But he goes on to say that the only good thing is that there should be very many creatures alive.  He says there were many other animals before the first men and the later ones were better than the earlier ones; but he says the animals were not born because of what is said to the young about bent and good action by their elders.  And he says these animals did not feel any pity.”

“She —” began Weston.

“I’m sorry,” interrupted Ransom, “but I’ve forgotten who She is.”

“Life, of course,” snapped Weston.  “She has ruthlessly broken down all obstacles and liquidated all failures and today in her highest form— civilized man— and in me as his representative, she presses forward to that inter-planetary leap which will, perhaps, place her for ever beyond the reach of death.”

“He says,” resumed Ransom, “that these animals learned to do many difficult things, except those who could not; and those ones died and the other animals did not pity them.  And he says the best animal now is the kind of man who makes the big huts and carries the heavy weights and does all the other things I told you about; and he is one of these and he says that if the others all knew what he was doing they would be pleased.  He says that if he could kill you all and bring our people to live in Malacandra, then they might be able to go on living here after something had gone wrong with our world.  And then if something went wrong with Malacandra they might go and kill all the hnau in another world.  And then another — and so they would never die out.”

“It is in her right,” said Weston, “the right, or, if you will, the might of Life herself, that I am prepared without flinching to plant the flag of man on the soil of Malacandra: to march on, step by step, superseding, where necessary, the lower forms of life that we find, claiming planet after planet, system after system, till our posterity — whatever strange form and yet unguessed mentality they have assumed — dwell in the universe wherever the universe is habitable.”

“He says,” translated Ransom, “that because of this it would not be a bent action — or else, he says, it would be a possible action — for him to kill you all and bring us here.  He says he would feel no pity.  He is saying again that perhaps they would be able to keep moving from one world to another and wherever they came they would kill everyone.  I think he is now talking about worlds that go round other suns.  He wants the creatures born from us to be in as many places as they can.  He says he does not know what kind of creatures they will be.”

“I may fall,” said Weston.  “But while I live I will not, with such a key in my hand, consent to close the gates of the future on my race.  What lies in that future, beyond our present ken, passes imagination to conceive: it is enough for me that there is a Beyond.”

“He is saying,” Ransom translated, “that he will not stop trying to do all this unless you kill him.  And he says that though he doesn’t know what will happen to the creatures sprung from us, he wants it to happen very much.”

Tomorrow:  Why Can’t Johnnie’s Teachers Reason Either?

This month, after a scathing investigation by Steve Coll, Sheila Coronel, and Derek Kravitz of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Rolling Stone magazine officially retracted its November story about a supposed gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity house.  Managing editor Will Dana writes, “We would like to apologize to our readers and to all of those who were damaged by our story and the ensuing fallout, including members of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity and UVA administrators and students.”

The only mystery here is why Rolling Stone waited five months.  As Dana admits, critics had questioned the journalistic failings of the story within days of its publication.  We now know that although the magazine’s “fact checker” had interviewed “Jackie,” the young woman who made the allegation, at length, the staff made no attempt to contact those whom she accused.  In fact, they couldn’t have, because she refused to provide the name of the alleged leader of the alleged assault.  In other words, there was no fact checking at all.  But the reporter, the editors, and the fact-checker-who-didn’t-check-facts “believed firmly that Jackie's account was reliable,” so they reported it as fact.

Then again, perhaps the long delay isn’t so mysterious.  The psychology of this sort of journalism is exhibited in a December essay titled “Why We Believed Jackie’s Rape Story,” published in the UVA student newspaper, the Cavalier Daily, by Julia Horowitz, who was then its assistant managing editor and has since been elected as its editor-in-chief.  “[I]t is becoming increasingly clear that the story ... has some major, major holes,” she said at that time.  “Ultimately, though, from where I sit in Charlottesville, to let fact checking define the narrative would be a huge mistake.”

People accustomed to speaking frankly may be baffled by the meaning of that statement.  Let’s decode it.  In plain English, Ms. Horowitz is saying that journalists shouldn’t base their stories on the facts; they should trim the facts to fit the stories they have already decided to tell.  For her, there would have been no need to find out whether the allegations of gang rape were true, because reporting them as true made women feel “comfortable sharing their stories.”  The important thing isn’t whether a story is accurate, but whether it promotes her preferred view of reality.

But Ms. Horowitz is wrong.  Sexual assault is a filthy crime; so is false accusation.  We don’t have to be cavalier about the possibility of lying just to prove how serious we are about rape.  Truth is not served by indifference as to which things are true.

Tomorrow:  Getting the Bugs Out of Humbug

I’m breaking my “Monday for students” rule again.  This letter is from an attorney in Jamaica.

Query:

Why is it that we humans find nothing wrong in defying physical laws, for example by flying, yet we do consider it wrong for us to defy moral laws?  Just thinking.

Also, doesn’t the fact that some people have defended slavery as "natural" show that we cannot be certain about the content of natural law?

Reply:

I’m glad to answer.  There are two mistakes in the way you pose your first question.  The first mistake is that we don’t defy violate natural forces; we only make use of them.  When an airplane flies, it responds to a number of forces at once.  Gravity pulls it down, lift raises it up, and thrust drives it forward.  The motion of the airplane is the resultant of all of these forces together.

The other problem is that you are mixing up natural forces with natural laws.  A law is a rule and measure of right and wrong, suitable to guide the acts of a free and rational being.  From this point of view, “Never murder” is a natural law, but gravity isn’t a law; it is merely a natural force.  When we call gravity a “law,” we are speaking analogically, because the airplane is not thinking to itself, “Golly, I am in a gravitational field – I ought to fall down.”

We see then that the original form of the question has things backwards.  The airplane cannot defy the force.  But a rational being can defy the precept – although it shouldn’t.

As to your second question:  Some pre-Civil-War American masters defended the enslavement of black Africans on ground that the slaves were naturally inferior.  They were gravely mistaken.  So doesn’t that show that we can’t be sure about right and wrong?

No, it shows just the opposite.  After all, if you weren’t sure that slavery was wrong, then how could you call them mistaken?  It is only about real matters of fact that it is possible to make mistakes – and it is only about real matters of fact that it is possible to correct these mistakes.

You wouldn't say that since physicians once mistakenly believed that bloodletting could cure everything from cancer to acne, therefore we can never be sure that it doesn't.  Or that since astronomers once mistakenly believed that there were canals on Mars, therefore we can never be sure that they don't exist.  Or that since surgeons once operated without washing their hands, therefore we can never be sure about the benefits of asepsis.  So why should you worry that since some slaveowners once tried to convince themselves that Africans were natural slaves, therefore we can never be sure that they aren't?

Tomorrow:  On Not Letting Facts Get in the Way

Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher of will to power who originated the motto “God is dead,” wrote, "I think of myself as the scrawl which an unknown power scribbles across a sheet of paper, to try out a new pen" (letter to Peter Gast, August, 1881).

He was not the only one.  It seems that in our age a number of new pens are being tried out – in politics, literature, music, culture, mendacity, disgrace, and oppression.  A day is coming when the scribble will seem to fill every inch of every sheet, every placard, every wall.  And yet it will not prevail.

Tomorrow:  Defying the Natural Law

“Ten million young women rose to their feet with the cry, ‘We will not be dictated to,’ and went off and became stenographers.”

-- G.K. Chesterton

Tomorrow:  A Word to the Wise