the communist is no match for the capitalist. She escapes unscathed, leaving him wounded by the parting shot:
There’s so much hatred in you Sean McVie. What happened to you? What did they do to you, Sean McVie, over all those years? And it’s nearly over, and where is your revolution: just fifteen hundred members, six hundred in arrears, some odd jobs for the Iraqis and an old man and a terrorised woman in a dingy office off Streatham High Street.
‘Where is your revolution?’ was a good question, and in trying to explain why the chance of his revolution succeeding had vanished, Anderson blamed the style of the far left as much as the slow death of revolutionary politics in the dingy offices of socialist parties. Anderson said that he and Edward Said had noticed that intellectuals who supported market economics wrote in ‘a fluent popular style, designed not for an academic readership but a broad international public’. It should be ‘a matter of honour on the Left to write at least as well, without redundancy or clutter, as its adversaries’.
He didn’t admit it, but few who had tried to read New Left Review could pretend that its intellectuals who called themselves left wing did that. Many were post-modern academics employed by the states they presumably wanted to topple to teach ‘theory’ in Western universities. Anderson did not realize that their infamous obscurantism was a sign of their cowardice as well as their political isolation.
Writers write badly when they have something to hide. Clarity makes their shaky assumptions plain to the readers – and to themselves. By keeping it foggy they save themselves the trouble of spelling out their beliefs and recommendations for the future. For academics, of all people, this is a disreputable way of going about business, but one that has many uses. Obscurantism spared the theorists who emerged from the grave of Marxism the pain of testing dearly held beliefs and prejudices, as well as the inevitable accusations of selling out from friends and colleagues a clear-headed revision of their ideas would bring.
In defence of academics, jokes about incomprehensible intellectuals are as old as Aristophanes’ digs at Socrates. In any case, they hardly formed a monolithic bloc. The best critics of the post-modern academics were not golf course wags who found P. J. O’Rourke a riot, but other academics, particularly philosophers, scientists and historians, who insisted on clear logic and reliable evidence, and psychiatrists exploring the arts of manipulation. A psychiatric team led by Donald H. Naftulin, a professor at the University of Southern California School of Medicine, suggested why students would take the theorists seriously when it showed how easily educated people can be seduced into believing gobbledegook with the marvellous ‘Dr Fox’ experiment of 1972.
Dr Myron L. Fox inspired confidence. He was an imposing figure: tall, poised and well spoken; silver of hair and sober of dress … every inch the authoritative scholar. As his curriculum vitae proved, he was an expert in the newly fashionable field of ‘game theory’, a branch of mathematics that calculated how game players try to maximize their returns. The Cold War had made game theory a subject of urgent interest – if America drops an H bomb, will the Soviet Union respond and both sides carry on until the destruction of the world? Or will there be a point where it would be in the best interests of both sides to pull back? The Scientific American had published an article on this vital new area of knowledge, and the educated public was keen to hear more. Dr Fox seemed the man to tell them. He attracted audiences of graduates to a series of lectures entitled Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physical Education. Afterwards the listeners filled in questionnaires on his performance. They were overwhelmingly positive. Eighty per cent rated him ‘an outstanding psychiatrist’ who had used ‘well organized’ material and ‘stimulated their thinking’. One said that ‘he was certainly captivating’. Another reported that ‘his relaxed manner of presentation was a large factor in holding my interest’.
They didn’t know it but Dr Myron L. Fox had blinded them with the illusion of intellectual authority. He was an actor, of course. Naftulin and his colleagues had rearranged sentences from the Scientific American’s article into a meaningless muddle and hired Dr Fox to read them. ‘Excessive use of double talk, neologisms, non sequiturs, and contradictory statements’ filled the lecture, said a proud Naftulin as he reported the results of the experiment. A minority was unimpressed, but Naftulin said that no one had ‘a competent crap detector’ to warn them the speaker was a fraud. Dr Fox seduced all his listeners into believing he was an expert.
Dr Fox was addressing educated people who weren’t specialists in game theory. In 1980, J. Scott Armstrong, from the University of Pennsylvania, examined which writing styles seduced specialists. He sent articles from the business press to thirty-two professors in North American business schools. They all covered the same story and conveyed the same accurate information. Armstrong discovered that the harder an article was to read, the more trustworthy the professors found it. His method of distinguishing good writing from bad was questionable. He said a clear piece of writing was composed of short sentences. Like this. But many clear writers don’t use short sentences. They carry the reader with them by building up clause after clause until they reach the conclusion. As business writers rarely deliver perorations, Armstrong was probably still right to conclude that ‘overall, the evidence is consistent with a common suspicion: clear communication of one’s research is not appreciated’.
Jargon-mongers certainly stuffed the business schools and used convoluted language to make banalities appear profound. However, no academics could come close to matching the obfuscation and murkiness of post-modern specialists in ‘theory’ – feminist theory, postcolonial theory, ‘other’ theory, critical race theory, queer theory, communicative action theory, structuration theory, neo-Marxian theory … any kind of theory, every kind of theory.
In 1996 ‘theory’ was the victim of the Sokal hoax, the academic sting of the decade. Naftulin and his team had shown that a plausible conman could convince an educated audience to believe rubbish if they weren’t experts in the field. Armstrong had suggested that authentic experts preferred true but unnecessarily convoluted writing about their field. Alan Sokal, a New York University physics professor, showed that experts in the field of ‘theory’ beat them all: they believed unnecessarily convoluted writing which was also rubbish. He strung together bizarre claims from Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray and many another star of the humanities departments into a gibbering argument that reality was a bourgeois illusion. (Irigaray was my favourite. She denounced Einstein’s E = mc2 as a sexist equation which ‘privileges the speed of light’ over more feminine speeds ‘which are vitally necessary to us’. Presumably, light might have appeased her if it had shown its feminine side by slowing down to 30 m.p.h. in built-up areas.) Sokal stacked up the idiocies and then concluded that the laws of mathematics were instruments of capitalist repression. He sent his spoof to the editors of Social Text, a leading postmodernist journal, which published it in a special edition that promised to ‘uncover the gender-laden and racist assumptions built into the Euro-American scientific method’.
Sokal was a man of the Left and his hoax proved that not every left-wing intellectual was a theorist. But ‘theory’ was the dominant form of thought in arts and social studies departments, particularly in American universities, and what the theorists were trying to say appalled academics who wanted to uphold basic intellectual standards. In 1996 Denis Dutton, the editor of Philosophy and Literature, fought back by opening the annual Bad Writing Contest. ‘No one denies the need for a specialized vocabulary in biochemistry or physics or in technical areas of the humanities like linguistics,’ he said. ‘But among literature professors who do what they now call “theory” – mostly inept philosophy applied to literature and culture – jargon has become the emperor’s clothing of choice.’ Dutton invited readers to send him egregious examples of academic prose from the English-speaking world. The winner of his 1999 Bad Writing Contest was a piece by Judith Butler, a Marxist and feminist acclaimed by her fellow theorists as one of the most significant thinkers in America. She informed the reader that:
The move from a structuralist