Anti-intellectualism and speaking plainly

I was in a training session for professionals at a Fortune 100 company, during my post-Professor career.  The trainer told a story about training another Fortune 100 company's VP.  The VP was asked what he does for a living, and he said "I sell ideas."

The trainer celebrated this answer as the mark of a very smart man, for the VP could see the true nature of what he does and explain it clearly.

I don't doubt that the VP was probably very competent: that trainer, though, struck me as more than a little slow.  That, or he had drunk far too much of the anti-intellectual kool-aid, and it had killed off some of his brain.

American anti-intellectualism has its typical rhetoric.  One such type is Plato falling off the turnip truck, but shifted to our place and time.  Too often, I've seen the rhetoric depicting really bright people as those who can distill the essence of something and speak it plainly (instead of being the people who can also see nuances and clarify those as well).

But plain speech in the professions is a landmine. Really, it is: that's why we have jargon. Jargon can be very useful: with one jargon term, we can eliminate sometimes whole paragraphs of explanation.  Jargon can increase the efficiency and specificity of communication, so long as the audience also already knows that jargon (and so long as the term hasn't drifted recently).

And that audience needing to already be in the know leads to the other reason we have jargon (even if we don't want to accept or admit it).  Jargon keeps the know-nothings out of our playgrounds, because the work needed to learn the jargon will nearly always lead to the person becoming a know-somethings who we would welcome into the playground.  Jargon functions to communicate, and to gatekeep.

(And I'm not the first to point this out, but I can't recall where I read it. Peter Elbow maybe? I.A.Richards?  Stanley Fish? Probably Fish. All I can recall at the moment was being surprised to read that tidbit in that place in someone's argument: it was under utilized at the time.)

Using plain speech in the professions is tricky: doing so announces that the content is easily enough understood that the efficiency and specificity of jargon isn't necessary.   But it also invites the know-nothings: it says to everyone that the ideas are ones we can all understand.  It breaks the gate around the playground, which opens that playground to all.

Including someone who just fell off the turnip truck. Including people who hate nuance.

Plain speech is more democratic; it's also a tool too often used by anti-intellectuals.  It gets us all into the playground, making all the brain numbing noise of any playground packed with too many kids.

It encourages simplicity, to the point of stupidity.

Yet I am writing my blog pretty plainly, for I believe that the way to fight the rhetoric of anti-intellectualism is to encourage thought, despite the hullabaloo around us. We will never teach everyone to be able to pass the gatekeepers of jargon: there's too much to learn, too much nuance to juggle.  But to not even try denies the democratic spirit buried in using the plain style



PS. My personal favorite example of jargon drift is in the term "ideology".  I believe it once meant those beliefs that are so completely shared by a community that the members of the community can't recognize them: we're effectively blind to those shared beliefs.  These days, "ideology" is regularly discussed as those beliefs that are commonly shared, not the ones that are so deeply set that we are blind to them.  I find that shift frustrating, because the original idea--of beliefs that we can't know we have--is useful.  Instead, "ideology" has shifted to mean little more than "conventional wisdom".