05 May 2001
Further Defense of the Genuine
I'm torn over Michael's journal entry yesterday. On the one hand, I agree with all of his substantive points on communication and writing, and his entry is one of those pieces of writing that just makes my brain race (of course, I was too busy yesterday actually to LET my brain race over any of it, instead sending Michael a lame "great stuff -- more later" sort of email). On the other hand (there's always another hand), I don't have enough information to judge his assessment of Andrew, although I do share his condemnation of intellectuals who DO ACT as he claims Andrew is acting.
Michael criticizes Andrew, whose fascination with theories of communication is well known, of not being fascinated with communication per se, but of what his communicative modes and choices say about him: communication as "self-projection" as Michael calls it. Whether this is true of Andrew or not, I can't judge, but it IS true of far too many intellectuals: people hiding behind dressed-up language to project a sense of superiority. Anyone who has ever tried to make sense of Martin Heidegger understands this phenomenon firsthand, although it's become far worse lately because people who engage in this behavior are much more ignorant than Heidegger, a highly learned man. And even Heidegger is problematic, because if his intention was obscurity so that he would be received well by an audience of academic elites also engaged in self-projection, his enterprise was actually a great success, given his prominence in academic philosophy and literary studies today, and the hundreds of books and journal articles devoted to "explaining" Heidegger!
That last raises a real problem for thinking persons, the question of intended audience. Does Andrew necessarily believe ALL of the things he writes about, including the E-Prime nonsense (more on that below), or is he engaged in a genuine attempt to discuss NLP and other theories on their own terms with people who are interested and proficient in the same? The reason I ask is that I agree with Michael 100% about communication, yet find that sometimes specialized language IS necessary to approach certain subjects, which can come off as terribly pretentious to those who do not share the same training (context, really); this exchange on my message boards where I momentarily slip into grad-student-style discourse before backtracking and making the subject more accessible to the smart people with whom I was conversing (who did not share my own grad training, reading, etc) is a great example! The same is true of another pet topic of mine; I would LOVE to have a technical discussion about the the concept of Natural Right in Leo Strauss and Ayn Rand, but have yet to find someone trained in political philosophy who has also studied Rand and would therefore be able to have that conversation at a technical level. Were I to write very much about it, I'm sure that I would look like a pompous self-projector to many people -- and if my goal were simply to show up people instead of trying to promote discourse on an interesting, but complex and specialized topic, that would be a fair indictment. Because I don't know Andrew's goal, and I'm hesitant to indict him on those grounds.
Further, I don't know Andrew's purposes in praising and linking to an explanation of Level 3 that begins with the premise that attraction "is the root of all change in the universe" nor do I know his purposes in linking to a journal composed entirely in E-Prime, which, as Jaffo points out, is a wonderful example of a new-age "language" that makes it more difficult to communicate by removing usage of "to be" (it does so on the grounds of a dubious philosphical premise, and renders communication much more wordy by, essentially, eliminating connotation in some instances where it might be useful, eliminating denotation in some instances -- although I don't know if its proponents even know this is what they are doing, they're having so much FUN with the nonsense). I tend to agree with Michael that these examples obscure, rather than making clear and distinct (which is what, presumably, we are trying to do when we communicate), if that's any consolation to the people who, Michael notes elsewhere on this same topic, "assume that if they don't understand [Andrew], there's something wrong with them!"
Leaving Andrew out of the conversation altogether, I was struck by the following two paragraphs from Michael's journal. I wish I had penned them myself. Instead, I'll reproduce them for emphasis:
These guys claim to love communication so much, but in practice, they're coming up with ways to destroy it. Goofball theories that make things needlessly complex. Somewhere along the way, we've learned to associate complexity with superiority, and that's just nuts. . . .
Because I really do care about communication. I really do want to be understood. I take communication very seriously, and academic posturing like this creates artificial barriers between people.
I blogged that entry for those two lines alone yesterday, with the caption "In Defense of the Genuine." Whether you find Michael's blog provocative, infuriating, or 100% correct -- you will always find it to be genuine and passionate. And it will often make you think about matters that are not the immediate subject. That's refreshing. Which is why I hate to see his commentary occasionally dismissed with responses like "You boys crack me up. All playing your roles so well. Congrats on the great show!" Michael doesn't need me to come to his defense, and I'll refrain from commenting on that outside of this forum, where I will simply note that it's a shitty, but highly revealing, response.[Posted @ 12:30 PM CST]
