Seemingly, all things tend towards complexity. It is only a simple matter of time. Certainly this is true with nature, within which the unicellular grew into the multi-cellular, and biological evolution has transformed just about every Earthling and made one species in particular contemplate philosophy and its own inevitable annihilation. Socially - and here we have a word that no doubt also springs from and is made possible by the biological - human societies have grown enormously, and wandering hunter-gatherers have been replaced by civilizations. Within the human mind - again, another aspect that has its roots in the biological - matters have also grown complex. We can imagine our more ape-like ancestors marveling at an odd stone or a shooting star, no doubt stunned by the novelty of the vision, but likely unable to take this contemplation a step or two further. Now, any person of average intelligence among us can have a speedy tutorial on Quantum Physics and be blown away by the magic, indeed logical absurdity, of it all.
Our art has turned more intellectual (sadly), as has almost every other branch of conversation, and once more, I will chalk it up to the trend towards complexity. But surely, not all intellectualness is particularly good, and might even do the unforgivable of being pseudo-intellectual. There is no question that the Left has done an enviable work of conquering the academy and setting new rules by which successive waves of young and spongy minds are being influenced and perhaps even reshaped. The massive success of this is gathered from any brief observation of those who have passed through college and now make a point of going around and showing everyone just how smart they are. And in particular, on no better topic is all of this exhibited than on that of liberation - the seeing to equality (these are not necessarily my own words or how I might even phrase them, but I hope they help convey the idea).
On plenty of occasions, hearing some on the Left talk about a struggle or movement that they are a part of, I have had a specific experience repeated over and over again. It concerns the words used in their argumentation and general talk. For starters, “spaces” is employed to replace every other word that could be used to mean or designate an area. “Bodies” is the word discharged to refer to human beings. “Performance” is used to convey the message that someone committed an act, no matter the act itself. As for this in particular, it seems to highlight the point and my consternation with it more than any other example. By this I mean the following. It is my suspicion that these strange words are employed instead of more common and direct ones for the purpose of distancing people from the effects they end up producing. To perform an act instead of to commit it, gives the impression that one was not quite himself while he was doing the deed, and as such, responsibility could be argued against, for example.
It strikes me that what the relevant branches of the social sciences, and more specifically, the professors and bureaucrats who lead them are trying to accomplish is to render the human a subject if not in fact an object. I have long suspected sociologists and their academic kinsmen of being slightly jealous of biologists, chemists, physicists and other natural scientists, for these men and women of the hard sciences can in fact conduct controlled experiments and delve farther in their studies than ethics would allow for social scientists to go. For we hold that all human beings possess a spark of the divine, or whatever the materialist analogy of that poetic phrase is. This does not allow for anything other than the utmost respect, regard and sensitivity towards human studies. It is thus my suspicion that the aforementioned use of impersonal language employed by the academics and so-called intellectuals, is a tactic to reduce this high bar that governs where the human as topic of interest exists.
But above all, the ubiquity of this academic-speak might just be proof of the tremendous group-think that has gripped vast swathes of these people and their phalanxes, no matter their geography; all of them charmed and seduced by the first of their kind, his successors, and the pseudo-intellectualism that underpins their racket. In his important Politics and the English Language, George Orwell warned of the dangers of words and language being used to obfuscate, blur and confuse, instead of to illuminate, clear and make simple. Yes, complexities abound, and sometimes necessarily so. And of course, to make a matter simple is not to reduce it to the level of a simpleton. But it is with some alert-raising frequency that I witness unnecessary complication, especially when the subject of discourse is of the socio-political. Indeed, it has even reached and affected that which was once sublime: poetry. This does not on its own signal intelligence, and might even be a warning sign of its absence and the forgery and fraudulence now required to conceal that fact. We can take our cue from nature, that the truth is in fact rather simple. From Occam’s Razor and mathematics, to the other arguments for parsimony, our intellectual forefathers knew this to be true.
