Screwtape: sheer genius

[avram]

I’m re-re-reading CS Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. I’ve generally never found Lewis’s theology convincing, but his observations about human foibles, especially hypocrisy and the various ways we trick ourselves into doing the wrong things, are nothing less than brilliant. The beginning of Letter I contains an observation that sums up about three-quarters of what’s wrong with modern political discourse:

[...] It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy’s clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning.

I don’t believe that for a moment, incidentally, but hang on, here comes the brilliant bit:

But with the advent of the weekly press and other such weapons, we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think about doctrines as primarily “true” or “false”, but as “academic” or “practical”, “outworn” or “contemporary”, “conventional” or “ruthless”. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong or stark or courageous — that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.

Phil Agre has written at length [Google’s cached version if that link craps out] about what he calls “The New Jargon”, but Lewis summed it up decades before, much more elegantly.

Comments

[zoe-trope.livejournal.com]

The other day my English teacher said the word "foibles" and it made me giggle and, um, that's all I really have to say for now, thanks.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's a hell of an article. Thanks for linking to it.

[cattitude.livejournal.com]

Somewhere I have a tape of John Cleese reading The Screwtape Letters. It is truly brilliant.

[kent-allard-jr.livejournal.com]

I'll have to read The Screwtape Letters sometime. I may be completely off-tangent, but one thing that fascinated me about the Santorum flap was that it (unintentionally) raised fundamental ethical questions. Unfortunately few people seriously addressed them...

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I continue to disagree pretty strongly with Agre's choice of "jargon" to name and describe the phenomenon he's talking about. That makes it sound like it's just a collection of slang terms, rather than a battery of techniques deployed in aid of distortion, disinformation, and propaganda. It also makes it sound far more harmless than it is. And it's likely to be just plain confusing to people who already have a working notion of what "jargon" means. I agree it's important to name the phenomenon, so people can see it, but I think his choice of terms actively harms the case he's trying to make.

By coincidence, though, Hal was recently listening our tapes of Cleese's reading of the Screwtape Letters

[avram]

One of the things that sturck me about the Lewis piece was that here's Lewis, a philologist, using jargon to mean pretty much just what Agre means by it. This prompted me to look the word up:

Main Entry: ¹jar·gon
Pronunciation: 'jär-g&n, -"gän
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French
Date: 14th century
1 a : confused unintelligible language b : a strange, outlandish, or barbarous language or dialect c : a hybrid language or dialect simplified in vocabulary and grammar and used for communication between peoples of different speech
2 : the technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group
3 : obscure and often pretentious language marked by circumlocutions and long words

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Which one of those definitions are you supposing to be congruent with the phenomenon Agre is pointing at? None of them come close to matching my understanding of what he means by it.

[avram]

It's sort of a hybrid of 3, 1a, and 1c, with perhaps some new elements mixed in.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

The thing about that, as I said, is that it totally misses that the methods of "jargon" are, as a whole, not a specialized language, not just obscurity, but a battery of deliberately deployed rhetorical techniques, intended to elicit and manipulate emotional response, and disguise rhetorical intent. Whenever Agre does a "jargon" entry, it turns out the terminology isn't at all crucial to what he's talking about; it's technique. The particular terminology of "jargon" may not recur elsewhere at all. But the technique does. And it isn't that the language is obscure -- the individual words of "jargon" are usually deceivingly ordinary; it's the way they are combined that is obscuring to honest discourse, to the intentions of the writer, to the facts of the debate at hand, and so forth. Or not even obscuring of, but distracting from them. What Agre is actually pointing at is a rather sophisticated set of propaganda methods.

And I think it's important to recognize that set of methods, name it, codify it, and find ways to innoculate people against it. For that reason I think it's really damned unfortunate that Agre keeps using the term "jargon" because it obscures the problem. It is, as I've told him, in itself an instance of "jargon" as he defines it.