Zoom your Way to the Emerald City?
The bricks in the Yellow Road are beguiling words, fool's gold.
I started this blog last week with my own rhetorical flourish. It was ironic because the purpose of the essay was to question the spread of dubious seminars and zoom talks that seemed to be offering multisyllabic words as “deep thinking.”
I wanted to make a comparison. Blimps on guide ropes above the streets of New York, and the coinage of phrases that seem to offer the reassurances of understanding.
We navigate a land of rock and sea. To float above is a comforting illusion.
I thought I learned this lesson many years ago but doubt I have avoided the dangers. I too have played word games that hint at deep understanding, while only masking confusion.
I remember a conversation with John Kautsky, one of my mentors in graduate school, questioning whether an article in a prominent political science journal made any useful sense. All the sentences he said were random expressions of “deep thought.” The language of the discipline sprinkled on, so that the text glistened.
He and one of his students cut the article into brief passages and pasted them on cards. One of them began a lecture by shuffling the cards and provided the “ideas” in 10 minutes of professional “speak.” The other then took the same cards, visibly reshuffled them and lectured for another 10 minutes.
Students took notes.
These days, we find many inherited ideas inadequate to the present crisis. New ideas are needed but beware counterfeit offerings. Call it “flimflam” if you wish. The “bit coinage” of words. Deep voices that stress a particular syllable and pause for emphasis. They are often conventional thinking on guide ropes.
This is not a way forward. If indeed well meaning, as I assume most are, they are the hucksters of our time. Older than the Republic. More American than whatever pie you favor.
I generally approach this with students using a cople of illustrative comparisons.
One is to discuss what the artist intended to convey with this painting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanderer_above_the_Sea_of_Fog
The other is to use this quote from John Lewis Gaddis' book "On Grand Strategy:"
"Steven Spielberg’s 2012 film Lincoln is dramatization at its best. It shows the president, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, trying to make good on the claim, in the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal: what more praiseworthy cause could a hedgehog possibly pursue? But to abolish slavery, Lincoln must move the Thirteenth Amendment through a fractious House of Representatives, and here his maneuvers are as foxy as they come. He resorts to deals, bribes, flattery, arm-twisting, and outright lies—so much so that the movie reeks, visually if not literally, of smoke-filled rooms.
When Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) asks the president how he can reconcile so noble an aim with such malodorous methods, Lincoln recalls what his youthful years as a surveyor taught him:
'[A] compass . . . [will] point you true north from where you’re standing, but it’s got no advice about the swamps and deserts and chasms that you’ll encounter along the way. If in pursuit of your destination, you plunge ahead, heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp . . . , [then] what’s the use of knowing true north?'"
Too many discussion look to stay above the mists and not explore the terrain beneath, or remain focused on "True North" without regard to the obstacles that must be confronted.