Well this is going to be fun. Thanks to the link at Arts and Letters Daily, we’re getting letters about the ‘Bad Writing’ In Focus – agreeing on the whole, but with some dissenters too. Perhaps it’s dirty pool for me to answer them here…?

Nah. Most people who visit the site never even find Notes and Comment, and besides – the question of the way Bad Writers defend Bad Writing is in fact part of the issue. It’s part of what the article was about, and part of what’s wrong with the whole field. So talking about it is part of our (admittedly self-appointed) brief.

This awful article trots out very familiar objections to “theory” in a way which

I’ve been re-reading Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, about the Rwanda genocide and what the US, the UN, Belgium didn’t do to stop it, and what France did to help it along. Or perhaps really I should include the US along with France, since we not only didn’t send troops ourselves, we urged other countries not to send troops either. It’s all, really, exceedingly uncomfortable reading.

And relevant to not one but two subjects we were discussing here yesterday: the inadequacy of blanket pacifism in the face of genocidal tyrannical regimes, and the inadequacy of blanket free-speechism in the face of genocidal regimes or movements that use speech, … Read the rest

And speaking of the Interahamwe and what people listen to on the radio and how easy it is to overlook what’s not right in front of our eyes…There is a discussion going on at Crooked Timber about free speech and speech codes. For some reason I was moved to ask a question that always occurs to me in the context of such discussions, and that doesn’t seem to me to get asked enough. What do free speech absolutists say about situations like Rwanda and the Balkans where government leaders went on the radio to incite people to go out and kill or ‘cleanse’ other ethnic groups, with all too much success? So far, I’m interested to see, I haven’t had … Read the rest

Now by way of a holiday from bad writing, we can have a look at some good writing. David Aaronovitch is pretty reliable that way, and he’s good at that (alas all too easy) parlor game of pointing out the omissions and blind spots in some leftist rhetoric. It’s an honourable job, Orwell made a good thing of it, and certainly somebody has to do it. It’s no good leaving it all to the right, thus giving the impression that no one on the left objects to silly or ill-founded arguments. Such as this from the novelist Philip Kerr in the New Statesman:

I find it almost incomprehensible that someone from a generation who came of age during the Vietnam

I thought we were through with the Bad Writing subject for the moment, but now I’m not so sure. Maybe it’s one of those subjects that one is never through with – not until it goes away, at least.

A kind (and horrified) reader has sent me this delightful example. And the writer is from Norway, too! Wouldn’t you think they would know better? I have this idea (very essentialist of me, really) that Scandinavians in general and particularly Norwegians are sensible people, not the kind of people who are inexplicably impressed by Bad Writing and seized with an uncontrollable need to imitate same. Why do I think that, I wonder. I don’t know – something to do with Roald … Read the rest

I posted this report on an address by Amartya Sen a few days ago, because I admire Sen (I well remember the moment I heard over the radio that he’d won the Nobel Prize, and how surprised and delighted I was) and also because he said something I’ve been thinking and muttering about for a long time, including here.

The Emeritus Professor at Harvard tore to shreds, the theory of ‘clash of civilisations’ (championed particularly by Samuel Huntington) and which has gained much currency, describing the classification as “very crude.” According to him, “what is most immediately divisive in this kind of theorising is not the silly idea of the inevitability of a clash, but the equally shallow prior insistense