Carrol Cox wrote:
>I suppose in an ideal world all scholars are great scholars, great
>writers, great thinkers. But in a less ideal world, if we want to know X
>in order to write about Y, and it turns out that most of the scholarship
>which describes X is poorly written & much of it wrongheaded or
>egotistical or whatever, then if we are able to use that to write
>clearly and beautifully about Y, then it is the case that our study of Y
>would not have been possible without all the badly written, egotistical
>writing on X.
>
You might be right, but it doesn't jibe with my experience. Poorly
written, wrongheaded = nearly useless, except as base material for a
sociological study of wrongheadedness.
>And I have known personally some fine teachers and excellent
>conversationalists who were lousy writers, but who would not have been
>around to do that fine teaching if they had not plunged ahead and
>published their badly written material. I have also learned over the
>last 50 years an awful lot from sources that were badly written, plagued
>with errors, petentious, et cetera.
>
Good for you.
>Anyone who decides that they will only learn from well written and clear
>sources is going to end up an ignoramus at the end of his/her life. That
>may have been why Orwell's writing, as a whole, was so damn shallow --
>he was unwilling to learn from others who were, he thought, his
>inferiors.
>
I think I was making an argument that intellectuals/scholars have an
obligation to write clearly and to shape a clear, common language: an
eloquent vernacular, if you will.
As for Orwell's shallowness, I'm not sure what to say. I don't think he ever pretended to be deep. He wasn't Wittgenstein and he wasn't Marx. Yet, what he did in "Shooting an Elephant," "Politics and the English Language," "Inside the Whale," "Homage to Catalonia," and many more, have not been done better by anyone in the 20th century. Moreover, most everything he wrote will be perfectly comprehensible one hundred years from now.
Joanna
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