Tony Judt on language and writing: If words fall into disrepair ..

British historian Tony Judt (left) died earlier this week and The Guardian has one of his final essays, presented with the headline, “If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have “.

An excerpt:

… it is one thing to encourage students to express opinions freely, and to take care not to crush these under the weight of prematurely imposed authority. It is quite another for teachers to retreat from formal criticism in the hope that the freedom thereby accorded favours independent thought: “Don't worry how you say it, it's the ideas that count”.

Forty years on from the 60s, there are not many instructors left with the self-confidence (or training) to pounce on infelicitous expression and explain clearly why it inhibits intelligent reflection. The revolution of my generation played an important role in this unravelling: the priority accorded the autonomous individual in every sphere of life should not be underestimated – “doing your own thing” took protean form.

Today “natural” expression is preferred to artifice. We unreflectively suppose that truth no less than beauty is conveyed more effectively thereby. Alexander Pope knew better. For many centuries in the western tradition, how well you expressed a position corresponded closely to the credibility of your argument. Rhetorical styles might vary from the spartan to the baroque, but it was never a matter of indifference: poor expression belied poor thought. Confused words suggested confused ideas at best, dissimulation at worst.

The professionalisation of academic writing – and the grasping of humanists for the security of theory and methodology – favours obscurantism. This has encouraged a counterfeit currency of glib “popular” articulacy, exemplified in history by the ascent of the “television don”, whose appeal lies precisely in his claim to attract a mass audience in an age when fellow scholars have lost interest in communication. But while an earlier generation of popular scholarship distilled authorial authority into plain text, today's “accessible” writers protrude uncomfortably into the audience's consciousness. It is the performer, not the subject, who draws the audience.

[An aside here: I wish I knew the answer to this question — and pardon my ignorance if I'm wildly off-base — but is the “television don” to whom Judt is referring here, his contemporary Simon Schama, by any chance? How did Judt and Schama get on?]
The New York Review of Books, incidentally, has assembled a selection of Judt's essays in that publication. If you don't know Judt's work, pick one and see if you like it.