American Notes: On Social Scientific Speech

In my latest entry on the US I spoke about freedom of speech. Today I want to say something about the way Americans use speech itself, which I find somewhat interesting. To it say from the start: I admire the American style of speech, at least the way it is used in academia and, in general, among learned audiences. I am not in a position to say to what extent it is an American phenomenon as opposed to an English-language one.

American argumentative speech is direct, clear, to the point. In the social sciences, the part I am most familiar with, this is a very welcome thing. From an academic standpoint, I was raised in an environment dominated by German-style social theory, with the occasional concession to French thought. That influence has never worn out in my case, I still take seriously the insights from those traditions. But one unfortunate aside in them is a propensity to use the most forbidding prose.

Abstract concepts that somehow establish among themselves relations that you would rarely observe in real life, neologisms, nominalizations, extremely long sentences and paragraphs and so on and so forth are often trademarks of the writing of even the greatest. Hegel is only the most extreme case; Marx can play that game also (although, to be fair, it´s much worse on the stuff he didn´t mean to publish), even an American-influenced thinker like Habermas writes often in an incredibly dry and abstruse style.

I don´t know why (although I´ll presently offer two conjectures about that) but whenever I read American social scientists, even those that are relying on the same categories as Continental social theorists, the text flows better. Not that they all write concise and clear prose. There is no regional monopoly on obscure writing. But when it comes to finding readable, understandable presentations of social scientific themes, more often than not they are written in English.

As far as I can discern, there are two reasons for that (of course, there might be many more). Early American social thought was driven by very specific concerns, bound in time and space. For instance, the Federalist Papers are basically attempts at thinking about how to establish a constitutional government. This meant that history and current events play a much larger guiding role than broad philosophical or theological constructs. By the time America develops its own philosophical school, it is none other than Pragmatism, that is, a philosophical doctrine that doubts on the existence of abstract truths unless they can be connected to our everyday experience.

To my mind, the result of this combination of an emphasis on concrete concerns and a philosophical spirit that validates those same concerns creates a style of reasoning that makes for great social scientific writing. In that tradition, if your ideas are correct, no matter how abstract and complex, you must be able to offer an example in real life to support them, you must be able to offer your reader a concrete experience that connects to them. In this regard, I love the piece of advice of Strunk and White (I believe): "Good writing is good not because it tells every detail, but because every detail tells." (I´m quoting by memory so don´t hold me to that.)

There is another unhealthy habit that has little space in American prose: long-windedness. Colombians (and Latins in general) tend to write looong. (I´ve done it myself.) American prose goes to the point.

Of course, not every American contribution to speech is good. Given the place that competitive activities occupy in American life, much of the current American prose is littered by metaphors and terms taken from business life and (American) sports. This is especially problematic if, like in my case, you´re ignorant about American sports.

It may seem that I am being rather superficial by putting so much emphasis on prose. But I believe that prose, and speech in general, are an important part of communication in society. I think that this style of speech has had a salutary effect on American social sciences: it has helped dialogue, the little cross-fertilization there is among different schools has been enabled by this set of shared argumentative values.

Given this, one would expect that American intellectuals would do well in the public sphere and that, in turn, this would have a great effect on American democratic discourse. Regretfully, American society rarely listens to its intellectuals. The "public intellectual" is a European (and Latin American) phenomenon. But that is topic for another post. Today I just wanted to express admiration for one little noticed aspect of American academia: its commitment to a style of argumentation that democratizes ideas by making them accessible to the receiver.