That’s Not Writing, That’s Bullying

Lewis Lapham, “the famed former editor of Harper’s Magazine” — we much preferred the previous proto-Spy Michael Kinsley version — asks what we think is supposed to be a profoundly impertinent question:

Why then does it come to pass that the more data we collect — from Google, YouTube, and Facebook — the less likely we are to know what it means?

Personally, we don’t recall collecting any data from Google, YouTube, and Facebook, although we tend to visit all three in the course of our blogging and professional day. (What was that damn PHP lowercase function? Ah. Right.) We do collect data from — wait for it — databases, but that tends to be data we had a hand in storing to begin with. And, mirabile dictu, we do know what it means. It means the database is functioning.

But this, of course, is not what Famed Former Editor Lewis Lapham is getting at. After all, Famed Former Editor Lewis Lapham would not blow 3,318 words just to confirm that our programming works the way we intend it to. No, Famed Former Editor Lewis Lapham is making a point.

And God help us if we can’t figure out what it is.

It is at this point that we are obligated to remind Dear Reader that we have a master’s degree — in philosophy! — so it’s not like we’re unfamiliar with impenetrable writing. We’ve wrestled Kant to a draw, so mastering an essay by Famed Former Editor Lewis Lapham, intended for a literate general audience — and you know who you are — should be a relative no-brainer, if you’ll pardon the expression.

Actually, never mind the pardon. Here’s a concise summary: McLuhan McLuhan McLuhan McLuhan McLuhan McLuhan McLuhan McLuhan McLuhan McLuhan McLuhan McLuhan McLuhan McLuhan McLuhan McLuhan McLuhan McLuhan McLuhan McLuhan McLuhan McLuhan.

Or, if you’d prefer the annotated version: “Emperor Charles V”, Johannes Gutenberg, “computer scientist Jaron Lanier”, “French Novelist Albert Camus”, “Swiss playwright Max Frisch”, George Orwell, “the critic George Steiner,” Toni Morrison, “Roman agriculturalist Marcus Terentius Varro”, “the NKVD”, “the Gestapo”, Tomás de Torquemada, Joseph Goebbels, “Filippo de Strata, a Benedictine monk”, “Niccolò Perotti, teacher of poetry and rhetoric at the University of Bologna”, Grub Street, and “David Carr, media columnist and critic for the New York Times”.

That’s not writing, that’s bullying. A long time ago, we would have been cowed by such Intellectual Name-Dropping, the writer’s equivalent of Robin Williams seeing how many references he can slip past you. If you want to go all McLuhan on it, the names are the medium, and the message is that the writer is smart enough to gather them — and you aren’t. They certainly provide a formidable smokescreen to obscure a writer’s banal observations.

And Famed Former Editor Lewis Lapham’s intellectually encrusted observation? Stupid people say stupid things, more or less. In the words of Celebrated Fictional Teddy Bear Winnie-the-Pooh, Oh, bother.

Lewis Lapham: Machine-made news [War in Context, via Sully]