Academic Jargon has NO Place in the Public Sphere
Rebecca Schuman’s essay We need academic jargon more than ever under Trump posits
that academic jargon is misunderstood, especially as a fight-back against the anti-
intellectualism signified by the election of blowhards like Donald J Trump.
The problem is, the fight against anti-intellectualism comes not from using bigger, more
ridiculous words, but rather from using simple words that everybody understands. Schuman
claims that the only way nuance is grasped is if jargon is used. Words that have little meaning
like “deterritorialization” (which Microsoft assures me is not actually a word) can “call up an
entire philosopher’s corpus and all the nuances contained therein”. But this issue faces two
major objections (one of which Schuman has raised herself):
1. Alienation from the general public
2. A lack of basic understanding from those not among the well-educated, privileged
cognoscenti
Let us take a friendly term, “male privilege”, for example. In the field of Sociology, it
describes the set of circumstances that one is born with, that enables a person (in this case a
man) to rise up in life more easily than other groups. A man for example, has more mentors
and role models (who will look more favourably upon him than a woman), enabling him to
rise up in the business world. Men are also overrepresented in political spheres, which would
likely lead to policies being male-centric (or at least having males centered as a default). Such
a matter of fact, when boiled down to the single term “male privilege”, serves only to spark
off those who think that they are unfairly prejudiced by the alt-right.
Figure 1- Example of unnecessarily extravagant prose
Because people find it difficult to interpret the nuances inherent in a phrase, and take it at
face value, they will often reject such phrases. Third wave feminists (who talk about the
abolishment of gender roles, increased representation, queer theory, and intersectionality 1 ) are
reduced to terms like Feminazi for the alleged mistreatment of men. Furthermore, academics
get trapped in the cycle of knowing what they are saying, but not being able to express what
they are saying in terms that actually create understanding. This renders their ability to
communicate and show their ideas ineffective, even to their own colleagues. Refer to the
paragraph below by Judith Butler:
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social
relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations
are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of
temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian
theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into
the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as
bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is what is defined in literary terms as “a hot mess”. This leads me
very conveniently to my second point. Schuman spoke disdainfully of the disparity that the
Arts and Sciences have when jargon is used. In pop-culture pieces like Back to the Future
and House, the characters (namely Doc Brown and Dr House) display their intelligence by
mumbling unintelligible strings of scientific jargon. Schuman even refers to the fact that
scientists are allowed to use “mass spectrometer” as some kind of example of the
discrimination against Humanities thinkers.
It is here where she falsely conflates how and when jargon is used. In Science, jargon is used
really often (without the ponderous and convoluted prose that so often seizes Humanities
writing), but when shared with the public sphere, science becomes much simpler to
understand. The role of Science educator, popularised by Carl Sagan, has never had a
Humanities counterpart. Scientists like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Michio Kaku go on
television and talk shows, sharing basic scientific facts and understanding. They rarely, if
ever, use jargon. Oxford University even has a professorial post for this: Simonyi Professor
for the Public Understanding of Science.
The Humanities, by contrast, have no such counterpart. The closest few would be philosopher
Slavoj Žižek and linguist Noam Chomsky, and even they do not have the television presence
of Tyson and company. Expertise also cannot be an excuse (as mentioned above); the
Simonyi Professor, Marcus du Sautoy, is a Mathematician, yet he wrote a book encompassing
fields like quantum physics and neuroscience.
This is deeply antithetical to the niche that the Humanities has characterised itself in. The
Humanities has often claimed its essential utility to human life and flourishing. An
understanding of Greek Philosophy used to be a mainstay in any university education, and
keen knowledge of Politics, Economics and Sociology is essential in making key decisions
whenever an election comes around. This becomes all the more disturbing when it is realised
that, outside of keen readers of The Economist, very few people have an appropriate
understanding of the world as a whole. The rise of Donald Trump has been attributed to the
lack of understanding of economics knowledge, and a desperation that he will somehow
make things better (in spite of Paul Krugman’s best efforts). This removes jargon from the
field of academia to an actual problem that we will all have to face and combat.
In defeating a populist blowhard who uses words at the reading level of a ten-year- old, it is
probably better to beat him at his own game than to outsmart him. The solution to Donald
Trump is not more jargon, but less.