Gotham Diary:
What I Wanted to Be
25 July 2013
Reading Adam Gopnik on Edmund Burke in this week’s New Yorker, I had to pinch myself to remember that Gopnik trained as an art historian, not a political one. You’d never know from the piece, which explains, better than I’ve ever seen done, the difficulty of getting a fix on the monumental conservative. (There’s the American Burke — sympathetic to the rebels; the Indian Burke — an outspoken humanitarian and early critic of colonial misrule; and the French Burke — hysterical reactionary to the French Revolution, and the most familiar of the three.) The appearance of this excellent review of a new book about Burke by Drew Maciag was very convenient for me, as I’m in the middle of getting to know Condorcet, whose views Burke disparaged in a memorable passion about “endless discussions.” But it also reminded that, born before Adam Gopnik, I was deprived of the opportunity to tell my parents that I wanted to be him when I grew up.
I wish that Gopnik would translate Emma Rothschild’s Economic Sentiments into “New Yorker.” Perhaps any staff writer could do the job. I don’t know what Rothschild’s target readership is, but it certainly isn’t the general one. Familiarity with the writings of Adam Smith and Nicolas de Condorcet seems to be presumed, as is a great deal else that might have been made less daunting by the liberal insertion of those brisk paragraphs that bring you up to speed in the typical New Yorker piece. This would not make the book longer, if the repetitions were cut from Rothschild’s book. The author seems anxious to make her points (which are very much worth making), and this always makes for anxious reading. Several passages went down the wrong pipe, as it were. I had to re-read the phrase “Necker’s administrative genius” three times to grasp that Rothschild was referring to the (imaginary) gifted administrator, posited by the autocratic financier, with a genius for knowing what would make everybody happy, and not the “genius” of Necker’s administrative schemes. (I’d edit Rothschild’s text to read “genius administrator,” and then try to find some less clunky, but no less clear, alternative.)
One consequence of the idea that politics exists only to determine the rules and conventions of everyday commerce — dare I call this “Condorcet’s Axiom”? — is that the language of politics as well as that of the actual rules and conventions (insofar as the latter are acknowledged in writing) must be clear and free of jargon. (It is possible that the concept of “terms of art” has outlived its usefulness, and that professionals ought to be discouraged from saying x when they mean y — particularly when x is not x.) It also follows that the language of social science — another sorry term — ought to be clear as well. Given that human beings are its subject, it ought to avoid the blandishments of systematic presentation; everyday life does not begin with first principles. I’m not calling for simplistic reductions, and I know that formulas are both necessary and boring to read. But the clarity of the New Yorker style is hardly unattainable. There would be a great deal of tough detail to work out in realizing Condorcet’s Axiom (the relationship between public discussion and legislative representation needs to be recreated, just for starters), but a stipulation on clear writing (and thinking) is the obviously and necessarily the first matter to settle.
Come to think of it, in schools today, why don’t they just throw out all the English and “social science” curricula and run seminars on each week’s issue of The New Yorker?