The Spell of Spellings

Nothing intrigues me more than the question of how it is, how it is possible, that the humble, simple person is often absolutely, plainly,  correct in his dealings with the most complicated, ineffable realities of the world and how often, in contrast, the most learned, sophisticated, long-toiling scholars are as blind, confused, lost and unknowing as if they were the birds in the garden.

I saw this astonishing paradox most strongly in my many years in the academy, where there was such a great display of learning, and pride in sophistication.

However, it was right there in the fairly tales I knew from early childhood. Those tales have a frequent theme in which the most unlikely brother, the simpleton as opposed to the clever - the open-hearted as opposed to the selfish calculator - achieves the treasure-hard-to-attain. The Percival legends have it. The great Cinderella story, which exists in some form in every culture, has it.

There is a feel for it in the best of Christianity. Here is St. Paul writing to the Corinthians:

For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent

But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are

But I think the reality of this was most intense, in my own experience, in the academy. There is a mystique that is useful to the wordy person – spelling itself casts a spell. Spelling and a spell are cognate, and in other languages than English. My own field of specialization, sociology, was as full of abracadabra magic word as any other. I remember hearing the great Talcott Parsons talk about the fundamental functional prerequisites of social systems at a convention. Great respect was paid, as well as money, but probably no one knew what the hell he was saying, if for no other reason than that there is no such thing as a fundamental functional imperative of social systems.

Robert “Bob Dylan” Zimmerman uses this a lot. Nobody knows what he's saying, but it must be something because he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, has a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a member of the French Legion of Honor. There must be something there. There must be, you think, despite not even being able to hear the words, much less make sense of them.

There is no question but that highly abstract conversations have their place, but such conversations have to be capable of being understood by any normally intelligent person. That's the essence of the “publicly observable” requirement of objectivity and science.

Here is a sentence from one of my favorite

George Herbert Mead

philosophers, George Herbert Mead. Mead is not all that easy to read, despite being one of the American “Pragmatist” philosophers, who generally are understandable to a normal person. The generally-accepted founder of that movement in philosophy, William James, is remarkably readable. Anyway, Mead:

It is not until science has become a discipline to which the research ability of any mind from any class of society can be attracted that it can become rigorously scientific, and it is not until its results can be so formulated that they must appeal to any enlightened mind that they can have universal value.

Mead is writing at a profound level there, not just “promoting ignorance” - as I have been accused of doing – by saying that we really can't just rely on the learned class in the academy. I found, during my several years of teaching and studying Mead and Pragmatism, that such a statement could be presented with teaching skill and empathy, so that often when I was done a student would think, “OK, so what else is new? Tell me something I don't already know.” But that is one of Pragmatism's ”proofs.”

But just try reading most other philosophy. You get the feeling that it is scholasticism, impenetrable to normal human beings. The disease of the academy is this obsequious deference to word collections, especially long-standing word collections, that can't translate into something that anyone else can understand.