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ENLIGHTENMENT: Sinister, destructive period of history which had a ‘project’ to dominate nature, prefer reason to superstition and stop people going to church. All a big mistake, but postmodernism will fix it.

Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom, 2004

GOING BACK over the far left’s arguments of the last century felt a fool’s errand. A historian friend dug out yellowing pamphlets from thirty years ago. He collects them as passionately as men with sheds collect model trains, and can talk for hours on the ferocious rivalries and extravagant ambitions of the rival Marxist sects. It is his hobby, but he accepts that general readers can take only so many manifestos for a revolution that never came before their mouths gape and eyelids droop. Why should they care when humanity has waved goodbye to all that?

I said that Kanan Makiya became an intellectual celebrity, and so he was for a while. None the less, most educated people lived through the Nineties without reading him. Palestinians will remember Edward Said’s name, as Iraqis will remember Kanan Makiya’s, but Said’s influence in the West seemed to be confined to the cultural studies departments of the universities where jargon-spouting post-modern theorists perplexed their students – and each other. Like Makiya, he could walk down most streets without being recognized.

Said, Tariq Ali and the Marxists who first backed then abandoned Makiya gathered around New Left Review, the world’s foremost journal of Marxist theory for academic leftists. In 2000, on the journal’s fortieth birthday, its Old Etonian editor Perry Anderson let out a piercing howl of regret for the lost world of his youth. Like Karl Marx, he had expected so much for history, only for history to leave him beached.

When he was a young man in the Sixties, Marxism had seemed a good bet. Communist tyrants ruled one-third of the world from Berlin to Shanghai. Mass Marxist movements in Western Europe and Japan threatened to overturn the status quo. The Red Guards were preparing to terrorize China. In Vietnam and Cambodia, communist guerrillas led by Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot were fighting for power. In Latin America, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro were thrilling him and his comrades with their revolutionary élan. Marxism never got anywhere in Britain where the Left generally meant a Labour Party that true Marxists despised for its boringly ‘reformist’ attempts to make most people’s lives a little bit better. But given the success of Marxism elsewhere, they could dream that a true revolutionary socialist party would supplant Labour.

And forty years on, what was left of his Left? Socialism had vanished in the Eighties. Long before the Berlin Wall came down people had stopped thinking about it or seeing it as a plausible answer to the problems of organizing societies. It wasn’t just that communism was clearly finished. In the free world, trade union membership fell, and all left-wing parties with a chance of winning an election stopped pretending that they could and should nationalize the commanding heights of the economy. All around Anderson, the movements that had given purpose to his life were dying or dead, going or gone.

He cleared his throat with a few words about the ‘enormities of Stalin’s rule’ and ‘the lack of democracy in any of the countries that described themselves as socialist’, then bewailed the loss of his youthful love. The Soviet Union had fallen, China was embracing market economics and American capitalism had ‘resoundingly re-asserted its primacy in all fields – economic, political, military [and] cultural’. No one cared about him and his kind any more. The names of the Marxist philosophers who had inspired him to fight for revolutionary socialism in the lecture halls and drawing rooms of Bloomsbury were as unfamiliar to modern students as ‘a list of Arian bishops’. Neo-liberalism had triumphed and become ‘the most successful ideology in world history’. Like the Roman Catholic Church in pre-Reformation Christendom, it had no credible competitor, no rival creed that might mount a plausible challenge. ‘To say that these changes are enormous would be an under-statement,’ he concluded.

If you can stomach his lament for the passing of the communist slave empires, you must grant that Anderson’s analysis was an honest recognition of defeat.

The political chasm that separates the twenty-first century from the twentieth is that socialism is no longer credible. The loss of Anderson’s Marxism is no loss at all, but the enfeeblement of the humane and generous forces of social democracy in Europe, India and North America has been a disaster. There were plenty of leftists at the millennium, but no radical left with a practical plan to transform society.

James Buchan picked up the sound of the creaking joints in High Latitudes, his 1996 novel about the Britain Margaret Thatcher helped to create. Jane Haddon, his heroine, is an aristocratic banker, who is not only successful, beautiful and rich, but thoughtful and kind with it. She confronts Sean McVie, the leader of the Workers’ Party, whose resemblance to Gerry Healy Buchan makes no effort to disguise. He is everything she is not: ugly, irrelevant and boring beyond measure. McVie’s timid secretary, Sheila, takes Jane to his office. The dirty old man tries to terrify her. For a moment it seems as if she will suffer the same fate as ‘all those girls in charity shop jackets, those extras from the Gaiety, those orphans from Sidon and Beit Jennine; so many girls, so many girls; brought round by Sheila in tightly buttoned rage and up the stairs and to the sofa’.

But the communist is no match for the capitalist. She escapes unscathed, leaving him wounded by the parting shot:

There’s so much hatred in you Sean McVie. What happened to you? What did they do to you, Sean McVie, over all those years? And it’s nearly over, and where is your revolution: just fifteen hundred members, six hundred in arrears, some odd jobs for the Iraqis and an old man and a terrorised woman in a dingy office off Streatham High Street.

‘Where is your revolution?’ was a good question, and in trying to explain why the chance of his revolution succeeding had vanished, Anderson blamed the style of the far left as much as the slow death of revolutionary politics in the dingy offices of socialist parties. Anderson said that he and Edward Said had noticed that intellectuals who supported market economics wrote in ‘a fluent popular style, designed not for an academic readership but a broad international public’. It should be ‘a matter of honour on the Left to write at least as well, without redundancy or clutter, as its adversaries’.

He didn’t admit it, but few who had tried to read New Left Review could pretend that its intellectuals who called themselves left wing did that. Many were post-modern academics employed by the states they presumably wanted to topple to teach ‘theory’ in Western universities. Anderson did not realize that their infamous obscurantism was a sign of their cowardice as well as their political isolation.

Writers write badly when they have something to hide. Clarity makes their shaky assumptions plain to the readers – and to themselves. By keeping it foggy they save themselves the trouble of spelling out their beliefs and recommendations for the future. For academics, of all people, this is a disreputable way of going about business, but one that has many uses. Obscurantism spared the theorists who emerged from the grave of Marxism the pain of testing dearly held beliefs and prejudices, as well as the inevitable accusations of selling out from friends and colleagues a clear-headed revision of their ideas would bring.

In defence of academics, jokes about incomprehensible intellectuals are as old as Aristophanes’ digs at Socrates. In any case, they hardly formed a monolithic bloc. The best critics of the post-modern academics were not golf course wags who found P. J. O’Rourke a riot, but other academics, particularly philosophers, scientists and historians, who insisted on clear logic and reliable evidence, and psychiatrists exploring the arts of manipulation. A psychiatric team led by Donald H. Naftulin, a professor at the University of Southern California School of Medicine, suggested why students would take the theorists seriously when it showed how easily educated people can be seduced into believing gobbledegook with the marvellous ‘Dr Fox’ experiment of 1972.

Dr Myron L. Fox inspired confidence. He was an imposing figure: tall, poised and well spoken; silver of hair and sober of dress … every inch the authoritative scholar. As his curriculum vitae proved, he was an expert in the newly fashionable field of ‘game theory’, a branch of mathematics that calculated how game players try to maximize their returns. The Cold War had made game theory a subject of urgent interest – if America drops an H bomb, will the Soviet Union respond and both sides carry on until the destruction of the world? Or will there be a point where it would be in the best interests of both sides to pull back? The Scientific American had published an article on this vital new area of knowledge, and the educated public was keen to hear more. Dr Fox seemed the man to tell them. He attracted audiences of graduates to a series of lectures entitled Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physical Education. Afterwards the listeners filled in questionnaires on his performance. They were overwhelmingly positive. Eighty per cent rated him ‘an outstanding psychiatrist’ who had used ‘well organized’ material and ‘stimulated their thinking’. One said that ‘he was certainly captivating’. Another reported that ‘his relaxed manner of presentation was a large factor in holding my interest’.

They didn’t know it but Dr Myron L. Fox had blinded them with the illusion of intellectual authority. He was an actor, of course. Naftulin and his colleagues had rearranged sentences from the Scientific American’s article into a meaningless muddle and hired Dr Fox to read them. ‘Excessive use of double talk, neologisms, non sequiturs, and contradictory statements’ filled the lecture, said a proud Naftulin as he reported the results of the experiment. A minority was unimpressed, but Naftulin said that no one had ‘a competent crap detector’ to warn them the speaker was a fraud. Dr Fox seduced all his listeners into believing he was an expert.

Dr Fox was addressing educated people who weren’t specialists in game theory. In 1980, J. Scott Armstrong, from the University of Pennsylvania, examined which writing styles seduced specialists. He sent articles from the business press to thirty-two professors in North American business schools. They all covered the same story and conveyed the same accurate information. Armstrong discovered that the harder an article was to read, the more trustworthy the professors found it. His method of distinguishing good writing from bad was questionable. He said a clear piece of writing was composed of short sentences. Like this. But many clear writers don’t use short sentences. They carry the reader with them by building up clause after clause until they reach the conclusion. As business writers rarely deliver perorations, Armstrong was probably still right to conclude that ‘overall, the evidence is consistent with a common suspicion: clear communication of one’s research is not appreciated’.

Jargon-mongers certainly stuffed the business schools and used convoluted language to make banalities appear profound. However, no academics could come close to matching the obfuscation and murkiness of post-modern specialists in ‘theory’ – feminist theory, postcolonial theory, ‘other’ theory, critical race theory, queer theory, communicative action theory, structuration theory, neo-Marxian theory … any kind of theory, every kind of theory.

In 1996 ‘theory’ was the victim of the Sokal hoax, the academic sting of the decade. Naftulin and his team had shown that a plausible conman could convince an educated audience to believe rubbish if they weren’t experts in the field. Armstrong had suggested that authentic experts preferred true but unnecessarily convoluted writing about their field. Alan Sokal, a New York University physics professor, showed that experts in the field of ‘theory’ beat them all: they believed unnecessarily convoluted writing which was also rubbish. He strung together bizarre claims from Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray and many another star of the humanities departments into a gibbering argument that reality was a bourgeois illusion. (Irigaray was my favourite. She denounced Einstein’s E = mc² as a sexist equation which ‘privileges the speed of light’ over more feminine speeds ‘which are vitally necessary to us’. Presumably, light might have appeased her if it had shown its feminine side by slowing down to 30 m.p.h. in built-up areas.) Sokal stacked up the idiocies and then concluded that the laws of mathematics were instruments of capitalist repression. He sent his spoof to the editors of Social Text, a leading postmodernist journal, which published it in a special edition that promised to ‘uncover the gender-laden and racist assumptions built into the Euro-American scientific method’.

Sokal was a man of the Left and his hoax proved that not every left-wing intellectual was a theorist. But ‘theory’ was the dominant form of thought in arts and social studies departments, particularly in American universities, and what the theorists were trying to say appalled academics who wanted to uphold basic intellectual standards. In 1996 Denis Dutton, the editor of Philosophy and Literature, fought back by opening the annual Bad Writing Contest. ‘No one denies the need for a specialized vocabulary in biochemistry or physics or in technical areas of the humanities like linguistics,’ he said. ‘But among literature professors who do what they now call “theory” – mostly inept philosophy applied to literature and culture – jargon has become the emperor’s clothing of choice.’ Dutton invited readers to send him egregious examples of academic prose from the English-speaking world. The winner of his 1999 Bad Writing Contest was a piece by Judith Butler, a Marxist and feminist acclaimed by her fellow theorists as one of the most significant thinkers in America. She informed the reader that:

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.

To ask what Butler means is to miss the point, said Dutton. ‘This sentence beats readers into submission and instructs them that they are in the presence of a great and deep mind. Actual communication has nothing to do with it.’

The response of the theorists was instructive. Instead of accepting that they were going badly wrong, they produced books in defence of bad writing. The authors of Critical Terms for Literary Study turned on opponents who claimed their ‘artificially difficult style,’ hid the truth that the theorists had ‘nothing to say’. The fault was in our readers not in ourselves, the authors replied. ‘The project of theory is unsettling’ because ‘it brings assumptions into question’. They admitted that some theorists could be self-indulgent on occasion, but said that the writing of others was difficult for ‘compelling reasons’. They went into dangerous territories and questioned the preconceptions of the thoughtless. Conservative readers were ‘frightened off’ and ‘dismissed’ theory with a defensive horror because they couldn’t handle the red-raw radicalism on the page.

Such supercilious self-regard led Ophelia Benson of The Philosophers’ Magazine to remark acidly:

Ah – so that’s it. It’s not that the writing is bad, it’s that the readers who think it’s bad are 98-pound weaklings who turn pale and sick at unsettling projects. They are ‘frightened off’, the poor cowardly things, by the ‘difficulty’ of theory – not the ineptitude, mind you, or the slavish imitativeness, or the endless formulaic repetition of repetition – no, the difficulty. So as a result they ‘can dismiss’ theory – not laugh at, not hold up to scorn and derision, or set fire to or thrust firmly into the bin or take back to the shop and loudly demand a refund – no, dismiss. And dismiss ‘as an effort to cover up in an artificially difficult style the fact that it has nothing to say’. Well – yes, that’s right, as a matter of fact. We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.