The bean counters and their big hill of beans
Why is my coffee merchant offering to sell me pre-ground coffee, and not ground coffee? Once you have abandoned the idea that the coffee should be ground beforehand, there are only these alternatives: post-ground coffee, and coffee ground during transit. That does not make sense. The merchant is hardly about to follow the parcel through its stages, unpacking it at staging posts to grind the beans as they go; she is not going to be given admittance to my home, so that she can set to work in my kitchen. I grind my own beans, and I expect you do too. Did I wish someone else to grind my beans, no matter how far from breakfast time that grinding might occur, so that the ground beans exceeded their zenith, I should not want them ground in any sense ad domum. Ground must always mean pre-ground when it comes to beans as surely as planning always is ‘forward planning’. Not that I buy them ground (as I say).
Perhaps you think I fuss pretentiously.
But consider: ‘we as a society’, not ‘society’; ‘continue on’; ‘meeting with’ for ‘meeting’. The pedants’ war became irrelevant a long time ago. This has gone beyond ‘flaunt’ for ‘flount’, ‘deems as’ for ‘deems’, ‘comprised of’ for ‘comprising’. It is not just that a technical jargon has overtaken normal speech when, as if in legalese, people are said to ‘require to do something’ rather than to ‘need to do it’ or to ‘require it’. Matters have long ago gone further than forgetting the divide between transitive and intransitive verbs. That river was crossed when waiters began to tell a customer to ‘Enjoy!’ It is not even some matter of nothing more than the mistaking of nouns for verbs, with people ‘servicing’ rather than ‘serving’ one another — or whatever else that usage may connote — and ‘decisioning’ not ‘deciding’. I have even read, ‘focus holistically’, and an advertisement from a reputable British university this year suggested the lucky applicant would need to ‘cascade upwards’.
With the best will in the world, it is no more possible to focus holistically than to circulate squarely. Once you cascade upwards, you are upside-down. When I left school, people were running things up the flagpole to see if they flew, rather than trying out ideas; but no one then thought this was serious speech. If you are being ‘overly simplistic’ you are being (if I may say so): ‘simplistic’. What you call ‘simplistic’ may very well be ‘simple’ instead. I know language changes. ‘Playing the system’ can evolve into ‘gaming’ it. To propose something quite demanding can indeed become ‘a big ask’. Mea culpa truly is ‘my bad’ these days, even though ‘bad’ is an adjective. I am not campaigning for people to confess ‘my badness’; not even, that they should admit their ‘fault’.
The problem I am describing is different. This is saecular; it is a step change; it is not that the language is changing: it is that people are not thinking about the language. Even as a totalitarian Puritanism creeps over all conversations, an utter indifference to critical thought follows it quietly. There really is a gulf in meaning between culpa and malum and etymology is often even at this stage of language’s course a true guide to meaning. If you cannot prise open the gap between ‘composed’ and ‘comprised’ then you really are at the mercy of the impression which big words may make on you. Feeling an inner lack of confidence when it comes to putting things into words is guaranteed to provoke people towards conflict, fear and intransigent, authoritarian attitudes. Words are not just weapons which we throw at one another like fists. These are tools that we are letting slip.
At the same time as law and judgment gives way to procedural legitimacy and back-covering, the procedures become ever-more onerous, time-consuming, and impenetrable, because at another level, solecisms such as ours are merely impractical. ‘Sorry, we did not recognise either your name or your password’: well, which? Did you recognise neither my name nor my password, or was it at least one of these things, and possibly not both, that I got wrong? Hubbub ensues. What is far more worrying (and it is the point made by George Orwell): sloppy language promotes sloppy thought, sloppy thought is incompatible with functional democracy, and sloppy thinkers cannot see past false promises or idiot policy. Usually there is no distinction to be found between ‘a drama’ and ‘a psychodrama’. We should not be fooled. The prime minister of the United Kingdom has considerable kudos among people who cannot define kudos because he mumbles a bit of Greek to impress.
Conflict follows, as teachers will tell you, because children who cannot find and use their words will bite and punch. They will also follow anyone who can use big words and seems like a Big Boy. A teacher is well accustomed to hearing from teenagers what has been coming from a large section of the electorates over recent years — ‘nobody told us’ — but the thing is: you were told; you did not want to think it through; you did not pay attention; you did not understand. What teachers need to consider is the corollary: we did not teach you to understand; we did not train you to pay attention. We were ourselves too pressed with executing systems that we do not question to ask if we had educated you at all.
The education industry is a production process governed by procedural legitimacy and not by the law of conscience. It produces people trained to a test by a generation that was itself trained to a test, and that is why the English reforms at the end of the 1980s are coming home to roost in the politics of this decade. Drilling for tests trained for tests, not the mind, and that is why education could not be squeezed into optimally profitable segments and measured by performance management. Unlike thinking, tests at school are something we will never need to manage again. Rather like prayer, learning looks like wasted time — at the time. Gearing every part of our lives, and even our childhoods, to money, has now made it hard for people to participate in decisions regarding ways in which that money may be spent and the bean-counters who ‘optimise curriculum delivery’ have left us our culture in a heap of spilled beans. For democracy, the heap is now a hill to climb. Trump nearly won that election. He had every reason to think that ‘Sleepy Joe’ might prove what now we call ‘an impactful phrase’.
Mocking anyone who points out these phenomena for a pedant is a harmful distraction. It may seem like Matthew Arnold meets Karl Marx, but no matter. Debating whether the present author is described as Cassandra or John the Baptist will do nothing to help the fact that very few people now know who at least three of these four people were — and little in their many years at school has convinced them that it would butter their bread to find out. To borrow a phrase from Fats Waller: one of the most revolutionary things you could possibly do right now is to sit right down and write yourself a letter, about a book you have read.
I owe the phrase ‘totalitarian Puritanism’ to Jessica Kirk
