The task of taking language away from poetry is a larger operation than appears at first, and in the eyes of some students an impossible one, even if it were desirable. We are all like Emerson’s scholar in that the ordinary affairs of life come to us business and go from us poetry—at least as soon as we start expressing them in speech. Many words which we think of as prosaic literalisms can be shown to have their origin in long-forgotten comparisons. The word “depend” analogizes the action of hanging from; “contact” analogizes a relationship. “Discoverer” and “detect” stand for the literal operation of taking off a covering, hence exposing to view. A “profound study” apparently goes back to our perception of physical depth. In this way the meaning which we attach to these words is transferred from their analogues; and, of course, the process is more obvious in language that is more consciously metaphorical. It thus becomes plain that somewhere one has to come to terms with metaphor anyhow, and there is a way to turn the necessity into a victory.
V
Is the expression of social science affected by a caste spirit? The fact that social scientists are, in general, dedicated to the removal of caste, or at least to a refutation of caste presumptions, unfortunately does not prevent their becoming a caste. Circumstances exist all the while to make them an élite. For one thing, the scientific method of procedure sets them off pretty severely from the average man, with his common-sense approach to social problems. Not only is he likely to be nonplussed by techniques and terminologies; he is also likely to be repelled by what scientists consider one of their greatest virtues—their detachment. Finally, it has to be admitted that social scientists’ extensive patronage by universities, foundations, and governments serves to give them a protected status while they work. Every other group so situated has tended to create a jargon, and thus far the social scientists have not been an exception. Their jargon is a product partly of imitation and partly of defense-mindedness.
Naturally one of the first steps in entering a profession is to master the professional language. A display of familiarity with the language is popularly taken as a sign of orthodoxy and acceptance; and thus there arises a temptation to use the special nomenclature freely even when one has doubts about its aptness. This condition affects especially the young ones who are seeking recognition and establishment—the graduate students and the instructors—in general, the probationers in the field. Departure from orthodoxy can be interpreted as a sign of ignorance or as a sign of independence, and, in the case of those who have not passed probation, we usually interpret it as the former. Accordingly, there is a degree of risk involved in changing the pattern of speech laid down by one’s colleagues. So the problem of what one has to do to show that one belongs can be a problem of style. It is entirely possible that many young social scientists do not write so well as they could because of this inhibition. They are in the position of having to satisfy teachers and critics, and they produce what is expected or what they think is expected. In this way a natural gift for the direct phrase and the lucid arrangement can be swallowed up in tortuosities. The pattern can be broken only by some gifted revolutionary or by someone invested with all the honors of the guild.
It is, moreover, true, as Harold Laski has pointed out, that every profession builds up a distrust of innovation, and especially of innovation from the outside.[173] It requires an unusual degree of humility to see that the solution to our problem may have to come from someone outside our number, perhaps from some naïve person whose advantage is that he can see the matter only in broad outline. Professions and bureaucracies are on guard against this sort of person, and one of the barriers they unconsciously set up is just this one of jargon. If certain government policies were announced in the language of the barbershop, their absurdity might become overwhelmingly apparent. If certain projects in social science research (or in language and literature research, for that matter) were explained in the language of the daily news report, their futility might become embarrassingly clear. One can only surmise how an experienced political reporter would phrase the findings in Beyle’s Identification and Analysis of Attribute-Cluster-Blocs, but one has a notion that his account would sound very little like the original. Would it be unfair? The reply that such language would destroy essential meanings in the original would have to be weighed along with the alternative possibility that the language was used in the first place because it was euphemistic, in the sense we have outlined, or protective. A user of such language may feel safe because the definition of terms is, in a way, his possession. And so technical language, as sometimes employed, may be Pickwickian, inasmuch as it serves not just scientifically but also pragmatically. The average citizen, faced with sociological explanations and bureaucratic communiques, may feel as poor culprits used to feel when confronted with law Latin.
VI
The rhetorical obligation of the scientists has been aptly expressed by T. Swann Harding in a discussion of the general character of scientific writing. “Scientists,” he says, “gain nothing by showing off, and the simpler they can make their reports the better. Even their technical reports can be made very much simpler without loss of accuracy or precision. Nor is there really any valid substitute for a good working knowledge of English composition and rhetoric.”[174] The last statement is true with certain qualifications, which ought to be made explicit. In a final estimate of the problem it has to be recognized that social science writing cannot be judged altogether by literary standards. It is expression with a definite assignment of duty; and those who have made a comparative study of methods and styles know that every formula of expression incurs its penalty. It is a rule in the realm of writing that one pays for the choice one makes. The payment is exacted when the form of expression becomes too exclusively what it is. In course of use a defined style becomes its own enemy. If one’s writing is abstract, it will accommodate ideas, but it will fatigue the reader. If it is concrete, it will divert and relieve; but it may become cloying, and it will have difficulty in encompassing ideas. If it is spare, it will come to seem abrupt; if it practices a degree of circumlocution, it will first seem elegant but will come to seem inflated. The lucid style is suspected of oversimplifying. And so the dilemma goes.
Now the social scientist has to write about a kind of thing, and, notwithstanding his uncertain allocation of facts and concepts, he may as well accept his penalty at the beginning. He can never make it a primary goal to be “pleasing,” and for this reason the purely literary performance is not for him. Dramatistic presentation, a leading source of interest in all literary production, is largely, if not entirely, out of his reach. The only kind of writing that gets people emotionally involved contains some form of dramatic conflict, which requires a dichotomy of opposites. Yet the only dichotomy that social science (as a science) contemplates is that of the norm and the deviate, and these two are supposed to exist in an empirical rather than in a moral context, and the injunction is implicit that all we shall do is observe. The work, then, is going to be either purely descriptive, or critical with reference to the norm-deviate opposition. Not many people are going to develop a sense of poignant concern over such presentations. To a certain extent Middletown did catch the popular imagination, but the contrast developed here was between what the American observably was through the eyes of detached social scientists and his picture of himself, with its compound of self-esteem, aspiration, and social mythology. The community empirically found was put on the stage to challenge the community sentimentally and otherwise conceived. The same will hardly hold for the typical case of scientific norm and empirically discovered deviate, for no such ideas are involved in the contrast. Recent Social Trends in the United States,[175] for example, the monumental report of President Hoover’s Research Committee on Social Trends, could not look to this kind of interest for its appeal. Unless, therefore, we regard metaphor as a means of dramatistic presentation, this resource is not ordinarily open to social science.
Yet within the purpose which the social scientist sets himself there is a considerable range of rhetorical possibility, which he ignores at needless expense. Rhetoric is, among other things, a process of coordination and subordination which is very close to the essential thought process. That is to say, in any coherent piece of discourse there occur promotion and demotion of thoughts, and this is accomplished not solely through logical outlining and subsumation. It involves matters of sequence, of quantity, and some understanding of the rhetorical aspects of grammatical categories. These are means to clear and effective expression, and the failure to see and use them as means can produce a condition in which means and ends seem not discriminated, or even a subversion in which means seem to manipulate ends. That condition is one which social science, along with every other instrumentality of education, should be combating in the interest of a reasonable world.