Notes on a Theory of Literary Decline

Macintyre, Conrad, Wittgenstein

The Otago, captained by Joseph Conrad in the late 1880s

I have spent much of the last month revisiting the works of Alasdair MacIntyre, who died in May at the age of ninety-six. The luridly coloured Duckworth editions are being slowly reshuffled on my shelves as I haul them down at random in search of half-remembered bits of quotation. It is an edifying experience to re-read books set aside for some time, especially when they are full of jottings and notes. There is no better way to learn about the powerful effect intellectual preoccupations have on your reading, sharpening and at the same time constraining the ambit of your attention.

Returning to MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981), a book that stands up remarkably well to re-reading, I am surprised by how much I missed or simply ignored. For example, what now seems to me the pivotal part of the book, the fourteenth chapter ‘On the Nature of the Virtues’, is barely annotated. It is here that MacIntyre introduces his definition of a ‘practice’, one which, despite its congested clauses, I find difficult to improve on:

By a practice I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.

Chess, architecture, farming, music are all examples of practices, as are politics, chemistry and botany. Each practice has some good that is intrinsic to itself; we play chess, for example, to achieve ‘a certain highly particular kind of analytical skill, strategic imagination and competitive intensity’. A practice can also be pursued for strictly extrinsic goods which have no part in defining its standards of excellence, such as money, which can motivate participation in any practice, even chess, so long as the reward is sufficiently large. Practices, so conceived, are central to MacIntyre’s own revisionary theory of ethics, in which the virtues are understood as the moral qualities needed to attain the intrinsic goods of human activity. That, at least, is MacIntyre’s position ‘up to a first approximation’, and the last third of the book is spent buttressing it with auxiliary arguments and qualifications.

I want to take up this idea of a ‘practice’ and examine it under a different aspect. MacIntyre says that to enter into a practice is to accept the authority of its ‘standards of excellence’ and thereby make them your own. This is surely right, but I would add that in this process two things are internalised at the same time - the standards of excellence and the language in which those standards are framed. Chess has its own language much in the same way that botany does, and to become a chess player is to learn the grammar proper to chess. The point I am trying to make here is that all ‘socially established cooperative human activities’ form equally coherent and complex language communities. Thus, the ‘systematic extension’ of human ends and goods that MacIntyre describes always effects a corresponding shift in language.

Consider the following example from Joseph Conrad’s memoir The Mirror of the Sea, (1906) where he discusses the ‘sea language’, or, to give it a MacIntyrean gloss, the language typical of the practice of seamanship. I will quote the section in full as, apart from anything else, it is an example of near-perfect English prose:

Before an anchor can ever be raised, it must be let go; and this perfectly obvious truism brings me at once to the subject of the degradation of the sea language in the daily press of this country.

Your journalist, whether he takes charge of a ship or a fleet, almost invariably “casts” his anchor. Now, an anchor is never cast, and to take a liberty with technical language is a crime against the clearness, precision, and beauty of perfected speech.

An anchor is a forged piece of iron, admirably adapted to its end, and technical language is an instrument wrought into perfection by ages of experience, a flawless thing for its purpose. An anchor of yesterday (because nowadays there are contrivances like mushrooms and things like claws, of no particular expression or shape—just hooks)—an anchor of yesterday is in its way a most efficient instrument. To its perfection its size bears witness, for there is no other appliance so small for the great work it has to do. Look at the anchors hanging from the cat-heads of a big ship! How tiny they are in proportion to the great size of the hull! Were they made of gold they would look like trinkets, like ornamental toys, no bigger in proportion than a jewelled drop in a woman’s ear. And yet upon them will depend, more than once, the very life of the ship.

An anchor is forged and fashioned for faithfulness; give it ground that it can bite, and it will hold till the cable parts, and then, whatever may afterwards befall its ship, that anchor is “lost.” The honest, rough piece of iron, so simple in appearance, has more parts than the human body has limbs: the ring, the stock, the crown, the flukes, the palms, the shank. All this, according to the journalist, is “cast” when a ship arriving at an anchorage is brought up.

The genius of this passage lies in the almost imperceptible sleight of hand with which Conrad moves from the anchor as an instrument of seamanship to the anchor as a metaphor for the sea language itself. It is as true of language as it is of an anchor that it is ‘forged and fashioned for faithfulness’ and well-chosen words should bite into reality with the same purchase as shaped iron thrust into the ground. Through his counterpointing of the two Conrad establishes, in the very texture of his own perfected speech, the inseparability of the practice from the idioms in which it has found the terms to define itself. He goes on to explain how the sailor resembles a sort of poet or novelist in the way he precisely fits words to experience¹:

He is the man who watches the growth of the cable—a sailor’s phrase which has all the force, precision, and imagery of technical language that, created by simple men with keen eyes for the real aspect of the things they see in their trade, achieves the just expression seizing upon the essential, which is the ambition of the artist in words. Therefore the sailor will never say, “cast anchor,” and the ship-master aft will hail his chief mate on the forecastle in impressionistic phrase: “How does the cable grow?” Because “grow” is the right word for the long drift of a cable emerging aslant under the strain, taut as a bow-string above the water. And it is the voice of the keeper of the ship’s anchors that will answer: “Grows right ahead, sir,” or “Broad on the bow,” or whatever concise and deferential shout will fit the case.

It was Mallarmé who first said that the function of the poet is to ‘purify the language of the tribe’. T S Eliot makes use of this line, with minor amendment, in ‘Little Gidding’, the last of the Four Quartets (1941). It is true, as far as it goes, but what both Mallarmé and Eliot neglect to mention is that the language of the tribe is the creation of simple men with keen eyes for the real aspects of the things they see. I would go so far as to say that practices are the primary engines of language-creation, and that the health of a language, its richness and so its value as an artistic medium, depends in some admittedly complicated way on the health of the practices which use it.

What I want to suggest here is that, just as Conrad noticed a ‘degradation’ in the sea-language that he had so thoroughly assimilated to himself during his time as a captain in the French and British merchant navies, we are witnessing a far deeper degradation of language as such, a general language crisis.

This is not a new argument. In my other ‘other’ life on Substack I am currently transcribing the lectures delivered by Geoffrey Hill during his tenure as Professor of Poetry at Oxford. In them, Hill cites two examples of language crises² - first, the English language after the massive upheaval in the ecclesial and social fabric with the passage of the two Acts of Supremacy in the sixteenth century; second, the German language following the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, amply documented by writers like Victor Klemperer³, Aurel Kolnai⁴ and Theodor Haecker⁵. In both England in the 1530s and Germany under the Third Reich, the crisis was caused by the combined application of a new propaganda with careful policing of language that was felt to be inconsistent with the ruling authority.

Obviously, nothing of the sort is happening now, at least not in the anglophone West, where instead we are undergoing a vast crisis of practice. That is my theory - and here I can only offer conjectures as to causes.

The first is that the variety of practices is declining. We are all largely doing the same things, especially when it comes to ‘work’, and with each new extension of industrial technique, the domain of human practice contracts proportionally. The phenomenon of specialisation means that when we actually do different things we are separated off into little solitudes between which there is no real communication. I hardly need add that AI will only reinforce this trend.

Second, the forms of practice we are all converging on are uniquely uncongenial to language used with ‘force, precision and imagery’. The standard watchword for this kind of work is ‘managerialism’, but MacIntyre prefers the older Weberian term ‘bureaucracy’, defined in After Virtue as the matching of ‘means to ends in an evaluatively neutral way’. We are all familiar with the bureaucratic patois, which has reached its own form of malign perfection in this century. What are ‘the real aspects of things’ seen in this trade, if it can be called a trade?

This brings me on to a third point, that language, especially in the world of the modern corporation has been replaced with what I can only describe as an eclecticism of symbolic media - the spreadsheet, the powerpoint presentation, infographics, and the ideogrammatic use of emojis.

Finally, Conrad attributed the impoverishment of the sea-language in the popular mind to journalism, which is still every bit as pernicious as it used to be, but is also now utterly irrelevant when compared with the language-maelstrom that is the internet. Economists speak of the velocity of money as the rate at which money changes hands, with higher velocity associated with inflation. We have entered an era of high-frequency language and while the dead weight of words increases every year, the web of language, the connections between its different values, is getting looser and looser.

In the fragment on the philosophy of psychology that is usually appended to the Philosophical Investigations (1953), Ludwig Wittgenstein writes of:

‘The familiar face of a word, the feeling that it has assimilated its meaning into itself, that it is a likeness of its meaning - there could be human beings to whom all of this was alien. (They would not have an attachment to their words.) - And how are these feelings manifest among us? - by the way we choose and value words’

Today we would be more likely to express amazement that there could be human beings to whom all of this was not alien, that there were people once who could see the familiar face of a word.

1. On Substack we have our own

Working Man

2. ‘I intend to try to persuade you, over the five years of my tenure, that we are currently experiencing a language crisis, comparable to that which struck english literary culture in and after 1534, the year of the Henrician Act of Supremacy and the Treason Act, whereby dissent, expressed by words alone, could be deemed an act of treason punishable by death. A mid-20th century parallel could perhaps be drawn with the crisis of German culture, and the nazi distortion of the German language between 1933 and 1945, thence with the correlative yet wholly antithetical deployment of neologism and parataxis in the post-war poetics of Paul Celan, tactics deriving directly from that murderous crisis.’

G Hill, 'Legal Fiction' and Legal Fictions’

3. ‘…it isn’t only Nazi actions that have to vanish, but also the Nazi cast of mind, the typical Nazi way of thinking and its breeding-ground: the language of Nazism. What a huge number of concepts and feelings it has corrupted and poisoned! At the so-called evening grammar school organised by the Kulturbund and the Freie deutsche Jugend, I have observed again and again how the young people in all innocence, and despite their sincere effort to fill the gaps and eliminate the errors in their neglected education, cling to Nazi thought processes. They don’t realise they are doing it; the remnants of linguistic usage from the preceding epoch confuse and seduce them.’

V Klemperer, LTI, Lingua Tertii Imperii : A Philologist's Notebook, Routledge (2006), p.2

4. ‘A chapter in Jung’s book is inscribed “culture; soul; German culture'“. Anything of this kind would be quite inconceivable in any other language, but - though of course very bad style in German, too - it is a quite common occurrence in the wonderland of German nationalism. Mowrer is guilty of no exaggeration when speaking of “the use of the adjective ‘German’ to the point of mania in all public nomenclature.”’

A Kolnai, The War Against the West, The Viking Press (1938), p. 518

5. ‘It is verboten to refer to members of the party as Kerle ‘fellows’. A tremendous change in the language when one thinks that Goethe and Schiller were still ‘fellows’ and took no offence at it, although the word had already been debased and corrupted by a Prussian King. But really these ‘fellows’ who now forbid its use, have done more than anyone, by their very existence, to defame the word.’

Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night, Pantheon (1950), p. 99