Two For Writers (One for Philosophers)

 I am amused by those who do not know me, but wish to put me into some ideological straight jacket. To myself, I am a conservative pragmatist. If you want to understand my politics, I have two suggestions.

First, listen to The Kinks' The Village Green Preservation Society. 

Second, consider John Stuart Mill's essay on Coleridge:

But I must close this long essay—long in itself though shortin its relation to its subject and to the multitude of topics involved in it. I do not claim to have given a sufficient account of Coleridge; but I hope I have proved to some who were not before aware of it that in him and in the school to which he belongs there is something that they would do well to know more about. I may have done something to show that a Tory philosopher cannot be wholly a Tory, but must often be a better Liberal than Liberals themselves; while he is the natural means of rescuing from oblivion truths that Tories have forgotten and the prevailing schools of Liberalism never knew. 

(Searching for that quote turned up Mill on Coleridge from Harper's Magazine, and this passage:

For Mill, the liberal is hard to imagine without the conservative, the two are an inevitable pairing, living in a sort of political symbiosis. Liberalism seeks inevitably to define itself through an interaction with conservative thought; that process is in fact essential to understanding it. ) 

Here is my conservatism showing -

 Guarding the Gates of Our Language (Quillette)

When it first appeared in 1926, Modern English Usage was celebrated as an essential guide, but also a terror. Every writer feels a sense of alarm on reading the book, as one reviewer noted: “His previous light-hearted impulses, in selecting his vocabulary, wilt under the searchlight that Mr. Fowler’s articles turn on his usage.” Indeed, the joke goes that Fowler’s main contribution was to rid the world of bad writers by shaming them into silence. The London Times wrote a wounded editorial warning that the book would cause the average writer to suffer a crisis of confidence. “He is like the centipede in the poem, which lost the power of walking as soon as the frog asked him which leg he moved first.” 

*** 

Perhaps sensing the winds of reaction, Oxford University Press re-issued the original in 2010, with an introductory essay by a professor from Bangor who celebrates its wonders despite its inconsistencies. Do we detect in this reissue a return to cultural gatekeeping, or at least a recognition that the English language, the culture of the English-speaking peoples who invented it, is not some open source code for the world’s “diverse” peoples to ransack but a precious inheritance whose preservation requires more, not less, effort because of its success?

The rub, of course, is that we can no longer consult “the conversational usage of educated people” as a guide to our cultural patrimony because that cohort has now become the problem not the solution. The US-based Conference on College Composition and Communication issued a denunciation in 2021 of what it called “White Language Supremacy,” calling standard English a tool to oppress those “whose dynamic language practices do not fit monolingual white ideologies.” Many educated people today would have us all sounding like a cross between an HR manual and Kamala Harris. All the more reason, then, to revive a determined, punctilious, and judgmental culture of correct English among those interested in cultural preservation. The point of gates, after all, is not just what they keep out but what they enclose within.

 Prose serves to communicate. Formal prose has its rules so that we can communicate to all English-speakers. What I would do in formal prose, or even in narrative prose, is different from what I would do in dialog. KH wants me to use more contractions, and I do except when I want to make out a formal speaker - while also trying not to drop into dialect. The only writer I know who writes dialect in a way that is readable without denigrating the speaker is Zora Neale Hurston. She was an anthropologist; I am not. She is a great writer; I am not.

 Why Writers Need a Sense of Wonder in Fiction More Than Ever (KM Weiland)

We live in a storytelling moment deeply fascinated by darkness—and for good reason. Stories have always descended into shadow to help us metabolize our fear, trauma, and moral failure. They name the monster, bringing it out of the shadows where it can be faced and perhaps integrated or understood. But stories don’t just explore darkness; they also orient us within it as part of a larger narrative. This is why writers need to continue exploring a sense of wonder in fiction more than ever—not as escape or denial, but as a way of completing the arc. Wonder, hope, and other life-affirming paradigms are what allow stories to move through the descent rather than getting stuck there, which in turn shapes how both individuals and cultures imagine whether the journey is ultimately worth it.

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