Uit: Language in Thought and Action, door S.I. Hayakawa.

Chapter 16

Higher Education, Learned Jargon, and Babuism

Education of the wrong kind also contributes tremendously to our intensional orientations. Some people look upon education largely as a matter of acquiring a learned vocabulary (including terms like "intensional orientation") without a corresponding concern (and sometimes with no concern at all) for what the vocabulary stands for.
    In the course of getting an education, students have to read many difficult books. Some of these books, the student feels, are much more difficult to read than they need to be, because of the addiction of many scholars to extremely difficult terminology. Students, like other people, often ask why all books cannot be written more simply.
    There are of course two answers to this question. The first is that some books are difficult because the ideas they deal with are difficult. An advanced work in chemistry or economics is difficult to one who knows no chemistry or economics for the simple reason that such a work presupposes on the part of the reader a background of previous study.
    But there is another reason why books may be difficult. A learned vocabulary has two functions: first, it has the communicative function of giving expression to ideas - including important, difficult, or recondite ideas; secondly, it has a social function of conferring prestige upon its users and arousing respect and awe among those who do not understand it. ("Gosh, he must be smart. I can't understand a word he says!") It can be stated as a general rule that whenever the social function of a learned vocabulary becomes more important to its users than its communicative function, communication suffers and jargon proliferates. . This rule may be illustrated by a passage from a recent issue of the American Journal of Sociology:
  In any formal organization, the goals as reflected in the system of functional differentiation result in a distinctive pattern of role differentiation. In turn, role differentiation, whether viewed hierarchically or horizontally, leads to what Mannheim called "perspectivistic thinking," namely, incumbency in a particular status induces a corresponding set of perceptions, attitudes and values. In an organization, as in society as a whole, status occupants tend to develop a commitment to subunit goals and tasks-a commitment that may be dysfunctional from the viewpoint of the total organizational goals. In other words, "perspectivistic thinking" may interfere with the coordination of effort toward the accomplishment of total organizational goals, thus generating organizational pressures to insure adequate levels of performance.

    In this passage the author is merely saying (1) that in any formal organization, different people have different tasks; (2) that people sometimes get engrossed in their own special tasks to a degree that interferes with the goals of the organization as a whole; and therefore (3) that the organization has to put pressures on them to get the over-all job done. What is clear from this passage (the only thing that is clear) is that the author's concern with his professional standing as a sociologist has almost completely submerged his concern with communicating his ideas. Thus, students are compelled in their studies to read, in addition to material that is intrinsically difficult, material that is made unnecessarily difficult by jargon.
This sociological passage, however, has at least the merit of possessing a discoverable meaning. There are some readings a college student encounters for which even this much cannot be said with certainty. For example:
  The being that exists is man. Man alone exists. Rocks are, but they do not exist. Trees are, but they do not exist. Horses are, but they do not exist. Angels are, but they do not exist. God is, but he does not exist. The proposition "man alone exists" does not mean by any means that man alone is a real being while all other beings are unreal and mere appearances or human ideas. The proposition "man exists" means: man is that being whose Being is distinguished by the openstanding standing-in in the unconcealedness of Being, from Being, in Being. The existential nature of man is the reason why man can represent beings as such, and why he can be conscious of them. All consciousness presupposes ecstatically understood existence as the essentia of man - essentia meaning that as which man is present insofar as he is man. But consciousness does not itself create the openness of beings, nor is it consciousness that makes it possible for man to stand open for beings. Whither and whence and in what free dimension could the intentionality of consciousness move, if instancy were not the essence of man in the first instance?
(Martin Heidegger, "The Way Back into the Ground of Metaphysics," in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (1957), pp. 214-15.)

    The foregoing are only samples of the many kinds of abstract prose that the student -especially the college and university student - encounters daily in his studies. Sometimes his professor, who presumably understands the readings he assigns, lectures at equally high levels of abstraction, so that the student is never quite sure, from the beginning of the course to the end, what it is all about. What is the effect upon students of readings and lectures of this kind? Obviously, the student is left with the impression that simplicity and clarity of style will get him nowhere in intellectual life, and that even a simple idea (or no idea at all) will gain academic respectability if it is phrased in a sufficiently abstract and incomprehensible vocabulary.
    The British in India used to have a derogatory term for the pretentious and often comically inappropriate English used by poorly trained Indian clerks and civil servants: they called it "babu English" . The term is admittedly offensive, and the writer uses it only because it contains an idea for which there is no other term. Abandoning its original application, then, let us use "babu English," or "babuism," as a general term to mean discourse in which the speaker (or writer) throws around learned words he does not understand in order to create a favorable impression. Babuism probably has existed and will continue to exist in every culture in which there is a learned class of magicians, shamans, priests, teachers, and other professional verbalizers with big vocabularies. Babuism results whenever people who are not learned try to confer upon themselves by purely verbal means the social advantages of being considered learned.
    Elsewhere in this volume, much has been said of the common tendency to confuse symbols with the things they stand for. The student may do the same: he may confuse symbols of learning (such as an abstract and difficult vocabulary) with learning itself. Not being able to understand the books he is reading, and blaming himself for his failure to understand, he conscientiously applies himself again and again to his assignments until he is familiar with the vocabulary of the course - a vocabulary that cannot help becoming a "babu English," since he still does not know what it is all about. If he is verbally clever, he will be able to parrot enough of this vocabulary in his final term paper to make it sound extremely plausible. The teacher reading the paper will also not be too sure what it is all about, but he will recognize the vocabulary as his own and so will give it a passing grade.
    Thus the student, by learning to speak and write several kinds of babu - literary babu, psychological babu, educational babu, philosophical babu, the babu of art criticism, etc. - will eventually get his bachelor's degree. Perhaps he will go on to graduate school and get his Ph.D. Then he will teach it to others.
    Thus does intensional orientation, like Ol' Man River, keep a-rollin' along.


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