Word of the Year: Sophistry
-
Ted Gioia's the shit. But I shouldn't be surprised—his brother is Dana Gioia, poet laureate, who amazingly defends and writes in patriarchal, oppressive, racist formal metre. (Also, we had the same day job back when he was doing that sort of thing.)
I subscribed to Ted's Substack awhile back and I'm really glad I did; every article is awesome. If you like good articles about music that are well-researched and well-informed, he's great.
Anyway, here are some pertinent quotes from this article. I've made many of the same points before, but I was too lazy to research it as much as he's done here.
Dictionary editors love picking the word of the year. It can’t be just any word, but must be something emblematic of the era. That’s how we got words of the year like binge-watch (2015) or vape (2014) or tweet (2009) or subprime (2007).
There are at least a half dozen different organizations that pick a word of the year. But I want to join their ranks. Because I have a better word of the year than any of them.
My word of the year is: sophistry.
I didn’t expect to see sophistic techniques spread to every other sphere of society—including my own. Yet it has.The first time I saw it in music criticism, I was dumbfounded.
This happened eight years ago. I had written a hard-hitting article about our music culture—and readers loved it, but some people with institutional affiliations felt threatened by my comments. So they responded.
But how they responded was new to me. I’m used to disagreement, but in this instance my sly critics avoided any direct response to what I’d written. They wouldn’t even quote what I said. In fact, they scrupulously avoided quoting my article. Instead they distorted and spun my words like I was a candidate for office and they were a squad of rival political operatives. By the time they were done they had attributed ridiculous, idiotic opinions to me—views with no resemblance in the least to what I had written or believe.
And at this juncture I was genuinely naïve. I assumed I could clear things up by pointing to what I’d actually written in my article. But, as I soon learned, this had no effect whatsoever—these institutional parrots, as they soon made clear, had no interest in responding to my actual views. They wanted to take me down, and could only pull this off by constructing a crude and ridiculous parody of my position.
I’m still dumbfounded by all this. I can understand spinning and distorting when actual power and prerogative is at stake. I don’t condone it, but I grasp why it is happening. But why would anyone do this when discussing songs?
This is like telling a lie about the ingredients in a casserole. Or pretending that your losing team won the World Series. Or insisting that night is day.
But in the current sophistic environment, people are prepared to do just that.
While researching this article, I reviewed the academic literature on sophistry. What I found surprised me, but really shouldn’t have.
The sophists are having a revival.
The experts are defending them—and in particular giving them credit for anticipating the linguistic turn in contemporary thinking. Even better, the ancient sophists are the original source for the key tenets of postmodern philosophy. It’s their critics who are all wet and full of gas. The sophists are happening now, at least judging by peer-reviewed papers.
The sophists were apparently the first to grasp (long before Derrida) that truth doesn’t exist, and that everything boils down to linguistic games. And they also understood (long before Foucault), that the goal of manipulating words is to assert dominance and power.
You might even say that the sophists were laying the groundwork for our post-truth society. And they were doing it 2,500 years ago.
Sophistry is not only thriving in our democracy, but it has become the actual engine driving the system. And it can’t be a coincidence that the sophists gained influence at the very birth of Western democracy. Don’t get me wrong—I support rule by the people, but this insinuation of manipulative rhetoric into every sphere of public life must be seen as a flaw in the system.
The end result is a sophistic mindset so pervasive that it even impacts how we talk about music and movies and everything else—probably even the most intimate matters on the home front.
Yes, you can even be a sophist in the bedroom.I don’t like it. Not one bit. I’d love to see our smartest people go after sophistry, the way Plato and Aristotle did back in ancient Greece.
But I will make one concession. Yes, sophistry is divisive. It’s ugly. It promotes muddled thinking and close-minded ways. But it absolutely deserves to be word of the year.
Let’s get rid of it, and next year we can go back to selfie sticks and binge-watching. Or, if that’s too much to hope for, let’s at least start talking honestly about this matter—ignoring that first rule of sophistry club, a group that thrives on not calling things by their true names. Because even that small step toward honest dialogue can be a role model and powerful corrective.
