Intellectual silliness

Capitalism has made people unable to judge themselves and others except in terms of their material possessions. That's why we're all so sexually repressed.

Perhaps it's true, perhaps it isn't, but it's not a convincing argument. In fact it's not really an argument at all, just a bald assertion without any explanation or supporting evidence and it certainly wouldn't be read out on Radio 4's Thinking Allowed – like the letter below was, which makes basically the same argument:

Sexual repression arose at the same time as the start of the objectification of the self, the discovery of the subject as object and thereby externalisation of the self in consumer goods driven by the needs of capitalism and commodification.

The sentence is garbled. Syntactically it falls apart after the first "and", and I'm not pointing that out to be pedantic. In this case, as in many others, sophistry and pseudo-intellectual posing seem to have been made to substitute for clearly discernable meaning and this sentence has been deliberately made unintelligible. If an idea is so simple that it can be summarised in fewer than fifty words, like this one, it's reasonable to assume that it's simple enough to be written in normal English prose, without detriment to the sense. Writing like that isn't clever: it can expose a lack of thought about the deeper meaning of one's arguments and it is designed to mystify the reader, which is the opposite of what good writing should do.

This sort of language is now almost universal in sociological and philosophical academic writing, and sadly literary criticism isn't very far behind. As George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language":

If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

• The classicist Peter Jones made a similar point, and made it far better than me, here. It's well worth reading.