Informed by hot air
Another View by Stephen Mulholland.
Should I once again read or hear the word “informed” used by some pseudo-intellectual ANC poseur to describe how his or her view on something or other was arrived at I shall become immediately and seriously sick to my stomach.
This hackneyed word, or rather the hackneyed use of it by pretentious hacks who seem to believe being an “intellectual” is something essential to their social and political standing, falls from their lips, grandly intoned, at the slightest encouragement.
Google has almost 300 000 references coupling that ultra-poseur, little Thabo Mbeki with that dreaded calling card of the ANC’s card-carrying intellectual aristocracy, “informed” or “informed by”.
It seems that once this sacred term is announced all the speaker then has to say carries with it the force of intellectual affirmation. He or she have been “informed” in their views so that’s that; the end of the argument, and the revelation of the truth.
As is invariably the case with pseudo-intellectuals, the language is often redundant as in the passage below from Mbeki’s address to a Non-Aligned Movement conference in Durban in 2002. Quoting himself, another pseudo-intellectual habit, and employing the royal “we” which even the Queen appears to have abandoned, Mbeki reminded his audience that at another conference “we declared that ‘poverty, more than any other of the devastating threats facing the world, must be ended’ ”.
Then our tiny leader hit full stride: “This decision,” he intoned, “was informed by the reality that poverty is by far the principal cause of death and suffering among the billions of people that belong to the south”.
Well, yes, it is sort of obvious that poverty does tend to damage health and lead to early death but we don’t need to have our views and actions “informed” by such self-apparent knowledge. How about “because” or some such less high-flown term?
Perhaps Mbeki’s pompously redundant style is influenced by Anthony Heard who, one is given to believe, is or was one of his speech- writers and a former editor of the Cape Times, a position from which he once gave me no option but to remove him.
Be that as it may, one does hope Anthony is not the author of all that repetitive “informed” stuff as it would reflect poorly on the fine institution we attended together as boys, the Durban High School, and particularly on Anthony as he passed matric whereas I failed outright.
In his sublime Genius, the great Harold Bloom covers 100 of history’s geniuses ending with the late African American novelist, Ralph Waldo Ellison, “whose visionary genius achieved perfection in his Invisible Man...”
It might interest Mbeki, who considers himself a political and intellectual giant, and is neither, that Ellison refused to “debate his art in the service of black nationalist or separatist movements...”
Bloom advises that genius follows its own laws.
Intellectuals, of course, are far from harmless. As my friend, Paul Johnson, the historian, writes in his book, Intellectuals:“Taken as a group, they are often ultra-conformist within the circles formed by those whose approval they seek and value...(and) often generate irrational and destructive courses of action.”
Previous Mulholland columns