The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker

Author:Steven Pinker [Pinker, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781846145513
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2014-09-03T22:00:00+00:00

Keegan is among the most esteemed military historians who ever lived, and A History of Warfare was a critically acclaimed bestseller. Several reviews singled out the quality of his writing for praise. Certainly the mechanics here are sound, and at first glance, so is the coherence. The topics are war and Clausewitz, and we have a number of connectives, like however and yet. Nonetheless, I found this paragraph barely coherent.

The problems begin in the first sentence. Why is a book on warfare starting out by telling us what war is not? I recognized the dictum from Clausewitz, but it was hardly uppermost in my mind as I began a book on war, if for no other reason than that I always found it obscure—an impression confirmed by Keegan’s equivocating explanation in the third and fourth sentences. If Clausewitz’s dictum is so subtle, complex, and misunderstood, how is the reader being enlightened by being told it is false? And if even the people who are familiar with the dictum don’t know what it means, how could the world be “simpler” if it were true? For that matter, is the dictum false? Keegan now tells us that it’s merely “incomplete.” Should he have begun, “War is not just the continuation of policy by other means”?

OK, I tell myself, I’ll wait for the rest of the explanation. Soon we are told that war reaches into a place where emotion is paramount, where instinct is king. But two sentences later we’re told that the instinct to hunt and kill is directed by the intellect. These can’t both be true: kings don’t take orders, so instinct cannot be a king and be directed by the intellect. Let’s go with the last thing we were told and assume it’s the intellect that’s in charge. So what part of this thought did Clausewitz and Aristotle (and what’s he suddenly doing in this conversation?) fail to confront: the fact that man is a thinking animal, or the fact that what he thinks about is how to hunt and kill?

The confusing opening of A History of Warfare provides us with an opportunity to look at three other contributors to coherence, which are conspicuous here by their absence: clear and plausible negation, a sense of proportion, and thematic consistency.

The first problem is Keegan’s maladroit use of negation. Logically speaking, a sentence with a naysaying word like not, no, neither, nor, or never is just the mirror image of an affirmative sentence. Saying that the integer 4 is not odd is logically the same as saying that it is even. If something is not alive, then it’s dead, and vice versa. But psychologically speaking, a negative statement and an affirmative statement are fundamentally different.17

More than three centuries ago, Baruch Spinoza pointed out that the human mind cannot suspend disbelief in the truth or falsity of a statement and leave it hanging in logical limbo awaiting a “true” or “false” tag to be hung on it.18 To hear or read a statement is to believe it, at least for a moment.

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