In yesterday’s Boston Globe, language columnist Jan Freeman raises a question that’s of interest to all bloggers: can we have too many peeves? and can community peeving increase each person’s count of annoyances even an order of magnitude higher than it would have been normally?
She starts with the great problem of the word “create.” Many of us, I suppose, have never heard anyone complain that the word “create” has a modern implication that is foreign to our traditional way of thinking. I think I first ran into this purported “issue” when reading The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom, or maybe in George Steiner. At the time, most likely, I assumed the idea—that only since the modern era have artists been considered “creative” in a sense previously reserved to God’s creation of the universe in the Biblical book of Genesis—was a commonplace. I can easily imagine Percy Bysshe Shelley, perhaps, arrogating the word “creative” to himself and his fellow poets. Yet that is only speculation, especially if, as Freeman says, there’s no basis in historical fact for thinking that “creative” in this sense is a modern invention.
In Bloom’s case, it is easy for me to dismiss what he says in retrospect. In the fifteen or twenty years since I read his book, I’ve learned a little about how political disputes can contaminate otherwise scholarly thought, and these days I wouldn’t believe anything Allan Bloom says about anything unless I could find corroboration, properly documented and argued. The case of George Steiner is more difficult given his liberal politics, but the personality he conveys in his books (and the fact that he says much Bloom would also agree with), makes it increasingly less so. Yet, if there isn’t a real issue there, why would Daniel Boorstin have begun his popular book The Creators, about the literary canon, with a survey of metaphysics or creation myths in various world civilizations? Though, on the other hand, the absence of a real issue might be exactly what makes that book a little unconvincing.
Is there really anybody who believes it’s immoral or impious for individuals to “create”? A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times Book Review ran a review of a book by the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus that inspired me to coin the new logical fallacy, “dixit ergo creavit”: he said it, therefore he created it. Neuhaus, in essence, blames philosopher of postmodern pragmatism Richard Rorty for certain ills of the modern world. His evidence: Rorty’s vivid description of the effects of those ills. That is unfair, surely. Describing problems does not make them any worse or bring them more concrete being than they had before. In fact, Neuhaus himself would have been unable to attack those putative developments without Rorty’s description.
Anyway, I considered whether “creavit” or “invenit” (discovered) was the better word. “Discovered” certainly describes better what I think Rorty, a scholar, not a belle-lettriste, was trying to do in his book. But the fallacy is not only the unsurprising fact that the first person who says a thing may not have been the first person to think it. Without the idea that Rorty had introduced something new into the world, Neuhaus’s accusation doesn’t have a lot of force. Evidently he felt Rorty had created the turn of thought he wrote about: taught his students to believe this, whether or not that was an actual fact. Evidently he felt human beings would be better off if nobody at all had even suggested its possibility.
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