I was intrigued to read what appears to be Professor Pete Shirlow’s review of my review. I do not want to go into all the points raised as I think I would be providing oxygen to something I do not wish to entertain. All my objections are contained in my actually rather generous original piece, such as highlighting the inadequacy of not revealing the names of interviewees (why for instance, in the study of Loyalism and other subjects, have other writers managed to name who they’ve been talking to?). So I will be brief in this rejoinder. Something I can start by helping with is the phrase ‘a bit of a mouse’.
Before complaining about this at length Pete professes not to know what it means. Figuratively, a mouse is something minor and insignificant. This is how I view the book’s overarching thesis that Loyalism has both ‘regressive’, i.e. ‘bad’, and ‘progressive’, i.e. ‘good’ elements. I consider this a truism and the nature of almost every ideology, political movement and individual that has ever existed in the world. It further diminishes and simplifies something which is varied and complex.
Revealingly, Peter confuses ‘intellectual’ with jargon. There are many natural intellectuals in all walks of life – I have found a number of Loyalist interviewees to be highly intellectual in their sophistication and world view – and this is not the same as jargon, which is a style of writing (or speaking). It does not mean being intelligent or clever. Similarly jargon is not a particular ‘big’ word but a way of writing (for some people it is perhaps a way of life), and has nothing to do with theory which can be fascinating. And this is where I must stick my neck out. This jargon – aside from being dreadful to read for both a scholarly and general readership – prevents people from understanding and is therefore damaging. I feel this is worth confronting because although Pete’s work suffers from it, the problem is a common one and exists in much, though by no means all, academic writing.
In his 1946 essay ‘Politics and the English Language’, George Orwell argued that sloppy jargon had potentially dangerous political consequences. Targeting in particular two theorists from the British Left – Harold Laski and G.D.H. Cole – Orwell believed bad writing could, at an extreme, lead to the late-night visitations where people are ‘shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in arctic lumber camps’. Through the elimination of ‘meaningless words’ and ‘pretentious diction’, Orwell believed, writers and society as a whole make the ‘first step towards political regeneration’. His analysis has particular resonance in Northern Ireland where repetition and a special kind of jargon have been used to retrospectively justify some very dark moments of the recent past, and – not much better – skew our understanding and recognition of a subject or issue. Of course, Pete’s The End of Ulster Loyalism? never justifies anything heinous, but the nonsensical, convoluted phraseology (an intellectual word here) Orwell complained of is prevalent throughout. This jargon, a sort of verbal waste, even makes its way into Pete’s response to my review of his book. At the end of the point-by-point rebuttal, which has an oddly rehearsed quality, he complains that I did not refer to ‘the context of idea building’ his work so prizes. Stand back for a moment and unpack that phrase. What on earth constitutes ‘idea building’? What has ‘context’ to do with it? What human concept or mental process does not involve an ‘idea’, and when are ideas ever ‘built’?
While ideologues and writers from all the major parties and traditions in Northern Ireland practice the jargon – ‘designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind’, in Orwell’s assessment – the weakest academic writing demeans and prevents people from finding out what they need to find out about. I am with Orwell on this. Each sector of the society has its part to play: the kind of jargon and pure wind found in The End of Ulster Loyalism? should be avoided in the future. Given the problems facing Loyalism and – distinctly – the Protestant working class at the moment, the times are too serious for this bad writing to continue.
