On Learnin'

It's amazing how a little education can upset your productivity. Since I started a new Open University course (Philosophy and the Human Condition) last week I've been put off attempting to write fiction; how can someone as ignorant as I am presume to educate the masses? Such hubris!

My intellectual shortcomings have been comprehensively exposed. Isaiah Berlin's notions of "negative" and "positive" liberty are one thing, but when Gerald MacCallum gets up and starts trying to simplify things I totally lose the thread. This may be partially the result of his tortuous prose, behold:

"But a reason for this especially worth noting at the start is that disputes about the nature of freedom are certainly historically best understood as a series of attempts by parties opposing each other on very many issues to capture for their own side the favorable attitudes attaching to the notion of freedom."

Let's see if we can pare that down a little. By taking out the superfluous clauses and qualifiers, for example.

"But a reason for this is that disputes about the nature of freedom are best understood as a series of attempts by opposing parties to capture the favorable attitudes attaching to the notion of freedom."

Better? Well, why not go further? Why not extract the actual meaning of the sentence and just write that?

"Most disputes about the nature of freedom are just attempts by the parties involved to claim its favorable associations for themselves."

Better still, let's write it as an epigram.

"Beware those who talk always of freedom; their chatter masks the rattle of the jailer's keys."

There you go, Gerald. You should have been a poet.