He walked down the dark lonely road, jellyfish-net in hand, whistling a merry tune. He was alone. Every step he took, he suspected…that someone was behind him. He stopped under the moonlit lane.
“It feels like,” said Spongebob slowly, “somebody…wants to sell me something!”
He wheels around and points his finger accusingly into the empty air. Nobody there, just a single boulder on the side of the road. Cut to behind the boulder. Two travelling salesmen (salesfish?) are crouching, hidden from view. The fish on the right snaps at his companion, “I told you he was onto us!”
The fish raised his head above the boulder, only to see Spongebob’s back retreating in the distance. We never find out if the two fish ever got the chance to flog their wares at our protagonist, for other hijinks ensue.
Do not trust these guys; you will never benefit from the contents of their briefcases.
This brief comedic Spongebob interlude, less than twenty seconds long, perfectly distills what it’s like to read an article or, even worse, a book by a writer who has been corrupted by interest, someone can’t see the world objectively anymore. Somebody who, dare I say it, wants to sell you something.
They are the complete opposite of essential reads.
The Most Appropriate Writing Style
Various writing styles offer various purposes for bother reader and writer. However, only one style is suited to making the reading experience enjoyable. It’s name is classic style.
In their book Clear and Simple As The Truth the scholars Mark Turner and Francis-Noel Thomas go through several different writing styles in order to distinguish what makes some writing easy and pleasant to read, and what makes some writing tortured and miserable to read. Not all writing strives for the same goal. It makes little sense for your toaster instructions to read like Pride & Prejudice because you don’t have time for art appreciation when assembling another piece of crap you bought from IKEA. Similarly, when you’re taking the time to read a book, you want to get lost in the experience, not feel like you’re reading a government start-up manual. Classic style, so Turner and Thomas argue, is the best genre of writing.
I won’t break down every last detail on classic styles as that’s the job of their book. Only one salient feature matters when considering authors who have been corrupted by interest. This passage provides a critical clue: “Classic style is in its own view clear and simple as the truth. It adopts the stance that its purpose is presentation; its motive, disinterested truth. Successful presentation consists of aligning language with truth, and the test of this alignment is clarity and simplicity.“ [emphasis added].
What separates classic style from the herd of alternatives is the concern with “disinterested truth”, the writer describing their subject as an objective reality. If that sounds hard, it’s because it is. Being impartial about a subject, especially a subject one knows more about than anyone else, could feel like digging to the bottom of an endless well. And good luck seeking disinterested truth if the subject is political, religious, or partisan in nature. The book might wind up being very far from ‘classic’ regardless of the writer’s attempt at performing in classic style. But still, writers should get over themselves (and their opinions) and do the ‘classic’ thing, which is to present the all sides of the subject with the coolness of James Bond.
Trust and Opinions
Part of classic style’s superiority in the book world stems from the credibility it establishes with the reader. Whether one is reading a beach novel or tackling volume sixty-seven of existentialist philosophy (don’t ask), the writer’s credibility with the reader matters quite a lot. If your reader can’t trust what you’re saying, you’ve already been checkmated. Therefore, taking the steps to make sure the reader doesn’t view the author like the dodgy fish crouching behind a boulder should be a publisher’s highest priority.
So this naturally raises the question: why does impartiality establish trust and credibility with the reader? Easy, impartiality avoids polarising any one section of the reading public from the text purely on the grounds of “that guy’s not on our team”.
Polarising opinions, whatever the evidence backing them up, can be detrimental to the reader. Opinions are cheap; you can think whatever you want. If I want to believe that Italian food is superior to French food, then so be it. I love eating pasta and hate eating snails, so Italian is clearly better.
Now, like any mellifluent citizen with a pen, I could marshal my thoughts into comprehensively proving Italian food’s superiority to its French counterpart in a well-crafted book. I could find evidence from all the way back to the Roman Empire if I wanted to. However, there would be a problem with the Italian food project from the get-go: my readers, even if they’re not into eating snails, would see straight through my uplifting oratory about wheat drum and Parmesan. They would see with their own eyes that I have a serious interest in ensuring that Italian food is deemed worthier than French food. My credibility as a food connoisseur would be quickly called into question.
This is exactly the same situation with books where the writer’s judgement or opinion excessively clouds the quality of the text. The writing could be crystal clear, but it couldn’t be classic style as the writer has been corrupted by interest. The readers lose trust in the writer. But surely it’s unrealistic to expect every book to be devoid of opinion and partisanship. Sometimes the writer needs to persuade the reader to see things their way. This is 100% correct, but the manner in which said opinions are conveyed is the difference between an important book and just another polemic polluting a bookstore near you.
So let’s examine how to make one’s case without losing their credibility with the reader.
The Prosecutor’s Approach
If one is trafficking in opinions, then the key to credibility is transparency. The reader should never doubt that they are consuming the opinions, however sophisticated or world-changing, of the writer. It keeps the reader and writer on equal footing even though the writer is technically higher up on the totem pole because they have the important information and the reader doesn't (yet). Being transparent about the opinionated nature of the book can be a class act in of itself. The author shouldn’t be required to compromise the quality of their book by putting an ugly author’s note in the preface saying some variant of “What you’re about to read is my opinion, please don’t throw dead poultry at me if you don’t like it”. There are ways of ensuring opinions fit snugly in the classic style template.
My personal favourite is in Cal Newport’s new book A World Without Email. Newport, is a productivity writer, considering the ways technology and productivity interact (and often clash). His observations fall squarely in the classic style theme of “disinterested truth" as he is often directing the reader’s attention to facts about technology that they might not have known. Nevertheless, Newport’s expertise in the subject will inevitably have him leaning this way or that about a particular fact. The subject of this new book is, obviously, email. Intrigued as ever, I gave the book a read. Upon reading the table of contents, I noticed that the book was split into two sections. The first one is what matters here for it was entitled “The Case Against Email.”
The title conjures familiar imagery. The reader is quickly reminded of a prosecutor charging a mafia don with high crimes and misdemeanours in a courtroom. Newport’s stated intention is to convince the reader that email is a productivity wasteland, and that alternative ways of organising your office are far more productive. The reader is like the jury being presented with the crimes email committed against their productivity, time, and attention. They are able to see with own eyes, and without Newport talking down at them, that banishing this villainous scoundrel from their workplace is the appropriate measure to protecting the women and children.
To be sure, early transparency is not a total get-out-of-jail free card. Books can be rubbish for other reasons. Once the transparency is established, all of the other hard work that goes into the performing classic style must be executed, a job Newport does to perfection. Transparency about opinions might need to appear several times throughout the book, not just at the beginning. Seeing a sentence like “From this evidence, I believe that the most likely interpretation…” will not sink the writer’s credibility nor will it deviate away from the tenants of classic style. Readers aren’t on a hair trigger about an opinion that might be around the corner.
Sometimes, the writer’s interpretation is the only available subject matter. For example, another book that earns two thumbs up in the world of Elliott is The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went To War In 1914 by Christopher Clark. Clark’s book is an exemplar of classic style, telling the panoramic story of what the various European countries did in the years running up to World War I. However, there are many areas of knowledge missing from the historical record, most notably in the Serbian archives concerning The Black Hand…you know, the group that shot the archduke which got the ball rolling in the first place. Astonishingly, the group left a super-thin paper trail, which is remarkable considering they carried out the not-so-small task of masterminding an international conspiracy to kill the heir-apparent of a rival country. Therefore, Clark is forced to resort to circumstantial evidence and interpretation. I never faulted him for utilising his subjective expert opinion to keep the narrative moving in a compelling way. Clark is not alone in doing things like this.
But when do the opinions become a problem? When does the reader start saying to themselves “It…feels like…somebody…wants to sell me something!”
The Masquerade: Their Truth As The Truth
The books that earn the greatest censure in my house are books where the writer so comprehensively blurs the objective facts presented and their judgements about those facts that it is impossible to tell the difference. Remember, objectivity earns the reader’s trust as it leads the reader to believe that the writer has the reader’s best interests at heart.
A smalltime offender in this area is Malcolm Gladwell, which I spend more time discussing in this review. Gladwell’s books, however readable, often mix up Gladwell’s interpretation of the situation with what actually happened. The result can be some glaring omissions, oversimplifications, and non-sequiturs in his books and podcast. Hell, his podcast is called “Revisionist History”. That should alert any reasonable person of Gladwell’s style.
In Gladwell’s defence, his books are explicitly about marrying one set of ideas with another, creating something wholly new, like the concept of “The Tipping Point” or an “Outlier”. Inevitably, some facts will get missed and whatever gripes I have with his approach are far less severe than how I feel about David Graeber’s book, Debt: The First 5000 Years.
Graeber’s book is the paradigm case of being corrupted by interest, where a reader be deceived by a rhetorical partisan pushing their ideology onto them as if it were THE truth.
How does Graeber’s book commit this sin? First, look at the title, Debt: The First 5000 Years. The title conveys a degree of financial impartiality about an omnipresent feature in most societies, debt. Where did debt come from? How does it play out in the financial system? These and similar question whirled in my head as I downloaded the book onto my kindle.
Upon reading the first page, something smelled wrong. Graeber began the book by describing a party he attended in Westminster Abbey of all places. Next, he recounts with an interaction with a woman who worked for the IMF. He unabashedly proclaimed that he and his fellow protestors (huh?) “took down” the IMF or something like that in the ‘80s. He immediately lost me; my indignation was growing. He seemed to describe the IMF, a complex international body, as a sort of parasite screwing people in Africa…somehow. Wait, what? And why did he crow about his achievements as if he were the cat that swallowed the canary? Annoyance ascending in my heart, I flipped back to the Amazon blurb (all emphasis points mine).
David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, and one of the organisers of Occupy Wall Street, presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: he shows that long before there was money, there was debt. In this sweeping study, Graeber argues that our current ideas about money are limited, if not completely wrong. Society has always been divided into debtors and creditors, and debt and forgiveness have been at the centre of political debate long before money existed. Graeber shows how we are still fighting these battles today, and the financial crisis is an urgent and global example of that.
I burned red-hot with embarrassment reading this description as several red flags emerged immediately. First, “our current ideas about money are limited, if not completely wrong?” What the hell does that mean? That description makes it sound like money is a top-down invention that was cooked up by a vague consortium of actors for the rest of us to use. Somehow, I don’t think that’s how money works, but what do I know?
More insidious is the phrase “organiser of Occupy Wall Street”. Why is that a problem? Because Occupy Wall Street was a partisan movement with an agenda and a clear interest in seeing things in a particular way. The problem here is that Graeber’s book led me to believe it was one thing (an impartial examination on the topic of debt) but instead was something else entirely (a partisan polemic against current wealth inequalities viewed through a Marxist lens).
For me, the straw that broke the camel’s back was his Wikipedia page describing him as an “activist scholar”, a university professor with an explicit agenda in their teachings and research. Few individuals earn my scorn quite like these people as they are the writers most likely to produce books which commit the gravest sins against classic style. I didn’t know that about Graeber going into this book, infuriating me further when I discovered that crucial fact about him.
In short, I felt like I’d been duped, that I’d been sold something that I didn’t want to buy. So enraged was I that I actually went to the trouble of asking for a refund from Amazon. Graeber’s book was so corrupted by interest that, even though I probably agree with him on some stuff, there is no universe in which I deem it a good read.
Conclusion
The books which become the biggest joys to read are the ones where you never have to worry about the author’s interests acting nefariously. Readers, like all people, don’t like the feeling of being talked down to or feeling exploited (however mildly). Books that are corrupted by interest are a broad category with few hard and fast criteria, but when you come across one, that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach will always be painful.
Spotting such reviling texts can be really easy or really hard. What’s the difference? If you hate the ideas being sold to you, you’ll be more likely to cotton onto the writer’s partisan nature. However, if you agree with the author’s ideas a priori then the disingenuous salesmanship will be harder to spot. The moment you find yourself sounding like Spongebob walking down that road, stop reading immediately.
A book corrupted by interest, no matter how much you may enjoy it, will ultimately do you a disservice. They are the opposite of an essential read.