3-Minute B.A.: A Writer’s Guide to Sounding Smart at Parties

I once heard a bar exam instructor say you go through three levels of understanding in the study of any given subject matter:

Level 1: Glib familiarity.

Level 2: Glib familiarity plus mild panic as you realize you don’t know enough to be considered competent.

and

Level 3: Glib familiarity plus total despair as you realize that in a lifetime you’ll never know enough to be considered competent.

“But don’t despair” he added.  “Glib familiarity is all anyone ever needed to pass a bar exam.”

Writers need to sound smart at parties

Even in a digital age there is still a body of academic trivia which writers must know in order to sound educated.  If we hope to someday contribute to the best newspapers (The New York Times, The Economist) or the best blogs (Slate, Crooks and Liars ), then we had better be clear on who said “peace in our time” and who was the first female Secretary of State.  Problem is, we learned that 101 stuff in college, and we promptly forgot it all the moment we tossed our mortarboards into the air.

Don’t despair!  Glib familiarity was all any writer ever needed to make it through a cocktail party.  You can hold your own so long as you’ve got the names of a few 20th-century trailblazers on the tip of your tongue.

A few thinkers

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951).  Hardcore philosopher.  Wittgenstein did for philosophy what Hemingway did for literature, blasting through the esoteric language of his predecessors with concise albeit often enigmatic statements. (That observation is on the house, by the way.  Feel free to repeat it over dinner as if you’d made it up yourself) .  No one ever fully understood Wittgenstein, so don’t worry if you don’t.  What you need to remember is: (a) he changed the liberal arts and social sciences forever; and (b) it’s pronounced “VIT-guhn-shtine”.

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004).  Philosopher/literary critic.  Terribly French.  A man of many words and very subtle distinctions.  You’ll remember Derrida as the father of the Deconstructionist movement in criticism.  Derrida and his disciples wanted to ferret out and undo the reader’s assumptions about related concepts in textual language.  Derrida is beyond cool in academic circles; the mere mention of his name will amaze your friends and terrify your enemies.

Noam Chomsky (b. 1928).  Philosopher/professor of linguistics.  A pillar of MIT and reportedly a mean old curmudgeon, Noam Chomsky quite literally wrote the book  on linguistic theory.  Most contemporary linguistic scholarship falls beneath his considerable shadow.  Chomsky dedicated the best years of his life to chasing his pet theory of Universal Grammar, which posits that the structure of language is innate in the human mind (something like a grammar instinct), and that certain basic rules govern all human tongues.  Spoiler alert!– he’s probably wrong.  There’s good evidence  that some languages simply will not conform to Chomsky’s supposedly “universal” parameters.

 A few bean-counters

Paul Volcker (b. 1927).  If economists are ever canonized, this guy will be patron saint of commonsense, why-haven’t-we-been-doing-this-all-along? federal banking regulation.  Simply put, the so-called “Volcker Rule”  is a section of the Dodd-Frank Act which seeks to curb consumer-bank involvement in the riskier sorts of betting more commonly engaged in by hedge funds.  Volcker was Chairman of the Fed under both Carter and Reagan and an important member of Obama’s 2009-2010 economic recovery team.  Now we wish he’d come back, and bring Glass-Steagall back with him.

John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946).  As in “Keynesian economics”.  Keynes’ ideas became the foundation of a macroeconomic schoolwhich holds that an unregulated private sector can actually lead to market inefficiencies.  Keynes’ followers have been known to observe that Adam Smith’s classic “invisible hand” theory of market behavior wrongly assumes consumers are rational (See e.g. Squinkies®) and everyone is privy to the same information (See e.g. “Raj” Rajaratnam).

Steven David Levitt (b. 1967).  Trendy and controversial, but serious economists take him seriously.  This is the Freakonomics  guy.  With an odd tendency to focus on matters of crime, Levitt’s sprawling research tracks and models behaviors as disparate as drug gang finance and cheating in the professional Japanese sumo circuit.

 Carpe diem!

With that, you’re armed and intellectually dangerous–fit to keep your head above water in polite conversation.  We’ve given you wings, now go hitch your wagon to a star. Or at the very least, have another drink.

Image Courtesy of Flickr, Martin Stabenfeldt