Way Over My Head

I've been reading obituaries for a long time. Lots of them. But today's NYT obituary on Sheldon S. Wolin, 93, a political theorist by William Grimes has got to be the most densely worded, incomprehensible obituary I've ever read. It's not the obituary that's hard/impossible to understand, it's the deceased.

You can't tell you're headed for the thicket of the forest from just visually absorbing the deceased's picture, caption, or outquote. But the lede lets you know you're in for molasses in January in a cold climate.

Mr. Wolin, "a political theorist whose landmark 1960 book Politics and Vision shifted the center of gravity back to politics rather than economic or sociology, in the field of political science, and who went on to analyze the possibilities and limits of democracy in a series of influential studies, died..."

I like the "center of gravity" part. I understand Mr. Wolin changed the emphasis in political science back to politics (hence the name political, maybe?) from other disciplines. Whether we're better or worse off for this I don't know, but I should have stopped there. It's the last thing that made any sense to me, other than the standard biographical parts of hometown, marriage, schools, survivors, etc.

I was not admitted to any of the colleges Mr. Wolin taught at. Full disclosure, I didn't apply to any of them, thus I had no chance of spending a semester trying to figure out what the guy was trying to say. If the subject matter of the class were as thick as I gather from the obituary, I think an "A" would have been in order just for perfect attendance and not succumbing to sleep in his presence. Osmotically you might have absorbed something.

Mr. Wolin's life apparently did not leave us with a cute anecdote, or a cute play on words that you might expect from such an academic. There doesn't seem to have been a twinkle in his eye telling us that really all this stuff might really just be crap.

Consider Mr. Grimes's next to last paragraph, a quote from a 1994 essay of  Mr. Wolin's: "Democracy in the late modern world cannot be a complete political system...and given the awesome potentialities of the modern forms of power, and what they exact of the social and natural world, it ought not to be hoped or striven for." His last book was titled: Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism.

When does the bell ring?

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