Jerome Kagan and the Passion for Abstraction

Jerome Kagan (Photo by Rick Friedman)

I see in the Times that Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan died recently. In his Three Seductive Ideas (1998), Kagan analyzed human nature’s “passion for abstraction.” He said, “The human brain, like the brain of a rat, is biased initially to attend to generality rather than particularity.” 

If you believe, as I do, that specificity is the key to effective writing, you'll find that Kagan’s observation explains a lot. It explains why specificity doesn’t come naturally, why we have to school ourselves to use definite, specific, concrete language. William Strunk and E. B. White, in their classic The Elements of Style (1972), wrote,

If those who have studied the art of writing are in accord on any one point, it is on this: the surest way to arouse and hold the attention of the reader is by being specific, definite, and concrete. The greatest writers – Homer, Dante, Shakespeare – are effective largely because they deal in particulars and report the details that matter. Their words call up pictures.

This, to me, is writing's golden rule. It’s a difficult rule to apply because, as Kagan pointed out, it runs counter to our natural inclination to generalize.