A couple of years ago I wrote about kinds of thinkers: Explainers, Illuminators, and Provokers. That classification was based on effect, that is, what those thinkers do for me as a reader. But you can also classify thinkers by their purposes. Thus my second tripartite scheme, thinker-writers who are
- Diagnostic
- Prescriptive
- Therapeutic
Diagnostic writers are usually also Explainers, and what they’re trying to explain is What Is Wrong. What’s our affliction? Where did it come from? (Diagnosis is commonly etiological.) Our moment, it seems to me, is greatly overpopulated by diagnostic writing. As I’ve commented before, most of our diagnostic writers seem unaware that hundreds or thousands of writers before them have made precisely the arguments that they make. (That doesn’t stop readers from treating them as savants, though.)
We don’t have nearly as many Prescriptive writers, but those who exist tend to be really bad at it: obvious and abstract. (“We need to cultivate a society of mutual respect.”) I remember long ago seeing a cartoon: a clown is standing in front of a TV camera, while someone is holding up a cue card that says, “Make a funny joke.” That’s what our current prescriptive writers tend to do.
Therapeutic writers try to help us manage our misery. They may or may not have diagnoses of it, they may or may not have prescriptions for cure, but they know that while we’re in the midst of it we need entertainment, distraction, or consolation — ideally all three. I don’t think we have enough of this kind of thing either; and even when it’s good it’s not especially highly regarded.
We have so much diagnostic writing because it often tells us something we very much want to know: which of our enemies are to blame. That, I think, is why we can read it endlessly, even when it repeats what we’ve already read.
