Moralizing with adjectives

The night before, still in Phnom Penh, in a vain effort to forget my misery, I took a novel to bed (I think it was Murdoch's The Sea The Sea) but I had to put it away: the introduction was that awful.

It was relentless moralizing with adjectives.

"Moralizing with adjectives" is a category of discourse. It is the favorite rhetorical form when addressing one's own party members. It's a particularly empty form of rhetoric: because an adjective can morally praise or dispraise anything, a sock could be characterized as smug, or self-sacrificing. Such a characterization does not tell us anything at all except that the author likes the sock (or does not, as the case may be).

(Is it fair to generalize that proper speech -- one conveying meaning -- should contain no adjectives at all?)

The introduction was just such a succession of meaningless, value-laden adjectives relentlessly beating up on Yuppies, Margaret Thatcher, and -- well, some kind of invisible, unnamed enemy: "we are told", "we are made to", "we are taught", all wrongly of course, but the passive mode of the expression makes it resoundingly unclear we are told by whom.

The introduction's only discernible message -- one that could actually be tautologically paraphrased -- was the -- patently wrong -- claim that Buddhism's does not recommend withdrawal from society.

The overwhelming impression of the piece was the sensation of the utter and complete A.D. (agitated discombobulation). I felt both intense pity for the author, realizing in how much pain he was writhing, but I was also terrified to know how wrong and how confused a mind could be. Here I was looking in detail at the kind of unstable state of mind in which suicides or murders are committed.

Unbelievably, the publisher let the piece run.

Why?