Not sure if you're being sarcastic here - I do have a tendency to sometimes overcomplicate the way I express ideas, but I'm not certain that particular sentence is exceptionally overwrought.
Sorry for piling on, but it's my prerogative as an English teacher, and Marcus Brutus has a point. Phrases like:
it's very dangerous to treat human beings as fungible stimulus-response machines, and locate the nexus of responsibility for outcomes in the complex of external behavioral influences rather than in human agency itself
are great for showing your college professor you've mastered the jargon, but they don't get you many Likes on Facebook. Why not just say:
while there can be mitigating circumstances, I believe in personal responsibility
I'm sure that one might find a more concise and elegant way of expressing the thoughts I attempted to convey in that sentence. But I hope you'll agree that reducing
> Everything might be rightly construed as a potential influence on human behavior, and anything taken to excess might inspire dangerous or irresponsible behavior; but it's very dangerous to treat human beings as fungible stimulus-response machines, and locate the nexus of responsibility for outcomes in the complex of external behavioral influences rather than in human agency itself.
to
> while there can be mitigating circumstances, I believe in personal responsibility
is at best an example of extremely lossy compression. That rewording gives at most a vague impression of what my position would be were the question reduced to a mere binary "are you for or against prohibition?" contest.
I agree that concision is important, and I know that my earlier comment didn't quite achieve it, but I'd still regard concision as efficiency in the use of words: saying as much in fewer words, not using fewer words for its own sake, even if it means actually saying less.
Actually I was not sarcastic at all. I really loved that sentence as I too have a penchant for long-winding sentences that are hard to parse but in closer inspection have no noise and every word in them is essential. Comes from my days of reading Aristotle where it is not uncommon to have a page of only two sentences. Or look at the Declaration of Independence or the Treaty of Paris for more recent examples of page-sized sentences. I think it shows how far downhill we've gone in terms of literacy or perhaps even mental capacity. Yours, while not in the same league, was a sentence I really liked and it never occurred to me that people might construe my comment as sarcastic.
Apologies; my own writing style is influenced by reading a lot of eighteenth-century text, which tends to be very wordy, but which also seems to express a much higher precision of thought than the more terse modern fashions of writing.
I've noticed that Pitarou's advice on rephrasing my original reply would reduce it to something much vaguer than I'd intended, and would simply convey the conclusion of my thought process as a simple yes-or-no response, leaving my actual rationale entirely hidden.
I'm not entirely convinced that we've necessarily gone downhill in terms of literacy or mental capacity, but I agree that the outward expressiveness of language certainly has declined in comparison to the past, and this may be in part an explanation for the coarseness and contentiousness of much modern discourse.
