Politics and the English Language

Friend Xerxes in his latest column argues, quoting another writer, that “violence is what happens when we don’t know what else to do with our suffering.”

This is wrong, in a variety of ways. This condones violence.

If it were true, we would expect the survivors of the Nazi death camps, once released, to have been particularly violent. In fact, we found the opposite: they were notably unlikely to be arrested for any violent crimes. We would expect the depressed to be particularly violent. In fact, they are much less likely to commit violence than the general population. We would obviously never punish a child for misbehaviour: it would make them more violent. And prisons would make crime worse. 

Yet this is apparently the common opinion on the left. This is why they imagine that defunding the police would reduce crime.

The ancient and universal wisdom is that suffering teaches us not to inflict suffering on others. It teaches empathy. In the words of the I Ching, “through suffering we learn to lessen rancor.” This is indeed the reason suffering exists; why a good God would create a world in which suffering is possible.

So, too, coddling or spoiling a child creates a bully.

The claim that violence comes from suffering is well calculated to increase the general level of violence and suffering. It justifies violence, rewards violence, and encourages us to shun the suffering. They are, after all, violent—so we tell ourselves.

Xerxes then points out that “Violence is not limited to inflicting physical harm.”

It is, in fact, physical harm by definition.

Violence (Merriam-Webster): “the use of physical force so as to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy.”

(American Heritage): “Behavior or treatment in which physical force is exerted for the purpose of causing damage or injury: the violence of the rioters.”

This leads us in very dark directions: to justifying violence in response to speech. To the end of all civil discourse, or democracy, or human rights.

But even more disturbing, when I point out to Xerxes the dictionary definition, his response is “You shouldn’t let yourself be straitjacketed by dictionary definitions.” And he simply reiterates that “verbal abuse is a form of violence, directed against another. … As is emotional blackmail: ‘If you don’t do as I say, I’m going to leave you.’ Shutting down social security networks, so that people starve, is a form of violence.”

This makes a fairly explicit claim to a right to use violence against your political opponents: against those who would “shut down social security networks.”

I also find it sinister that his example of emotional blackmail is “If you don’t do as I say, I’m going to leave you.” This is actually seen from the point of view of the abuser. The abused inevitably wants to get away; the abuser wants the victim to stay. And the abuser will accuse the abused of abuse. Perhaps this says everything.

But neither of these considerations are as central as Xerxes’s, and the left’s, claimed right to overrule the dictionary and take command of language itself. Both language and all human society collapses at the point people demand the right to change the meaning of words: if any word can mean anything, no word means anything. And this is just what the left is doing now, systematically. 

Aside from “violence,” consider how they have subverted the English pronouns; the word “phobia”; “genocide”; “exceptional”; “indigenous”; “aboriginal”; “woke”; “progressive”; “liberal”; “Fascist”; “Nazi”; “racism”; the list grows daily.

George Orwell pointed out that the most pernicious and dangerous form of totalitarianism is an attempt to control the language itself. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

A Short Glossary of Newspeak

 

Some mainline journalist has done an article accusing Matt Walsh of “transphobia.”

By its nature, that is a charge one cannot counter. Because “transphobia” is bad by definition, and is otherwise undefinable.

A phobia is an “excessive, extreme, irrational, fear or panic reaction about a situation, living creature, place or object.” (phobia definition - Search (bing.com)

Yet that is obviously not what we are talking about. There is really no such thing as “transphobia.” Nobody has a panic reaction to seeing a man wearing a dress. Similarly, there is no such thing as “Islamophobia,” or “homophobia.” Anyone using these terms is simply dishonest, and speaking in bad faith. It is a way to avoid addressing an argument by simply declaring it irrational.

There is also, I warrant, no such thing in the modern world as a “white supremacist.” Even the Nazis were not “white supremacists.” The insult is effective precisely because everyone considers it a bad thing (like “phobia”). Accordingly, nobody is it. Anybody using it against an opponent is almost necessarily arguing in bad faith.

There are other such dishonest terms. They are proliferating. “Pro-choice,” for example; for wanting unrestricted abortion.  Unrestricted abortion assigns one more choice to the mother, by removing it from everyone else. An abortion denies all choice to the foetus, the father, the grandparents, the siblings, or the community.

“Gender-affirming surgery” is another deliberate lie. Said surgery destroys or obscures one’s gender (or sex) while incapable of giving you a new one. 

“Reproductive health,” as the term is now used, is about preventing reproduction, and so is, by normal standards, induced reproductive illness.

“Planned Parenthood” actually means planning not to be a parent.

Politicians these day use the term “invest” when they mean “spend money.” As if the government necessarily gets a return on spending. I believe this verbal trick was invented by Bill Clinton, but now everyone who wants to raise government spending uses it.

When people use terms that are deliberate lies, it proves one thing: they know they are doing something wrong.

It is interesting that all the examples I can think of are from the left. I cannot think of examples on the right. 

Jive Talking

 

One of my students, attending University of Indiana as an international student, has been assigned an article by James Baldwin titled “If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?”

English, French, German, and Spanish are languages. “Black English” is a dialect.

Baldwin’s first contention: “People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate.”

Rather, people evolve a language in order to communicate. To suppose you can control your circumstances (or “reality”) by the language you use is the premise behind George Orwell’s sinister Newspeak. It is a delusion of the power-mad.

While insisting that “Black English” is a separate language, somewhat paradoxically, Baldwin insists that standard American English owes much to it. I grant him the term “jazz.” He could have cited many more. But he cites, falsely, “beat generation” as coming from the black expression “beat to his socks.” The term was coined by Jack Kerouac, who ought to know, and he said it was a reference to the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount. Even if it weren’t, “beat” has perfectly reasonable and applicable senses in English that do not rely on any reference to that idiom. One can be beat without being beat to one’s socks.

Baldwin describes “black English” as “a language, that the white man could not possibly understand, and that, indeed, he cannot understand.” Of course white Americans can understand most of what is said in “black English.” Few white people learn it, or use it, because it has no utility for them. Its only value is as a mark of ethnic identity, a cant or jargon; they are not going to convince anyone they are black in any case.

But look at how that premise harms black people. If “white” people are unable to learn black English, you have to entertain the parallel argument that black people may be unable to ever learn to speak standard English very well. You have no defense, now, against that claim. Perhaps they are also unable to learn algebra, then, or medicine, or science, or law…not a road you should want to go down.

“If this absolutely unprecedented journey does not indicate that black English is a language, I am curious to know what definition of language is to be trusted.”

The author has not considered any definitions of language. Here’s the one that is tenable in linguistics: a language, as distinct from a dialect, has a standardized written form and a literature. All Englishmen, regardless of their local dialect, can read the London newspapers. They can read Agatha Christie’s novels. All Chinese can read the Chinese classics, even though they often cannot understand one another when they speak. Conversely, Hindi and Urdu, although mutually comprehensible, are considered different languages: they are written in different scripts. The same for Croatian and Bosnian.

Black English is a dialect, not a language, because books, magazines, newspapers, and epic poems are not printed and read in black English. Perhaps in some future they may be; but it is unlikely. An author does not want to limit his audience, and all speakers of black English can also read standard English—along with about a billion others.

Tellingly, Baldwin himself chooses to write this article in standard, not in black, English. He should not demand otherwise from black youth. He is crippling them.

Language is communication. The best language is the language that can communicate with the most people.

Black English is a millstone around the neck.

Violence against Language

I tend to hobnob with other editors on Facebook, and this meme has come around more than once.

This Orwellian attempt to politicize language always alarms me. Especially among editors, who are in a position to impose censorship on what we get to read, just like Winston Smith in the Ministry of Truth.

The use of the passive in this case looks perfectly legitimate. It is entirely likely that the reporter has been given a number for how many women were raped, or how many girls were harassed, and no number for how many men raped or how many boys harassed. It is obviously not the same number. More obviously, it is easy to have a number for how many women are pregnant. It is essentially impossible to know how many fathers are involved.

And there is essentially the same problem for rape or harassment. How do you arrive at a number for how many men rape? You could, if you simply went with the number of convictions for rape, and the number of charges cited in each. Very few men rape. But I wager that is not where the original number came from. It probably came from some feminist source, who wanted to float far higher numbers than this would produce. It probably came from women self-reporting. The figures for boys harassing girls almost certainly did.

So, to get the figures for perpetrators, you could do the same, right? Do a thorough survey, and ask men how many have raped some woman, and boys how many have harassed girls, in the past year?

Does anyone think that number would be accurate? Does anyone thing the two sets of figures would be comparable?

But then, logically, going by self-reporting for women and girls is no more likely to be accurate. We cannot assume that women always tell the truth, and men do not. That’s a deeply sexist view. We are dealing in all these cases with a “he said/she said” situation, with no ability to know the truth.

But here’s the bigger gaping maw of sexism: what about numbers for women raping men, or girls harassing boys? We apparently just start with the initial premise that either that never happens, or if it does, it does not matter. Why do we hear so much about “violence against women,” yet never about “violence against men”? Noting that, in the real world, men are far more likely to be the victims of violence than women. Some surveys suggest this is even true of domestic violence specifically. We are saying only violence against women matters.

What could be more sexist than that?

The Right to Choose Your Own Sex

Sorry, folks, I guess I need to vent. The following cartoon came down on an international editors’ Facebook feed.

One of the rules of the list is that political posts are forbidden. And this one was apparently posted by one of the moderators. Nothing political here, it seems. Nothing that could be controversial. This is something all editors, around the world, are now apparently expected to impose on any authors seeking publication. One is not to designate anyone by sex until the person itself [sic] tells you which sex they choose.

True, it is not political, really. It would be more accurate to call it psychotic. This is the definition of psychotic: out of touch with the physical world around you.

Sex is a lot more a part of your biology than just the dangly bits. It is programmed into every cell. It affects the various organs. Female arms are different. Male brains are different. Females experience different symptoms before a heart attack. Men do not ovulate. And on and on.

Just try to extend this logic: if biology is irrelevant, and we may not say what a person is, regardless of biology, until they make a decision themselves on the matter, how can we possibly know, in the first place, who is a person? As opposed, say, to a gorilla or a watermelon? In this case, too, in just the same way, the difference is biological.

Some people have apparently already applied the logic to insist they are really cats or ponies. In Delaware, I read, everyone is now free to choose their own race. Which seems only right: race is far less biologically conditioned than sex.

So much for any justification for “affirmative action” programs.

But if you think that is still okay, you still have not thought it through. Look again at that comic strip. If we have no right to assume that someone is a male or female until they tell us so, even if they are evidently not capable of making that decision for themselves, then we have no right to assume that someone is a person and not a cat until they say so; and then we equally have no right to assume that someone is a cat and not a person until they say so. Until and unless each individual apparent cat, watermelon or wildebeest announces their decision, we can make no assumptions.

It follows that anyone who eats a watermelon should be tried for murder. Or anything else, for that matter. And why even recognize the biological significance of organic chemicals? Anyone who burns gasoline in their car, for example, or melts metal in a mold, or perhaps even moves a stone from here to there, is also a murderer.

The collapse of civilization would be the least of our worries. Within a month or two, all human life ends on earth.

Sure, you can get around this. You could remove all punishments for murder, and make it okay to kill and eat human beings as well. I’m not sure that would be much better.

I think this demonstrates, and not for the first time, that our current professional class, our “elites,” our modern Pharisees, are on the cusp of collapse. They have become too obviously flat-out insane. This present trajectory is not sustainable. It is as though they are crying out for an intervention from someone, somewhere.

Newspeak to English Dictionary

Confucius taught that the first task in creating good government is “the rectification of terms”—making sure words mean what they are supposed to mean. I think his point was the same point George Orwell made in his essay “Politics and the English Language” as well as in 1984: the meaning of words can be subverted for political ends.

They say in China that the first to get thrown in prison by any oppressive government are the poets and writers. They are a danger, because they understand language too well. But when it comes to ordinary people, it is easy enough, by manupulating language, to make the bad appear to be the good, to, as Plato said of the Sophists, make the weaker argument appear the stronger, and so get away with just about anything.

To change the meaning of a word, to deliberately use it where it does not fit, is to tell a lie. And in a sense, it is the lie that makes all other evil possible; for if we call a sin what it is, our conscience begins to hold us back. This is why the devil is called “the father of lies.”

To manipulate the meaning of common words is therefore, in and of itself, deeply evil; the proper use of language is, as Confucius said, a moral issue.
So we need someone to step forward and make the ways streight for the Lord. We need a systematic “Newspeak to English dictionary” to point out where a term has been subverted. I offer a few terms that should be included:

Liberal – this is supposed to mean a bedrock belief in individual liberties; a true liberal believes in free trade, small government, the right to work, and loose immigration policies. It has been perverted since the 1950s and the communist scare into a euphemism for Marxism, socialism, or social democracy. If you want to sell socialism, okay; but don't pretend it is liberalism. That would be gross fraud if a corporation did it: selling Pepsi, say, under a fake “Coca-Cola” label.

Social justice – the term was coined by a Jesuit scholar in the nineteenth century to refer to a belief in basic human dignity, the social contract, and the doctrine of human rights. It had nothing to do with the redistribution of wealth, but has been hijacked by Marxists, socialists, and social democrats to imply this. Whether it is justice to take money from Peter and give it to Paul, simply because Peter has more money than Paul, or because Paul is of a different race, is not self-evident.

Anti-racism – now means what the old term “racism” already covered: systematic discrimination for and against specific groups on the basis of their supposed ethnicity. Yet the prefix “anti-” is supposed to mean “against,” not “more, more; faster, faster!”

Affirmative action – in itself, the term is perfectly meaningless, a bit of nonsense worthy of Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland. But its vagueness usefully obscures something the proper name of which is less appealing: discrimination on the basis of sex, race, etc.

Gender – properly refers to the classification of nouns into more or less arbitrary groups grammatically. It is now used to replace the term “sex” in order to force into the very language the obvious lie that the sexual differences between man and women are arbitrary human inventions, not inborn.

Homophobia – a phobia is an irrational fear; this term tries to subvert debate with the nasty ad hominem that anyone who objects to homosexuality is insane. It is also illiterate. “Homo” does not mean “homosexuality.” “Homophobia” would make more sense as an irrational fear of living in Kansas.

Gay – “homosexual” was never a pejorative; it was a technical term. Seeking to replace it with another term with a universally favourable meaning is plainly dishonest, whatever you think of the morality of homosexual sex.

Progressive—properly means someone who believes in overall human progress, or at least human material progress, as in the old “Whig view of history.” It is now commonly used for the exact opposite: for those who believe the world is hurriedly heading for hell in a handcart, and those who oppose all material progress as “unsustainable.”

Invest—deceitful when used for government spending. A notable innovation by Bill Clinton. The term is fair if and only if there is a reasonable expectation that a given government expenditure will lead directly to higher government revenue in future. One might oppose government spending, but it is hard to oppose government “investment.”

Peace – everyone wants peace, which makes it dishonest to co-opt the term for a specific theory on how best to achieve it. Which is just what has been done, when people on the left refer to things like “Peace Studies.” These rarely speak favourably about collective security and the need for a strong military as a deterrent.

Abuse—a term far too useful for the Pharisees to leave alone; it can be trotted out to apply to anyone doing anything the speaker disagrees with. It started with “drug abuse,” already a nonsense term; went on to “wife abuse,” “child abuse,” “emotional abuse.” I have even heard of “financial abuse.” Call anything “abuse,” and you get to pass a law forcing people to conform. Call someone an “abuser,” and you have stripped them of all humanity.

Rape – has a good strong connotation, and so it is useful to exploit—to the point at which “all heterosexual sex is rape.” The term should be restricted to coitus achieved by physical force, and nothing else.

Working class – contemporary Marxists have twisted this concept and term to the point at which the “working class” is the professional, managerial class. Writers and artists even become “cultural workers.” Marx’s working class of manual labourers? They’re not working class; they're “rednecks,” or at best are designated “middle class.” By this sleight of hand, teachers, professors, and civil servants become a victim group oppressed by the manual labourers who must pay their salaries whether they like it or not.

Choice—As in “pro-choice,” and “a woman’s right to choose.” There is no such thing as a “right to choose,” to begin with. And here the term is deliberately vague to disguise the true referent: abortion. “Choice” means “abortion”: it is that simple. “A woman’s right to choose” = “A woman’s right to abort.”

Evolution—evolution is, properly, the belief that species evolve into different species over time. This is quite distinct from “Darwinism” or “Darwinian evolution”; it is false to claim that, if you reject Darwin, you reject evolution. Darwin's contribution was the idea that evolution is due to natural selection of random mutations in an ongoing struggle for survival.

Sexual predator – a predator is an animal that kills what it eats—a carnivore. There is simply no relationship to someone who seeks sex with children. But using the term, again, strips the person of all humanity and justifies any punishment.

All for now—a child has jumped in my lap. I could go on.