Language policing is the French Fries of political conversation
It's cheap, and lazy, and requires no intellectual effort.
In a 1961 book, the Liberal Mind, (now out of print) an Australian politics professor, Kenneth Minogue, described something he called ‘St George in retirement syndrome’. Here is a loose adaption of his parable: St George slays a dragon, and that's a good thing, because dragons are dangerous creatures, and they need to be slayed. Perhaps he slays a couple more, and that's a good thing too. Then he looks for another, but there aren't any more in the neighborhood. But someone has a horse. They have four legs, and a tail, and that kind of looks like a dragon. So, he kills that. Another neighbor has a Great Dane dog, so it might be a dragon in disguise, so he kills that. Soon, St George is running around the neighborhood killing cats, and everyone has to be on guard, making sure their cats are indoors whenever St George is around. His followers band together to fight dragons. They form ‘flying squads’ who descend on people’s houses to make sure nobody is expressing sympathy for dragons. They soon start expressing opinions on what the parents should put in their children’s school lunches, in case they have things that might attract dragons. They seem to have little subject-matter knowledge of dragons, but they express a lot of opinions anyway. It becomes hard to have a conversation in your own house without the flying squads interrupting all the time. Some people don’t want to be in their own houses.
Before long St George and the troops are using up everybody's time and energy as they attacks smaller and smaller creatures. Meanwhile, over in the next town, there are real dragons St George isn't paying attention to.
The Stanford University IT department recently released guidelines on what phrases staff should avoid in online documents, lest they trigger people (here). Some of their suggestions are obvious, like not referring to Native American women as Pocahontas. Good. But one should not say “to flog a dead horse” because this condones cruelty to animals. (I don’t know how, if the horse were already dead.) “Homeless people” sounds stigmatizing, so use “persons without housing.” I’ve also seen the suggestion that “homeless” should be replaced by “persons who are currently unhoused.” I’m sure this change in title will make a significant improvement to their lives. St George is chasing ever smaller animals.
Glasgow City Council has recently considered removing plaques and statues to one of its most famous residents, David Livingston, the explorer and author, because of problematic links to slavery. As an adult, Livingston campaigned vigorously against slavery, so what did the city council find troubling? In 1823, when he was ten-years old, he worked in a cotton mill, where the cotton was likely picked by slaves in the West Indies (see here). St George is charging at mice.
Increasingly across the western world, the left has been redefining itself and its purposes not on the basis of economic class, or on making material changes to people’s circumstances, but on the basis of identity. And how is someone’s position on identity issues judged? Increasingly not by what they do, but by the language that they use. Left wing parties have become supported by the university educated, and right-wing parties have captured what was once termed the working-class vote. In the US, the republicans now have more voters than the democrats among people without a college education, and the democrats have more college graduates. This is a reversal of the historical position. (The parties crossed paths in 2004, details here).
There’s an interesting quote, (here) by (James Button) “… this left-wing movement will focus on language. It may be the first in history to use words that are incomprehensible to people without degrees. That language has some very long words – like cis-gender, intersectionality, heteronormativity, [and] othering…”
This focus on telling other people how to speak reached the heights of weirdness in the US when someone (I can’t find out who) invented the term Latinx as a gender-neutral term for Latino people, and educated democrats began to push its use. The trouble is, most Latino people strongly dislike it, because it doesn’t sound Spanish (n and x don’t occur together in Spanish), Spanish is inherently gendered – nouns are either male of female - and over 95 percent of them won’t use it (here). Because one can’t search for the text of a podcast, I now can’t find who I heard refer to this word as a piece of “Anglo-linguistic imperialism”: Educated white, left-wing people telling Spanish speakers how to refer to themselves.
This point is not merely academic. Some of us tend to forget the low levels of literacy in much of the public. A survey of 1,000 women for the British cancer charity Eve Appeal found that about 40 percent of British women can’t locate the cervix on a diagram of the female reproductive tract (here). Similar figures apply for the other parts of the tract. Only a third could correctly label all six parts on the diagram. The average American adult reads at eight grade level (here). If we pre-occupy ourselves with language wars, many potential voters will not have a clue what we are talking about. I have seen social media debates on whether trans woman should be one or two words, or have hyphen or not, (e.g. here) with one American (a trans woman from Texas) saying that the single-word usage was a west-coast thing. And west-coasters should stop telling gulf-coasters how to speak Who is actually benefiting from this? Does the average undecided voter in a marginal electorate care?
The civil rights movement for people of color in the US focused primarily on actions that affected black people. In rough chronological order:
· access to diners (whites only restaurants),
· transport (Rosa Parkes sitting in the white section of the bus and refusing to move back to the ‘colored section’, which led to a consumer boycott of the bus company )
· discrimination in hiring and pay rates (the deGraffenburg v General Motors court cases over the fact that GM hired white women, in the office, and black men on the assembly line, but not black women, see here. Kimberle Crenshaw’s analysis of this court case gave rise to the term ‘intersectionality’),
· the non-provision of housing loans (‘redlining’, where banks drew red lines around districts on maps, and refused to give housing loans to anyone in those areas, which overwhelmingly affect people of color),
· and more recently, the killings of black people by police.
Campaigns by gay people in the US focused on actions that discriminated against gay people, e.g.:
· the repeal of the ban on gay people serving in in the US military in 1993, and it’s replacement by the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy which was repealed in 2011, see here,
· the right to marry,
· the refusal of service in shops (when a couple of Christian cake shop owners refused to make a cake for a gay wedding, which gave rise to the “gay wedding cake” court cases, see here),
Transphobia is increasingly defined not by what anyone has done, e.g. whether they’ve actually discriminated against a trans person in the provision of housing, or finance or commercial services but by the use of language. In 2022 a controversy within the Victorian state branch of the Greens in Australia erupted when a recently elected state convenor had her election overturned in response to a paper she had written four years earlier. The attacks on Linda Gale in 2022 were over a 2018 paper she criticized which was largely about language: whether someone should use the expression “Trans identifying” or say “Trans women don’t get periods” (the paper acknowledges that, literally, they don’t, but wants banned anyway) or “Trans women aren’t the same as cis women.,” (which the paper admitted is “technically” true, but should be prohibited anyway.) The paper Linda criticized was called “Trans Exclusionary Rhetoric,” not “Trans exclusionary behaviour.”
A lot of people under the age of 30 are unaware that this change has taken place, because it began when they were in primary school, so they think that left wing people attacking others over language debates is actually normal and useful.
How did the English-speaking left change from its outward focus on seeking social change to its increasingly inward concern with language policing?
I suggest there is an answer. Language policing is the French Fries of political conversations: the ingredients are cheap, you can learn to cook it up in fifteen minutes, the recipe is simple and requires no intellectual effort or ability. But it makes lots of people look good. Many social issues are complex, take time to master, and understanding the complexities of possible solutions takes real effort. Language policing does not.
It serves another purpose. As Jessa Crispin, an American feminist says (in “Why I am not a feminist, a feminist manifesto,” pp. 13-15) we keep people on the defensive by demanding that they use the correct language, but we keep changing what the correct language is. Since no language change occurs instantly across the whole society, there will always be someone who has not adopted the new vocab yet, and we can attack them.
The psychologist Jonathan Haidt makes an interesting comment here. Calling for more diversity in an organization increases the chances of what the French call a ‘faux pass’: a false step. A situation where someone uses an expression, or makes an assumption that someone else feels slighted by. It is, he says, bound to happen as more people from differing ethnic, or religious backgrounds, or different social classes, or differing senses of gender come together. If at the same time you engage in micro-aggression training, (or if people are teaching it to themselves without knowing it) then you set the stage for conflict, because nobody is going to cut anybody any slack.
I think this is another of those psychological issues that has made its way into the left: the search for ever smaller things to declare “problematic,” the intellectual ease of language policing, and the sense of power, self importance and self-righteousness that doing so gives people. This is not a good development. On the left, we need to get back to issues of substance, not contemplating our own navel, looking for a new place to stab ourselves.