Parts of Speech

"We need to be able to use ideological words in a widely-recognized sense, even if . . .

". . . even if we also think there's legitimate contestation-- "I'm the real conservative because I want to conserve the environment," "I'm the real socialist because I believe in cooperation in society, not the state," "I'm the real egalitarian because I believe in equality of opportunity," "I'm the real progressive because I think the most important value is the material and technological progress capitalism makes possible," etc etc." -- Jacob T. Levy

Haidt Explains Why "Hate Speech" Now Means "Speech People Hate".

The definition of a "hate" group has been in constant flux, no, expansion, for so long now that it's easy to forget that it was stable for generations. I always thought that the standard use of it for Nazis and other organized racists was unimaginative, and risked underestimating how dangerous they actually were, but at least everyone knew what it meant. American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell used it to describe his group's product as least as far back as the early 1960s, when he founded Hatenanny Records. In a 1991 college newspaper column titled "Bad Words to be Purged from the Language," I wrote,

"Hate speech, groups etc. As angry as they make us, Doug H. [prominent campus racial slurster] and friends are still expressing opinions, not hate. They probably have feelings of superiority, entitlement, self-pity, fear, envy, and contempt, but I doubt that many racists are possessed by hate or anything else unknown to the rest of us. The ones I know espouse sociological theories that were dominant until the 1940s, and think their own experiences empirically support them. They don't even dislike minorities, as long as they stay in their familiar and inferior "place."

With more space or forethought, I would have added that they often aren't expressing anything, they're just looking for words that will hurt, humiliate and enrage whoever they're using them against, or they're just trying to fit in with others, or show them that they can think of something powerful to say, and so on.

But this was still a "sidelines" kind of comment -- it wasn't about anything that was threatening me, or people I respectfully disagreed with, or any core values. It was just at that stage where you sense something "off" about someone who says it it, something that bespeaks some unknown, idiosyncratic, quirk in how they process the world, that might suddenly turn vicious under pressure if you had to trust or rely on them.

But now, Lord, ain't we got fun! At some point in the gay marriage movement, which itself had been outside the Overton Window of acceptable opinion until the early 90s, someone decided to label its opponents as "hate" advocates. Never mind that those opponents included Senators Clinton and Obama, at least officially. And now that the monopoly on "hate" victim status is broken open, everybody wants a piece of it.

In 2012, Randall Parker broke this ongoing process down in "On Labeling Opponents Of Multiculturalism As Hateful", citing and building on Jonathan Haidt's study showing why "The right gets the left better than the left gets the right":

That the Obama Administration would label a video that lampoons a religion as hate demonstrates why I so distrust Barack Obama. The primary use of the term "hate" is to label someone as outside of civilized discourse and deserving of pariah status. But lets get to root causes. Why use the term "hate" for this purpose? The role of hate looms so large in the elite liberal mind in large part because liberals lack the ability to understand non-liberal minds. The left has elevated their own psychological blindness and misunderstanding into a campaign of marginalization where they label their opponents as hate groups. This blindness of liberal minds to half the moral considerations used by conservative minds creates a condition very much like the Dunning-Kruger Effect where someone lacks the ability to detect the extent of their own misunderstanding, ignorance, and incompetence. ... This is the part that scares me. Will multi-culturalism and the desire to placate ethnicities at home and abroad cause an even larger reduction in freedom of speech than it already has? Speech codes in workplaces are already left-liberal. I'm expecting them to become more strictly enforced and for that enforcement to extend beyond the workplace.

The reason for this, as revealed in Haidt's study and vividly described by John Faithful Hamer:

Jonathan Haidt has found that when you give conservatives a questionnaire and ask them to answer it like a liberal, they’re able to do so with ease. When you ask them to answer like a libertarian, they’re able to do that too. Libertarians aren’t nearly as adept as conservatives, but they’re still fairly good at imagining how a conservative or a liberal might answer the questionnaire. Alas, the real outliers are the liberals.

In numerous studies, with respectable sample sizes, Haidt has demonstrated that liberals simply don’t have a clue. When you ask them to answer the questionnaire like a conservative, they answer it like a fascist. When you ask them to answer it like a libertarian, they answer it like a sociopath. The liberal conception of what makes the average conservative or libertarian tick is, Haidt concludes, way off.

Are liberals less imaginative than conservatives and libertarians? I highly doubt it. The virtues and vices are, it seems, to be found everywhere to varying degrees. Why, then, do liberals do so terribly on this “ideological Turing test”? And why do conservatives do so well? Haidt maintains that conservatives do well because they base their moral thinking on all six of the moral foundations (Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity, Liberty, Care & Fairness). Liberals do poorly because they base their moral thinking on only two of them (Care & Fairness).

Haidt’s explanation is fascinating. But it’s got way too many moving parts and a fatal flaw: namely, it implicitly presumes that liberals are somehow spectacularly deficient in imagination. I find it hard to believe that any sizable group of human beings could be spectacularly deficient in any virtue (or vice). That’s why I’ve come up with a simpler explanation for Haidt’s robust findings: liberals suck at this test because shutting down certain parts of your imagination has become central to what it means to be liberal.

Liberals haven’t just demonized their political opponents, they’ve demonized the very act of trying to think like their political opponents. Trying to sympathize with, say, a Trump supporter, has come to constitute a kind of thought-crime for many liberals (and almost all progressives). So it’s not that liberals have less imagination than conservatives or libertarians; it’s that they’ve set up mental firewalls that actively prevent them from even going there. Just as Odysseus’s men stopped up their ears with wax so they wouldn’t be tempted by the seductive song of the Sirens, many liberals have, it seems, set up taboo boundaries which more or less ensure that they’ll never have to empathize with a conservative or a libertarian. This is decidedly unwise, as it often leads to group polarization.

...

Just as the violent suppression of the labor movement pushed a lot of good people into the communist camp in the twentieth century, I fear that the outrageous attacks on nonconformists like Jordan Peterson may radicalize a lot of middle-of-the-road moderates in the twenty-first century. As Malcolm Gladwell makes clear in David and Goliath (2014), when you crack down on terrorism by demonizing an entire community, you invariably end up strengthening support for the terrorists; and when you crack down on the civil rights movement in a draconian fashion, you invariably end up strengthening support for the civil rights movement. What’s happening on the left at the moment is striking similar. Demonize everyone who seems to disagree with you and you’ll invariably end up strengthening support for those who actually disagree with you.

Telling people off on Twitter and preaching to the choir on Facebook can be fun. But it’s a dangerous kind of fun. Because you get intellectually lazy. Because you start speaking in a specialized jargon that no one outside of your safe space can understand. Because you develop a contempt for everyone outside of your élite group of cool kids that frequently leads you to dehumanize those who disagree with you. Live in your little bubble long enough, and you’ll become downright delusional, like the emperor in that Hans Christian Andersen tale.

-- John Faithful Hamer, "In Praise of Listening", also published in Hamer, Social Media Land, 2020

More:

• "Why Won’t They Listen?" by William Saletan, NY Times, March 23, 2012
• "Hateful speech on hate groups" by Dana Milbank, Washington Post, August 16, 2012

“Translate” Shakespeare? Yes! Extremely carefully.

Modern English is a big language, sprawling over roughly 500 years of literature, and many different structures, dialects and styles, including some that brought back even older forms, the gothic thees and thous, the license poetic to rearrange where go the nouns, verbs and adjectives, the words resurrected or repurposed because they sounded more medieval and Germanic; it welcomes and absorbs words from every language, every trade, every sport;  it very well contradicts itself; it contains multitudes.  

And we need to keep that big language alive and predominant, to have people of average education able to converse with Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Milton, Pope, Dr. Johnson, Jefferson, Gibbon, Austen, Byron, the artificially archaic language of Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, the Hebraic rhythms and devices of Whitman’s free verse. It isn’t hard; it comes naturally so long as students still read them and worship still includes the classic wording. But if that stops, we’ll lose access to those incomparable classics: they’ll first start to sound difficult, and then like a foreign language.

But the new effort to “translate” 39 Shakespeare plays is being done for all the right reasons; preserving the old whenever it has value, but finding replacements when it’s so decrepit that it serves no purpose but confuses and deadens the lines. And finding a way for the replacements to do the most important things that Shakespeare’s language did originally. In the hope that an audience that isn’t straining so hard to follow the language will react more immediately and fully to the words, the acting and the action, more like the original audiences did. So far, it seems to be succeeding better than anyone hoped. As productions begin, sometimes the audiences and actors haven't been able to tell that anything is new, or have mistaken Shakespeare's words for contemporary updates.

We need to keep using historic words, historic literature, historic places and historic items as long as possible; but they best connect us to history when we actually use them, and interact with them, instead of putting them in glass cases and treating them  as curiosities, trivia, and markers of leisured elitism.

How Play on! came to be: The backstory of Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s translation project

 

#Munchausen By Proxy needs a new name, just as vivid, but as serious and ghastly as it is; focused on the abuse, not the "disease".

You may have read about Christopher, a Dallas-area 8-year-old who has been, without exaggeration, sadistically tortured his whole life, completely robbed of a normal life, in an extreme case of "Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy." 

Christopher’s mother treated him as if he was deathly ill from his birth until she was arrested last week: feeding tubes, oxygen tubes, heart tubes, hospice, do-not-resuscitate orders, wheelchairs, 13 surgeries, hundreds of hospital visits. She tried to subject him to a lung transplant. But actually, he was always completely healthy, except for life-threatening blood infections from the tubes. His father took her to family court to stop it, but the court responded by cutting off the father's visitation for the past five years.

Munchausen is a dashing and lighthearted name for a horrible, sadistic form of lifelong child abuse; they really should give it a name as serious and awful as it is. It has many vague and forgettable official names, none of which are remotely as ghastly as they ought to be.

The actual and fictional Baron von Munchausen  was a romantic, satirical figure who told unbelieveable but enthralling tales of adventure and derring-do. Regular Munchausen Syndrome is pathetic, it annoys and exploits others but it generally screws up the life of the person with the Syndrome far more than it does other people's. Naming it after a silly character in old movies is the least that the rest of us  can do to add a little bit of humor and culture, to slightly leaven the misery and aggravation it imposes on us.  It also makes it identifiable and memorable, which greatly increases lay people's (and doctors') likelihood of recognizing it.

But Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy is nothing to joke about. There's nothing cute about it. And the real victims of it are not those who have it, but their innocent children. We need to find a name that's recognizable, memorable, vivid and visceral, but serious.

Finally, the other big problem with this "Syndrome" is that it's a name for whatever mental disorder the perpetrator may be suffering, but the pattern of behavior, the abuse that the children suffer and can even die from, is even more socially real and important than whatever in the perpetrator's heads may be making them do it. It's as if we had a term for "Feline Proximity Induced Restless Leg Syndrome" but no word for "Cat-Kicking." "Itchy Trigger Finger Syndrome" but no word for "Mass Shooting". Kleptomania but not Theft.

And when faced with people who chronically make up diseases, is diagnosing them with a disease really the best way to deal with them?

I have no opinion on whether or how the psychologists should classify this as an official mental disorder, but let's start talking first about the abuse of the children, and only secondarily about the abusers' psychological "Syndrome."

As Confucius said, "First, the rectification of names."

The problem with misused fancypants words is NOT that they're Pedantically Incorrect, it's that they're pseudo-pedantic

Here's my reply to Chris Brecheen's '10 Words Writers Need to Learn to Use "Correctly"':

The problem with most of these is not that they're Pedantically Incorrect: It's that when used incorrectly, they're twee, faux-highbrow words that most people don't really understand, in situations where normal straightforward words would work much better. That's Bemused & Nonplussed, and to a lesser extent Disinterested, Reticent and Penultimate (the last three when used right are non-twee and just fine, and each of the three is the best single word to convey its exact meaning).

Decimate's figurative meaning is totally legit, and needed, and the original meaning is interesting history, but not essential.

Conversely, Redundant's standard meaning is well-known and important, and it would be a shame to lose the ability to conceive and convey it. But the people whom you think are misusing it to simply mean "useless" may have some connection to its standard meaning in mind when they do so.

Literally is overused but it does have a legit comic/figurative sense. Which may be Ironic, but probably in the wrong sense of the word.

With Plethora, I find it hard to see your distinction between the two senses (a wild overabundance versus a plain old abundance), or at least where to draw the line between them, and it's often used with a sense of comic exaggeration.