A Plea for Linguistic Honesty
This is going to be a slightly derivative post, (specifically, it’s inspired by this fine article from Johann Hari in the Indy a few months back). Essentially, I’m calling for a bit more rigour when we talk about political and ethical ideas. There are certain words which we use to endorse or dismiss ideas when said words are actually completely neutral descriptions, and it’s frankly getting annoying. For example:
‘Old-fashioned’/‘modern’. Whenever there’s a move to privatise some public utility or other (*coughROYALMAILcough*), the supporters of the move invariably equate privatisation with modernisation, then use that to dismiss those who oppose it as old-fashioned. It’s disingenuous, vacuous and intellectually dishonest. A political idea’s similarity to or difference from one that was popular in the past is irrespective of its merits, and it’s not like free-market classical liberalism is any newer or shinier than socialism anyway.
‘Progressive’/‘reactionary’. Two totally empty words. A progressive favours forward-looking reforms (a pretty insubstantial notion in itself, but presumably with some vague overtone of novelty), while a reactionary wants things to go back to how they were at some unspecified point in the past. Neither is necessarily rightwing or leftwing, or intrinsically better or worse than the other. It’s pretty reactionary to want a return to the pre-Thatcher postwar consensus on the Welfare State and the place of trade unions, but that doesn’t make it a bad idea. I realise you could say exactly the same thing about the use of ‘conservative’ – a desire to maintain some aspect of the status quo isn’t inherently left- or right-wing either – but I realise that battle is probably lost at this point. If I said I had conservative views about the BBC’s licence fee, people probably wouldn’t take that to mean I wanted to maintain it.
‘Extremist’. An extremist idea is one that differs radically from mainstream opinion on the subject. Nothing more, nothing less. It might be right and it might be wrong, but the question of its rightness is completely independent of the question of how extreme it is. The BNP’s policies aren’t wrong because they’re extreme, they’re wrong because they’re discriminatory. Martin Luther King could easily be considered an extremist, in the context of the time and place he inhabited (‘you want to end all segregation?’). I’m actually indebted to The Third Estate’s very own Jacob for this point, as it’s one he made in an article he wrote some years ago for a now-defunct university politics magazine, which even he’s probably forgotten about writing.
If an idea’s good or bad, say so, and justify your assertion with reference to the idea’s merits. Using words like the above as a way of showing whether or not you approve of an idea is nothing but a lazy substitute for actual thought. I’m sure there are more I haven’t thought of, so please feel free to point out any you come up with.
Reader Comments
Martin Luther King, in fact, did respond to J Edgar Hoover’s description of him as an “extremist” by accepting the label, justifying this by asking “Wasn’t Jesus Christ an extremist in love?”
Everyone’s an extremist from one point of view or another, including extreme supporters of the status quo.
The definition-of-conservative battle isn’t one that should be fought anyway. Language has moved on beyond the definition you gave, and it’d be pretty damn prescriptivist to argue for an attempt to drag it back to where one wants it.
Oop, but you seem to be revealing somewhat prescriptivist leanings with your ‘nothing more, nothing less’ definition of Extremist anyway. You’re giving the term as you would define it rather than how it is generally understood, which flies in the face of how languages work. As long as they’re not dead.
I don’t think it’s as simple as that. Meaning is about shared understanding (more or less, without getting all late-Wittgensteinian about it). But it’s not just about that. As speakers of a common language, we want to communicate with each other as effectively as possible. If a word originally meant one thing, and there was no synonym to concisely express the same thing (for example my ‘prescriptivist’ definition of extremist, which tallies closely with the meaning of other non-political variants of the same word, such as extreme), and then the meaning of that word changed, then I would argue that makes our language poorer. Since, as you rightly point out, language is dynamic, then it makes as much sense for me to be prescriptive about how I’d like our language to be as for anyone else.
When a language truly needs a word, one will come to fill the gap. One could argue that ‘radical’ is growing to encompass the definition you described above.
But regardless, I think history has proven that attempts or intent to force direction upon a language is ultimately fruitless. Even Shi Huang Di’s forced unification of the Chinese script couldn’t stop the whole-sale division between the dialects and languages of the area from developing and spreading even further apart. Griping from anyone less than those with such power brings the phrase ‘farting in the wind’ to mind.
Language is dynamic, sure, and part of that process is holding onto or pushing meanings that you prefer, but it’s not sloppiness to recognise that words like ‘extremist’ and ‘progressive’ have acquired historical meanings and associations that make a perfectly valid and meaningful political conversation possible using them. The quest to ‘communicate with each other as effectively as possible’ is always going to come second to the dynamism of language, struggles over meaning and the loose coalitions of thought and argument that develop in the socio-political field.
It might well be worth asking people to clarify their thought on what they believe ‘progressive’ politics to entail, for example, but in most of the contexts you’ll find it used, I would suggest that it’s not true that all they’re saying is they believe in reform of some description rather than sticking to the status quo. There’s more to it than that, and I find it hard to see how it’s linguistic dishonesty to acknowledge and use the wider levels of meaning.
But what do I know, it’s not really my field
Just to be clear I don’t just think this is a problem because the (mis)use of language offends my aesthetic sensibilities. Because of the ambiguity of the meaning of extremist, you could easily (and accurately) describe a revolutionary socialist as an extremist, and in doing so implicitly condemn their views by equating them with those of the BNP. I’m not a revolutionary, but I think marginalising ideas just because they go against received opinion is generally a bad thing. I’m far more relaxed about marginalising the ideas of the BNP, because they’re both strongly opposed to received opinion and demonstrably harmful (for example, they’re very homophobic, and a culture where homophobic ideas are tolerated is much more likely to be one where homophobic violence is also tolerated, which is why homophobic violence in schools is still so bad compared to most other environments).
As for ‘farting in the wind’, um…we’re a blog read by a few hundred people a day, and as such our impact thus far on the political landscape of the UK has been minimal. I’m not sure what makes this post uniquely ineffectual compared to everything else on the site.
You’re putting your localised situation against my general statement. There are political blogs that do arguably have an impact – or at least, there are people who (when they speak on political matters) are heard and make an impact in the field. The activity is not without merit.
However, I don’t think that anyone short of a fascist ruler willing to do something about it will make any difference spouting prescriptivism, making it more or less entirely without merit. It’s complaining that the sun sets too late, or that the tides don’t go out when you wish they would.
But even more than that, it comes across badly – prescriptivism is saying that the populace is wrong in the way they use language and that they should listen to you, because you know better than all of them. Whether this is true or not, it’s a mighty bold thing to imply.
In the area of linguistics, anyway. That’s pretty much what everyone implies in politics every day of the weak.
Well, I’m not sure why me claiming that most people are wrong in the way they use language would be intrinsically worse than me claiming that they’re wrong about some area of politics, but in any case that’s not really what I was doing – the post was mainly a response to other blogs, newspaper comment articles and politicians’ speeches, rather than to how ‘the populace’ use language.
Whether it’ll be effective…meh. I don’t really see the relevance of your point that some people’s political opinions have clout. ‘Some people who opine on political matters have enough influence to effect positive change’ does not entail ‘opining on political matters when you have minimal influence is a worthwhile activity’. I certainly disagree that being prescriptive about language is fruitless. The campaign for ‘political correctness’ is a pretty clear example of prescriptivism about language, and it had a pretty considerable impact – I can’t remember the last time I heard a black person referred to as a ‘nigger’, for example.