[lit-ideas] Re: Do You Have a Moral Urgency?
- From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2006 14:33:31 -0400
Judy: it was an angry yell, provoked -- as I should have
explained -- by your "PCE" point and quote.
Oh, well, in that case, here's a larger section of Wallace's
essay. It shows his linguistic critique in the context of
his own concern for social justice.
__________________
I refer here to Politically Correct English (PCE), under
whose conventions failing students become "high-potential"
students and poor people "economically disadvantaged" and
people in wheelchairs "differently abled" and a sentence
like "White English and Black English are different and you
better learn White English if you don't want to flunk" is
not blunt but "insensitive." Although it's common to make
jokes about PCE (referring to ugly people as "aesthetically
challenged" and so on), be advised that Politically Correct
English's various pre- and proscriptions are taken very
seriously indeed by colleges and corporations and government
agencies, whose own institutional dialects now evolve under
the beady scrutiny of a whole new kind of Language Police.
From one perspective, the history of PCE evinces a kind of
Lenin-to-Stalinesque irony. That is, the same ideological
principles that informed the original Descriptivist
revolution — namely, the sixties-era rejections of
traditional authority and traditional inequality — have now
actually produced a far more inflexible Prescriptivism, one
unencumbered by tradition or complexity and backed by the
threat of real-world sanctions (termination, litigation) for
those who fail to conform. This is sort of funny in a dark
way, maybe, and most criticism of PCE seems to consist in
making fun of its trendiness or vapidity. This reviewer's
own opinion is that prescriptive PCE is not just silly but
confused and dangerous.
Usage is always political, of course, but it's complexly
political. With respect, for instance, to political change,
usage conventions can function in two ways: On the one hand
they can be a reflection of political change, and on the
other they can be an instrument of political change. These
two functions are different and have to be kept straight.
Confusing them — in particular, mistaking for political
efficacy what is really just a language's political
symbolism ... — enables the bizarre conviction that America
ceases to be elitist or unfair simply because Americans stop
using certain vocabulary that is historically associated
with elitism and unfairness. This is PCE's central fallacy —
that a society's mode of expression is productive of its
attitudes rather than a product of those attitudes — and of
course it's nothing but the obverse of the politically
conservative SNOOT'S delusion that social change can be
retarded by restricting change in standard usage. [40]
Forget Stalinization or Logic 101-level equivocations,
though. There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct
English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of
progressive reform but is in fact — in its Orwellian
substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social
equality itself — of vastly more help to conservatives and
the U.S. status quo than traditional SNOOT prescriptions
ever were. Were I, for instance, a political conservative
who opposed taxation as a means of redistributing national
wealth, I would be delighted to watch PCE progressives spend
their time and energy arguing over whether a poor person
should be described as "low-income" or "economically
disadvantaged" or "pre-prosperous" rather than constructing
effective public arguments for redistributive legislation or
higher marginal tax rates on corporations. (Not to mention
that strict codes of egalitarian euphemism serve to burke
the sorts of painful, unpretty, and sometimes offensive
discourse that in a pluralistic democracy leads to actual
political change rather than symbolic political change. In
other words, PCE functions as a form of censorship, and
censorship always serves the status quo.)
As a practical matter, I strongly doubt whether a guy who
has four small kids and makes $12,000 a year feels more
empowered or less ill-used by a society that carefully
refers to him as "economically disadvantaged" rather than
"poor." Were I he, in fact, I'd probably find the PCE term
insulting — not just because it's patronizing but because
it's hypocritical and self-serving. Like many forms of Vogue
Usage,[41] PCE functions primarily to signal and
congratulate certain virtues in the speaker — scrupulous
egalitarianism, concern for the dignity of all people,
sophistication about the political implications of language
— and so serves the selfish interests of the PC far more
than it serves any of the persons or groups renamed.
http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/DFW_present_tense.html
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