[lit-ideas] Re: Do You Have a Moral Urgency?
- From: "Judith Evans" <judithevans1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2006 23:57:38 +0100
> 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."
Of course I think the first 2 examples are silly and I've gone in
to
bat against the second -- within groups of disabled people
and on feminist lists. The third, well, I'd put the third
differently
if I happened to need to make the point (i.e. I'd make the same
point but less bluntly, unless there was no alternative); I hope
I'd also bear in mind as I made it what I trust Wallace bears in
mind,
that there are white people who need to learn "White English" or
flunk, too.
To my main point.
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.
Clearly calling someone "economically disadvantaged" rather than
"poor" fits this analysis. Avoiding derogatory terms for black
and
Jewish people -- and Arabs -- may do too, in that of course
racism,
anti-semitism, and ethnic discrimination don't disappear when
offensive terms cease to be used. But I doubt you'd argue
that we should use offensive racist terms for this reason, that
avoiding them is silly and Stalinist (etc.). And though Simon's
point about context is important too, I'd say the more
offensive a term, the rarer the context that can absolve its
user.
IOW that -- particularly in the US, as compared to the UK --
"PC" has become extensive and also seen as an agent of change (in
a
way that it has not, for many on the left here), is no reason for
us to ignore the language of racism and antisemitism and ethnic
hate (and sexism, but this has never been a
list particularly attuned to that).
I commend to you Jeremy Waldron's "Boutique Faith"
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n14/wald01_.html
----- Original Message -----
From: "Eric Yost" <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, August 17, 2006 7:33 PM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Do You Have a Moral Urgency?
> 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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