Tuesday 2 January 2024
Weak Words
Why do people in responsible positions say things which are plainly misleading, biased or untrue? Why is this not at all uncommon? Suppose we take just one aspect of it - the language of public discourse which has become progressively shrill yet weaker in it the way it fails to map the real world. Language which is supposedly progressive but no longer pragmatic.
In the not so distant past, weakness and ambiguity in social discourse were opposed by educational rigour applied to meaning, grammar and worthwhile subjects for discussion. Today this pragmatic robustness within public debate has been weakened by political fashions.
From some mysterious point, perhaps towards the end of the nineteenth century, robust cultural conventions came to seem too oppressive and discriminatory to be quite the thing in fashionably progressive society. Holes appeared in the language of right and wrong, good and evil, upright and corrupt. The value of pragmatic discrimination quietly slipped away into what was subsequently presented as a grim and prejudiced past. ‘Dickensian’ became a pejorative adjective.
The slowly meandering result is cultural drift towards indulgently weak public discourse. Under the relentless nudge of fashions and ideologies, names are changed, meanings shift, pragmatic moral boundaries weaken, culture softens to a level of incoherence no sane person would have planned.
The softening is powerfully seductive and correction not a trivial matter. The language of pragmatic discrimination has weakened, faded into a history which is no longer understood by those whose job it is to understand. Priggish denunciation of the past undermines any possibility of learning from it. There has been a fundamental cultural erosion which is probably well beyond remedy because we don’t have enough people who still speak the required remedial language.
A stronger, more pragmatic and less political culture would have to be built on the culture we have now. It would have to be built using language more powerfully rational than the language now settled within public discourse.
It is beyond remedy.
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6 comments:
But, as per George Orwell, you are currently denied the words that underlie pragmatic discrimination (wrong speak).
Perhaps, just perhaps, there are signs that the progressive ideas that everyone is born a 'blank slate' and deserves a hand up (at the expense of the well off) are crashing into reality. Not everyone is born equal. Not everyone can, or want to, seize an opportunity.
So while I am in favour of not discriminating against people on the basis of the characteristics of 'the group they belong to' I am quite happy for personal merit to be a distinguishing factor when offering a job, etc. I am against the idea of reparations - it's just a political idea of taking money from people who are not guilty and giving it to people who are not victims.
You could even say that the current aversion to pragmatic discrimination is yet another instance of the collectivism versus individualism debate. I take heart from history that the debate will swing back into a more balanced view.
DJ - yes there are signs of progressive nonsense crashing into reality. It was/is bound to happen eventually because reality must win in the end, but it can take a very long time and the damage can be colossal. A suboptimal existence does seem to the norm for most people, so we'll always be battling with the swings of the pendulum.
I saw this on UnHerd this morning. It's from Gurwinder Bhogal, and I think it goes quite a way to providing an answer:
"The Opinion Pageant.
The rise of social media as the primary mode of interaction has caused us to overvalue opinions as a gauge of character. We are now defined more by what we say than what we actually do, and words, unlike deeds, are easy to counterfeit."
I love that phrase: "Opinion pageant".
Sam - yes, "Opinion pageant" is worth remembering. Worth repeating too, because it may catch on and remind people to see opinions as opinions first and whatever else second.
A lot of our present ills can be blamed on the educational reformers of the 1960s. Their machinations have left a disfunctional education system and a broken society.
Tammly - I agree, much of what I hear about our grandkids' education is certainly discouraging. Looking in from the outside, bureaucracy and an inability to deal effectively with disruption seem to be major problems. The quality of teaching from teacher to teacher also seems to be much more patchy than I remember.
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