Language and Politics
I remember it like yesterday—the day I first encountered pronoun mania. It was in London, the late Seventies, at a student party in the philosophy department of University College London, where I used to teach. A female (girl, woman) student told me she had enjoyed our tutorial on the analysis of knowledge but had one question for me: why did I keep saying “he” when I discussed analyses of knowledge? Was I forgetting that women (girls) often know things too? This struck me as a bizarre criticism, but I addressed myself to it, making what I thought were rather obvious points. No, I wasn’t forgetting that, but merely availing myself of the conventional means of expressing generality in the English language. To my surprise I made little headway with this newly minted zealot, who had no doubt heard this “criticism” from a female professor, or possibly read it in a feminist tract. I had been a feminist since the Sixties and needed no conversion, but this business with pronouns struck me as extreme, unhelpful, and perverse. Little did I know it would become feminist orthodoxy across the globe, taken as self-evidently correct.[1] I never imagined it would become a political touchstone, an article of faith and righteousness, a model for other politically motivated linguistic measures. I could not have foreseen that this seemingly mild piece of speech reform would become the seed of the ascendancy of right-wing politics—the reason left-leaning politicians fail to be elected, the reason the Democratic party in America lost the support of non-college-educated voters. Allow me to explain.
I will be blunt: the thinking behind the student’s question stems from a misguided and wacky theory of the relation between thought and language. We are familiar with this theory under the name “the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis”, but it is actually a general theory to the effect that language shapes (determines, constitutes) thought (knowledge, emotion, intention). Your mind is held to be a product of the language you speak; it has no other form. Conceptual schemes are composed of words. And words limit what your mind can grasp, biasing it, distorting it. Thus, when you say “he” to express generality you are tacitly assuming that everyone you are talking about is male. When I formulated a Gettier case using “he” I was actually thinking or assuming that all knowers are male. I was excluding female knowers from my thinking. The pronoun “he” is a masculine pronoun, so my meaning was masculine, so I must be thinking that knowers are always male, or at least making that assumption. If I retort that I was not thinking that and did not mean that, I will be sternly reminded that I am violating the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or some variant of it. But this is a terrible theory of the relation between conventional linguistic meaning and speaker meaning—between what words mean in themselves and what speakers mean in using them to perform speech acts. The word “he” has a masculine meaning, but when I used that word, I was expressing my speaker meaning, which was not marked masculine—I meant “he or she”, in effect. More generally, it is not the case that spoken language shapes or determines thought, even what is meant by speakers when they speak. I won’t go into the reasons for saying this; my point is that the objection raised by the student depends on a contestable theory of the relation between thought and language. I would argue that this false theory reflects behaviorist assumptions that deny the reality of the inner: language is what is outer and observable, so it must constitute whatever is real in our mental talk. This theory in turn happens to suit a capitalist ideology that views the human being as essentially a machine with no inner life, a useful tool in the production process—so that no ethical implications arise for the exploitation of workers in factories and the like. But that is another question; again, my point is that the theory has complex relations to economic and political positions. It is not a self-evident truth. In fact, it is pretty wild and implausible when impartially considered. It is characteristic of a range of far-out theories developed and popularized by social scientists (sic) working in universities and passed on to the general population. It is a philosophical theory, in the broad sense—speculative, controversial, almost certainly false. Think Freud and Skinner, Armstrong and Ryle. All the contortions engaged in by the grammar police involving “he” and “she” ultimately rely on a dubious theory invented by academics. This theory floats around universities and infects the minds of the educationally impressionable, eventually transmogrifying into politics and policy. But—and this is the practical political point—it is not absorbed by people who didn’t go to college and are never exposed to the theories prevalent there (and which change with the seasons). These theories are the province of the semi-educated—those with college degrees but not advanced degrees, roughly. Freud and Skinner were eventually demolished, but not before entering the minds of people unable to critically evaluate them for themselves. Similarly for the theories behind the pronoun mania that has swept campuses, boardrooms, and public services. Theoretically speaking, the pronouns of natural language are devices proper to language as a formal system; they are not determinative of the very structure of human thought. There is thus no need to reform ordinary grammar in order to protect thought from malign influences; we just need to recognize the distinction between linguistic meaning and speaker meaning. Words are our tools; we are not their puppets. We don’t need to police language in order to make our minds politically perfect. The concept of an “ideal language” is misguided and unnecessary. Sociologically, people who have never been exposed to these false theories are not influenced by them; and they regard them, correctly, as strange and unconvincing. They will therefore be disinclined to vote for politicians who espouse them. They will think, in short, that they are bullshit, and they are not wrong to think that. If a political party becomes strongly associated with such theories, or their practical applications, it will lose support among the non-college-educated population. The pronoun mania will drive them away from a party that indulges in it. And this is likely to carry over to good theories too, because they will be tarred with the same brush by the skeptical electorate. The party that opposes all that shaky theory-mongering will gain ascendancy—it will become the party of “common sense”. Does any of this sound familiar?
The linguistic theory of thought is not the only academic theory that has captured the minds of impressionable people, usually young people. But it is a particularly powerful example of the general phenomenon: pronoun reform has led many zealots to believe that they have here an undeniable victory against the old guard. This set the tone for further theoretical incursions into politics. The patriarchy had seeped into our native language and needed to be rooted out if political reforms were to be achieved (often laudable enough in their own right). An academic theory thus led to policy recommendations. Are there other examples that mimic the pronoun paradigm? They are not far to seek. Consider the push for “diversity”. Suppose you believe (as many do) that truth is relative; there is no such thing as “absolute” or “objective” truth. You have had this drummed into you by your professors, and anyway it sounds vaguely egalitarian to you. Then you will primed to accept that diversity is a good thing: if there is no such thing as a single objective truth, shouldn’t we encourage a plurality of viewpoints on “the truth”? Let’s gather the many truths that people accept: these will be best found by assembling a diverse group of people. Thus, “diversity hires”. The trouble with this line of reasoning is that the motivating theory is terrible: truth is not relative. Again, I’m not going to argue the matter here—I am making a political point. Those who accept the underlying theory will find it self-evident that diversity is a value to be promoted, while those who have never got the relativist memo will be perplexed by the urge towards diversity. The latter don’t think truth is relative, so there is no need to hire a diverse group of people to teach a bunch of relative truths. All this will seem like mumbo-jumbo to them—and I think they are right so to think. They will not be inclined to vote for a political party that advocates such mumbo of the jumbo. That party will become, in their minds, the party of the wacky, the nonsensical, the phony. College graduates may be more tolerant of such fantasies, given their educational background, but the rest of the electorate will not be taken in. Maybe there are counterintuitive theories that should be accepted (I am thinking of sound economic theories), but the tendency will be to suspect any political party that traffics in silly-sounding theories. The same is true of all the recent talk of “power imbalances”. Again, this comes from theoreticians in the weaker areas of the humanities (e.g., Foucault)—the idea that “power imbalances” imperil “agency”. There cannot be voluntary liaisons where there are asymmetries of power, it is held. This is utter rubbish, but it can be made to seem plausible by choosing certain kinds of example and keeping the language abstract and abstruse. Impressionable minds are easily manipulated by this kind of sophistry. But to those who have never been subjected to such “teaching” it will seem preposterous, pretentious, and plain stupid. How can people who mouth this kind of crap be trusted with running the economy? That is what people will think; and they will desert the party that promotes it as superior virtue. Nonsense does not win elections, especially the higher type of nonsense, the type found in universities. Not that everything taught in universities is nonsense, but some of it is—and it leaks into political policy and rhetoric. Plain language, plainly spoken, is what is needed to win elections.
What are the implications for democracy of these reflections? If the college-educated part of the electorate supports a particular party, that party is likely to champion intellectual ideas and theories originating in universities. These ideas will almost certainly include dubious theories, often absurd theories, which are then applied to practical issues. This will alienate the non-college-educated part of the electorate, leading them to fall into the hands of the more untheoretical and philistine populist party. Thus, depending on the proportions of educated and non-educated voters, the former kind of party will find itself unelectable. It will need to purge itself of these theories, at least as elements of the party platform. Do not defend abortion as justified by women’s’ “bodily autonomy” (“a woman has the right to control her own body”). Do not insist on strict pronoun rules or punish deviations from the approved norm. Do not speak of “safe spaces” or “power imbalances” or use any jargon invented by humanities professors. It’s asking for trouble. Keep ideological feminism out of it. Never talk of “defunding the police”. Don’t tell people how to pronounce unfamiliar words. Avoid obscure and unmemorable acronyms like “LGBTQ”. Don’t use phrases like “critical race theory” even if the denoted theory is perfectly sound. Above all, never import academic theories of dubious credentials into policy discussions. If in doubt, consult an expert in the field at issue, especially when there is academic controversy, which there nearly always is. The generalizing use of “he” should never have been stigmatized, looked down upon, viewed as a sign of moral illiteracy. This kind of attitude could destroy democracy.[2]
[1] Some years later I wrote an article on the analysis of knowledge for an American publication. I used “he” a good deal. When it came back to me the copy-editor had re-written the whole thing to fit the new pronoun orthodoxy, with many a cumbersome paraphrase and lumpy grammar—without my permission. That is how entrenched and taken-as-gospel it had become. I should have made a fuss then, but I let it go. Now I see that it wasn’t just harmless pedantry in a good cause; it was the root of the linguistic political correctness that threatens to undermine left-wing politics. Nowadays it’s hard for me to declare myself a lefty liberal.
[2] I write this because of all the handwringing occasioned by the recent election of Donald J. Trump. What caused the American electorate to desert the Democratic party? No doubt many things, but I am focusing on one thing that is not usually mentioned, viz. bad ideas born in the academy migrating into practical politics. This is a vice of the party of the college-educated, leaving others cold. The left has clearly succumbed to theories invented by academics, mostly bad theories: postmodernism, social constructionism, linguistic idealism, feminist ideology, relativism of all kinds, bad psychology, etc. In a word, it has become pseudointellectual.
