What We’ve Got Here is Failure to Communicate

Back in March I explored conflicting perceptions of the meaning of “woke” and “racism” as applied to the original Star Trek, describing social media as “a gold mine of jargon” that means different things to different people. Today I’d like to take a look at other terminology that obstructs political discussion.

Woke On that term, many think of the term as shorthand for “justice” and “diversity,” unaware that woke and non-woke perceptions of each have a little commonality and a great deal of difference. What matters to the non-woke is means, not ends. The “woke” view society in terms of conflict between aggressor classes vs. victim classes, akin to Marxism’s view of capitalists and workers. Wokeness perceives no win-win scenarios – one side has to win at the other’s expense. Its chief weapon is (no, I’m not gonna quote Cardinal Ximinez) discriminatory affirmative action. Allan Bakke must be shafted by an admissions board to give a minority a chance at college. Movies and TV must evolve to the extent of taking old stories and erasing the old heroes to replace with newer and dramatically different ones. Show business displays another application of wokeness: when studios fixate on “diversity” so much that they neglect to figure out whether a potential showrunner has genuine talent for developing stories and characters. Symbolism over substance, as Rush used to say.

Racism If the word “racism” were a currency I’d short it against the Euro. To recap the point made in the Star Trek post, racism historically refers to race-based prejudice, but Critical Race Theory appropriation of the term associates it with “prejudice plus power,” to quote academic Paula S. Rothenberg. In addition, opposition to welfare schemes, affirmative action discrimination, or any other policy that strains against the “don’t cut in line” ethic is often perceived as “racist” by the left.

Fascist The word is misapplied in two fashions: sometimes as a lazy reference to conservatism in general, other times (by both leftists and rightists) to conjure images of the sort of abuses real-life fascism shares with Communism. The latter contradicts the conventional wisdom that identifies fascism as right-wing and Communism as left-wing. There is scarcely anything fascism and Communism don’t have in common. One is nationalist collectivism and the other (on paper) economic class collectivism. Fascism nominally allows the existence of private business yet the state reserves the right to seize any business at will; property rights are a mere illusion. The Communists are honest about who owns what. They come right out and say all your means of production are belong to us. Here’s a question to ask those who believe fascism is a right-wing philosophy: what did Hitler have in common with William F. Buckley that he did not have in common with Stalin?

Capitalism Nowadays we see “capitalism” criticized more openly and frequently than we did a generation ago. The nominal anti-capitalists rarely if ever define terms; they appear to believe that “capitalism” is something that big business does and that small business does not. Or perhaps they view “capitalism” as the very existence of big business.

Gender The term “sex” originally referred to one’s status as biologically male or female. When it evolved into slang for sexual intercourse, to avoid confusion the word “gender” filled in for the original definition. At some point between Woodstock and the dot-com bubble, a philosophy emerged claiming that gender is a social construct unrelated to chromosomes. Nobody ever tells us why people are willing to believe this. I suspect that the belief descends in part from the blank slate theory of human nature and the notion that human males and females have no psychological differences.

Marriage The marriage debate taught me two important lessons. First, everyone got End Times prophecy wrong. The Rapture came, and took only the anthropologists. Without them their craft was never applied to studying how marriage developed over the millennia. Second (more seriously) I finally learned how Hegelian synthesis works. I knew the basic formula but not the real-world applications: A and not-A are treated not as irreconcilable principles but as premises that can somehow be made compatible with one another. The way to accomplish this is to misdefine either A and/or not-A.

People need not agree on the origins of marriage to recognize how it manifested after a certain point. Aside from any religious purpose, marriage serves as checks and balances on human mating and cohabitation. Social stability requires minimizing the conflict over potential mates, and preserving the learning curve of civilization requires maximizing the number of intact households. Only in that context does this statement from Loving v Virginia make any sense: “Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival.” The Sexual Revolution dispensed with the notion that procreation must be disciplined, yet the infatuation with weddings and other superficial trappings of marriage did not go away. The revolutionaries redefined marriage as a vehicle by which the married party was granted social acceptance and legal benefits and in return owed nothing other than filling out the paperwork.

Militia Archaic terms are ripe for misunderstanding, and the Second Amendment offers us the word “militia.” The couch potato lefty whose awareness of current events doesn’t go much further than the nightly news and Jimmy Kimmel thinks “militia” is a state’s standing army staffed by professionally-trained part-time volunteers who serve on a rotating basis – a National Guard unit, a concept that did not exist in the 1700s. In reality the Constitution uses “militia” to refer not to a military unit but to the body of draft-age men. Mistranslation of “militia” drives mistranslation of “the people” referenced later in the amendment. The latter half of 2A states that refraining from impinging on the people’s RKBA is a necessary condition for the “well-regulated militia,” which is compatible with any definition of “well-regulated” (“governable,” “competent,” etc.).

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I must confess to a little projection on my part. Screwtape’s lecture on jargon always brings to mind the language issue heavy in my own mind: terminology conflicts that confuse political discussion. C. S. Lewis’ bureaucrat from Hell discusses jargon in a different context: the use of fancy adjectives that insinuate vague concepts of an idea’s goodness or badness, designed to prevent those discussions from starting at all. Some modern examples include “common-sense ____ laws,” “fair share,” and “democratic.”