A critique of woke language

The Atlantic is beginning to publish a number of articles critical of wokeness, and the one below is one of the best.  George Packer, a staff writer at the magazine, makes the case that “equity language” (you’ll know what it is, but I’ll give some examples) is proliferating, and that’s part of a deliberate strategy to hide uncomfortable truths from people as part of an ideological strategy. It is also, as he says, a form of performative political action: pretending to change the world while actually doing almost nothing.  While the aims of the language-purifiers are good—to help those who are less well off—they do no such thing, and the exponents of language purification actually realize this.  The gap between their aims and their accomplishments, argues Packer, bespeaks a deep pessimism about their ability to actually change anything.

Click to read; if you haven’t read the magazine lately it’s free, and I also found the article archived here.

 

I’ll put a few main points (and quotes) under my own headings, and compare Packer’s thesis to that espoused in Orwell’s wonderful essay Politics and the English Language (free online), as there are many similarities. Quotes from Packer and Orwell are indented; unless I say otherwise, I’m quoting Packer.

The ubiquity of equity language:

Equity-language guides are proliferating among some of the country’s leading institutions, particularly nonprofits. The American Cancer Society has one. So do the American Heart Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, the National Recreation and Park Association, the Columbia University School of Professional Studies, and the University of Washington. The words these guides recommend or reject are sometimes exactly the same, justified in nearly identical language. This is because most of the guides draw on the same sources from activist organizations: A Progressive’s Style Guide, the Racial Equity Tools glossary, and a couple of others. The guides also cite one another. The total number of people behind this project of linguistic purification is relatively small, but their power is potentially immense.

Indeed it is. While you may refuse to stop using “field work” to refer to biology done outdoors, terms like “Latinx,” “enslaved person,” and “diverse person” have worked their way into everyday prose.  I myself have used all three of these, and of course you have to be au courant since the words keep changing as the ideological arguments shift. But one result from reading Packer’s work is that I will no longer sacrifice clarity to truckle to the ideology of a few people who decide what terms are proper. Terms like “brown bag lunch,” “Americans”, “blind to this idea”, and similar ones (all demonized) will remain in my vocabulary

Examples of equity language:

In the spirit of Strunk and White, the guides call for using specific rather than general terms, plain speech instead of euphemisms, active not passive voice. Yet they continually violate their own guidance, and the crusade to eliminate harmful language could hardly do otherwise. A division of the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work has abandoned field, as in fieldwork (which could be associated with slavery or immigrant labor) in favor of the obscure Latinism practicum. The Sierra Club offers refuse to take action instead of paralyzed by fear, replacing a concrete image with a phrase that evokes no mental picture. It suggests the mushy protect our rights over the more active stand up for our rights. Which is more euphemistic, mentally ill or person living with a mental-health condition? Which is more vague, ballsy or risk-taker? What are diversity, equity, and inclusion but abstractions with uncertain meanings whose repetition creates an artificial consensus and muddies clear thought? When a university administrator refers to an individual student as “diverse,” the word has lost contact with anything tangible—which is the point.

Or, as Orwell said, “words and meaning have almost parted company.”

Why these changes are ideological.

When the San Francisco Board of Supervisors replaces felon with justice-involved person, it is making an ideological claim—that there is something illegitimate about laws, courts, and prisons. If you accept the change—as, in certain contexts, you’ll surely feel you must—then you also acquiesce in the argument.

Likewise, banning the term “paralyzed by fear” (verboten because it’s ableist) has the rationale that describing one form of inaction or indecision somehow worsens the lot of people suffering from physical paralysis. There is of course no evidence for this; it’s an argument made purely to demonstrate that this kind of language hurts groups of people. If there were evidence that it really did, that would be one thing, but there is no evidence for such claims except in the worst cases of ethnic slurs. Can you find anybody actually injured by somone saying, “Tom is off in Montana doing field work”? No; the argument for harm is purely hypothetical. However, as Orwell realized, gaining power over language gives you political power—and that is the point of his essay (and one of the points of his book Nineteen Eighty-Four).

As Packer notes, these changes don’t occur the normal way words and phrases change: through an organic process that people adopt gradually. Instead, the ideological changes are imposed from above by diktat—imposed by a cadre of those who think they know what language will improve society and what language will not.

Why these changes suck the life out of prose. Both Packer and Orwell rewrote passages, putting them into politically correct language, to show how ludicrous the changes are:

Here’s Packer (by the way, I’m going to read Boo’s book):

Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a nonfiction masterpiece that tells the story of Mumbai slum dwellers with the intimacy of a novel. The book was published in 2012, before the new language emerged:

The One Leg’s given name was Sita. She had fair skin, usually an asset, but the runt leg had smacked down her bride price. Her Hindu parents had taken the single offer they got: poor, unattractive, hard-working, Muslim, old—“half-dead, but who else wanted her,” as her mother had once said with a frown.

Translated into equity language, this passage might read:

Sita was a person living with a disability. Because she lived in a system that centered whiteness while producing inequities among racial and ethnic groups, her physical appearance conferred an unearned set of privileges and benefits, but her disability lowered her status to potential partners. Her parents, who were Hindu persons, accepted a marriage proposal from a member of a community with limited financial resources, a person whose physical appearance was defined as being different from the traits of the dominant group and resulted in his being set apart for unequal treatment, a person who was considered in the dominant discourse to be “hardworking,” a Muslim person, an older person. In referring to him, Sita’s mother used language that is considered harmful by representatives of historically marginalized communities.

Equity language fails at what it claims to do. This translation doesn’t create more empathy for Sita and her struggles. Just the opposite—it alienates Sita from the reader, placing her at a great distance. A heavy fog of jargon rolls in and hides all that Boo’s short burst of prose makes clear with true understanding, true empathy.

Orwell did a similar thing:

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one.

Why the changes are made.  Of course we already know about the purpose of wokefying language. Although motivated by a form of compassion, the ultimate result, as the proponents may realize, is not only to gain linguistic and hence political power, but to take the sting out of hard reality: to make words like “slave” easier on the ear by calling them “enslaved people.”  And it of course is authoritarian, not only giving power to the language-changes but to demonize those who refuse to go along.  Both Packer and Orwell make these points.

Packer:

The whole tendency of equity language is to blur the contours of hard, often unpleasant facts. This aversion to reality is its main appeal. Once you acquire the vocabulary, it’s actually easier to say people with limited financial resources than the poor. The first rolls off your tongue without interruption, leaves no aftertaste, arouses no emotion. The second is rudely blunt and bitter, and it might make someone angry or sad. Imprecise language is less likely to offend. Good writing—vivid imagery, strong statements—will hurt, because it’s bound to convey painful truths.

. . . and Orwell:

Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

(Note how well Orwell writes here, using metaphors that actually make you visualize something!)

In the end, politicizing language in this way (and I freely admit that there are a few words that should not be used; you can guess them), corrupts and kills language, corrupts thought, and gives power to those who don’t deserve it. The use of power is particularly invidious because those who mandate language changes are not the same group that the changes are aimed at helping. Language-changing is the purview of the privileged, of professors, and of those who realize that there’s an easy way to control the behavior of other people.

We all recognize that most of the suggested changes in words and phrases are performative; that is, they don’t effect any positive social change. (This is reminiscent of the drive to improve society by getting rid of the common names of all birds named after people, whether those people be good or bad.) The linguistic changes don’t bring different groups of people together or reduce divisions in society. Now perhaps some of the language police really think their efforts will make big changes in society, but it’s hard to argue that convincingly.

Instead, the main result is to make the privileged exponents of language change feel better about themselves—a form of linguistic narcissism.  But Packer does make a new and important point at the end: language-policing bespeaks a deep pessimism about the possibility of social change. Perhaps this is because its promoters realize that to really produce meaningful social change, we need long-term, difficult, and expensive work done to ensure, as far as possible, that all people get equal opportunities from birth. This is a practical impossibility, but we can surely get closer to that goal, though it will require real work and financial sacrifice from those who are better off off.  It’s curious, but not coincidental, that the both rejection of the idea of real progress and the drive to purify language, comes from the left, once the habitat of Free Speech.

Packer:

This huge expense of energy to purify language reveals a weakened belief in more material forms of progress. If we don’t know how to end racism, we can at least call it structural. The guides want to make the ugliness of our society disappear by linguistic fiat. Even by their own lights, they do more ill than good—not because of their absurd bans on ordinary words like congresswoman and expat, or the self-torture they require of conscientious users, but because they make it impossible to face squarely the wrongs they want to right, which is the starting point for any change. Prison does not become a less brutal place by calling someone locked up in one a person experiencing the criminal-justice system. Obesity isn’t any healthier for people with high weight. It’s hard to know who is likely to be harmed by a phrase like native New Yorker or under fire; I doubt that even the writers of the guides are truly offended. But the people in Behind the Beautiful Forevers know they’re poor; they can’t afford to wrap themselves in soft sheets of euphemism. Equity language doesn’t fool anyone who lives with real afflictions. It’s meant to spare only the feelings of those who use it.

The project of the guides is utopian, but they’re a symptom of deep pessimism. They belong to a fractured culture in which symbolic gestures are preferable to concrete actions, argument is no longer desirable, each viewpoint has its own impenetrable dialect, and only the most fluent insiders possess the power to say what is real. What I’ve described is not just a problem of the progressive left. The far right has a different vocabulary, but it, too, relies on authoritarian shibboleths to enforce orthodoxy. It will be a sign of political renewal if Americans can say maddening things to one another in a common language that doesn’t require any guide.

And Orwell’s ending:

. . . one ought to recognise that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin where it belongs.

Speaking of dustbins, I’m making an effort to unwoken my language, and I’d recommend that you think twice before you automatically adopt the politically correct recommendations.  I’ve been using some PC language, even on this website—going along to get along. But that’s not a good reason for changing one’s writing.

h/t: Merilee