LINGUISTIC “QUICKSAND”
Strategic Manipulation of Language to Gain Power
David Barnhizer
Significant power is obtained by being able to control the linguistic “quicksand” of what is deemed offensive at any particular moment and into which the unwary “trespasser” sinks. Daphne Patai argues that: “In feminist circles in particular, academic freedom is under attack by those who advocate and put into effect coercive sexual-harassment policies that are so broad, vague, and all-inclusive that their application routinely violates the due-process rights of the accused.”
Feminist scholar Mary Joe Frug explained the strategy of using imagery and shifting word meanings to “appropriate” power in an analysis for the Harvard Law Review:
“The liberal equality doctrine is often understood as an engine of liberation with respect to sex-specific rules. This imagery suggests the repressive function of law, a function that feminists have inventively sought to appropriate and exploit through critical scholarship, litigation, and legislative campaigns.” Frug went on to say that: “This is not a proposal that we try to promote a benevolent and fixed meaning for sex differences. … Rather, the argument is that continuous interpretive struggles over the meaning of sex differences can have an impact on patriarchal legal power.”
Forcing Continuous Interpretive Struggles over Language Is a Strategy to Keep ”The Enemy” Off Balance
Control of the allowable language of discourse is a critical element of political strategy. As part of our calculated political advocacy, we speak in code and false tongues. We shape our words to gain political goals that put power at the center, not truth. Everything becomes goal-oriented, and the goal is neither truth nor understanding, but control and the furtherance of political ends. Outcome is the dominant factor, not intellect, honesty, and insight. This is what the university has become.
Control of the language of discourse not only provides the concepts that can be used but also inhibits the use of disfavored concepts. This is an inevitable process in a general political community, particularly one constructed by postmodernists intent on using their power to construct their own “truths.” The question is the degree to which this kind of control is desirable or appropriate in the university. It is not. Universities have a duty not only to the immediate society, but to the past and future. This includes the duty to resist strategies aimed at controlling intellectual freedom and discourse.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali Exposes Wokeism as Seeking
“Unchecked and Absolute Power”
]In an article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on September 11, 2020, Ayaan Hirsi Ali compared America’s Wokeism and Islamic Jihadism through the unique lens created by her journey of abandoning Islam, leaving Africa and her family, and becoming a member of the Netherlands parliament, all while under a death sentence imposed by Muslim fanatics for what they saw as her heresy. She then migrated to America and is serving a prominent role in the Hoover Institute. She writes:
The main goal of the woke is to seek unchecked and absolute power, advancing from the academy and out into other institutions of society,” Ali [said]. “In America, and the rest of the English-speaking world, it is no issue of any significance that we can discuss in any meaningful way without running into woke sabotage. One reason why it’s difficult to pin down wokeism is that the theories of [philosophical] deconstruction are constantly expanding with grievance after grievance”. … “If you can pin [down] an idea, you can expose it… But if its meaning keeps shifting, with the grievance of the day, it becomes elusive. It’s not social justice theory. Weirdly, though, it’s not a theory at all… You can’t treat it like other theories that is by taking it through the process of scrutiny for certification or verification.” Ali asserted that a “key element” of wokeism is the “contamination of language,” pointing to its “lexicon” of terms like “microaggressions, safe spaces” and “equity.” And that existing language is “policed” by the woke “to become purified of any perceived bigotry or injustice.”
Linguistic Cleansing Through Condemning Purportedly “White Values” Like
“Rational Thinking,” Intellectual Interaction, Precision, and Rigor
Those who control language control society. One way to control language is to use “open-textured” terms that appear reasonable, fair, and even moral on their face but in fact have no intrinsic meaning. They are entirely subjective terms into which the activist pours meaning that advances a specific political end designed to advance an agenda. This process may lack specific meaning but, if successful, replaces other possible meanings and controls the “linguistic field” by blocking delegitimizes and ultimately punishes those who continue to use disfavored interpretations.
“Diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” (DEI) are examples of an entirely Orwellian strategy of linguistic cleansing. The list of banished terms spreads widely and includes terms such as “White supremacy,” “privilege,” “micro-aggression,” “insensitivity,” and much more. You can, of course, ask, “Diversity of who and what?” and “What exactly, or even almost, do you mean when you say “equity,” and being “inclusive”? Are we talking about full and total inclusivity, or do you have something very specific in mind that excludes other kinds of diversity? Plus, what are the criteria of who is included within the sphere of “diversity” and who is excluded? The “charges” imposed by the “Language Police” cover a lot of ground.
A real intent of DEI, CRT, and LGBTQ+ activists, etc. is to control and subjugate the “white” and “toxic male” components of American society. The problem is that if you ask about the actual meaning and appropriate application of the terms to real systems, you are immediately condemned as a “racist” or “phobic bigot” of some sort. At least in one dimension, this agenda is stripping “people of color” of the skills and values needed for them to do well within our society as proud and skilled members of a system that, for decades, has been striving to be a fairer and more just system. It is also compressing and defining the creative richness of individual humans of whatever mixture into a rigid, narrow, and inevitably antagonistic “identity” that is being artificially created for purposes of gaining political power and control and has nothing to do with justice.
What’s Truth Got to Do With It?
Speech suppression, propaganda, and Cancel Culture aren’t about truth. They aren’t even about taking real offense at what is being said or done by those unfortunate enough to be “canceled.” Virtually all of the faux “outrage” screamed by the Woke is tactical. The purpose is to put others on the defensive, uncertain about whether what they said or did was wrong, and feeling shamed by their accusers. Language manipulation of the kind we are experiencing about such things as discrimination, phobias, micro-aggressions, proper use of pronouns relative to an individual’s identity preferences, subconscious bias, etc., are all about power.
Psychological projection is the technique of the day. Truth doesn’t matter. The “battle” is everything. The projection strategy of false or grossly overstated accusation is internalized by those who are part of the mass after experiencing continual repetition of propaganda iterations on social media and in the press. Given that studies indicate as many as 86 percent of Americans now obtain their news about what is occurring from social media sources, the often biased and even false reports and links sent around among identity group members and activist journalists offer a one-sided and skewed view of reality.
Wokes and Crits Want to Do Away with the “White Oppressor’s” Tools,
like “Rationalism, the Rule of Law, and Private Ownership of Property”
Rich Lowry, in writing the “Woke claim that ‘rational thinking’ is a white male thing is both insulting and absurd,” provides a sense of this counter-productive debacle in his analysis of an aspect of the attack on the University of Chicago’s Dorian Abbot. Abbot’s “sin” was daring to criticize, or more accurately just ask questions about, DEI implementation at his university. Lowry explains:
“The New York Times ran a report on the canceling of University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot for his dissenting views on affirmative action. The paper quoted a Williams College geosciences professor, Phoebe A. Cohen, who supports Abbot’s shunning. She explained her dim view of academic freedom thusly: “This idea of intellectual debate and rigor as the pinnacle of intellectualism comes from a world in which white men dominated.” Ah, yes, that poisoned fruit of the patriarchy—intellectual debate and rigor.
Of all the faddish notions blighting college campuses and the broader culture, it is among the most indefensible and self-destructive. Start with the fact that to reason is deeply human. Steven Pinker points out in his new book “Rationality” that one of the world’s oldest people, the San of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa, don’t survive by happenstance. These hunter-gatherers make closely reasoned, evidence-based judgments about their prey; without the use of logic, they wouldn’t be successful. If someone told them they needed to give up all this reasoning and cede it to white males, they’d presumably react with fury and incomprehension. Needless to say, other cultures and civilizations are capable of great intellectual rigor. It doesn’t require endorsing the fashionable theories that the West invented nothing and rose to preeminence through colonialism and theft to acknowledge the historic achievements of China, India and the Islamic world.
The implication that women and minorities somehow aren’t as capable of rigorous thought as white males, or shouldn’t be as interested in it, is deeply insulting. This is taking one of the worst beliefs of the Western past, dressing it up in the rhetoric of diversity and inclusion, and pretending it’s somehow a blow for progress. What’s the alternative to intellectual debate and rigor? Superstition, personal preference and, ultimately, sheer power. It’s the latter that the woke critics of Western reason believe they can wield to crush their enemies, facts and logic be damned.”
The use and abuse of language for political advantage is everywhere. One example, to its everlasting shame and discredit, is offered by the National Education Association (NEA). In endorsing Critical Race Theory in schools, the NEA pledged to fight against anti-CRT speech and to: “issue a study that ‘critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society.’”
You can’t make this absurd stuff up, but at least the NEA has company as evidenced by a poster display offered by the Museum of African American History and Culture, part of the Smithsonian Institute. The Museum put up a poster stating that “white culture” includes things like “nuclear family,” “self-reliance,” “rigid time schedule,” and “delayed gratification.” One critic responded that the poster was “despicable” and the Museum removed the poster. But the removal does not change the mindset of what we are facing, nor does it change the underlying message that such values are supposedly possessed by a specific ethnic group of “all Whites wherever found.” That is a contemptible and false racist narrative is designed to create a “revolutionary enemy” to energize “the revolutionary struggle.”
The “Purity Spiral”, “Virtue Signaling” and Our “Moralistic Feeding Frenzy”
Roger Kimball describes what is happening in terms of the “Purity Spiral” and “virtue signaling.” He equates the behavior we are experiencing in America with that of China during the Cultural Revolution and the savagery of the Red Guards.
The journalist Gavin Haynes has a great phrase for a familiar and disturbing phenomenon: the purity spiral. “A purity spiral occurs,” he writes, “when a community becomes fixated on implementing a single value that has no upper limit, and no single agreed interpretation. The result is a moral feeding frenzy.” In the late 1960s, the Red Guards took to the street to identify and destroy anyone and anything involved with traditional Chinese culture. The result was an orgy of destruction and murder on an industrial scale. … The purity spiral is also a search for enemies, a concerted effort to divide the world between the tiny coterie of the blessed and the madding crowd of the damned. The game, Haynes notes, “is always one of purer-than-thou.” … Writing in the magazine New York, the commentator Andrew Sullivan notes the prominent role that language—that is, the effort to police language—plays in the economy of coercion. “Revolutionaries,” he writes, “create new forms of language to dismantle the existing order.”
Kimball goes on to provide several examples of how the “dismantling” of the “existing order” and its institutions proceeds. These include “white supremacy,” “women,” “oppression,” and “racism” or “racist,” along with “structural racism.”
The use of the term ‘white supremacy’ to mean not the KKK or the antebellum South but American society as a whole in the [twenty-first] century has become routine on the left, as if it were now beyond dispute. The word ‘women,’ J.K. Rowling had the temerity to point out, is now being replaced by “people who menstruate.” The word “oppression” now includes not only being herded into Uighur reeducation camps but also feeling awkward as a sophomore in an Ivy League school. The word ‘racist’, which was widely understood quite recently to be prejudicial treatment of an individual based on the color of their skin, now requires no intent to be racist in the former sense, just acquiescence in something called ‘structural racism’ which can mean any difference in outcomes among racial groupings. Being color-blind is therefore now being racist. “[T]here is no escaping this. The woke shift their language all the time, so that words that were one day fine are now utterly reprehensible. You can’t keep up—which is the point. . . . The result is an exercise of cultural power through linguistic distortion.”
The Three Faces of Eve
At this point it feels as if we are caught up in a “Twilight Zone” episode being narrated by Rod Serling. In that unreal dream, we have somehow been drawn into the plot of the 1957 movie The Three Faces of Eve where a woman suffering from severe headaches and inexplicable blackouts goes to a psychiatrist to be helped. She amazes the doctor when, under treatment, including hypnosis, she displays dramatic shifts between three fundamentally different personalities. One is a housewife. Another is an extremely sexy woman, and the third is the ultra-practical Jane. The medical diagnosis was Multiple Personality Disorder. The plot of the movie is actually based on a real life individual who reportedly displayed twenty-two distinct personalities during her life. With the “language games” being played by the Woke/CRT activists, it seems like we are playing out a larger and more destructive societal and individual version of “Eve” in our everyday reality. Nor does this mean that Eve’s beliefs did not create a set of personality constructs that weren’t “real” to her, just that they do not impose the responsibility of all others to reconstruct society to accommodate her self-perceptions.
With all the claims about gender fluidity we are now hearing, it feels like we are “extras” in an incredibly complex cinematic project. Think of the effects of “ne, ve, ze/zie and xe pronouns.” Do the same on cisgender, micro-aggressions, White privilege, systemic racism, they/them, we and like usages. These are not only neutral words. They are control mechanisms, as well as substantive propositions about “things” that are altering our perception of gender, race interaction, and social and political behavior. Once internalized, they cede control over “us” and our perception of reality to groups that are deliberately using language as a strategic device to advance their political agendas and gain greater power. It is a political strategy—and it works, both offensively to force your agenda into widespread use, and defensively to undermine and degrade any other interpretations.
If We “Cave” to the “Pronoun Police” and the “Linguistic Social-Engineers”
the Battle for America’s Soul Is Over and the Fascists Win
Linguist Ruth Nanda Anshen offers a vital insight in explaining that humans do not only “use” language but “become” the language they use, even to the extent it defines their identity and sets limits on their ability to perceive and interpret reality. She explains: “man is that being on earth who does not have language. Man is language.”
When this occurs, particularly with activist collectives, “their” language becomes “their” personal reality, one they zealously seek to impose on the “unenlightened masses.” Nikolas Lanum offers the insight of William Jacobson on this issue. Lanum writes:
Cornell Law Professor William A. Jacobson warned that colleges and universities are "manifesting authoritarianism" by removing "problematic" words and firing staff that don't abide by left-wing ideologies. Jacobson said he believes the increase in stories about word-banning on college campuses is a manifestation of what is referred to as "repressive tolerance," wherein tolerance serves to preserve a repressive society by neutralizing opposition to impose forms of authoritarianism.
"They monitor your language, they get you to use language that only they approve, and once you've done that with somebody, once you've done that with a campus, that's enormous control," he told Fox News Digital. There are numerous examples of colleges attempting to change the language of faculty and students, according to Jacobson. He pointed to the implementation of author Ibram Kendi's antiracism agenda in staff training sessions as one of the more recent examples. The concept of "antiracism" has embedded itself in the diversity, equity, and inclusion departments and programs now widely implemented in colleges across the country.
This may seem subtle, but it represents why the Woke/CRT movement has been continually inventing new language and defining what they consider “correct” contexts for the use of existing language we are supposedly obligated to use. This also applies to language we are required to abandon. The point is multi-faceted. Once you allow an interest group to have control over language, you have granted power to that group. It is being endowed with the power to define the terms of engagement. When that happens, the rest of us are always “walking on eggshells” lest we suffer the “wrath of the Woke” and be condemned as bigoted or phobic.