A lovely twist on Luxury Beliefs as etiquette - thank you.
As an aside, I also learned something from that le Carre passage about apples and class. I'm British & my mother came from a very humble background, spending her whole life attempting to present as upper middle class. But she always peeled an apple in one strip.
I can’t help but feel this was a rather simple point hidden behind a meandering narrative with a lot of fancy words, and more nuanced than it needed to be. Inclusive language is upper class in-group behavior masquerading as changing the world for the better. There are sub-discussions that can fork off that point, but that’s really all you had to say.
I thought Freddie deBoer had a really good point related to this: the term 'retarded' was once created as a more objective, unoffensive term to ones like 'idiot'. And now we have other unoffensive terms and 'retarded' is considered derogatory and taboo. Has any of this changed people's actual behavior or social attitudes?
My objection to all of this linguistic performance for a long time has been that it is actually an elitist and exclusive practice. But I also agree with Matt that the strong reaction to this sort of performance you see on the right is itself another kind of group-identity-affirming performance. I think it makes sense to gently push back against those who are using these language games as a way to condemn exclude others and to work just to listen to people and include them in conversation.
Wow, bravo. This might be my favorite MY article to date, and that's saying something. I mean no disrespect when I say that this topic is clearly something MY understands extremely well. I have a lot to think about.
Substantively, I think that justice only moves forward in lockstep with power. To the extent that humans can act justly towards polar bears, it's only insofar as we have power over them. We can save the bears when the bears are far away or we are in an armored car with weapons. But if we flipped the power balance - if you were alone on the ice with a polar bear at 100 yards, say - then you would try your best to kill the bear for food, just as the bear would you. I know it's a faux pas to speak so colorfully about sensitive topics, so I won't belabor the point, nor the obvious analogy to elites vs hoi polloi, nor especially any talk about which is the polar bear.
I just want to point out that justice is a luxury, and we only worry about it because we're so filthy stinking rich and powerful, compared to when we used to worry about it less. It makes sense that the filthiest, stinkiest, richest, most powerful among us worry about it the most, but not in any way that seriously threatens the power balance. Again, I'm not exactly sure what lessons to draw from that. I have a lot to think about.
This XKCD is more about correcting grammar, but I think it also applies to inclusive language: https://xkcd.com/1576/
"You can never know for sure what any words will mean to anyone. All you can do is try to get better at guessing how your words affect people, so you can have a chance of finding the ones that will make them feel something like what you want them to feel. Everything else is pointless.
I assume you're giving me tips on how you interpret words because you want me to feel less alone. If so, then thank you. That means a lot. But if you're just running my sentences past some mental checklist so you can show off how well you know it, then I could care less."
I want to continue to use "good enough for me" words like slaves, minorities, etc. I thought that was a way of resisting woke, but it seems I'm instead playing right into their hands, identifying myself as a somebody they can be superior to.
Except “they” are a tiny fringe minority who for a few years had the twitter bully pulpit and who will soon cease to command our attention when enough corporations suffer consequences for kowtowing to the tiny mobs that HR departments grow some spine and implement due process before firing or deplatforming somebody over a twitter “blow up”. Then we can go back to collectively shrugging and rolling our eyes when these people talk about ableism and insist on changing “master bedroom” to “primary bedroom”.
> You can imagine a world, though, in which Stella joins Stanley in the Church of England and inherits her father’s money after he dies. Then her kids would grow up with money and a Carne education in the right church and the right social circles
This is still a very American way of seeing the world. It does "take centuries to make a gentleman" and her kids might be often able to pass, but they would certainly not fully be upper class. One way that this would happen is that they would not get the invitations to the "right" events for at least one or two generations longer.
One thing these language games reveal is how much pressure elites are feeling to be more egalitarian. There's a lot of guilt & shame implicit in the discourse around "privilege", "harm", etc. I feel like this has changed a lot in the last 50 years, and it should be a good thing -- it should lead to redistribution of material resources & power. Instead it's leading to ever-more rarefied etiquette.
This is what makes these language games so pernicious. It's not that they're horrendously bad in and of themselves, it's the opportunity costs. In the same sense that snake oil might itself be benign, but selling snake oil as a miracle cure can be fatal if it leads a patient to eschew more effective treatments.
I think people felt far more shame about being wealthy in the 60s than they do now despite (?) society being far more egalitarian back then. People seems to be happier to flaunt their wealth at levels unseen since the gilded age or something. They just enjoy adding to that the ability to moralize against the poor, just as their class ancestors did in the 19th cent and earlier. It’s just the content of the moralizing that’s shifting is all.
I like framing the issue as one of etiquette, because that means behavior rather than personal, internal attitudes. If the Woke Left had started with etiquette maybe they wouldn't have alienated the conservative Right.
But I was also drawn to the quote "It takes centuries to make a gentleman." Ironically or maybe metaphorically, it points to my problem as an aging human. I'm having enough trouble accessing general vocabulary that I picked up later in life (Wordhippo is my friend.) And, since I'm retired, or reading widely across the centuries, or not being able to volunteer as much because of Covid, I'm losing track of the latest "approved" jargon. (what? I can't say "third world"? What's this "center" stuff? In my Cascadian city, URM means Unreinforced Masonry.) In the meantime, my decades as a liberal have taught me that the jargon will change anyway.
Nevertheless, at the same time I continue to think deeply about the issues using my "outdated" terms to formulate my thoughts and even to come up with new, fairly original ideas & perspectives that I send out in comments like these. Worrying about vocabulary can distract from the deeper issues since sometimes the latest approved wording just expresses something I've already been aware of for decades.
If I ever do end up in face-to-face discussions with someone I might actually offend by using superseded terms (as opposed to someone of my own ilk who will just be eager to reprove me) I'll just have to rely on respect and etiquette.
I have a question for anyone who might be closer to academia than I am. How do decisions like the one made by USC Sociology get made? More particularly, how much evidence do they feel they need in order to make a statement like "phrases such as “going into the field” or “field work” may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign.”"
The, admittedly few. close friends and family members I have who are Black or Hispanic roll their eyes as hard as anyone at something like that. I find it hard to believe that if you hooked them up to an EKG you could get any measurable response at all with which you could conclude they were affected by the language.
As someone who was active in progressive circles for quite a while, I strongly disagree with the thrust of this article. This is not to say that I support the substitution of “practicum” for “field.” That’s obviously silly.
I would say the real reason is better described by Pinker’s term “euphemism treadmill.” Liberals identify as caring people. At the same time, liberals are aware that we live in an extremely unjust world, and unless you’re prepared to join Doctors Without Borders, there’s really no way move through your life in a non-exploitative way. If you own anything with a microchip, it was almost certainly manufactured by people in terrible working conditions, and perhaps even slave labor. But we’re not going to go live in microchip-free communes.
This leaves a lot of progressives in a constant state of low-level anxiety and inadequacy, particularly ones who care enough to dedicate a significant amount of their free time, or even their professional lives to making things better. It’s not a class thing to know URM (first time I’ve heard this term), or a social marker. It is genuine worry that you might offend someone.
These circles also tend to reward hypersensitivity and severely punish insensitivity. If someone accuses you of a micro aggression, even an apology probably won’t assuage them. The only way to not come off as a monster is to counter-accuse them of some micro aggression of their own that you have been too gracious to mention until now. So if somebody announces that going forward, they wish to be referred to as an URM, it’s much easier to use URM than to get into an ugly fight about why you’re too much of a jerk to do this simple thing.
As for White Fragility, I do think it made some interesting points, but it also says that if you disagree with a single word of it, it’s your own white defensiveness, and you need to work until you do agree with every word. This is obviously Orwellian. As the same time, white people do get preemptively defensive about race, myself included, and defensiveness pushes us to dismiss even valid points as woke nonsense.
That is to say: assume good faith if possible. Countering silly terms like “practicum” with an insistence that it’s unconscious snobbery, is simply a way of deflecting one perceived injury with another. “I may be racist, but you’re classist.”
I'll just note that I did a big project at one of the elite schools Matt name-checks. Part of our contract required us to go through their DEI process to "ensure equitable opportunities", and it was so transparently phony and shallow that it was beyond parody.
A lovely twist on Luxury Beliefs as etiquette - thank you.
As an aside, I also learned something from that le Carre passage about apples and class. I'm British & my mother came from a very humble background, spending her whole life attempting to present as upper middle class. But she always peeled an apple in one strip.
I can’t help but feel this was a rather simple point hidden behind a meandering narrative with a lot of fancy words, and more nuanced than it needed to be. Inclusive language is upper class in-group behavior masquerading as changing the world for the better. There are sub-discussions that can fork off that point, but that’s really all you had to say.
I thought Freddie deBoer had a really good point related to this: the term 'retarded' was once created as a more objective, unoffensive term to ones like 'idiot'. And now we have other unoffensive terms and 'retarded' is considered derogatory and taboo. Has any of this changed people's actual behavior or social attitudes?
My objection to all of this linguistic performance for a long time has been that it is actually an elitist and exclusive practice. But I also agree with Matt that the strong reaction to this sort of performance you see on the right is itself another kind of group-identity-affirming performance. I think it makes sense to gently push back against those who are using these language games as a way to condemn exclude others and to work just to listen to people and include them in conversation.
Wow, bravo. This might be my favorite MY article to date, and that's saying something. I mean no disrespect when I say that this topic is clearly something MY understands extremely well. I have a lot to think about.
Substantively, I think that justice only moves forward in lockstep with power. To the extent that humans can act justly towards polar bears, it's only insofar as we have power over them. We can save the bears when the bears are far away or we are in an armored car with weapons. But if we flipped the power balance - if you were alone on the ice with a polar bear at 100 yards, say - then you would try your best to kill the bear for food, just as the bear would you. I know it's a faux pas to speak so colorfully about sensitive topics, so I won't belabor the point, nor the obvious analogy to elites vs hoi polloi, nor especially any talk about which is the polar bear.
I just want to point out that justice is a luxury, and we only worry about it because we're so filthy stinking rich and powerful, compared to when we used to worry about it less. It makes sense that the filthiest, stinkiest, richest, most powerful among us worry about it the most, but not in any way that seriously threatens the power balance. Again, I'm not exactly sure what lessons to draw from that. I have a lot to think about.
This was a well-structured screed; you held your powder dry til the end.
This XKCD is more about correcting grammar, but I think it also applies to inclusive language: https://xkcd.com/1576/
"You can never know for sure what any words will mean to anyone. All you can do is try to get better at guessing how your words affect people, so you can have a chance of finding the ones that will make them feel something like what you want them to feel. Everything else is pointless.
I assume you're giving me tips on how you interpret words because you want me to feel less alone. If so, then thank you. That means a lot. But if you're just running my sentences past some mental checklist so you can show off how well you know it, then I could care less."
I want to continue to use "good enough for me" words like slaves, minorities, etc. I thought that was a way of resisting woke, but it seems I'm instead playing right into their hands, identifying myself as a somebody they can be superior to.
Except “they” are a tiny fringe minority who for a few years had the twitter bully pulpit and who will soon cease to command our attention when enough corporations suffer consequences for kowtowing to the tiny mobs that HR departments grow some spine and implement due process before firing or deplatforming somebody over a twitter “blow up”. Then we can go back to collectively shrugging and rolling our eyes when these people talk about ableism and insist on changing “master bedroom” to “primary bedroom”.
> You can imagine a world, though, in which Stella joins Stanley in the Church of England and inherits her father’s money after he dies. Then her kids would grow up with money and a Carne education in the right church and the right social circles
This is still a very American way of seeing the world. It does "take centuries to make a gentleman" and her kids might be often able to pass, but they would certainly not fully be upper class. One way that this would happen is that they would not get the invitations to the "right" events for at least one or two generations longer.
You keep getting more based over time Matt
Damn. Busy day I sure missed a banger. Great article. I’m sure Twitter is losing their minds. Well done.
I know that I feel more elite since I started eating my Snickers bars with a knife and fork.
One thing these language games reveal is how much pressure elites are feeling to be more egalitarian. There's a lot of guilt & shame implicit in the discourse around "privilege", "harm", etc. I feel like this has changed a lot in the last 50 years, and it should be a good thing -- it should lead to redistribution of material resources & power. Instead it's leading to ever-more rarefied etiquette.
This is what makes these language games so pernicious. It's not that they're horrendously bad in and of themselves, it's the opportunity costs. In the same sense that snake oil might itself be benign, but selling snake oil as a miracle cure can be fatal if it leads a patient to eschew more effective treatments.
I think people felt far more shame about being wealthy in the 60s than they do now despite (?) society being far more egalitarian back then. People seems to be happier to flaunt their wealth at levels unseen since the gilded age or something. They just enjoy adding to that the ability to moralize against the poor, just as their class ancestors did in the 19th cent and earlier. It’s just the content of the moralizing that’s shifting is all.
I like framing the issue as one of etiquette, because that means behavior rather than personal, internal attitudes. If the Woke Left had started with etiquette maybe they wouldn't have alienated the conservative Right.
But I was also drawn to the quote "It takes centuries to make a gentleman." Ironically or maybe metaphorically, it points to my problem as an aging human. I'm having enough trouble accessing general vocabulary that I picked up later in life (Wordhippo is my friend.) And, since I'm retired, or reading widely across the centuries, or not being able to volunteer as much because of Covid, I'm losing track of the latest "approved" jargon. (what? I can't say "third world"? What's this "center" stuff? In my Cascadian city, URM means Unreinforced Masonry.) In the meantime, my decades as a liberal have taught me that the jargon will change anyway.
Nevertheless, at the same time I continue to think deeply about the issues using my "outdated" terms to formulate my thoughts and even to come up with new, fairly original ideas & perspectives that I send out in comments like these. Worrying about vocabulary can distract from the deeper issues since sometimes the latest approved wording just expresses something I've already been aware of for decades.
If I ever do end up in face-to-face discussions with someone I might actually offend by using superseded terms (as opposed to someone of my own ilk who will just be eager to reprove me) I'll just have to rely on respect and etiquette.
I have a question for anyone who might be closer to academia than I am. How do decisions like the one made by USC Sociology get made? More particularly, how much evidence do they feel they need in order to make a statement like "phrases such as “going into the field” or “field work” may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign.”"
The, admittedly few. close friends and family members I have who are Black or Hispanic roll their eyes as hard as anyone at something like that. I find it hard to believe that if you hooked them up to an EKG you could get any measurable response at all with which you could conclude they were affected by the language.
As someone who was active in progressive circles for quite a while, I strongly disagree with the thrust of this article. This is not to say that I support the substitution of “practicum” for “field.” That’s obviously silly.
I would say the real reason is better described by Pinker’s term “euphemism treadmill.” Liberals identify as caring people. At the same time, liberals are aware that we live in an extremely unjust world, and unless you’re prepared to join Doctors Without Borders, there’s really no way move through your life in a non-exploitative way. If you own anything with a microchip, it was almost certainly manufactured by people in terrible working conditions, and perhaps even slave labor. But we’re not going to go live in microchip-free communes.
This leaves a lot of progressives in a constant state of low-level anxiety and inadequacy, particularly ones who care enough to dedicate a significant amount of their free time, or even their professional lives to making things better. It’s not a class thing to know URM (first time I’ve heard this term), or a social marker. It is genuine worry that you might offend someone.
These circles also tend to reward hypersensitivity and severely punish insensitivity. If someone accuses you of a micro aggression, even an apology probably won’t assuage them. The only way to not come off as a monster is to counter-accuse them of some micro aggression of their own that you have been too gracious to mention until now. So if somebody announces that going forward, they wish to be referred to as an URM, it’s much easier to use URM than to get into an ugly fight about why you’re too much of a jerk to do this simple thing.
As for White Fragility, I do think it made some interesting points, but it also says that if you disagree with a single word of it, it’s your own white defensiveness, and you need to work until you do agree with every word. This is obviously Orwellian. As the same time, white people do get preemptively defensive about race, myself included, and defensiveness pushes us to dismiss even valid points as woke nonsense.
That is to say: assume good faith if possible. Countering silly terms like “practicum” with an insistence that it’s unconscious snobbery, is simply a way of deflecting one perceived injury with another. “I may be racist, but you’re classist.”
I'll just note that I did a big project at one of the elite schools Matt name-checks. Part of our contract required us to go through their DEI process to "ensure equitable opportunities", and it was so transparently phony and shallow that it was beyond parody.