Verbal Class Distinctions

In exasperation an earnest young woman once asked me, “How can you be against progress?” For her, no question was merely rhetorical, so I mumbled, “Uh, define progress.” This did not help: she believed in progress and in its identity with her ideas. Perhaps I should instead have said, “By that I suppose you mean improvement. Just how is it an improvement?” But I never did – she and I were dating at the time – and armed with this definition of her politics as progress, she began our every discussion one-up on me.

So it remains: anyone who co-opts and then defines words such as progress and its less ambitious sibling, reform, has won the rhetorical high ground and often the debate without his opponent even realizing he is in one. For casual observers such as voters, journalists, and academics, certain terms such as discrimination then take on connotations of evil, while others such as social programs are presumed to be good. In politics diction may not always be destiny, but we must pause occasionally to peel away the presumptions and false connotations that encrust every public debate, else we keep shooting ourselves in the tongue. Words have meaning and, crucially, leave impressions, too often the wrong ones. As Disraeli put it, “With words, we govern men.” So, never entrust their definitions to your opponents or to (and these are often one and the same) the verbal class that is the American media.

Most of us have long since learned to be cautious about words like free, expert, activist, hate speech, NGO, and (when referring to street thugs or those who rob banks and murder so they need not work while championing the working class) political prisoners. But not all are so blatant. The most pernicious example of these encrustations is discrimination. It is obvious that every law discriminates against someone. That is the purpose of laws, to separate sheep from goats, perps from victims, more money from some citizens than from others. But it is not so obvious that it is the obvious that we must continually emphasize, else it will be overlooked, like the pattern in one’s necktie. One discriminates in activities as harmless as choosing that necktie; there is other discrimination some consider immoral; and then there is illegal discrimination. The three are not the same, nor should they necessarily be. So, the next time someone screams “Discrimination!” just shrug and ask, “!
And your point is?”

It has long been apparent that the knee-jerk remedy for past discrimination is to be future discrimination, in the form of quotas – no matter that quotas are punishment for violation of an ex post facto law, something prohibited by Article I of the Constitution. And it is punishment: every affirmative action for one has an equal and opposite negative action for another. Had we instead heeded the liberal Democrat who recommended “benign neglect,” the wounds caused by slavery and Jim Crow might have healed years ago. Instead, we allow, even encourage, journalists, politicians, academia, and the popular entertainment media to continually pick, pick, pick at the scab: a cheap way to feel better about ourselves. Sometimes these opportunists fabricate, often they exaggerate. But to be even minimally plausible, they most often reach back decades or even centuries for their story lines, because the slaves and other victims of the worst of the past discrimination are – I hate to be the one to break this – dead. Too, it is remarkable how many of those who urge quotas (and reparations) upon us also oppose inherited wealth and advantage. By their lights, then, if after 1865 the freed slaves had been allowed to succeed, inheritance taxes should have prevented their passing any gain on to their descendants of the present day.

Soon enough a fallback euphemism for quotas appeared: diversity. By comparison this sounds harmless, but there is only one acceptable, indeed, possible way to gauge diversity: by the numbers. That is, by quotas. The system of quotas will be called something else, such as affirmative action or targeted hiring, but only their camouflage of additional syllables separates them from quotas. (And if diversity is so good, why is divisiveness so bad? Just wondering.)

Also closely related to discrimination is homophobia, a lofty dismissal of any opposition to homosexual activity as an expression of irrational fear or hatred. Here the phobia is merely assumed, as that is far less defensible than moral disapproval. In any case, neither fear nor hatred need be irrational; and even if fear and hatred were involved in the opposition to homosexuality, they follow logically from moral beliefs that have been strongly held for thousands of years by billions of people.
The confusion about homophobia is but an example of the misuse of toleration. Its proponents are quite intolerant of any exception to the general notion of toleration if the exception is based on personal beliefs – unless it is the proponents’ beliefs. And they automatically disallow any exception based on religious belief. (Moslems will know that their moment has passed, that they have, as it were, arrived in American popular culture, when it shifts from indulging Islam to despising it like any other religion.) Besides, it is not mere toleration that the proponents seek; it is legal protection and social approval: in toto, a privilege they will not extend to those who disagree. Worst of all, they link these for nearly any activity: it must be all of them (tolerated, approved, and legal) or it must be none of them. Or, as T.H. White wrote of the grim society of ants in The Sword in the Stone, “Everything not forbidden is compulsory.”

For an example of something that in less than a generation went from forbidden to compulsory: organizations like Planned Parenthood believe that it is, in the recent words of its president Gloria Feldt, “anti-choice arrogance” for a medical practitioner to choose not to participate in contraception and abortion. Why? It is impossible to know which is the basis for Feldt’s words – rank hypocrisy or a clueless inconsistency. Either way, if there are enough such rogue practitioners to make a significant difference in the availability of contraception and abortion, then they are also enough that their beliefs should be taken into account. But Feldt’s brand of totalitarian paranoia will brook no exceptions –for her, even one dissident suffices for a conspiracy, and somewhere, somehow, someone may be out of line. And for these arrogant anti-choice practitioners who resist the mandate, the director of something called the National Health Law Program has the final solution: “… At what point is it [refusing to perform an abortion] malpractice? If someone’s beliefs interfere with practicing their [sic] profession, perhaps they should do something else.” Ah, no pressure there, no anti-choice arrogance! Apparently being pro-choice is not what abortion proponents want; it is that one makes the correct choice: abortion.
Of course, all of these preceding encrustations stem from one: civil rights. The mere packaging of something as a civil right – by co-opting the jargon, personalities, organizations, presumptions, and odor of sanctity left over from the Movement’s glory years of two generations ago – has come to mean that it is a right, both civil and moral, and should remain so. Also sloughed over is this distinction: unlike the Bill of Rights, these newer rights are not aimed at protecting citizens from their governments, but rather at using the power of government to obligate other citizens and their property. That is, the jargon and so on of the Movement are enlisted in purely selfish interests.

A pattern is developing here: we Americans cannot reasonably discuss things like race and discrimination because we have so corrupted the pertinent vocabulary. It would seem best, then, to start over with new words, but by now those purely selfish interests are also vested and entrenched. More good news: hundreds of thousands of young people have spent too many years in American universities with Draconian and inconsistent speech codes; soon enough, they will be bringing this Pavlovian conditioning into our public schools, foundations, media, courts, and governments. At encountering the word discrimination they will follow the example of university administrators – that newly-classified phylum of invertebrates – and assume a fetal position.

Not so remarkably, diversity serves as a fallback for environmentalists, as well, though it is unclear why, given the infamous equation of PETA’s Ingrid Newkirk, that “… a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.” That is, if everything is the same, there is no diversity to maintain – we are all just so many blobs of cells. The PETA equation does not exalt the lower animals so much as lower the higher ones and, like all equalities, leaves us with no reason to differentiate. Given such moral equivalence, we need a tiebreaker – and self-interest is always at hand.

By diversity some few of the environmentalists may mean genetic diversity, to retain in the gene pool potentially beneficial genes (and deleterious ones, by the way). I suspect, though, that by diversity most of the marchers and saboteurs have noted those subtle differences invisible to Newkirk, and they instead mean no more than a variety of pretty plants and animals to look at. For example, Fran Mauer, an Alaska National Wildlife Refuge biologist, said of the oil drilling in two places that total .08% of the ANWR: “That would totally diminish any kind of wilderness experience.” Perhaps someone should have explained to Mauer, “Well, fer shure totally it would, if you keep hanging around one of those places and gawking at it. You’re bipedal; do a smart about-face and look somewhere else.” Mauer’s sort of expostulation reeks of a human-centered religiosity and estheticism: specism. As if to combat this specism, the Green Party strongly supports abortion, a practice that serve's to dry up the human gene pool, especially at the shallow end. (Of course, that is what Margaret Sanger intended with her support of abortion: post-coital eugenics.)
We are forever being told not to do this, not to do that. Foremost among the no-no’s is to legislate morality. That sounds so tolerant. So nice. But if not morality, then just what are we to legislate? Interests? Prejudices? The public interest, however determined? (In practice, this seldom is, and can be, little more than the toting up of special interests.) In practice, too, the stricture against legislating morality is now restricted to sexual morals because, as we saw in discussing homophobia, sex is the last respectable appetite, the 600-pound gorilla in our national pantheon. Most of those who, say, insist we tolerate same-sex marriage also regard affirmative action or the minimum wage as moral imperatives. So, when someone says, “You can’t legislate morality,” his unspoken coda is, But I can.

Similarly, liberals and some pro-life lite conservatives deride opponents of abortion as single-issue. Yet it is the liberals who, like Procrustes, attempt to trim and stretch everyone into one or another exclusive grouping based on, say, race or gender – some of which they deem to be more equal than others. (Now, that is a divisive practice!) And if the group does not exist, liberals will invent it. For example, a few years ago the New York Times earnestly referred to the “S&M community,” much as they would Harlem or the Village. Or they decry the wealthy, ignoring their own mega-rich supporters and candidates like George Soros and John Kerry-Heinz. Affecting to believe that the interests of the members of each group are identical – single-interest, that is – liberals promise to promote the interests of their favored groups, no matter how tinged by envy, greed, or vengeance. Liberals do not admit, or perhaps even notice, that their pet groups need not share the same interests and indeed might even be competing. For example, with so many groups clamoring for affirmative action, soon enough its proponents will have to determine which of their client groups are, so to speak, more unequal than others. There is nothing necessarily wrong with single-issue or single-interest; each reflects a high level of commitment. By those who oppose abortion, it is to the unborn children of other people; on the part of many members of other groups, it is to their own advancement.

Partisan and political are so often confused, and so often intentionally, that some think them identical. They are not. A partisan action is one based purely on party affiliation, and what a party hack says, at least publicly, has no more credibility than, say, a defense attorney's protestations of his client's innocence. A political action intends, if seldom with the purest of motives, to appeal to voters and taxpayers, something that seems hopelessly plebian to many politicians and members of the media, no matter how democratic they profess to be. It is from them that we most often hear accusations of pandering and demagoguery. These accusations may be true, but they are also admissions that if-we-let-this-turkey-come-to-a-vote-we'd-get-handed-our-heads.

Related terms are bipartisan and nonpartisan, and both are to be shunned. A bipartisan action is either a meaningless empty gesture or wildly expensive pork; often they manage to be both. Nonpartisan is a state of being lasting no more than a few nanoseconds, just long enough to garner tax-exempt status for an organization, which it will thereafter use to lobby to keep it. Nonpartisan organizations often share office space, staff, name, and ideology with their openly partisan brethren: a distinction without a difference, a hair only the IRS could split. Both are usually another IRS invention, the nonprofit organization. Nonprofits often stay in the red by paying high salaries to their staffs – in general, no organization is truly nonprofit if it has even one paid employee. The next time Chicken Little issues a press release that the sky is falling, remember that this is what Mr. Little does for a living.

Some have taken to referring to public schools as government schools. This name is appropriate, to be sure, but given the power of their employees' unions more accurate still is union schools. Every category and sub-category of school employee, including their principals and superintendents, has its own “association” – union is a word they abhor – but none approach the size or clout of the National Education Association. So dominant is the NEA that, at the national level, it owns and operates the PTA. We have a winner: the most accurate term is NEA schools.

Public accommodation is a concept invented to justify civil rights laws and like them is greatly overused. One place it is not used is private schools, so as to help maintain the wall of separation between them and public schools that the Founders so wisely specified in the Constitution’s Article – uh, it must be in there somewhere. This leads us to a word whose meaning and, consequently, protections are much less broad than its many advocates might admit: privacy. It is ironic that a culture that belligerently prides itself on allowing, tolerating, and approving just about any sort of behavior also insists that the behavior may be kept secret. And there is a major exception to the concept of privacy: private property is not. That is, your fellows may confiscate everything you own and leave you naked, but they may not inquire as to what you do once naked. Doubly ironic is the main exception to the exception: the last reliable proof of ownership is liability for whatever happens on it. In iudicium vocor, ergo possideo.* I am sued, therefore I own.

Another exception to the exception has been born in Ohio, where the new law permitting concealed carry of handguns allows the owner of what is otherwise defined as a public accommodation to bar access to anyone with a handgun, with or without the permit. Quite remarkably, a restaurant that is a public accommodation when it is, say, required to serve or hire some protected minority reverts to being private when it comes to the Second Amendment, which is thereby relegated to the back of the bus. This recognition of private property rights (as opposed to their liabilities), unique in recent legislation and jurisprudence, will require any prudent owner to bar access, because of concerns about liability and its evil twin, insurance premiums. Of course, the fatuous signs posted to prohibit weapons will not slow down anyone intent on robbery; it does mean that the owners can get insurance (and that only the robbers will be armed).

More subtle is social program, by which is meant, transfer program, wherein a government transfers money from one person to another by threat of force. The recipient may be poor, or he may be quite prosperous, a bureaucrat, academic, or vendor of goods like a landlord or farmer. (Indeed, transfer is accurate but so rigorously avoided that it has become the t-word.) Far better examples of social programs, ones that indiscriminately benefit a whole society, are the National Weather Service, police agencies, the Border Patrol, or the armed services.

Closely related to social programs is social justice, an attempt to achieve equity based on class, race, gender, or some other fashionable demarcation, not on any individual merit or action. No matter which basis, it is one-size-fits-all for the group in question, and the groupings of oppressed and oppressor are based far more on pick, pick, picking on history, even myth, than on the current relationships – once a kulak, always a kulak. So let us call it group justice. But in practice, at least in the United States (so far), social justice is not a coherent ideology or coherent anything else, and instead is merely a vague catchphrase intended to help justify transfer programs or quotas. That is, despite the rhetoric of envy and class warfare indulged in by academics, politicians, and the verbal class, you may not be hailed before a tribunal simply because your great-grandfather once made a fortune selling buggy whips. Well, at least not yet.

Also connected to this misuse of social for transfer programs are the names often adopted by the agencies that administer them – Human Services, Social Services, or even Health and Human Resources. (The last has become the usual euphemism for Personnel, itself a substitute for the ancient Hiring Office.) These names replaced welfare, as that had replaced relief, and that the dole, all of which lacked the conceit of the latest replacements: that only such agencies provide services to humans approaches the megalomaniacal. (Speaking of the euphemisms that so cloud our discourse: it is remarkable that since the Department of Defense replaced the War Department, the United States has never once declared war. Perhaps we no longer have the requisite vocabulary. Whoever heard of a ringing declaration of defense? It could not help but sound, well, defensive.)

One encrustation is so thick that it totally obscures the reality beneath: Federal government. We no longer have a federal system. The national government is not federal in any meaningful sense; it is instead the central or supreme government. Calling it the only government is most accurate but sounds too odd to catch on. This supreme government treats the various States at best as administrative units, at worst as conquered provinces, ones that to add injury to insult it expects to be self-supporting. This requirement is occasionally softened by the use of bribes in the form of Federal grants. Our citizens then behave as if their own taxes and debt were not the source for this Federal funding and that it comes instead from hypothetical Federal taxpayers, perhaps stashed in an abandoned salt mine in Utah.
Since the Supreme Court has allowed the curtailment of political speech, perhaps the Supremes could next make it subject to truth-in-labeling laws. However, the Court’s own decisions are among the worst offenders. But anyone who still believes that the definition of terms is not important is welcome to debate the matter in this forum.

We can toss a coin to see who gets to have the last word. Heads I win, tails you lose.

* Thanks to Fr. Ray Ryland for the rendering into Latin.

Terry Graves, a free-lance writer living near Pittsburgh, has contributed to Enter Stage Right, The Intellectual Conservative, The St. Austin Review, and The Conservative Monitor. His novel, Rain in Hell, is about original sin without, he hopes, being yet another example of it.