THE PROBLEM WITH LANGUAGE (…in 2022)

Linguistic gymnastics in the age of non-thinking...

I’ve noticed a disturbing, creeping trend over the past few years wherein Big Brother (the radical leftists in Academia and the literary world) seem to police language more and more grotesquely. Make no mistake: This language-distortion is a perversion.

Two things I hear from primarily young white Woke people all the time:

1.    Language is constantly evolving and changing so what’s the Big Deal?

2.    You’re just another WSM (White Straight Male) who’s afraid because things are new and different and changing. Your world-view is being fractured and that terrifies you.

I’d like to address both of these vexing points. (Which aren’t really points but rather excuses.)

#1. Yes, it’s true: Language is always evolving, growing, morphing, changing. This has been true since time immemorial. What words once meant in the original Latinate form thousands of years ago over time altered, and now the word sometimes means something often quite different. Cultures and generations transmogrify language in their own time and meanings diffract. Although usually the root Latinate or French or Greek word, etc, still holds a basic connection to our understanding of the word now. Example: The word ‘devolve.’ Which means ‘to gradually go from an advanced state to a less advanced state,’ or ‘to pass something, such as responsibility or power, from one person or group to a lower level of authority.’ It is connected to the words ‘evolve’ and ‘revolve.’ All three stem from the Latin verb ‘volvere’ which means, ‘to set in a circular course, to cause to roll, to bring round.’ ‘Devolvere’ means ‘to roll (something) down.’ In its earliest uses during the 15th century it meant literally ‘to roll onward or downward.’ In our current times the meaning has become more figurative, metaphorical, as when an authority hands down power to a lower level of authority, or when a situation falls (devolves) into chaos.

But: Words in the past have generally changed slowly over time and by the dictates of organic culture; as technology and civil rights and work and freedoms have expanded over time, more and more words and meanings of words have started to shift. What we’re seeing now, though, is different. Since roughly around 2013, when Wokeism seemed to explode across college campuses in an obvious way for the first time, we’ve seen a hardcore ideological drive to mechanically and purposefully change language. What the far left Wokies seem to want is to have their cake and eat it, too: They want to use traditional words (such as ‘gaslighting’) against their detractors, while simultaneously contradicting themselves by doing the very gaslighting they’re criticizing . It’s like they’ve taken the old words and cracked them open and have extracted all the meaning from them and inserted their own ideological bomb inside the words and then taped the words back together to make them look new and fresh and normal.

Examples.

Empathy:

As Dave Chappelle said in his TV special “The Closer”: Empathy must go both ways. It’s a two-way circuit. You can’t claim to be empathetic and then turn around and judge anybody who doesn’t agree with your myopic view of politics, culture, art, the world, etc. Woke people always claim to have vast reserves of empathy, and yet if someone (regardless of race, by the way) disagrees with their views, especially on gender or politics, suddenly empathy is long-gone. It's a very self-serving, ideological, extreme, and navel-gazing (read: selfish) way to think. And to repeat: This isn’t just WSM or white people in general. White Wokies are just as brutal towards Black, Hispanic, Asian and other groups who don’t agree with their narrow racial categories/views. I call this Selective-Empathy, or Woke-Empathy. How is this empathetic? How is this NOT racist? (The word probably most obviously contradictory is: Antiracism. Antiracism, wherein everyone belongs to a certain “group” identity and has no individual thoughts/ideas/characteristics) is supremely (word used on purpose) racist.

Inclusiveness:

Woke people love to include everybody in their circle, whether it be literary journal, magazine, grant, retreat, online forum, etc…as long as they don’t have the “wrong” views. (Again, this pertains to all genders and races. See John McWhorter, Coleman Hughes, Kmele Foster, the podcast Blocked and Reported, Sam Harris, etc.) Message for ya: This ISN’T inclusivity. Being truly inclusive means including all points of view, whether you agree with them or not. The net result of being “inclusive” while in actuality excluding anyone the group doesn’t agree with, is more division, more anger, more silos, more refracted media, more problems, less communication, less clarity, less understanding…less empathy.

Gaslighting:

This one frankly enrages me. Wokies love using this word. They use it as a distraction. They act like victims (again, the vast majority of Woke people are white) and claim that anyone who doesn’t share their view is “gaslighting” them, but all the while it’s actually the Wokies who are gaslighting all of US. What else do you call it? When whole sections of cities were being burned down during the 2020 George Floyd riots around the nation and BLM/the media was saying at the same time that this wasn’t actually happening, or that to the extent it was happening it was necessary: What else do you call that other than gaslighting? Trumpers not long before the BLM riots had been cuckolded by the media for gathering together without masks outside and protesting Covid lockdowns. Most people on the left found this act by Trumpers disgusting. (Myself included.)

(To be fair and as a reminder: I am no Republican. I understand why Trumpers chose Trump (the underlying motives) but absolutely abhor Trump himself. The January 6th riots (along with many, many examples on the right) were another example of gaslighting. The right has pretended that Jan 6 somehow wasn’t a big deal. (It was.) I am harder on the left because they are “part of my team,” my team being broadly the Democratic party. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The crazy reactions on the right (banning books, going hard against CRT, boasting American exceptionalism) are also damaging examples of gaslighting. But, and this is crucial to understand: As Zadie Smith said in her essay “Fences: A Brexit Diary” from her collection “Feel Free” (2018) page 29: The rise of Trump happened for deep systemic reasons. And every time the far left does or says something extreme (cancel-culture, silencing voices, being perceived as anti-free-speech, deplatforming people with different views, claiming there are no biological differences between men and women), guess what: The right responds. One side has to be the adult. I am hoping the Democratic party can finally take ownership for their side of this cultural-political quagmire. If we can take responsibility, and we can unite our party, there is at least a chance that we can heal.)

Mere months after the Trump Covid protestors millions of people across the nation are outside protesting and burning buildings down and it’s OK and normal and even necessary. Besides the obvious lying, corruption and confusion here: What else can you call this but gaslighting? Is this not the very definition of gaslighting? Here’s the Merriam-Webster definition of gaslighting: “psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one's emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator.” I have experienced this feeling of being manipulated and “questioning the validity of my own thoughts” dozens, perhaps hundreds of times over the past six years, both from Trump and the right, and from the radical Left. See what I mean about wanting their cake and eating it, too? Wokies want to be victims and perpetrators at the same time, but of course in a way that hides the latter and bolsters the former.

Open-mindedness:

No group is more close-minded than The Woke. Or, as John McWhorter calls them in his profound book, “Woke Racism”: The Elect. As the previous examples have hopefully shown: The far left is anything but open. Ironic, since their claim has always been that they seek diversity and inclusiveness. The truth is they seek ideological purity. In “Woke Racism” McWhorter refers to Wokeism as the new religion. I think he is dead right. They rely not on facts but on emotion. When the truth is inconvenient they bend it. (There are no differences between men and women; men can become pregnant; unarmed black men are being mowed down in the street left and right by white killer cops; etc.) They want to be the White Saviors by changing language and telling everyone in America how to think about race (Read: Robin DiAngelo), while simultaneously saying that to be white itself is to be racist and that white people need to Shut Up and Listen. (Except for The Elect: They are special and different.) People on the far left are generally young, generally white, generally upper class and generally highly educated. They represent a tiny percentage of Americans and they are far to the left of most Black Americans. (And most of the country in general.)

Here’s what I think. I think the real racists are The Wokies. Me thinks thou doth protest too much. I think it’s actually they who are filled with self-doubt and self-disgust. They, who are victims of trendy groupthink. They, who cannot see that they have fallen into the trap of “1984” and “Animal Farm.” It’s the rest of us—the “exhausted moderate majority”—who are the normal ones. It’s they who are broken, angry and toxic. Young Millennials and Gen Z. Their blurry, ahistorical, idealistic thinking is the result of coddling by helicopter parents, the rise of the iPhone and the internet, the loss of civics classes, the dissolution of critical-thinking (another abused word), and the politicization on both sides of the media, academia, and business. Commonsense has left us, people. No adults are in the room. And these are the young people who will one day run our world. Are you scared? You should be. You think Mark Zuckerberg is bad? Wait for the Woke Takeover.

Here’s a fascinating article by black writer DARVIO MORROW in Newsweek from December, 2021: CLICK HERE. Below is a brief quote from Morrow’s piece:

“And time after time, it has been Black Democrats who have had the fearlessness to call out the white progressives whose woke excesses harm Black Americans while they posture as our saviors. Meanwhile, the Democratic establishment largely remains silent—or worse, embraces the same woke language while abandoning our actual concerns and political preferences.”

#2. (You’re just another WSM [White Straight Male] who’s afraid because things are new and different and changing. Your world-view is being fractured and that terrifies you.) This is very simple and I’ll be seriously brief. The idea that “if it’s new it must be good” is horse-shit. Hitler and his extreme views were new in the 1920s. Communism in 1917 in Russia was new. Eugenics was once new. Mass industrialism was once new. Gasoline and coal were once new. My point is: Something’s newness has zero to do with it’s moral goodness or practical usefulness. Yes: Language changes over time. But who are behind those changes right now? How fast are those changes occurring? Do the mass of citizens agree with these changes? Who gets to make these choices? Should words like “racism” be infinitely bendable and moldable, or should the word at least have a basic spine which explains what it objectively is to be racist? Is it now up to a generation of people with little to no critical-thinking skills, who read less and less, who are more siloed and distracted than ever before in history, who are more interested in their iPhone than in real human connection, who live online, who want to claim that the United States was founded not in 1775 but in 1619?  

The point of all this ranting—and it is ranting, I admit that—is to say: We should all stop and really think (I know: So passe at this point) about what changes are occurring around us, why those changes are occurring, what that might mean for our future and future generations, and whether we want to live in a free liberal democracy or a pseudo-Marxist fantasyland where everyone is viewed solely by their skin color and group identity. (The exact opposite of what Dr. Martin Luther King preached.) Because if we’re not careful, the kids are going to pull the rug out from under us and we won’t know what hit us.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to live in that world.