Here’s yrstrly participating in a TV debate on Political Correctness. The other participants were Robert Shibley from FIRE and Lenora Billings-Harris.
I am particularly pleased with the final point I made about “who reclaims” abusive language, previously formulated in a post on this very blog.
One disappointment was my failure to challenge to the host Peter Lavelle when he claimed that the Russian press do not feel pressurised to say anything bad about Vladimir Putin. I claimed that ‘political correctness’ was used in many countries to enforce the political orthodoxy of the ruling elites, including in Russia. Peter retorted that though there were states where that happens, he (working in Russia) was not living in one. On reflection, instead of shaking my head in disbelief (never effective on a split screen TV programme) I should have asserted that many Russian journalists would disagree with him.
I would also have liked more time to engage Robert Shibley on the censure of Christian groups on campus. Very often I think that freedom of (Christian) religion is used as an excuse for unfettered homophobia, and the ‘political correctness’ that responds is really just healthy counter-speech. Having said that, I think the discussion we had did go beyond the shrill superficiality of most debates on this subject. Take a look at the comments on the YouTube page for the clip – almost universally vile and stupid.
Tag: Political Correctness (Page 5 of 8)
On Twitter, I have been discussing the use of mental health terms in political speech with the journalist Beatrice Bray. In recent weeks, Guardian cartoonists Martin Rowson and Steve Bell have both used the term ‘psychotic’ to describe political figures in negative terms. Beatrice says this is wrong and that is marginalises people who are actually clinically diagnosed with psychosis.
On the one hand, I think this is a case of ‘useful’ political correctness. First, I’ve said before that a respect for names and labels, of people, groups or cities, is one of my tenets of useful and persusive speech. Free speech campaigners always reserve the right to offend… but when we do, we are usually referring to the right to offend the people we are talking about! What Beatrice is complaining of in this case, is that other people – those with an actual mental illness – are the ones being hurt in the cross-fire. And I have sympathy with her contention that the ‘hurt’ caused is a very real social marginalisation, rather than just ‘hurt feelings’.
On the other hand, I cannot shake a feeling at the back of my mind, a sense that Rowson and Bell and others who use mental health terminology, are in fact using the words as metaphors.
Often, the term employed as a metaphor is not always used properly. ‘Spastic‘ was often used to convey mental deficiencies when in fact it refers medically to a motor/physical illness; and schizophrenia means delusional and disorganised, not split-personality.
However, I think Rowson and Bell are at least getting their metaphors straight. They seek to describe the Conservatives’ policies as being dangerously out-of-touch with reality. They reach into our vocabularies for a word that describes such trait… and often, the word ‘psychotic’ fits the bill. We all know that David Cameron does not actually have a clinical mental illness… but the term seems the perfect metaphor for his political tactics (as least to a liberal lefty).
So, while many will consider the word extreme, they nevertheless know that it is an accurate metaphor for the concepts under discussion. Does that necessarily translate into harm against people with a clinical psychosis? Thoughts and opinions welcomed.
The PCC have upheld the complaint made by TV presenter Clare Balding against the Sunday Times. In July, the critic AA Gill called her a “dyke on a bike”, which the PCC agreed was a form of discrimination.
In addition, the newspaper drew attention to two organisations called Dykes on Bikes (an American lesbian motorcycling movement; and a UK-based cycling movement) whose members had reclaimed the word “dyke” as an empowering, not offensive, term. It argued that an individual’s sexuality should not give them an “all-encompassing protected status”. …
In this case, the Commission considered that the use of the word “dyke” in the article – whether or not it was intended to be humorous – was a pejorative synonym relating to the complainant’s sexuality. The context was not that the reviewer was seeking positively to “reclaim” the term, but rather to use it to refer to the complainant’s sexuality in a demeaning and gratuitous way.
This reminds me of an interesting video blog I watched recently by Jay Smooth of the Ill Doctrine. In it, he makes the pithy point that, in general, “if you are not the original subject of an insult, you can’t be the one to reclaim it.” This seems a sensible rule of thumb to me.
This reclaiming of offensive words relates to david Foster Wallace’s discussions around dialect. He pointed out that words in opne dialect – for example, ‘Nigga’ in Black Urban English – is very different from using the ‘N-word’ in other contexts. This should be the put-down to idiots like AA Gill who are deliberately offensive and then try and cover their tracks by wailing “but other people use it!”
Five Chinese Crackers spots a stinker from Baroness Warsi:
“Well I think there’s a difference between multiculturalism per se, and state multiculturalism, where the state intervenes and says, ‘You will do this, you will do that.'” For example, she offers, “When the state says ‘We’ll have winterfest instead of Christmas, so everyone feels included.’ That’s wrong.”
Eh? Did I miss something? When – and you don’t have to be exact now, a year will do – did the state say we’ll have Winterfest instead of Christmas? (Except for the time when Cromwell’s government banned Christmas, smartypants).
The Guardian article by Decca Aitkenhead is here. Now is the perfect time to link to Oliver Burkeman’s fantastic debunking of the Winterval myth:
Perhaps the most notorious of the anti-Christmas rebrandings is Winterval, in Birmingham, and when you telephone the Birmingham city council press office to ask about it, you are met first of all with a silence that might seasonably be described as frosty. “We get this every year,” a press officer sighs, eventually. “It just depends how many rogue journalists you get in any given year. We tell them it’s bollocks, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference.”
According to an official statement from the council, Winterval – which ran in 1997 and 1998, and never since – was a promotional campaign to drive business into Birmingham’s newly regenerated town centre. It began in early November and finished in January.
Clicking back from the Five Chinese Crackers post, I find that the Exclarotive blog has been logging similar myths. Anton Vowl spotted another example of the Conservatives propagating the nonsense, this time over health and safety legislation. Ann Widdecombe cited several examples of PC gone mad during our debate on the issue last year. I wonder how many had any substance?
One might think that debunking articles, such as those mentioned above, might serve to sink the highly dangerous armada of lies that sails through our society, leaving a hatred of immigrants in its wake. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to be so. In the Boston Globe, John Keohane reports on a University of Michigan study that shows that the introduction of new facts may actually cause people to double-down on their strongly held misconceptions.
“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon — known as “backfire” — is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”
This is why we need to discuss much of our politics in terms of narrative. It sounds pretentious, but the fact is that a single article giving some facts will rarely reverse a political consensus.
Update
Here’s my namesake in the Independent with a similarly fine debunking.
Åsne Seierstad, a Norwegian author, has been successfully sued in Norway over her book Bookseller of Kabul. It is a fictionalised account of her time staying with a family in Afghanistan, and much of the family’s private life is laid bare for the reader in unflattering detail.
On Comment is Free, journalist Conor Foley lays in to Seierstad, outlining the social faux pas she has committed:
Some may argue that freedom of artistic expression should be completely divorced from such political considerations. However, a writer who chooses to use a conflict as the background for their work cannot plead cultural immunity when real life intrudes on the result.
Indeed. But being stung, criticised and discredited for failing to respect cultural norms should not be punished in a civil or criminal court. Jonathan Heawood, director of English PEN, explains in the Independent why this development is a worry:
That’s not to say that Seierstad has not broken an unwritten code of hospitality, or that the Rais family has not faced problems as a result of the book’s publication. Although Rais himself continues to operate a successful business out of Kabul, his first wife has sought asylum in Canada and other members of the family are now living in Pakistan. But is this discrepancy in the fates of the male and female members of the family the fault of a Norwegian journalist – or Afghan society? Is it appropriate for a Norwegian court to punish the messenger? Is a court of law the place to determine how a book treats the “honour” of an entire society?
The example that such cases set is a very bad one. What happens when an investigative journalist wants to deliberately abuse the hospitality of an Afghan businessman, in order to expose corruption? What if an Afghani journalist wants to make similar, off-message commentary about his countrymen. Seierstad should certainly suffer the reputational and social hit of her insensitivity, but dragging this sort of roman a clef into the court-room is a terrible precedent for free expression.