Feb 25, 2023 10:52 PM
(This post was last modified: Feb 25, 2023 11:11 PM by C C.)
The obsessive policing of language in the name of progress relies on magical thinking.
https://quillette.com/2023/02/24/a-consp...notations/
EXCERPTS: Discussions of censorship often operate from the assumption that the main motivation of censors is the suppression of dissent. For that reason, critiques of censorship often attack the idea of suppression: Censorship is often counterproductive and only makes samizdat material more popular. And if an idea is systematically censored, we can never really be sure that it’s wrong, since we’ll never see a full and honest accounting of the evidence for and against it. These are good arguments against suppression, and there are plenty more where they come from.
However, the goal of suppression does not explain a lot of contemporary censorship, which aims to punish innocuous statements alleged to carry some sort of pernicious hidden message capable of changing the way people think and behave. In such instances, the censorious impulse appears to be paired with a clownishly ridiculous idea of how language and society work—a kind of conspiracy theory of connotations. Three examples of this bizarre approach have made the news in recent weeks...
[...] “Wokeness” is an inchoate phenomenon. It may be that, as critics of its pejorative use allege, it is too difficult to define to be of any analytical use. But surely this backwards understanding of language, not to mention the strident and apparently arbitrary way in which it is policed, is central to what bothers people about contemporary progressive activism. The notion that our minds are somehow vulnerable to subliminal psychic attack by malevolent political forces seems to do violence to common sense and experience.
[...] Some academics even want politics to be conducted by explicitly redefining words to fit political preconceptions. [...] If the conspiracy theory of language fails to convince us that words are capable of harming people, potential harm can still be alleged because the meanings of words that describe harm have become excessively broad.
Against this strategy stands a conviction that the world comes first, and then our feelings about it, and that our language only follows after. The dispute about language is therefore a dispute about the direction of causation. The new censoriousness is informed by the idea that our problems begin with language, which determines how people feel about things, which in turn determines behavior and outcomes... (MORE - missing details)
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Placing language as first in the hierarchy of being harks back to social constructivism, linguistic idealism, etc. Such was a component in postmodern agenda to derail the natural world slash science from dictating anything prescriptive about human behavior, thus assisting the cultural egalitarianism of putting the beliefs of pre-modern, non-Western beliefs and communities and new ones (going against the grain) on equal footing with Western traditions. To relieve the colonial guilt of the white intellectual class, and secondarily accommodate the anarchical fantasy of achieving absolute freedom.
https://quillette.com/2023/02/24/a-consp...notations/
EXCERPTS: Discussions of censorship often operate from the assumption that the main motivation of censors is the suppression of dissent. For that reason, critiques of censorship often attack the idea of suppression: Censorship is often counterproductive and only makes samizdat material more popular. And if an idea is systematically censored, we can never really be sure that it’s wrong, since we’ll never see a full and honest accounting of the evidence for and against it. These are good arguments against suppression, and there are plenty more where they come from.
However, the goal of suppression does not explain a lot of contemporary censorship, which aims to punish innocuous statements alleged to carry some sort of pernicious hidden message capable of changing the way people think and behave. In such instances, the censorious impulse appears to be paired with a clownishly ridiculous idea of how language and society work—a kind of conspiracy theory of connotations. Three examples of this bizarre approach have made the news in recent weeks...
[...] “Wokeness” is an inchoate phenomenon. It may be that, as critics of its pejorative use allege, it is too difficult to define to be of any analytical use. But surely this backwards understanding of language, not to mention the strident and apparently arbitrary way in which it is policed, is central to what bothers people about contemporary progressive activism. The notion that our minds are somehow vulnerable to subliminal psychic attack by malevolent political forces seems to do violence to common sense and experience.
[...] Some academics even want politics to be conducted by explicitly redefining words to fit political preconceptions. [...] If the conspiracy theory of language fails to convince us that words are capable of harming people, potential harm can still be alleged because the meanings of words that describe harm have become excessively broad.
Against this strategy stands a conviction that the world comes first, and then our feelings about it, and that our language only follows after. The dispute about language is therefore a dispute about the direction of causation. The new censoriousness is informed by the idea that our problems begin with language, which determines how people feel about things, which in turn determines behavior and outcomes... (MORE - missing details)
- - - - - - - - -
Placing language as first in the hierarchy of being harks back to social constructivism, linguistic idealism, etc. Such was a component in postmodern agenda to derail the natural world slash science from dictating anything prescriptive about human behavior, thus assisting the cultural egalitarianism of putting the beliefs of pre-modern, non-Western beliefs and communities and new ones (going against the grain) on equal footing with Western traditions. To relieve the colonial guilt of the white intellectual class, and secondarily accommodate the anarchical fantasy of achieving absolute freedom.
"Strong social constructivism as a philosophical approach tends to suggest that "the natural world has a small or non-existent role in the construction of scientific knowledge". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constructivism