Language Matters – Page 26 – Maverick Philosopher

‘Homophobia’ and ‘Carniphobia’

If you are a conservative, don't talk like a liberal! I've made this point before but it bears repeating. We conservatives should never acquiesce in the Left's acts of linguistic vandalism. Battles in the culture war are often lost and won on linguistic ground. So we ought to oppose resolutely the Left's attempts at linguistic corruption.

Take 'homophobia.'

A phobia is a fear, but not every fear is a phobia. A phobia is an irrational fear. One who argues against the morality of homosexual practices, or gives reasons for opposing same-sex marriage is precisely — presenting arguments, and not expressing any phobia. The arguments may or may not be cogent. But they are expressive of reason, and are intended to appeal to the reason of one's interlocutor. To dismiss them as an expression of a phobia show a lack of respect for reason and for the persons who proffer the arguments.

There are former meat-eaters who can make an impressive case against the eating of meat. Suppose that, instead of addressing their arguments, one denounces the former carnivores as 'carniphobes.' Can you see what is wrong with that? These people have a reasoned position. Their reasoning may be more or less cogent, their premises more or less disputable. But the one thing they are not doing is expressing an irrational fear of eating meat. Many of them like the stuff and dead meat inspires no fear in them whatsoever.

The point should be obvious: 'homophobia' is just as objectionable as 'carniphobia.' People who use words like these are attempting to close off debate, to bury a legitimate issue beneath a crapload of PeeCee jargon. So it is not just that 'homophobe' and 'homophobia' are question-begging epithets; they are question-burying epithets.

And of course 'Islamophobia' and cognates are other prime examples. Once again, a phobia is an irrational fear. But fear of radical Islam is not at all irrational. You are a dolt if you use these terms, and a double dolt if you are a conservative.

Language matters.

Why does language matter? Because clear thinking matters, and language is the medium of thought.

Why does clear thinking matter? Because clear thinking is truth-conducive.

Why does truth matter? Because living according to the truth is conducive to human flourishing.

Neologism: A Merton

A merton is a person who doesn't distinguish between studying a subject and writing a book about it.

Cf. The Journals of Thomas Merton, vol. III, 136: "Thought of writing a book on Columbia under Spain . . ..") In his short life Merton published some 60 books, some of them good, some of them but attempts to work his way into a subject.

Why Write?

A reader sends me the following quotation from a Richard Mitchell:

I have never yet written anything, long or short, that did not surprise me. That is, for me at least, the greatest worth of writing, which is only incidentally a way of telling others what you think. Its first use is for the making of what you think, for the discovery of understanding, an act that happens only in language.

I surmise that the Richard Mitchell in question is The Underground Grammarian.

I agree with Mitchell's thought subject to a minor qualification. The achievement of understanding is not possible without language, but it does not, in every instance, require writing, or even speech. Nevertheless, the perfection of (discursive) understanding is possible only by writing.

Second to the careful articulation of one's thought in written language comes that rare event called 'dialogue,' in which two sympathetic minds use each other to arrive at a truth that transcends both.

‘Traditional Marriage’ or ‘Natural Marriage’?

This from long-time reader, Bill Tingley:

As always, Bill, I find reading your blog enlightening and enjoyable. I note you are using the term "traditional marriage" to refer to marriage. Now that the Supreme Court has redefined marriage as nothing more than a civil union, the meaning of the word "marriage" is in turmoil. So we do need a term to mean what "marriage" has always meant until the day before yesterday. Instead of "traditional marriage", I suggest "natural marriage". "Natural" more accurately conveys what is essential to marriage than "traditional" does. After all, everything that can be said to be traditional about marriage follows what is natural about it, sexual complementarity. More than that, natural law informs us that the good of sexual complementarity is actualized in marriage. Nor does it hurt that the rhetorical force of "natural" pushes buttons that confuse the Leftists and denies them their knee-jerk response to all that is labeled traditional.

Now that the Left has destroyed the word 'marriage,' we need a word to distinguish the genuine article from the leftist innovation. I agree with Tingley about this. I suggest 'traditional marriage.' He suggests 'natural marriage.' His reason for the superiority of the latter over the former is that:

. . . everything that can be said to be traditional about marriage follows what is natural about it, sexual complementarity.

I think this overlooks something important, namely, that marriage, while grounded in the biological complementarity of male and female human animals, and essentially so grounded, is a social institution. So there is more to marriage than the merely natural. For this reason, I prefer 'traditional marriage' to 'natural marriage.'

To clarify this, a brief look at the relation between the natural-biological and the social-cultural is in order.

Consider three situations, each a kind of 'intercourse.' (1) A man and a woman playing chess with each other. (2) A man and a woman just copulating with each other. (3) A man and a woman getting married to each other and consummating their marriage.

Ad (1). Chess has no objective reality outside of the system of rules or laws that constitute it, and these are of a conventional nature. In this regard, the laws of chess are nothing like the laws of nature.* They are not descriptive of culture-independent occurrences. Nor are the rules of chess prescriptively regulative of processes and transactions external to them, in the way traffic laws regulate vehicular processes, and laws against fraud regulate business transactions by setting up norms that one ought to follow when one drives or does business. The rules of chess are constitutive of the game, not regulative of some antecedent process, and what they constitute is something of a wholly conventional nature. Chess is a social artifact in toto; there is nothing natural about it. A man and a woman playing chess are engaged in a social interaction with no natural or physical process underpinning it. Of course, the touching and moving of pieces are physical processes, but there is nothing in the physical world corresponding to an instance of chessic intercourse in the way there is something in nature corresponding to a description of photosynthesis.

Ad (2). Brute copulation is at the opposite extreme. Copulation is a physical process whether it is done in marriage or outside marriage, whether it is done lovingly or rapaciously. Brute copulation has nothing social or cultural about it. It makes sense to say that chess is a social construct or a social artifact; it makes no sense to say that brute copulation is a social construct or social artifact.

I am assuming a healthy-minded realism. I am assuming that there is an important distinction between what John Searle calls brute facts and what he calls institutional facts. It is a brute fact that the sun is 93 million miles from the earth or that two animals are copulating. It is an institutional fact that Barack Obama is POTUS and Michelle Obama FLOTUS. A woman's being pregnant is a brute fact; a child's being illegitimate is an institutional fact. The existence of gold, the metal Au, is a brute fact; the existence of money is an institutional fact even if the money is realized in gold coins. "Brute facts exist independently of any human institutions; institutional facts can exist only within human institutions." (The Construction of Social Reality, p. 27) It follows from these definitions that the consummation of a marriage, even though it necessarily involves sexual intercourse, is an institutional fact.

(Searle's use of 'brute fact' is a bit idiosyncratic. I would say, and I think most philosophers would agree, that a brute fact is a contingently obtaining state of affairs the obtaining of which has no causal or other explanation. If an atheist says that the universe just happens to exist without cause or reason, then he is saying that its existence is a brute fact in my sense. Of course, it is also a brute fact in Searle's sense. Only a leftist loon would maintain that the physical universe is a social construct. That the moon has craters, however, is not a brute fact in my sense though it is in Searle's inasmuch as it is not an institutional fact. That astronomical distances are measured in light-years is an institutional fact, but not the distances themselves!)

Ad (3). Marriage is between chess and brute copulation.** Chess is whatever FIDE or the United States Chess Federation says it is. Marriage cannot be what any legislative body, or bunch of judges playing legislators, says it is. For it is grounded essentially in the natural fact of human sexual complementarity. Chess is entirely a social construct; marriage is not.

On the other hand, marriage, unlike brute copulation, has a social side: it is after all a contract. For this reason, I prefer 'traditional marriage' over 'natural marriage.' Strictly speaking, there is no natural marriage: non-humans mate and reproduce and cohabit, but they don't marry.

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*An interesting question is whether 'laws of chess' can only be construed as a subjective genitive: the laws of chess are chess's laws, not laws about something external to these laws. But 'laws of nature' can also be construed as an objective genitive: the laws of nature are laws about something external to them, namely the natural world.

**And if I may be permitted a joke, too much chess and any extramural copulation, brute or not, can destroy a marriage.

On ‘Disenfranchise’ and Hillary’s Will to Power

According to the WSJ, Hillary Clinton thinks that Republican-controlled states have “systematically and deliberately” tried to “disempower and disenfranchise” voters.

Here is another clear example of how leftists distort language for their political advantage.

To disenfranchise is to deprive of a right, in particular, the right to vote. But only some people have the right to vote. Felons and children do not have the right to vote, nor do non-citizens. Not yet, anyway. You do not have the right to vote in a certain geographical area simply because you are a sentient being residing in that area. Otherwise, my cats would have the right to vote. Now a requirement that one prove that one has the right to vote is not to be confused with a denial of the right to vote.

My right to vote is one thing, my ability to prove I have the right another. If, on a given occasion, I cannot prove that I am who I claim to be, then I won't be able to exercise my right to vote on that occasion; but that is not to say that I have been 'disenfranchised.' For I haven't be deprived of my right to vote; I have merely been prevented from exercising my right on that occasion due to my inability do prove my identity.

But for a leftist, the end justifies the means; all's fair in love and war; and politics is war. This explains why they have no scruples about hijacking the English language.

It is not that Hillary does not know what 'disenfranchise' means; it is that she will do anything to win, including destroying what ought to be a neutral framework within which to conduct our debates.

Language matters because he who controls the language controls the debate.

Obama and Pigeon Chess

I've said it before: beware of unsourced 'quotations.' An über-conservative correspondent forwarded me the following:

"Negotiating with Obama is like playing chess with a pigeon." "The pigeon knocks over all the pieces, shits on the board and then struts around like it won the game."
~Vladimir Putin

Now Obama is indeed a feckless fool, and a disaster for the country and the world. It is a blot upon the American electorate that this mendacious incompetent was elected and then, horribile dictu, re-elected. I hope we can all agree on that. Mockery and derision are appropriate weapons to deploy against him and his supporters. But we who stand up for truth ought to be especially scrupulous about getting things right. So I ran the 'quotation' past Snopes.com whereat it is plausibly maintained that Putin said no such thing. There I snagged this nifty graphic:

A Checkered Past

Having recently compared two lunch companions to each other in point of having checkered pasts, but aware of recent shifts in the meaning of the phrase, and not wishing to give offense, I quizzed one of them on the meaning of 'has a checkered past' as applied to a woman and to a man. He replied that it suggests that the woman was a prostitute and the man a crook.

That answer is not wrong and accords with current usage. If you listen carefully to how 'checkered past,' 'checkered career,' and similar expressions are now used, I think you will find that they are often used with a pejorative connotation. But the phrase originally had no such negative connotation as far as I can tell. My old Webster's defines checker, v.t., as to vary with contrasting elements or situations and gives the example of a checkered career as a racer. Nothing pejorative about that: the racer's career had its ups and downs. Or one might describe a man whose 20s were spent in the Jesuits, his 30s teaching philosophy, his 40s as a soldier of fortune, and his 50's as an exterminator of insects as having had a checkered past. Nothing pejorative about that either.

Only a liberal or an idiot thinks that change qua change is good. And so I hold to the old way of using 'checkered past.' But I can do so only if my language mates let me. Like it or not, meaning is tied to use. If the phrase comes to be used in an exclusively pejorative way, then I must conform to the change if I want to communicate with the vulgar as opposed to display my erudition among the learned.

It is too bad that we are at the mercy of the masses in so many things, though not in all things. I have no objection to the phrase 'male chauvinism.' But if enough come to substitute 'chauvinism' for it, then the former has been rendered redundant and the latter destroyed. And that would be a change for the worse. I suppose this makes me a limited prescriptivist in matters linguistic.

For more on this particular example, see Chauvinism and Male Chauvinism.

Addendum. And then there's 'hook up.' To members of my generation it does not imply an exchange of bodily fluids when used in a sentence like 'I hooked up with Sally again after years and years.' Peter Geach, an English philosopher of my father's generation, in one of his books uses 'make love' to mean something like 'woo' or 'make a romantic approach,' a quaint usage that had fallen into desuetude by the time my generation came of age, a usage to be replaced in the main by one rather more raw and 'hydraulic.'

Trigger Warning!

The grandpappy of them all is attributable to Hanns Johst: Wenn ich Kultur höre, entsichere ich meinen Browning! "When I hear the word culture, I release the safety on my Browning."

Often misquoted and misattributed. I myself misquoted it once as Wenn ich das Wort 'Kulture' höre, entsichere ich meine Pistole. I apologize for that rare lapse from the high standards of MavPhil. Wikipedia:

When the Nazis achieved power in 1933, Johst wrote the play Schlageter, an expression of Nazi ideology performed on Hitler's 44th birthday, 20 April 1933, to celebrate his victory. It was a heroic biography of the proto-Nazi martyr Albert Leo Schlageter. The famous line "when I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun", often associated with Nazi leaders, derives from this play. The actual original line from the play is slightly different: "Wenn ich Kultur höre … entsichere ich meinen Browning!" "Whenever I hear of culture… I release the safety catch of my Browning!" (Act 1, Scene 1). It is spoken by another character in conversation with the young Schlageter. In the scene Schlageter and his wartime comrade Friedrich Thiemann are studying for a college examination, but then start disputing whether it is worthwhile doing so when the nation is not free. Thiemann argues he would prefer to fight than to study.

SCHLAGETER: Good old Fritz! (Laughing.) No paradise will entice you out of your barbed wire entanglement!

THIEMANN: That's for damned sure! Barbed wire is barbed wire! I know what I'm up against…. No rose without a thorn!… And the last thing I'll stand for is ideas to get the better of me! I know that rubbish from '18 …, fraternity, equality, …, freedom …, beauty and dignity! You gotta use the right bait to hook 'em. And then, you're right in the middle of a parley and they say: Hands up! You're disarmed…, you republican voting swine!—No, let 'em keep their good distance with their whole ideological kettle of fish … I shoot with live ammunition! When I hear the word culture …, I release the safety on my Browning!"

SCHLAGETER: What a thing to say!

THIEMANN: It hits the mark! You can be sure of that.

SCHLAGETER: You've got a hair trigger.

—Hans Johst's Nazi Drama Schlageter. Translated with an introduction by Ford B. Parkes-Perret. Akademischer Verlag Hans-Dieter Heinz, Stuttgart, 1984.

The famous line is regularly misattributed, sometimes to Hermann Göring and sometimes to Heinrich Himmler. In December 2007, historian David Starkey misattributed it to Joseph Goebbels in comments criticizing Queen Elizabeth II for being "poorly educated and philistine".^[1] It has also been adapted, for example by Stephen Hawking as "When I hear of Schrödinger's cat, I reach for my pistol" and by filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard in 1963's film Le Mépris, when a producer says to Fritz Lang: "Whenever I hear the word culture, I bring out my checkbook." Lang evokes the original line as he answers "Some years ago—some horrible years ago—the Nazis used to take out a pistol instead of a checkbook." Songwriter Roger Miller of Mission of Burma titled his 1981 song "That's When I Reach for My Revolver" after the line.^{[citation needed]}

Edward 'Cactus Ed' Abbey also riffs on the Johst line with his

I hate intellectual discussion. When I hear the words "phenomenology" or "structuralism", I reach for my buck knife. (Somewhere in Vox Clamantis in Deserto)

and his

When I hear the word ‘phenomenology,’ I reach for my revolver. (See here.)

Exercise for the reader: find more riffs!

UPDATE

Big Henry offers, "When I read the words 'trigger warning,' I reach for my delete key."

I'll go him one better. "When I hear the words 'trgger warning,' I reach for 1911 model .45 ACP."

Like Being the Chief Rabbi in Mecca

I heard David Brooks on C-Span 2 last night. He uncorked a very funny line. "I am the conservative at The New York Times, which is like being the chief rabbi in Mecca."

By the way, it was a mention by Brooks in his latest book that got my friend Lupu onto Soloveitchik. Now I am reading the good rabbi. I have finished The Lonely Man of Faith and I've started on Halakhic Man. Impressive and important for those of us exercised by the Athenian-Hierosolymanic dialectic.

In other humor news, Heather Wilhelm reports, via Chelsea Clinton, that the Clinton family motto is, wait for it:

“We have a saying in my family—it’s always better to get caught trying (rather than not try at all).”

Wilhelm comments:

Full disclosure: When I first read that sentence, I laughed out loud. Next, I read it two more times, just to make sure it was not some glorious figment of my imagination. “Get caught trying?” Who makes this their family motto? Concerned that I was missing the popular resurgence of this wise old adage—a saying that ranks right up there with “There’s more than one way to obliterate an old email server” and “If the silverware is missing, Sandy Berger’s pants are a-jangling”—I decided to Google “get caught trying.” If you’re looking for lots of advice on how to do things like hide an affair from your spouse, illegally sneak over the border, or fight off a wild crow that is trying to eat your lunch, I suggest you do the same.

Here’s the thing: If you “get caught” doing something, it implies that you are doing something secretive, underhanded, or out-and-out bad. What kind of family, outside of the Corleone crime syndicate, instinctively associates “trying” with doing something surreptitious, or an action where one can get “caught”? Moreover, is there any one-liner in the history of the world—with the exception, of course, of “It depends what the meaning of ‘is’ is”—that better sums up the Clinton ethos?

What Miss Wilhelm fails to realize, however, is the signal impetus Bill Cinton gave to a renewed assault upon the question of the meaning of Being, die Frage nach dem Sinn von Sein, a question occluded and forgotten (Seinsvergessenheit!) in political precincts until Bubba re-ignited it with his penetrating inquiry into the manifold meanings of 'is.'

On Advertising One’s Political Correctness

I am reading an article on some arcane topic such as counterfactual conditionals when I encounter a ungrammatical use of 'they' to avoid the supposedly radioactive 'he.' I groan: not another PC-whipped leftist! I am distracted from the content of the article by the political correctness of the author. As I have said more than once, PC comes from the CP, and what commies, and leftists generally, attempt to do is to inject politics into every aspect of life. It is in keeping with their totalitarian agenda.

If you complain that I am injecting politics into this post, I will say that I am merely combating and undoing the mischief of leftists. It is analogous to nonviolent people using violence to defend themselves and their way of life against the violent. We conservatives who want the political kept in its place and who are temperamentally disinclined to be political activists must become somewhat active to undo the damage caused by leftist totalitarians.

By the way, there is nothing sexist about standard English; the view that it is is a leftist doctrine that one is free to reject. It is after all a debatable point. Do you really think that the question whether man is basically good is the question whether males are basically good? If you replace 'he' with 'she,' then you tacitly concede that both can be used gender-neutrally. But then what becomes of your objection to 'he'?

You are of course free to disagree with what I just wrote, and you are free to write as you please. I defend your right to free speech. Do you defend mine? I understand your point of view though I don't agree with it. I can oppose you without abusing you though I may abuse you from time to time to give you a tase taste of your own medicine should you abuse me. Call me a 'sexist' for using standard English and I may return the compliment by calling you a 'destructive PC-whipped leftist.'

It's all for your own good.

Here's a modest proposal. Let's view the whole thing as a free speech issue. Don't harass me for using standard English and I won't mock you for your silly innovations. We contemporary conservatives are tolerant. I fear that you contemporary liberals are not. Prove me wrong.

It's a funny world in which conservatives are the new liberals, and liberals are the new . . . .

Imagine No ‘Re-Imagine’

Imagine no 're-imagine'
It's easy if you try
No such bullshit lingo
From the journalists' sty

Imagine all the people
Speaking sensibly
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one

Come along and join us
And foolish innovation's done.

Is He Your Prophet?

Here are some questions for journalists. Why do you refer to Muhammad as the Prophet? Is he your prophet? Do you mean to endorse his claim to be a prophet? Or the prophet? Do you accept the very idea of prophecy? Do you speak of Jesus as 'Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ'? Or as 'the Son of God'? If not, why not? Or perhaps you advocate a double standard: in a Christian country such as the USA one may not refer to Jesus using the honorifics employed by Christian believers, but one must, in a Christian country, albeit with a secular government, refer to the warrior Muhammad as the prophet, and this while Christians are being slaughtered by adherents of the 'religion of peace.'

Peter Kreeft on the Gender-Neutral Use of ‘He’

A reader sent me the following quotation from Peter Kreeft's Socratic Logic, 3rd ed., p. 36, n. 1:

The use of the traditional inclusive generic pronoun "he" is a decision of language, not of gender justice. There are only six alternatives. (1) We could use the grammatically misleading and numerically incorrect "they." But when we say "one baby was healthier than the others because they didn't drink that milk," we do not know whether the antecedent of "they" is "one" or "others," so we don't know whether to give or take away the milk. Such language codes could be dangerous to baby's health. (2) Another alternative is the politically intrusive "in-your-face" generic "she," which I would probably use if I were an angry, politically intrusive, in-your-face woman, but I am not any of those things. (3) Changing "he" to "he or she" refutes itself in such comically clumsy and ugly revisions as the following: "What does it profit a man or woman if he or she gains the whole world but loses his or her own soul? Or what shall a man or woman give in exchange for his or her soul?" The answer is: he or she will give up his or her linguistic sanity. (4) We could also be both intrusive and clumsy by saying "she or he." (5) Or we could use the neuter "it," which is both dehumanizing and inaccurate. (6) Or we could combine all the linguistic garbage together and use "she or he or it," which, abbreviated, would sound like "sh . . . it." I believe in the equal intelligence and value of women, but not in the intelligence or value of "political correctness," linguistic ugliness, grammatical inaccuracy, conceptual confusion, or dehumanizing pronouns.

What a sexist Neanderthal this Kreeft fellow is! Send him to a re-education camp!

‘Understand’ is a Verb of Success

Here I encountered the following sentence:

However, most people understand their side is good and the opposing side is bad, so it’s much easier for them to form these emotional opinions of political parties.

This sentence features a misuse of 'understand.' 'Understand' is a verb of success. If you understand something, then it is the case. For example, if you understand that both 2 and -2 are square roots of 4, then this is the case. Otherwise there is a failure to understand. 'Understand' in this respect is like 'know' and unlike 'believe' or 'think'. My knowing that p entails that p is true. My believing or thinking that p does not entail that p is true. My understanding that my side is good entails that it is. The above sentence should read as follows:

However, most people THINK their side is good and the opposing side is bad, so it’s much easier for them to form these emotional opinions of political parties.

Three Kinds of Idle Talk

Intellectual talk can be as bad as mundane trivial talk, an empty posturing, a vain showmanship without roots or results. But worst of all is ‘spiritual talk’ when it distracts us from action and (what is better) contemplative inaction.

Corruptio optimi pessima. The wonderful pithiness of Latin! "The corruption of the best is the worst of all."