JOHN MCWHORTER JANUARY 10, 2011
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Does anybody truly believe, even in the wake of something as hideous as what happened in Tucson last weekend, that we can do something as quixotic and indefinable as policing incendiary language on the web?
I get it if calling for this is about politics. But is anybody really thinking that this debate is about something real?
The object of discussion is real enough: the coarser brand of language we hear along the lines of Ms. Palin’s “Don’t retreat, reload” line, which is a symptom of a larger ill, the escalation of political polarization. Too often, though, this is discussed as if it were due to something in the water of late, or something uniquely repulsive about specific entities like Glenn Beck.
The actual cause of this new national temper is technology and its intersection with how language is used. Language exists in two forms in modern times: speech and writing. Writing is a latterly invention only some thousands of years old, produced and received more slowly than talk. It encourages reflection, extended argument (something almost impossible to convey amidst the overlapping chaos of conversation), and objectivity. Writing is, in the McLuhanesque sense, cool.
It once mediated much more between people in politics. Even speeches were couched in writerly prose. Most were expected to engage them on the page, as technology didn’t allow all Americans to see politicians speaking live at the press of a button. Plus, without amplification, public language had to be more careful and explicit. One could not stand before a crowd and “just talk.” Public language had to be like the public dress of the period: effortful. Even Millard Fillmore’s inaugural address reads like Virgil.
It is no accident that the shrillness of political conversation has increased just as broadband and YouTube have become staples of American life. The internet brings us back to the linguistic culture our species arose in—all about speech: live, emotional, unreflective, and punchy. The slogan trumps the argument. Anger, often of hazy provenance but ever cathartic (“I want my country back”) takes fire. All of this is reinforced by the synergy of on line “communities” stoking up passions on a scale that snail mail never could.
The reason that in the old days no political candidate taken seriously tossed off the likes of “Don’t retreat, reload” as a prime calling card was that America was still a culture of formal rhetoric, descendant from a tradition that began with the carefully honed oratorical skills of Ancient Greeks. With broadband and YouTube, the only question is why a culture of written-style language would persist.
Inevitably, it would seem, punchy, “incendiary” speech will sometimes serve as fodder for twisted minds to go out and do unspeakable things. Just maybe a case can be made that people like Glenn Beck and Anwar Al-Awlaki increase the number of loonies moved to take it to the next level, although we must never forget that serial murder and random assassinations were hardly unknown before broadband.
Naturally one asks at this point whether punchy need necessarily be incendiary. I suggest that the difference between the two is too ambiguous to submit usefully to policing, either formal or moral. Because we will not be rid of the punchy part—YouTube and its ilk are here to stay—we should face that we are also stuck with the incendiary part.
This is the rub: What’s “incendiary”? Upon what basis do we decide that someone saying “Don’t retreat, reload” is being incendiary when all of us know, loony or not, that the intent of the sentence was metaphorical?
Because we all do know that; if we didn’t, we wouldn’t be human. Language is all about metaphor—we do not use words simply as vehicles of tidy and unchanging dictionary definitions. Language is much more a marvelous mess than that. Anthropologist Donald Brown has even included in his list of human universals a basic understanding that the link between language and its literal referents is highly inexact. That is, all persons, be they in a rain forest tribe or a tall building in New York, understand this.
And are subject to it more than they typically suppose. Try this: Here’s the money passage from John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech:
The glow from that fire can truly light the world. And so, my fellow Americans—ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.
A great deal of that sentence emerged in metaphor, engaged in by people via the same mental process that allows to understand that Sarah Palin was not urging us to fire a weapon. True comes from a word in Proto–Indo-European, the grandfather tongue to most European languages, meaning tree—it started as tree and came to mean “steady as an oak.” The -ly on truly started as a separate word, that meant body. Body came to signify “like,” as in resembling this body, and that shortened to a suffix -ly that means “like.” Note the likeness in meaning between homebody and homely to get the sense in which -ly developed from body via, again, metaphor.
World started as two words that meant man age—that is, the human race, or world. Fellow started as a Norse word that meant fee layer—i.e. someone who laid down some money with you in a joint venture. The inference from that was friend, or fellow.
And so on. We don’t think of these words as metaphors now—but that’s only because the process of change has gone so far for them. Eons ago, those words were in intermedate states of drift from literal to abstract meaning. Now, others are. Here’s one: Is a dude a man or a woman? If it’s a man, then listen to younger women today saying to other women, “Dude, it wasn’t even ten o’clock!” Now, that woman would not point to another woman and say “There goes that dude.” But when she addresses a woman as dude, then dude is being used as a female word. Or—is it that in that particular usage by women, dude has morphed into just an interjection like Oh! or Darn!?
Yes, but still, what’s the answer to the question “What does dude mean?” Apparently it’s splayed somewhere across nouniness and interjectionality at this point, and poised in a rather quirky gender application. There are no neat answers here, and that’s how language works. The answer to the question, “Where do you draw the line?” here is: There is no line. Like so much that challenges us, the categories are fuzzy. It’s why the endless debate over what the N-word “means” is so futile—it’s a muddy cross between a slur and a term of endearment and that’s just the way it is.
It seems that we are more open to acknowledging this kind of thing in all of its messiness when it’s people we like who are being “incendiary.” Real-life examples of people left of center using words like target in “incendiary” ways are useful, but equally so is, as always, the thought experiment.
How about: Say it’s 1992 at the Democratic Convention and Congresswoman Barbara Jordan roused the base by urging, precisely, “Don’t retreat, reload!” You know—with her trademark smile and her noble history. So very many people of the kind who spit fire when Sarah Palin says that kind of thing would have been applauding almost teary-eyed if Jordan had said it—fully understanding that she certainly didn’t mean that we should have anything to do with guns.
And note: If some twisted individual the next day listened to her and went out and shot a Republican, we would think, quite simply, that he was insane, that such people will tragically always be with us, and that quite likely if Jordan hadn’t stoked him up, someone or something else would have eventually. We would not blame Barbara Jordan.
Is the analogy off because Jordan would have gotten some points because of being handicapped or female or black? I don’t think so, but if so, substitute Lloyd “You’re No Jack Kennedy” Bentsen. Again, I think we’d be much more understanding of how language works if he said it than if, say, Christine O’Donnell did. Note the blood pressure going up at the mention of her name—or, imagine Dan Quayle saying, “Don’t retreat, reload” ...
See? If we are really to police “incendiary language” then I think a goodly amount of this kind of thought experiment will be necessary, as well as a discussion I promise will be extremely sticky, as to where the metaphorical veers off into the meaningfully dangerous.
Otherwise, perhaps the sad truth is that in a world where we benefit from Google Maps, Hulu, Orbitz, YouTube, streaming, and jpegs, we must also endure the gruesome menace of the Jared Lee Loughners and Nidal Malik Hasans.
11 comments
Bismark famously said that with words we can quibble.
- paskunac
January 11, 2011 at 6:01am
If Washington is Hollywood for ugly people, politics is combat for milquetoasts. People who can't bestir themselves to discuss issues analytically often resort to martial, apocalytic rhetoric. Aramageddon talk about tax policy. Is that what the Old Testament had in mind? Perhaps TNR could launch a Milquetoast Award -- awarded weekly, perhaps, since there are so many candidates to choose from -- given to the political figure who makes the most absurdly armageddonic comment. Dan
- dbuck1
January 11, 2011 at 7:26am
But Sarah Palin has deliberately cultivated an image as a tough-as-nails, rough-and-ready, fight-for-my-country conservative, in a way that Barbara Jordan did not. To ignore that subtext and claim her words are rhetorically identical to the same language coming from Barbara Jordan is to listen to her with your fingers in your ears. I do not blame Palin for the shooting, but I do blame her for contributing to the normalization of "dissent-wth-a-gun" mythology among conservatives. It may have added only negligibly to the events of Saturday last, but it has certainly gone a long way toward discrediting the idea of compromising with liberals among people who would never think of using a firearm in a political statement.
- austinexpat
January 11, 2011 at 7:49am
Nice strawman there -- sure, "what if". But Barbara Jordan wouldn't SAY something like that. So then you compound your idiotic argument by speculating what the reaction would be with yet another strawman. But no, we can't "police incendiary language on the web". But the latest wave of incivility can easily be laid at the feet of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, enabled by the revocation of the Fairness Doctrine. 30 years of experience with this shows that without any action toward balance, extremists indulge in character assassination of the worst kind. Meanwhile, their audience listens only to the repeated propaganda of their favorite sites, becoming more extreme in the process. The solution is simple, put back in place the Fairness Doctrine. And ignore for a little while the howls of "That's CENSORSHIP!" You're not allowed to yell "Fire" in a crowded theater either, amd that's not censorship.
- AllanL5
January 11, 2011 at 10:30am
I can imagine Ann Richards or Molly Ivins saying "Don't retreat, reload," but not Barbara Jordan. Richards and Ivins cultivated a sort of "frontier woman" image - IIRC, Richards even went hunting, with the press in tow, when she was running against W. More importantly, both women saw themselves, and encouraged others to see them, as partisans, returning right-wing fire with left-wing fire (so to speak). They were more about combat than conciliation. But Jordan was all about conciliation, and moral, not martial, courage. Her life story as a living example of America's slow progress toward racial equality was part of her image - as she stated in her keynote speech to the 1976 Dem convention "my presence here is one additional bit of evidence that the American Dream need not forever be deferred." She put conciliation at the forefront of the speech, refusing to spend her time "praising the accomplishments of this party and attacking the Republicans," asking instead "Are to be one people bound together by a common spirit sharing in a common endeavor or will we become a divided nation?" The contrast between Richards and Ivins on the one hand, and Jordan on the other, illustrates the difference between contemporary Republicans and Democrats. Both sides have their firebrands - and many Dems wish we had more straightshooters like Richards and Ivins - but only one side has politicians who can talk credibly of the common good. For these folks, government is an essential guarantor, not an enemy, of liberty for all. The Declaration of Independence is "a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir" and the Constitution a promise of "liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time." This stands in sharp contrast to the contemporary Republican view that government is inherently tyrannical, particularly when a Democrat is in charge, and that the most important guarantee in the Constitution is the right of citizens to bear arms, because that allows them to oppose the government with deadly force if it tramples on their rights. These people do not advocate immediate violence, but they hold out the threat of violence in the future if they become convinced that it's the only way to "take their country back." The common ground folks believe that the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice; Republicans believe that the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots. The common ground folks believe that we are not enemies, but friends, and that we must not be enemies. Republicans believe that government is the enemy, particularly when it acts to expand freedom, whether by prohibiting institutional racism, promoting voting rights or simply making it easier for poor people to obtain decent healthcare. The reason "Don't retreat, reload" would mean something different if Barbara Jordan said it than if Sarah Palin said it is that Jordan would never say it. Just as Palin would never say "there is not a liberal America and a conservative America -- there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America -- there’s the United States of America."
- Geoff G
January 11, 2011 at 11:42am
Liberals might have shrugged had Barbara Jordan said something like that, but conservatives would have been outraged. Not put off or upset, outraged. To them it's fine for a nice white woman like Sarah Palin to use violent metaphors but a black politician would have invoked a far different reaction. Also, when Palin said that she wasn't just using a metaphor. She was deliberately invoking an image of herself and those who think like her as those who take action, as opposed to those wimpy liberals who are all talk. She definitely meant to suggest that guns are a tool of conservative power.
- jaime100
January 11, 2011 at 11:43am
Indeed, there is another straw man: I've not seen any argument that anyone's speech should be "policed." Rather, the suggestion is that political figures and pundits should exercise self-restraint, and should assume the responsibility of trying to restrain incendiary speech by their supporters. But framing the issue as one of "policing" speech apparently better serves McWhorter's purpose of discussing the ambiguity and intractability of language, particularly in a time in which electronic media dominates. And he is surely correct that it would be a fool’s errand to try to define which words or combinations of words are “incendiary” in advance and in the abstract. But, just as surely, we can effectively, even if not perfectly, exercise judgment about what constitutes incendiary speech in a given context. McWhorter does not make any serious contribution to the discussion because he ultimately concludes that the intractability of language in the electronic age means that we must simply accept matters as they are, i.e., “endure the gruesome menace of the Jared Lee Loughners and Nidal Malik Hasans.” Dhurtado
- NR143296
January 11, 2011 at 11:55am
No, we don't police incendiary language, we discourage it, for the same reason we adhere to other societal norms: tribe cohesion. Adultery is discouraged because it disrupts tribe cohesion (and sometimes leads to violence and death). Hard work. Thrift. Sobriety. What's unique about incendiary language in a political context is that one's cause can be considered so great that one is willing to sacrifice societal norms and tribe cohesion. The right's reaction to the violence in Arizona illustrates this point, as the right seeks to explain the incident for any reason (mental illness being the favorite) besides the obvious one that incendiary language can provoke violence and otherwise disrupt tribe cohesion. Consider incendiary language in a religious context. What if Jews were considered a threat to our freedoms and subject to a constant harangue of incendiary language. The irony in today’s debate about incendiary language in a political context is that those who seem to harbor the greatest fear are on the right side of the political spectrum, for it is the apostate on the right whose political career (and maybe his or her life) is in jeopardy.
- rayward
January 11, 2011 at 1:09pm
Why are you wasting our time with such obfuscation? If you are interested in saving Sarah Palin simply say so. Why go on this interminable voyage of etymology and Barbara Jordan dreamscape to support what a simple statement:' Sarah Palin did not mean what she said,' would have allowed all who read your article to understand? Everyone who has expressed an interest in toning down the rhetoric is not trying to police incendiary language. Most are simple asking for or hoping for more civility in our political discourse. The wackos, suicide bombers and assassins are part of this and the past century's landscape, and I would not hold any of the pundits, radio entertainers, and TV commentators/comedians responsible for the young man who shot the Arizona Representative. But have we in this age of goggle-internet-twitter lost so much of our fundamental human instincts that we don't know when a person is speaking in a threatening manner? And everyone that says 'I'm going to shoot you!' really mean something else? Like, have a scoop of ice cream?
- chadama
January 11, 2011 at 7:43pm
Mr. M.: I’m no criminal lawyer but here are pertinent sections from the Criminal Code of Canada: Section 318: Hate Propaganda (1) Every one who advocates or promotes genocide is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years. Definition of "genocide" (2) In this section, "genocide" means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part any identifiable group, namely, (a) killing members of the group; or (b) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction. Consent (3) No proceeding for an offence under this section shall be instituted without the consent of the Attorney General. Definition of "identifiable group" (4) In this section, "identifiable group" means any section of the public distinguished by colour, race, religion, ethnic origin or sexual orientation. Section 319 (1) Every one who, by communicating statements in any public place, incites hatred against any identifiable group where such incitement is likely to lead to a breach of the peace is guilty of (a) an indictable offence and is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years; or (b) an offence punishable on summary conviction. Wilful promotion of hatred (2) Every one who, by communicating statements, other than in private conversation, wilfully promotes hatred against any identifiable group is guilty of (a) an indictable offence and is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years; or (b) an offence punishable on summary conviction. Defences (3) No person shall be convicted of an offence under subsection (2) (a) if he establishes that the statements communicated were true; (b) if, in good faith, he expressed or attempted to establish by argument an opinion on a religious subject; (c) if the statements were relevant to any subject of public interest, the discussion of which was for the public benefit, and if on reasonable grounds he believed them to be true; or (d) if, in good faith, he intended to point out, for the purpose of removal, matters producing or tending to produce feelings of hatred toward an identifiable group in Canada… (7) In this section, "communicating" includes communicating by telephone, broadcasting or other audible or visible means; "identifiable group" has the same meaning as in section 318; "public place" includes any place to which the public have access as of right or by invitation, express or implied; "statements" includes words spoken or written or recorded electronically or electro-magnetically or otherwise, and gestures, signs or other visible representations. I’m sure there are like provisions in at least some states’ criminal law. There is a rich jurisprudence across the board both analyzing the specifics of the statutory provisions and their constitutionality too. For example, in Canada, by way of a few thumb nail notes, a hate crime is committed to intimidate, harm or terrify not only a person, but an entire group of people to which the victim belongs. The victims are targeted for who they are, not because of anything they have done. Hate crimes involve intimidation, harassment, physical force or threat of physical force against a person, a family or a property. Under Section 318, it is a criminal act to "advocate or promote genocide" - to call for, support, encourage or argue for the killing of members of a group based on colour, race, religion or ethnic origin and sexual orientation. Section 319 deals with publicly stirring up or inciting hatred against an identifiable group based on colour, race, religion, ethnic origin or sexual orientation. It is illegal to communicate hatred in a public place by telephone, broadcast or through other audio or visual means. The same section protects people from being charged with a hate crime if their statements are truthful or the expression of a religious opinion. The law encourages judges to consider in sentencing whether the crime was motivated by hate of: the victim's race, national or ethnic origin, language, colour, religion, sex, age, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation or any other similar factor. Note carefully the defences afforded by s. 319 (3) (a)-(d). All of this is laudable from my perspective and I’ll trust courts to make and build the necessary distinctions and narrow readings and line drawings to get at a sensible working balance between the interests of protecting free speech and—for the issue animating your post—prohibiting hate speech inciting violence. That balancing effects the compromises involved in what is, after all, “policing incendiary language” of a kind. And what I want to say is that all the talk in your post about metaphors, and writerly speech and punchy speech now prominent in tandem with the prominence of the internet and youtube, pace McLuhan, Postman and others, etymology and thought experiments involving Barbara Jordan or whomever having nothing to do with anything contemplated by criminal laws against incendiary language inciting violence as these law have it.
- basman
January 11, 2011 at 9:06pm
In decades of subscribing to TNR I can recall very few articles that were so obviously stupid as this one. No one is actually talking about "policing" political language. Barbara Jordon didn't actually say anything about reloading, and wouldn't have. There was a time when there were lefties talking about revolution and the founding fathers and rising up against the system, but that was quite some time ago -- and as I recall most others of us on the left were quite forthright in dissociating ourselves from such talk. Now it is the right that talks about 2nd amendment solutions and reloading, and it is (sorry) just stupid to pretend otherwise.
- russpitt
January 21, 2011 at 12:47pm