Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not flirting here with a certain kind of relativism. I'm not making some argument that says that no truths can ever be communicated, no sentences can ever be enunciated about sensitive political issues, without us having to worry that the hearer has understood the speaker. Nothing quite like that. My skepticism here about whether literal meanings can be effectively communicated in political speech isn't a bedrock philosophic skepticism. It doesn't go all the way down. It's more of a sociological observation that I'm making, one that one can find really quite a lot in the writings of Irving Goffman, the late, great observer of social interaction. I'm simply noting that in the game of public discourse -- and that's the intellectual spirit that I bring to the analysis: the game, the strategic interaction of public expression, where some motives are hidden, where a player can lose if he or she is not careful -- that in that vein, this kind of phenomenon, this kind of reading between the lines, and, in Strauss's memorable term, also "writing between the lines," that is, speakers strategically positioning themselves, delimiting what they say, saying things they may not even genuinely believe in order to gain the confidence of their audience, that this kind of calculated framing is inevitable. How do I present my ideas? Well, maybe there are some people who agree with me, but they're not helpful. The notorious people who agree with me, I'd just as soon not have their agreement. I may go at pains to distinguish myself from some other argument which I have no intention of making but which I don't want my audience to think I might have made. I may go out of my way to try to anticipate the possible reactions that people would have, the possible speculations about my motive, and to allay their concerns. Artful public speakers, effective political agents, certainly do that. They certainly are careful and calculating in how they present their arguments.
Recall from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, the scene in act III after Caesar's murder, Antony and Brutus come before the crowd to speak. Brutus speaks first. Brutus is naive and straightforward. He simply says, We had to kill the man. The man wanted to be king. We had to kill him. "Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more." That's what Brutus says, straightforward. The argument has the advantage of being true. It has the serious disadvantage of being guileless. Antony follows Brutus to the podium, and the first thing he says is a lie. He says, "I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him," but he proceeds immediately to do exactly the opposite and to remind the crowd of Caesar's kindness and of his greatness, of how the public coffers were filled, and all the rest. He says, Well, but "Brutus says Caesar was ambitious, and Brutus is an honorable man." But by the end those very words mean their opposite. He has worked the crowd up into a frenzy. Civil war is fomented. Brutus and Casca and the rest are run out of town. Brutus is naive in the forum; Antony is calculating in the forum. And the predictable naivete of the masses permit the calculating public speaker to carry the day.
We don't want to be fooled in the forum, is what I'm saying. In general in public discourse, the necessity of calculation is inescapable. My argument here in a nutshell is that political correctness, in the current term, or more broadly social conformity in public discourse is an equilibrium, self-reinforcing convention, a convention that can come into existence and that works because we expect it to work. It's a little bit like how we need for the good guys to wear white hats and we need for the bad guys to wear black hats. It's very helpful when we can identify the motives of speakers by reference to their willingness to engage in certain kinds of speech. We even invent tests that come into existence that help us to validate whether or not speakers are morally correct, whether or not their unobservable, but vitally important to us, value commitments line up correctly with our anticipation.
Nowadays, if someone uses the third person singular pronoun, the choice of how that expression is gendered is critical, it's absolutely critical. One does not just blithely and uniformly say "he." I write a paper here about speakers. I say, The speaker has to consider what will happen if he or she.... What do I say? S/he? Or "he" sometimes and "she" sometimes? Or if I have a speaker and a listener, I decide to designate the speaker as the "he" and the listener as the "she?"
All of this may seem trivial, but it's not trivial. It's actually very important. Why is it important? Because those who labor over whether or not we should distort the language -- we've heard these speeches about how awful it is that we've come upon this politically correct, gendered speech -- the ones who are prepared to labor in that way mark themselves as not sharing the value of liberalization with respect to the roles of women in society, of being concerned about equality between men and women, from the very fact that they're unwilling to go along with what has become a convention of being studious and scrupulous about how one uses the third person gendered pronoun. That convention is in itself a little bit of a sign. It's a little bit like the use of the term African-American, which wasn't in our language five or ten years ago. It's a relatively new phenomenon. Everybody uses the term in part as a way of signaling their awareness of the meaning of not using the term. A refusal to use the term -- Oh, why should I use that term? It's cumbersome. People are not African-American anyway. They're not Africans. They were never born there. Whatever. -- the very willingness to engage in that argument marks you as somebody who evidently doesn't affirm the value. So, whereas on the one hand, that seems like a kind of silly etiquette, a thought-police-like enforcing of linguistic conformity -- one should say gay and not homosexual or whatever it might be -- I can lengthen the list of these little tests.
All contents copyright (C) 1995,1996 Richard Landau. All rights reserved.
Revised: January 21, 1996