Robert Fisk, Whorfian?

I saw acclaimed Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk speak last night in San Jose. He had much to say about the perception by the Muslim world of America’s goals (“cultural, social, economic and military domination”), the injustice of the occupation of Palestinians (“there will be a one-state solution, I fear”), and the hopelessness of the “AfPak” venture (“it’s a cliché but it’s true that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires”). (As an aside, it may very well be true that Afghanistan is a graveyard for empires, but perhaps this graveyard’s inhabitants lived a rich and full life?) All in all a pessimistic talk, but with a tinge of dark humor, including an impersonation by Mr. Fisk of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, to provide some levity. Fisk even thinks the crux of the problem is that the West no longer believes in anything while the Muslim world very much does, oddly paralleling a prominent conservative argument. (As for Fisk’s beliefs, he considers journalism his religion.) Though Fisk has defined government in unromantic terms – “it’s about power, not good and bad guys” – and calls for the dismantling of the American imperial apparatus, he also suggests Western nations send their doctors, engineers and teachers abroad instead of soldiers, making him more a secular humanist progressive than libertarian.

Fisk began his talk with an engaging spiel about the abuse of language in mainstream journalism. “Collateral damage,” “road maps,” “peace process,” and all the rest. In each of these cases, he notes the implicit and inappropriate analogies, arguing that the language distracts from the true nature of what’s going on. I’m not convinced this goes as far as he thinks in misleading the thoughts of news consumers, though given his status as wordsmith I’m not surprised he’s so sensitive to it. I’m certain readers, e.g. of the Wall St. Journal, who come across the term “collateral damage” know just what that means (if they’re reading an article on such a subject it’s likely a self selection process is in the works which involves familiarity with the term to begin with) – they just don’t let it shake either their conviction that the war is necessary or, less confidently, “man, war is hell.” In either case, the compartmentalization of war in the mind’s file room, as something requiring a different set of language than that which applies to a local town killing spree, precedes the actual makeup of that language.

I’ve only recently looked into the subject, but Fisk sounds like he’s implicitly adopting the views of linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf, who believed, essentially, that language determined thought. John McWhorter tackles the recent uptick (“uptick” being another word Fisk skewers, incidentally, as in “uptick in violence”) in interest in Whorf’s views here. McWhorter writes:

Americans have a plethora of terms referring to psychology–complex, affect, syndrome, superego, compensation. Yet who would say that it’s the English language that makes us sensitive to these things?

In Fisk’s case, I doubt it’s the use of “collateral damage” that spurs insensitivity to foreign innocents’ death, but rather vice-versa. If peace and justice activists had their druthers, and “collateral damage” was replaced with e.g. “civilian deaths,” it’d make little difference in the anti-war effort (though it might make temporary waves). You’d soon hear cue-providing elites privy to the “biased” reporting of “anti-American” newspapers lambasting the language of “moral equivalence.”

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Steve Sailer Says:

September 23, 2010 at 11:29 pm

Militaries create neutral-sounding jargon (e.g., “Sir, we are experiencing incoming fire”) in the first place less out of moral hypocrisy than simply because combat is so terrifying that it helps keep soldiers from melting down to have prearranged linguistic categories for every contingency. Vivid linguistic devices (e.g., “metalstorm”) are not helpful in functioning under combat conditions.

teageegeepea Says:

September 23, 2010 at 11:33 pm

Fisk reminds me more of George Carlin & George Orwell (of “Politics and the English Language). He’s also something of a curmudgeon about language. For my part, I agree with Steve Pinker: the euphemism treadmill just gives new words the same connotation as old ones but makes them more of a mouthful.

Hopefully Anonymous Says:

October 5, 2010 at 3:55 pm
Professor Pinker way outclasses me as a thinker (I have an Igon Value problem) and obviously in topic literacy however, I’m intuitively skeptical of the euphemism treadmill concept as you relate it.

It seems to me to be very old knowledge that words often sort with the sounds they produce and the facial expressions we make when we say them (hence comediens and their love for the “k”/hard “c” sound to punch up a joke). Extrapolating from that, I think euphemism do create barriers to emotional reactions to words, and poorly chosen descriptors can increase the propensity for bad emotional reactions to tasks or objects.

Now throw all that out the window if it doesn’t match with empirical testing. But that’s the direction my intuition leads.

1. A. Paleocon Says:
  
  October 5, 2010 at 5:33 pm
  Usually I guess you think of Sapir-Whorf as being about semantics, not phono-semantics or whatever we might call it. Anyway, what you say sounds probably true.

Michael Says:

September 29, 2010 at 3:00 pm

I had never heard of Whorf; the suggestion that language influences thought is just the converse of the proposition that language reflects thought, which we find in Condillac and which ultimately derives from medieval nominalism. And we find in some of Condillac’s disciples, e.g., Lavoisier, the notion that technical or scientific terms should purposely be reformed to express the current theoretical understanding.

I like your phrase “euphemism treadmill.” The phenomenon of “political correctness” is largely one of euphemism. It doesn’t make cripples less crippled to call them “handicapped.” It doesn’t make a backward country less backward to call it “underdeveloped.” And once “handicapped” and “underdeveloped” passed from genteel to common use, it didn’t make the handicapped less handicapped to call them “physically challenged,” or the underdeveloped less so to call them “emerging economies,” or whatever. Hence the treadmill aspect.

Eventually we have to start recycling euphemisms, perhaps with a little variation. It is amusing to recall how “colored” was once the polite term for what it later became de rigueur to call “Negro” (always capitalizing the initial!); then Negro became passé, and “black” was fashionable. “African-American” had its brief moment, and later, coming almost full circle, “people of color.” All of this, needless to say, applies only to acceptable use amongst white folks – constant change is necessary, to keep us always off balance and ill at ease. People of the African race, amongst themselves, have never ceased to use the old, original, unvarnished term that must never pass the lips of a white man.

Dr. Horsemeat Says:

September 29, 2010 at 10:51 pm
There was that even more fleeting celebratory moment of “Afro-American” in the 1970s. I do remember that my 6th grade teacher, Mrs. Summers, insisted that “black” was demeaning, and that we use her preferred “knee-grow,” emphasis very much on the first syllable. I’ve gone with “black” ever since.

1. Michael Says:
  
  September 30, 2010 at 5:47 pm
  Another oddity about “Negro” was that even when it was the p.c. term, it was very definitely not p.c. to refer to a female of the species as a “Negress,” even if you capitalized the initial. I could never figure this out. I also gather that it is considered impolite to call a Jewish woman a Jewess. The reasoning again escapes me.
  
  It is of course impossible in many languages NOT to differentiate; e.g., French has le nègre, la négresse (note change of accent in the first syllable as well as the feminine ending); le juif, la juive (indeed, there is an opera entitled “La Juive,” by Halévy, a Jewish composer). German has der Neger, die Negerin; der Jude, die Jüdin (again, note addition of umlaut over the first syllable, as well as the feminine ending). Does anyone know if these usages have succumbed to p.c. in Europe?