One day when I was very young I came home from the playground and tried out some choice new words I’d learned. After the exile to my bedroom ended, my mother sternly told me that I was NEVER to use words that I hadn’t heard my father say. A few days later I was in the basement when dad hit his thumb with a hammer. I raced upstairs and tried out my new vocabulary, and quickly learned that, when it came to free speech, mom wasn’t a liberal (turned out that she wasn’t really progressive on the subject of corporal punishment either).
Free speech is one of those odd American shibboleths, even among progressives. Most of us are all for greater regulation of the economy. We agree that guns ought to be tightly regulated. But regulate speech? Hell no!
It’s particularly odd to hear free speech maximalists among the democratic socialist crowd. After all, the much-admired Nordic states manage to uphold democracy while outlawing hate speech in ways that are unimaginable in the U.S. Danish law is typical: it prohibits speech that is “insulting or degrading a group of persons on account of their race, color, national or ethnic origin, belief or sexual orientation.” (www.osce.org/...) The EU as a whole is moving toward restricting misogyny as a form of hate speech www.coe.int/....
Yet whenever someone on Dkos is flagged (or even challenged) for racial, misogynistic, or ableist language, the critics are decried as anti-free speech language police. “Language police” is of course a reference to George Orwell’s 1984, where a totalitarian state polices language to control its subjects.
So let’s take the “language police” accusation seriously.
Orwell, an avowed democratic socialist, was horrified by the Soviet and Nazi destruction of human rights and human lives. 1984 is a powerful indictment of totalitarianism.
Orwell’s fictional totalitarian state was already in power when it began manipulating language to preserve and extend its control. In this context, Orwell portrayed language policing as part of a conservative tactic to defend entrenched power. It was literally “policing” because the state possessed the power and agency to enforce its policies.
By comparison, in his essay "Politics and the English Language" Orwell made a strong case for the progressive use of language to challenge the political status quo. Orwell understood better than most the political power of language. During WWII, when he was unable to find a publisher for his unpopular political views, he complained that “anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced…. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing…. If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” (https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm)
Orwell’s work, seen in this light, is a rebuke on several fronts to those who attack the Dkos “language police.”
Most obviously, Dkos is no totalitarian state – it is a political website that permits remarkably open debate. The people who challenge language are not agents of Dkos, and they possess no policing authority. They are engaging in a political critique of language, and if political criticism is policing, then almost everybody on Dkos is a member of the “political police.”
Orwell’s defense of the use of language as a political tool with which to challenge the status quo offers a clear defense of the Dkos “language police.” like Orwell, they are challenging the entrenched power of language and its political subtexts. When they “tell people what they do not want to hear,” they are engaging in an explicitly progressive political critique of language.
Defenders of those who are challenged by the “language police” often argue that “this word or that phrase has always been used in this or that way.” Orwell was contemptuous of this type of defense. He wrote derisively of people who resorted to “ready-made phrases” that “will construct your sentences for you -- even think your thoughts for you.” Such linguistic laziness, he warned, could only serve to obscure meaning. Among the things he recommended to the “scrupulous writer” was to ask: “Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?”www.mtholyoke.edu/...
Language critique as progressive politics is a challenging thing. The Black Lives Matter movement is an excellent example of this. BLM has challenged progressives with both its words and its actions, placing us in the uncomfortable shoes of conservative defenders of the “progressive” status quo. I say “us” because I know how uncomfortable I was at first with BLM tactics, which seemed to undermine processes I believed in.
A wonderful article by sociologist Jenny Davis, “#BlackLivesMatter Hacks the Social System,” helped me to understand and support BLM tactics. She writes that “Black Lives Matter refuses to be Anonymous. They do not disrupt the system quietly. The hack is their presence. The hack is their voices. The hack is their faces. It’s not about discourse or even policy, but an insistence upon visibility; a refusal to remain unseen.” (thesocietypages.org/...) BLM are a superb example of the political power of telling “people what they do not want to hear.” When they challenge how we progressives speak and act politically, they force us to re-examine our entrenched beliefs.
In 1984 Orwell wrote that “doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” When people who call themselves progressives defiantly cling to language that implicitly or explicitly reinforces the racist, gendered, or ableist status quo, it is they who engage in doublethink.
The Dkos “language police” are a progressive force, asking us to think hard about the political power and meaning of our words. I applaud their efforts. (And as usual, mom was right.)