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Elon Musk, George Orwell, Judith Butler, spontaneous order, transaction costs
Newspeak and Doubleplusgood Duckspeakers
Categories: Economics and Culture Media Watch Political Economy
By Pierre Lemieux, Nov 14 2022
Language has enormous benefits. It dramatically reduces the transaction costs in exchange, taken both in the narrow sense of trade and in the larger sense of interindividual interaction. It allows the development of literature, philosophy, and science. It opens the road to prosperity. The more complex a language, the larger these possibilities. Language is a standard case of what Friedrich Hayek calls a spontaneous or autoregulated order, and its very complexity is a product of unplanned social evolution.
Newspeak was imagined by novelist George Orwell as a language manufactured by the state and meant to replace English. This would be the exact opposite of a spontaneous order. In the Appendix to his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell explained:
Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. … The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. … Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought,
Except for dead languages, any language of course changes as it adapts to new knowledge, technology, institutions, and general opinion. Contrary to what the Big Brother of Nineteen Eighty-Four was doing, however, changes are typically slow. We would, for example, expect changing opinions about sex and gender to bring linguistic changes, but slowly. Given the relative youth of the woke movement, not more than half a century if we include its postmodernist predecessor, we would not expect it to have already had a widespread impact on common language. So it is surprising to read in the Wall Street Journal (Alexa Corse, Suzanne Vranica, and Sarah E. Needleman, "Elon Musk Raises Specter of Twitter Bankruptcy Amid Executive Turmoil," November 10, 2022) the following sentences:
"I've made the hard decision to leave Twitter," Mx. Kissner, the chief information security officer—who uses the gender-neutral honorific—tweeted early Thursday.
Mx. Kissner resigned Wednesday after a disagreement …
Of course, Lea Kissner is free to call herself whatever she wants, but why would the Wall Street Journal echo the eccentric title she has chosen? Although most of us would agree that her sex should be of no import in our evaluation of her job performance or opinions on Twitter, why should anybody else change the way he talks about her just because she says so? Who has the power to change language everybody speaks like Big Brother fictionally did in Nineteen Eighty-Four?
The Mx. title, gender and racial obsessions, the multiplication of pronouns, and group-identity cages are just some elements of the linguistic innovations that have been pushed by the same fringe over the past few decades. It looks a bit like Orwell's Newspeak.
For sure, today's Newspeak in the making is a bit more elaborate. Let me give three examples. The first one, already quoted in my post "′Ice is not Ice′ and the Limits of Conversation," is an excerpt from a 2018 article by Professor Donna Riley in Engineering Studies and emphasizes identity groupism against intellectual rigor:
For those of us who work on engineering identity development, rigor may be a defining tool, revealing how structural forces of power and privilege operate to exclude men of color and women, students with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, first-generation and low-income students, and non-traditionally aged students.
The second example comes from an article by UC Berkeley philosopher Judith Butler in the journal Diacritics, and won the 1998 first prize awarded by Philosophy and Literature for the world's worst writing —for "the most stylistically lamentable [passage] found in scholarly books and articles." But I am not sure it's a question of bad writing or of scientifically-looking obfuscation. I suspect Newspeak:
The theoretical rearticulation of structure as hegemony marked the work of Laclau and Mouffe as consequentially poststructuralist and offered perhaps the most important link between politics and poststructuralism in recent years (along with the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak). The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
The third quote is from a 1989 University of Chicago Law Forum article by Kimberle Crenshaw, a critical race theorist, and mentions the development of a new language (thanks to Alan Kors for having pointed out this article to me, as well as the previous one):
It is not necessary to believe that a political consensus to focus on the lives of the most disadvantaged will happen tomorrow in order to recenter discrimination discourse at the intersection. It is enough, for now, that such an effort would encourage us to look beneath the prevailing conceptions of discrimination and to challenge the complacency that accompanies belief in the effectiveness of this framework. By so doing, we may develop language which is critical of the dominant view and which provides some basis for unifying activity.
I grant that this Newspeak lacks the conciseness of the Nineteen Eighty-Four variety. Perhaps it is because the easiest (least costly) entry point of today's Newspeak in public discourse was through scientific-looking but alchemist journals. And remember that Orwell's Newspeak did have different forms and levels of vocabulary.
I have a hypothesis: the real function of current Newspeak—that is, why its promotion is so easily embraced, consciously or not—is to make sure that anything written before the woke liberation becomes so awkward, outdated, and difficult to read that fewer and fewer people will read it. Orwell would have been prescient when he wrote:
In practice, this meant that no book written before approximately 1960 could be translated as a whole.
Two pages before, he explained that the Newspeak word duckspeak, meant "to quack like a duck." (Doubleplus was a standardized prefix for an accentuated superlative.) The word duckspeak was
was ambivalent in meaning. Provided that the opinions which were quacked out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but praise, and when The Times referred to one of the orators of the Party as a doubleplusgood duckspeaker it was paying a warm and valued compliment.
How can a fringe group of intellectuals and rich college kids push today's Newspeak's so effectively? Hypothesis: it has to do with government subsidization of colleges and universities, and indirectly of the "academic" journals who benefit from professors' free time for writing duckspeak.
Christopher Hitchens on George Orwell
Christopher Hitchens talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about George Orwell. Drawing on his book Why Orwell Matters, Hitchens talks about Orwell's opposition to imperialism, fascism, and Stalinism, his moral courage, and his devotion to language. Along the way, Hitchens makes the case for why Orwell matters.
READ COMMENT POLICY
Nov 14 2022 at 12:03pm
I think its done in part to implicitly out people's political affiliations in an environment where discussing politics is taboo
Nov 14 2022 at 3:01pm
Craig: Can you be more explicit? What is "it"? And which environment are you referring to?
Sorry, sometimes I think that the context of my comment is clear since I am writing it when the context is clear….to me.
In common parlance, the alternatives for he/she just aren't used, but I'd suggest they are being used as a kind of way to discern political affiliations because you can include them in your corporate email signature. So the presence or absence of your preferred pronouns is one way for them to discern your political affiliations, although not entirely dispositive.
IE. Tell me you're a Democrat(Republican) without telling me you're a Democrat(Republican).
Jon Murphy
who uses the gender-neutral honorific
I always thought "M." was the gender-neutral honorific.
Personally I prefer the Royal We, but that's just me. Actually just curious if the personal pronoun preference has hit the footers of academia's emails footers. Its becoming increasingly common in corporate world.
Yes they have. Some of the folks in Administration has them. I had the option to put them on my business cards (and declined)
"M." is also the abbreviation for monsieur, so perhaps that's why "Mx." would be preferred.
nobody.really
Nov 16 2022 at 4:07am
Does this strike anyone else as over-wrought?
Historically, English speakers would refer to women as either Miss or Mrs., thereby indicating the woman's marital status. Presumably these distinctions arose to signal a woman's availability for marriage–reflecting what those in power deemed important to know about a woman. English speakers made no analogous distinction between married and unmarried men. (Many other languages followed similar conventions.)
As it became more common for women to adopt social roles other than that of wife and mother, the need to note a woman's marital status became increasingly anachronistic—and transparently sexist. For better or worse, English speakers began adopting the convention of using Ms. in lieu of Miss or Mrs.
Inexplicably, the sky neglected to fall.
Now someone has asked people to refrain from being identified by gender. Obviously there's no conceivable rationale for a woman who works professionally on the internet to make such a request; chicks—go figure. But regardless of this individual's motives, I'm struck by the utter reasonableness of the request. What relevance does the person's gender have to the subject of the article in question? And if it has no relevance, why insist on specifying it? Perhaps the person is Jewish. And if so, we might insist that we publicly label the person as such—if we were Nazis. Are we? And if not, why should we treat gender any differently?
This linguistic reform is well overdue.
[A] rule of thumb in language is that any so-called corruption that occurs frequently enough for the guardians to notice it will turn out to have been common in the language for a century or more.
Steven Pinker, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language, at 74 (2000)
Ok, I don't know if Mx. has been around for a century or more–but Mx. has been in use for at least 45 years.
That's roughly the same amount of time for Ms. to enter "modern continuous use."
Mactoul
I am mystified by comparison of a voluntary usage of language which might be called natural evolution with a language imposed by an absolute dictatorship.
Nov 15 2022 at 11:05am
Mactoul: That's the crucial difference, emphasized by Hayek, between a spontaneous order and an organization. (It is closely related to the basic difference between the classical liberal perspective and any constructivist/authoritarian approach.) My Econlib reviews of the two first volumes of his Law, Legislation, and Liberty can perhaps give you a more precise idea.
AtlasShrugged69
I'd like to offer a slightly different explanation for pronoun usage:
Recently, I started coaching at my Alma Mater's Fencing Club. During one practice, I was corrected on my use of pronouns for one of the fencers. This is the first time I had had this happen, but I obliged and modified my usage. It occurred to me later that if I elected not to use their preferred pronouns, I would quickly be excluded from the group. The cost to me of using their preferred pronouns is almost zero, but the benefit to them is non-trivial. It reminded me of The Minority Rule (discussed by Taleb in This EconTalk episode), explaining why most cars are automatics, and also why all lemonade in Boston is Kosher. When a small minority of consumers require some product be manufactured in a particular way, which does not alienate other consumers when made in the new manner, eventually that method will be adopted industry-wide. I see this as a possible explanation for why entitled undergrads are able to demand compliance with their gender farce
Atlas (if I may call you by your first name): That's a good point. As a professor friend of mine often says, "that's a cheap way to adapt to political correctness." What we have to explain, though, is the asymmetry: why non-collectivists are not able to spread their own vocabulary in the general culture. Why, for example, can't we bring people to say "individuals" instead of miscellaneous group labels, or "the government of the United States" instead of "the United States" when what is meant is the former? Why did Trump fell obliged to say "LGBTQ" (tripping in the pronounciation of the word) before the UN General Assembly, while Biden does not feel compelled to say "individual liberty"?
I think liberty-minded individuals tend to express their language-related displeasure in more subtle ways (ie through a comment on econlib.org) than throwing a hissy fit on twitter (or in real life), once again making the cost of misgendering/excluding someone on the left that much higher, compared to the costs for collectivists to ignore the more liberty-leaning evolutions of language: none.
How can a fringe group of intellectuals and rich college kids push today's Newspeak's so effectively?
Technology. It's very easy to disseminate, with unprecedented rapidity, new forms of language, new words and meanings of old words thorough social media. And once a change is disseminated, it quickly becomes part of the language, with dictionaries noting and defining new words and changing or enlarging the definitions of old words. Look up "vaccine" or "female" online and compare with older dictionaries. Yes, language changes, and of course it always has, but it's never been easier to promulgate changes intentionally. In fact, prior to the internet, it was probably impossible, absent an all-powerful totalitarian regime.
David: That's a good point. Certainly, the Internet decreased the cost of actively participating in a linguistic change. Note however that Marxists did something similar without the Internet in the 19th century. This is not as obvious in the United States, where the Marxist influence has never been strong, but it is pretty obvious in France and, I would think, in many European countries. Similarly, the introduction of "Ms." in the 1960s or 1970s was meteoric–although I would not myself criticize that specific change, which was probably predictable after J.S. Mill's The Subjection of Women, and would not assimilate it to the changes I am discussing in my post.
Isn't this "Newspeak" push just a post-structuralist rehash of Schleicher's proposition that linguistics should be a "testing ground for the evolution of the species", as reiterated in Darwin's The Descent of Man, in which Darwin claims that language change occurs through natural selection as words "struggle for life"?
Take, for instance, the pronoun "they", Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year for 2019. Isn't today's more fashionable use of they and other pronouns simply an attempt by "fringe group(s) of intellectuals and rich college kids" to conjugate with the new "biological determinism" revolution?
And who can we say are the luminaries of this new fringe group of social activists representing our non gender-conforming demographic? Hanzi Freinacht? Paul Stamets? During the counter-culture movement of the 60s, they were Tim Leary, Tom Wolfe, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.
Monte: I am not sure I follow your argument about biological determinism, but let me emphasize three points. First, Hayek reminded us that the idea of social evolution preceded Darwin, who borrowed it from liberal thinkers; see my review of Hayek's The Fatal Conceit. Second, the idea of the evolution of a spontaneous or self-regulated social order does not extinguish (individual) free will. Third, the re-awakening of the old use of "they" (which you give as an example) to replace the singular does render difficult to formulate sentences where we want to emphasize the role of individuals; it may prevent the use of methodological individualism.
Monte: I am not sure I follow your argument about biological determinism
Pierre: By "biological determinism", I mean to say that human physical characteristics (ie. sex) are determined at conception and that we're (with rare exception) genetically predisposed to behave accordingly. The fact that we encounter deviations from this behavior (ie. boys who believe they're girls, girls who believe they're boys, or girls and boys who believe they're both or neither) are, I believe, a psychological phenomenon influenced more by socio-environmental factors and what we're witnessing today is a revolution, or rebellion, against this biological determinism.
I read your excellent review of Hayek's The Fatal Conceit and was so impressed that I'm inclined to borrow from it to make my next point. Hayek cautions us that "attempting to remodel society on a rational basis could spell the end of civilization and destroy much of present humankind and impoverish much of the rest." I would argue that today's gender ideologues are attempting to do the same on an irrational basis by coercively applying "abstract rules of conduct" (ie. insisting that we conform to their interpretation and use of preferred pronouns). As you indicate, "Traditions (including civil discourse), …must remain open to criticism, but this does not mean they should be actively challenged by a social-engineering state."
Having expressed my opinions thusly, I "can easily imagine tyrannical drifts and exclusions—whereby, for example, rednecks and other "deplorables" (those who think like me) would be excluded from society." That being the case, I comport with evolutionary biologist Colin Wright's admonition in his WSJ Opinion piece entitled "When Asked 'What Are Your Pronouns,' Don't Answer" (2-4-2022). To wit:
While being subjected to constant rituals of pronoun exchanges may seem silly or annoying at best and exhausting at worst, in reality participating in this ostensibly benign practice helps to normalize a regressive ideology that is inflicting enormous harm on society.
The effort to resist gender ideology is reality's last stand. We simply can't ignore fundamental realities of our biology and expect positive outcomes for society. Pronoun rituals are extremely effective at normalizing and institutionalizing the abolition of biological sex in favor of gender identity. These rituals take advantage of people's confusion and compassion to achieve compliance.
Monte: Thanks. We are basically in agreement.
[A] 1989 University of Chicago Law Forum article by Kimberle Crenshaw, a critical race theorist, … mentions the development of a new language…:
I have a hypothesis: the real function of current Newspeak—that is, why its promotion is so easily embraced, consciously or not—is to make sure that anything written before the woke liberation becomes so awkward, outdated, and difficult to read that fewer and fewer people will read it.
Maybe. Or maybe Crenshaw intends to develop language designed to undermine certain power dynamics that we find implicit in the language in order to aid members of marginalized or stigmatized groups. This is not exactly a new idea. The Eastern Christian abbot Dorotheus of Gaza a/k/a Abba Dorotheus (505-565 CE) advised, "Never say, 'he is a thief,' but, rather, 'he stole,' for otherwise you condemn his whole life."
Yes, English speakers have long referred to "cripples," but some contemporary English speakers prefer to say "people with disabilities," to emphasize our common humanity. Yes, English speakers have long referred to "slaves," but some contemporary English speakers prefer to say "enslaved people," to emphasize the idea that slavery was not a attribute of the person, but a condition imposed on the person.
I share the view that my choice of language can influence how I (and my audience) will think about a topic. Physicists long struggled with whether light behaves like a particle or a wave. They eventually concluded that light has BOTH properties. But this realization was impeded by their choice of the "particle vs. wave" metaphor, because in their daily experience they never encountered particles that behave like waves or vice versa, and they assumed that light would likewise respect this dichotomy; it didn't. As Albert Einstein observed in his Autobiographical Notes (1949), "[E]ven scholars of audacious spirit and fine instinct can be obstructed in the interpretation of facts by philosophical prejudices."
Therefore, I support certain efforts at linguistic reform promoted by General Semantics. In particular, I favor conforming language usage to better reflect my understanding of how the world functions. For example, I try to use the active voice, attributing action to actors. I try to avoid usages such as "a happy coincidence," so as to avoid giving the impression that non-sentient factors have emotions. Likewise, I try to avoid saying "the purpose of the heart is to pump blood," so as to avoid giving the impression that non-sentient things have purposes. Etc.
In short, I don't regard efforts at linguistic reform as inherently threatening. To adopt a neologism: chillax, dude.
Nobody: Your reflections are very relevant. I did acknowledge that language changes and I agree that "efforts at linguistic reform" are not "inherently threatening"–provided however that these efforts are private and non-coercive. Each individual is part of the spontaneous order. That the woke–not you or I–are the ones who try to coercively prevent speakers to say things they don't like with words they don't like is not insignificant. That the vocabulary they push in subsidized universities and indirectly subsidized journals is meant to build identity cages is not either. See my answer to Monte above.
Wallace Vickers Kaufman
My pronouns are I, me, my, mine. Try talking about I without mentioning my name. You get something like the Abbot and Costello routine, "Whose on first?"
Academic writing as unfathomable jargon-filled syntactically-tortuous blather predates the new wave. Been going on for decades. I've always thought its purpose was to make banal thoughts seem exquisitely complex by wrapping them in some kind of rarified lingo so's to stymie the peasants, while screeching to the choir. It's the pronoun thing and the "birthing parent/ people who menstruate thing" that's the new imposition, and too many heretofore English-speaking media have cravenly gone along. I've recently read articles where a person is "correctly" referred to as They and when a second individual (also a They) is injected into the article, it's impossible to know if the subsequent They/Them refers to either or both, and the result is unreadable and also hilarious. If 1% of the people want to speak in pig latin, it shouldn't impel the media to ite-wray at-thay.
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Economics and Culture
Language has enormous benefits. It dramatically reduces the transaction costs in exchange, taken both in the narrow sense of trade and in the larger sense of interindividual interaction. It allows the development of literature, philosophy, and science. It opens the road to prosperity. The more complex a language, the l...
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