Metaphors are not microaggressions
What happens when the speech police come for the writer's toolkit?
That’s probably a new phrase in the English language—in any language—and I’m sad to even have to construct it. The very existence of the word “microaggression” is absurdity itself. Aggression is aggression. Anything below the level of aggression is clearly something else. The continual attempts to redefine all interactions that fall beneath the level of aggression as violence of some variety is pathetic and manipulative, but are part of a larger effort to cynically hyper-dramatize all social interactions to extort acquiescence with its histrionics. Sensible people snigger at this brand of melodrama. But many fear it, because it comes loaded with accusations. The fact that it succeeds at all is the fault of those who play along with the game, the way adults fall down and feign injury when children point finger guns at them and say “bang!” The make-believe can be amusing, and it’s kind to humor children. But it ceases to amuse when they become adults and engage in these fictions for real—and it ceases to be kind.
I’ve been avoiding ideological discussions, but I read an article that really rubbed me the wrong way. So many articles frankly piss me off lately, and I manage to just close them and move on, knowing that there is nothing I can do. People are free to express their views. However, increasingly, classical liberals like myself are prevented from expressing ours. And, at what point do we begin grabbing hold of the things we care about before they are crushed under the heels of this cultural revolution and begin fighting to preserve them?
Then I came across this ridiculous article, one among many recently. But as a writer, I couldn’t ignore it.
Along the lines of the nonsensical “silence is violence/speech is violence” school of thought (if both silence and speech are violence, what’s left?) this particular diatribe is about the “violence” of “ableist” words. This crusade loves censorship. Taboo language has been one of the most fascinating aspects of The Wokening, and one that ties it closely to the religion I have long believed it is, but that is something I will have to expound on in a later post (or not, as smarter people than I, like John McWhorter have already done so at length.) Suffice it to say, I find it incredibly creepy that people are excommunicated for uttering certain taboo words or phrases related to the “sacred people” much in the way other religions punish making images of their prophet or speaking the true name of a deity. We so fear uttering the wrong nomenclature for a protected caste of people lest we invoke their wrath, it calls to mind the ancient tradition of referring to wolves and bears euphemistically as “the gray” or “the brown” rather than by their taxonomic names, lest they be accidentally summoned and wreak havoc on the speaker.
“False” idols of improper devotion are also smashed, defaced, and unnamed, much as ISIS did to ancient monuments, art, and artifacts that offended their vision of the caliphate. Heretical books are erased from memory so only the true gospel can be canonized and distributed to the masses. Awards are stripped from long-dead authors because their ideas reach out from the past and oppress readers in the present. Like the vampire-hunters of old, historical figures of old are dug up and staked through the heart with these decrees, their works and legacies thoroughly destroyed, to ensure no one reverences sacrilegious ideas or the heretics who expounded them. We’re supposed to be fine with this. Nothing to see here! Just the foundations of our civilization being systematically dismantled….
We are now provided an expanding list of taboo words we’re not allowed to say anymore because it “obviously” causes irreparable harm to certain elect people. Blessed are they… etc. Except the author of the article doesn’t seem to realize what the rest of us know: These words aren’t about the disabled and never have been. They’re metaphors. Rhetorical devices. Figures of speech. Or, perhaps worse, the author knows full well what they are, and in true Orwellian fashion, is bent on controlling language, perception, discourse, and therefore us, with these directives.
The author makes the argument that phrases like “fallen on deaf ears” are inherently harmful to disabled people which amount to “micro-assaults” and “linguistic micro-aggressions” and should be forever banished from our language along with:
“making a ‘dumb’ choice, turning a ‘blind eye’ to a problem, acting ‘crazy’, calling a boss ‘psychopathic’, having a ‘bipolar’ day.”
Firstly, let’s just pause to consider whether psychopaths really need this level of sympathy? Are they really offended if we use the name of their disease in vain? I’m guessing no, and if they are, I don’t fucking care.
She goes on to say:
“… for the most part, people who utter these phrases aren’t intending to hurt anyone – more commonly, they don’t have any idea they’re engaging in anything hurtful at all.”
Because they’re not. They’re engaging in metaphorical language that rational people understand to be figurative. However, the author insists:
‘falling on deaf ears’ provides evidence that most people associate deafness with willful ignorance. [emphasis mine]
Most people?
Actually, it is this unsubstantiated statement from the author that is the example of willful ignorance. Most people surely understand this idiom to express a figurative deafness, not a literal one. Let’s be honest: do we not all understand it to be metaphor, and not an assault on actual deaf people? To imply it is such is to be willfully ignorant and to argue in bad faith. “Deaf ears” has never implied a clinically deaf person, but an unhearing one, which is something we all can be. E.g. after 10 years of marriage, his mother-in-law’s insults fell on deaf ears, i.e. he learned to tune her out. Here, his selective deafness is an affirmative ability. No insult to deaf people is implied. Prove me wrong.
But much more than individual slights, expressions like these can do real, lasting harm to the people whom these words and phrases undermine…
Really? How so?
This accusation is made often—almost ubiquitously these days—and accepted uncritically. But where is the evidence of this “real, lasting harm”? Until verifiable, tangible evidence beyond “because I say so” is produced, I call bullshit on this claim. Saying a thing is true doesn’t make it so. Although unhinged Theorists have completely abandoned the scientific method, reasonable people still live by it; if they want to convince us their arguments have any merit, we’re going to need to see evidence. Show me studies. Demonstrate harm. Otherwise, you’re full of shit and I don’t have to take your claims as proof or accept your feelings as facts. I’m not obligated to abandon my beliefs in reason, objective reality, and empirical methods just because you have.
Words have only as much power over us as we give them.
Unless we are willing to concede that witchcraft and sorcery are real, words alone do not effect “real, lasting harm” as if they were magical spells or curses. If we are rational, scientific people, we know better and do not capitulate to magical thinking. Words have only as much power over us as we give them. That power resides, not with the speaker or writer, but with the listener or reader. It is their responsibility to decide how they allow words to affect them—and their responsibility alone. We all have this choice. And becoming stronger in the face of challenging words is a skill everyone can learn. Indeed, it is a skill we must learn if we are going to survive in the world. Ironically enough, this is one of those places where turning a deaf ear actually comes in quite handy.
… using disability as a shorthand for something negative or inferior reinforces negative attitudes and actions, and fuels the larger systems of oppression in place. [emphasis mine]
If we’re not allowed to form our own opinions and think of certain disabilities as negative experiences, the author seems to be suggesting that we must view disability as something positive. She’s asking people to lie. People with disabilities may be optimistic, and we should celebrate their positivity. Lots of people with disabilities are awesome and accomplish amazing things. But let’s not bullshit each other that disability itself is awesome. As Freddie DeBoer stated so well in his Seventeen Theses On Disability:
Disability is net-negative by definition. If a condition is not a net-negative, then it cannot be said to be dis-ability.
Instead of allowing individuals to be treated as unique people with their own personal experiences, challenges, and triumphs, she proposes to speak for them, and characterize their experiences monolithically for us. Worse, she assumes their disabilities are a net positive for them, without consulting them on how they feel or how their lives are affected. That’s a bold assumption. It’s an even bolder assumption to claim that merely altering the language we use in daily life will magically diminish the challenges faced by disabled people and transmute their afflictions into assets.
Specifically, according to the author, calling something “lame” is a forbidden slur under this new regime. But, let us parse this for a moment. Are Critical Theorists suggesting we banish the word “lame” from our vocabulary altogether? Or is she suggesting that “lame” is now a positive attribute because being disabled is a favorable experience we should assign a positive value to, like winning the lottery or falling in love? Is “lame” ever a good thing?
While no one should denigrate others because of their disabilities, neither should we have to pretend we’d view living with a disability as advantageous as life without it. I keep and train horses, and a lame horse, being less serviceable, is not as valuable as a sound one. This is a tragic fact among animals bred for their athleticism. It suffers tremendously and, if no one is willing to rescue it and pay to feed it until the end of its life, it is sold at auction and shipped to a slaughterhouse in Mexico. That is the unfortunate reality. It is far worse for creatures in the wild.
Humans, thankfully, take better care of each other than they do animals most of the time, and our ingenuity has allowed greater autonomy for humans with similar injuries or illnesses that affect mobility, and they are able to contribute in ways beyond the scope of their physicality. So, why must we lie to each other and gild lameness with euphemisms? Is anyone fooled by this? Do we have to ban the word as a descriptor—literal or metaphorical—because some find it difficult to face its harsh reality? I’ve rescued many lame horses over the years, and while they have all been loved and cherished and given homes for life, I’ve never spoken about them in any other terms. And I’ve never stopped using the word in its other senses of feeble, dull, or inept. Because I’m an adult who is capable of compartmentalizing a range of meanings and emotions. My ability to love and respect the physically lame horses in my care is never diminished by the words I used. Why do some people imagine it is otherwise for humans?
According to this disturbing website linked in the article (updated since I wrote this), it is also inappropriate and ableist to use these everyday words (among others) unless referring to specific medical conditions:
deluded / delusional, depressed / depressing, impaired / impairment, manic, narcissistic
Even the benign phrase “double-blind review” is apparently off limits. Where does all of this end? Explain who is harmed by these examples:
He’s delusional if he thinks he’ll get funding for that project.
I find the beige cinderblock walls of the office depressing.
Powdery mildew impaired the growth of this year’s crops.
I avoid the manic club scene these days.
Influencer culture rewards the narcissistic rather than the innovative.
I have epilepsy. I don’t pretend it’s positive and neither should anyone else. No one in their right mind looks on disease or disability and thinks: wow, lucky bastard! But when someone uses a phrase like “she had a fit over it” I don’t get offended at the alleged microaggression. Demanding society remodel itself or asking for special treatment is exactly the opposite of wanting people to act normally around you and treat you equally. You can’t have it both ways. Grand mal seizures may break my bones, but names will never harm me.
Why am I so exercised over this? Because the soul of a culture is its metaphors. Literature thrives on them, as does myth and religion. Joseph Campbell famously spoke of myth as metaphor. Our language is itself essentially structured on metaphor, as words are not things in themselves, but only mental placeholders for objects and abstract concepts. Metaphors are the vessels we fill with all the tongue-tied brilliance we continually fail to express before the wonder of existence, yet somehow manage to convey to one another through this arcane language of symbols—some elegant, some crude, but all of them beautiful in their ability to transmit meaning. They are the abstract gifts we trade in hopes of receiving similar wealth in return. Imperfect as they may be, words are the best we can do to share our inner worlds with others. Robbing us of even a single color in that palette diminishes the vibrancy of the pictures we can paint for one another.
Update: Stanford University has implemented its own Orwellian speech code for its websites and IT department—effectively the entire campus. After public criticism, they placed the list of forbidden words and Newspeak replacements behind a password. The Wall Street Journal kept a copy. Some of these examples would be hilarious if they weren't so disturbing: https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/stanfordlanguage.pdf
Bravo.
The double tragedy of all this is that it is so harmful to the people it purports to protect. They are teaching people to be fragile. They are teaching them to feel slighted or injured when they would not normally have felt any injury. And that will not only make people feel worse about themselves, because it will make them imagine the world is more hostile to them than it really is, but it will also paralyze them, making them doubt their ability to function in the world.
This is very much akin to the entirely predictable result of the hate speech laws. Thanks to the "hate speech" exemption to the free speech principle, people began to label every form of speech that they disagreed with as "hate speech" in an attempt to get it banned. But the inevitable result was that they and those who followed them came to believe that people actually hated them. They respond now as you do when you think someone actually hates you, with is to say with vitriol and violence, which, in many cases, leads to people actually hating them, where they never did before.
This is, of course, exactly what the activist personality wants. They don't want peace or resolution. They want the chaos. They want the bitterness. They want the hate. These are the things that keep them in business. It is time we came to understand that you can't reach a resolution with an activist. Resolution is not their aim, nor is it in their interest.
Well said. This sort of thing is ridiculous, and harmful to the people it's supposed to protect because:
Ridiculous: it's impossible to monitor every word you say in case ypu accidentally micro-aggress (is that a verb?) someone. Monitoring yourself like that would drive you mad -- I suppose I'm not allowed to use that word, but I can't think of an alternative.
Harmful:
First of all, it's patronising. Why do some people think it's acceptable to presume to speak on behalf of people they've never met? Hubristic or what?
Secondly, unless you name something, how can it be dealt with? For example, if colleges, say, are not allowed to ask on their enrolment forms if you have a disability, or the nature of the disability, how can that disability be accommodated?
I really don't understand why, when people are told that using expressions like "turning a blind eye" is a microaggression, they just don't tell the accuser to get stuffed. These people only have power because other people give them power. And what's especially annoying about drivel like that appearing on the BBC website is that we in the UK are forced to pay for that rubbish on pain of imprisonment if we don't. Now you've got ME started: I'm going to take some Rescue Remedy!