Let's Avoid the Language-Policing Fingertrap In the Future, OK?

the more you forbid transgression, the more they want to transgress

I wrote about art populism and exoneration culture for Romanticon. Check it out.

I get it: your instinct is to say “What year is this??” Language policing feels very 2019 and complaining about language policing feels very 2021. Well, yes, I know. But the reality is that these things are cyclical. The vibe did indeed shift. But as this piece on “nude” fingernails from the NYT shows, “the past isn’t even past” - it contains a completely unreconstructed let’s-find-something-to-get-mad-about section with the very dubious assumption that choosing to leave your nails unpainted is inherently an insult against the practice of painting your nails. (Reader, it is not.) We are less woke than we once were but still more woke than we were before that, and because this is all cyclical, we will be woke again, and the anti-woke will take up arms, darkness rises and light to meet it.

My interest lies in making “social justice” less dumb next time. Sooner or later the social justice crowd is going to rise again, and I want to do my feeble best to make it into a better, less self-destructive, less stupid movement than the one we got from 2012-2022. Besides, I’ve always held many of the same goals as the woke on political issues while finding their messaging and tactics illiberal, counterproductive, and incredibly unpleasant. So I need to articulate a better vision for such a movement, even as I acknowledge that my influence with such people is zero. I get a lot of “critiques everything, can build nothing” jabs, so rather than critiquing the next wave of social justice politics only after it’s already been restored to prominence, I want to think seriously about what a better, more humane, less self-defeating version of social justice might look like. If it’s coming back someday we should at least try to make it smarter, to steer it in a way that makes it more effective in opposing inequality and bigotry. And one way to do that is to define the Chinese fingertrap that is strict language norms.

I think this sentiment is quite correct, and I see it expressed more and more often: these days, people trying to sound transgressive by using a term like “retard” (the canonical case) just sound stupid. Deliberately using slurs to get attention is edgy in the worst, most tryhard way. No, I don’t think you should be ostracized for using “the r-word” in a manner that does not target and ridicule a specific person or people, and if you just want to say “fag” with your buddies on the golf course, no one was really stopping you in the fist place. But yes, expecting bad words to thrill people seems as dusty to me as Buzzfeed articles about the cultural appropriation of Disney movies, a relic from a past that’s quite recent but still seems like a thousand years ago. Those taboos haven’t vanished, but they do look something like a dog’s chewed up rope; the shock value is gone because so many people are inured to the experience. What’s left isn’t rebellion but rather a kind of pastiche, a Scary Movie-style parody of a recent film where all they really do is reenact what you’ve seen before without any actual new joke.

But beyond this simple social observation, that we are now sufficiently post-woke that many slurs don’t really agitate people very much anymore, I think this is a sentiment worth sitting with a little longer. Because while the most obvious message is that right-wing edgelords should move on from shock politics, there are lessons on offer for the language scolds too, obvious ones. Somewhere between 2012 and 2022, a decade of aggressive language policing in various forms and forums - content moderation, social media pile-ons, termination campaigns, mandatory sensitivity trainings, meetings with HR, the whole tedious apparatus of progressive linguistic enforcement - produced an outcome precisely opposite to what its architects intended. The more that institutions tried to forbid saying the bad things, the more people wanted to say them. This was, of course, perfectly predictable (I mean, I predicted it) but still took many by surprise: the more the fist clenched, the more people wanted to defy it, and defy it they did, repeatedly. American politics runs on reverse psychology of the most crude kind. It’s as regular as the Krebs cycle and as predictable as the tide.

Which is why, when the Great Wheel turns and progressive mores again retake the field of American institutions, it would be cool if progressive people could learn the lesson and avoid creating rules that conservatives will then be directly incentivized to break, and break with glee. It would be cool if they would stop playing into that cycle. They’re not going to stop, but it would be cool if they did.