Language Wars

Language Wars
http://www.sydneyline.com/Language%20Wars.htm
Keith Windschuttle
May 2004

In recent years, all states and territories have recognised the phenomenon
called "gender reassignment". This means that throughout Australia anyone
who wants to switch from being male to female or from female to male can now
do so legally and have the change recorded on his or her birth certificate.
The person concerned does not even have to undergo any surgery. It is enough
to simply adopt what the legislators call a "transgender identity" and then
fill out the forms. A distinction that was once thought to be irreducibly
grounded in biology is now a matter of choice.

In most cases, the governments concerned did not introduce any new laws but
amended those covering birth registrations and/or anti-discrimination
provisions. Western Australia went the furthest when in 2001 the government
passed the Gender Reassignment Act and established a Gender Reassignment
Board. New South Wales, which recognized "transgender" persons in amendments
to its anti-discrimination legislation in 1996, changed its Births, Deaths
and Marriages Registration Regulations in 2001 to include the text of the
Western Australian Act.

What this means is that the word gender, which until recent years was little
more than a politically fashionable substitute for sex, has now been
enshrined in legislation. Since the number of people directly affected is
small, the change is primarily linguistic and symbolic, but no less
significant for that.

It is a change that happened surprisingly quickly. Well into the 1980s, the
preferred term was still sex. The Hawke government introduced the Sex
Discrimination Act in 1984. That is why Pru Goward is still called the Sex
Discrimination Commissioner. The Bannon Labor government of South Australia
introduced its Sexual Reassignment Act in 1988.

Had a Sex Discrimination Act been initiated today there is no question that
Ms Goward would have gender in her title. In the media and most other public
discussion, sex has now been largely purged in favour of the newer usage.

For instance, recent newspaper stories report that the Government Insurance
Office calculates car insurance risks on "make and age of vehicle, age and
gender of owner/drivers"; the Sydney radio station Nova provides "an
eclectic mix of music which caters for no particular age or gender"; the new
Speedo racing swimsuits "are specific for different strokes as well as
gender". Other stories have discussed the "gender pay gap", the "gender
reading gap", "gender issues", "gender relations', "gender discrimination",
"gender equality", "gender imbalance" and "gender impact statements".

Prime Minister John Howard has himself succumbed. On March 11, announcing a
proposal to amend the Sex Discrimination Act, he said it would allow the
Catholic Church to "offer gender specific scholarships to encourage men into
teaching".

Despite this acceptance, traditional usage has not been completely
eradicated and inconsistencies abound. Earlier this year, the phrase
"same-sex marriage" was commonly used to describe the spate of ceremonies
performed in San Francisco and Massachusetts, although one publication of
the Anglican Church in Sydney preferred the term "same-gender marriages". A
story in the Sunday Telegraph said a "transgender" golfer had had a
"sex-change operation".

Even the Gender Centre in Sydney, an organisation funded by the NSW
government to support transgender people and to educate the wider
population, still feels the need to explain the term:

If you live, have lived, or want to live as a member of the opposite gender
(sex) to your birth gender, the New South Wales anti-discrimination law
counts you as transgender . under NSW law, only some people who are
transgender are legally counted as being the opposite gender (sex) to their
birth gender (that is, as their preferred gender).

Some might think gender has gained its current acceptance either because it
is a more polite term or because it removed the ambiguity that emerged in
the twentieth century when sex became publicly used to refer not only to the
distinct status of males and females but also to sexual intercourse.
However, there is much more to it than that.

Gender is a term that reeks of the sexual politics of the Seventies. It made
its first appearance when gay activists began to demand that homosexuality
be not merely tolerated but given equal standing with heterosexuality in all
things. It was reinforced by feminists who wanted to eliminate the
differences between men and women.

These activists had to face the fact that sexual differences are grounded in
biology. They are determined at conception by the distribution of X and Y
chromosomes and cannot be altered, no matter what identity a person assumes,
how many hormones someone ingests, or whatever surgery is performed.
Moreover, the biology of sexual difference has no place for homosexual
activities. Indeed, it implies they are unnatural.

A reconceptualisation was obviously needed and the linguistic term gender
came to the rescue, even though there is no gender assigned in the English
language. In those languages that do use it, gender is applied arbitrarily
and by custom. There is no inherent reason, apart from customary use, why
the French language, for instance, applies the feminine gender to "the sea"
or "the mountain", la mer, la montagne, or masculine gender to "the dog" or
"the desk", le chien, le bureau. If gender is arbitrary and customary, it
can be altered by changing the language.

The activists saw that if sex was redefined as gender, it too became
arbitrary and changeable. Hence, masculinity, femininity and homosexuality
were transformed from the realm of biological necessity to that of custom.
Since the mantra of Seventies radicalism was "the personal is political",
the way to ensure change was to engage in political struggle to have the new
concept socially accepted.

The institution that did most to foster this reconceptualisation was the
university. The agenda was set by the humanities departments when the
fledgling "women's studies" courses of the 1970s were transformed into
"gender studies" in the 1980s. The feminist jargon and moralistic speech
codes adopted within most Australian universities at the time were largely
the work of academics from these departments. When their graduates
eventually entered the bureaucracies, they took their linguistic concepts
with them.

Meanwhile, the public at large remained oblivious to this sleight of hand.
Most people never understood the issues at stake and saw nothing to get
upset about, let alone any evidence of a campaign to impose an ideological
orthodoxy. Even most of those who made their living as writers in the media
saw no need for any fuss and, unwilling to offend the protagonists, they
allowed gender to take the field without a struggle.

This strategy has been remarkably successful. One doesn't have to subscribe
to the false theory that language determines all our thoughts to agree that
a change to the language can influence some of our thoughts. This has
certainly happened in how we now think about sex. We no longer talk about
two sexes but of at least six varieties of gender preference: male and
female heterosexuals, gays, lesbians, bisexuals and the transgendered.

This is not to mention several further categories: cross-dressers, drag
queens, transvestites, hermaphrodites, plus pre, post and non-operative
transsexuals. (I quote this inventory from a recent policy document of the
Tasmanian Department of Education entitled Challenging Transphobia.) There
is now an academic journal called Genders, to emphasise how many there are.

Hence the idea once confined to radical circles that heterosexuality and
homosexuality were not biological imperatives but personal and political
choices is now much more widely accepted. As a result, the ability of sexual
activists to recruit followers in schools and universities at a time when
adolescents are often confused or uncertain about their sexual identity has
been made all that much easier. The left has chalked up another victory in
the culture wars.

Much the same has occurred with the term partner. News stories about
entertainers, sporting celebrities and political identities now rarely
bother to portray their characters' sexual relationships precisely. Recent
stories about footballer Jamie Lyon, athlete Darren Clark, Coffs Harbour
mayor Jenny Bonfield and Tasmanian green activist Naomi Edwards all
described them as having not wives, husbands, girlfriends or spouses but
partners. The Sunday Telegraph recently advised pregnant women to avoid
intercourse if "your partner has a sexually transmitted disease". A story in
the Daily Telegraph said married women often put on weight because they "no
longer needed to look attractive for a partner".

Even Liberal Party ministers use the same terminology, such as Assistant
Treasurer Helen Coonan who distinguished in a recent news release between
the single rate for pensions and "the maximum partnered benefit".

Like gender, the term partner has now been written into legislation. In 2000
the New South Wales Parliament passed the Superannuation (Same Sex Partners)
Bill allowing homosexual couples to leave their superannuation to each
other. In Australia, however, we still have some way to go to match the
Dutch Parliament which, when it passed a bill in 2002 to allow homosexual
marriages and adoptions, ordered that terms such as husband and wife and man
and woman be replaced by partner in all legislation.

In traditional usage, partner described a business relationship. In the
1980s, when homosexual couples began to be openly discussed in print, for
lack of a more polite term each came to be commonly described as the other's
partner. It is this homosexual definition, not the business version, that is
now widely applied to heterosexual couples.

Until quite recently, the common name for a live-in, unmarried lover was de
facto. A de facto relationship is essentially a heterosexual one, something
like a marriage but without the legal and ceremonial confirmation. This term
still crops up occasionally in the media, such as the recent Daily Telegraph
story about a man bashed by a gang in Campbelltown: "He and his de facto had
been walking along Queen Street . " These days, however, this usage stands
out because it has become so rare.

Indeed, it was revealing that when Australian animator, Adam Elliot, won an
Academy Award this year for his film Harvie Krumpet, he publicly thanked his
"boyfriend", Dan Doherty. Asked whether he was aware he was the first to use
that term in an acceptance speech, Elliot replied: "The reason I didn't say
partner is because it's ambiguous." In other words, partner is now such a
ubiquitous term for both homosexuals and heterosexuals that Elliot felt he
needed to use another word to assure his audience that he was actually gay.

What the rapid demise of de facto and its replacement by partner signifies
is the reduction of heterosexual relationships to a common linguistic
denominator with those of male homosexuals. It redefines the traditional
life-long heterosexual bond of marriage, which evolved primarily for the
need of children to be reared in a stable and loving household, as no more
than one of a series of impermanent relationships built entirely on the
sexual desires of the participants and which can be broken at whim.

Of course, in this case there is some reality behind the terminological
change. As divorce rates and unmarried pairings both escalate, traditional
marriage patterns do seem to increasingly resemble the kind of transitory
relationships that were once identified more with male homosexuals. The
shift in terminology has no doubt followed the shift in life patterns rather
than been a cause of it.

The growing use of partner, however, has had its own effect. It has helped
cement this change more firmly into place by defining serial relationships
as the norm rather than the exception. The rise of the term partner is
another example of the homosexualisation of our culture. Once again, this is
a considerable victory for the sexual radicals.

In these language wars, conservatives have not been completely subdued.
Indeed, they scored a notable triumph in the 1990s when politically correct
became part of common usage. Politically correct had the great virtue of
being a satirical term. It was used by conservatives to send up leftist
attempts to impose speech codes that forbade negative descriptors based on
race, sex, class, ethnicity, sexual proclivity and disability. The disabled
were no longer to be called blind, deaf, dumb or crippled. They were simply
different, indeed "challenged" by their difference.

The worst offenders were bureaucracies and public education. In the early
1990s, the suffix -man was ruled sexist by the Australian Government's style
manual for official publications, which forbade terms such as sportsmanship,
workman and statesmanlike. Guidelines for American university presses
declared a wide range of prohibitions including massacre, which was "highly
offensive" when used to refer to a successful American Indian raid or battle
victory against white colonizers and invaders. White Americans, however,
could still be said to massacre the Indians. No one could be called
deranged, insane or deviant, let alone mad or crazy. Even virgin forest was
out, along with any other comment about sexual experience or sexual
violation. In many government offices, schools and universities "Merry
Christmas" became "Happy Holiday" or "Season's Greetings", lest it offend
the non-Christian. These therapeutic euphemisms were so transparently
self-righteous and paternalistic they became a standing joke.

Political correctness is often portrayed as a conservative plot against the
left. This was the claim of a 1995 counter-attack by John K. Wilson, author
of The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack on Higher
Education. It was echoed by the outspoken Scottish feminist lawyer Helena
Kennedy: "Political correctness is an invention of the right". This is a
misunderstanding that grew from the fact that the acronym PC first gained
notice in an anti-left student cartoon strip produced at Brown University,
Rhode Island.

Political correctness works so well because it satirises terminology long
used by the left itself. A recent analysis, Political Correctness and the
Theoretical Struggle by Frank Ellis of the University of Leeds, shows that
rather than being a stuffy but essentially harmless effort to avoid
offending people, the concept has long been deeply embedded within radical
culture.

It originated in the early writings of Vladimir Lenin and evolved as a
concept in his work up to 1917. The phrase politicheskaya pravil'nost'
derived from Lenin's insistence on a rigidly enforced party line on all
questions. Lenin argued that only a specifically revolutionary theory would
prevent the revolutionary movement from abandoning "the correct path".
Before the Russian revolution, to be politically incorrect meant being
denounced by Lenin as a "revisionist", "factionalist", "wrecker" and "enemy
of the people". After the revolution, to be politically incorrect meant a
death warrant. Joseph Stalin used the phrase in the 1920s to destroy his
rivals Trotsky and Bukharin.

Mao Tsetung's China was similarly obsessed with the concept. The cultural
revolution of the 1960s declared that China

"needs a unifying thought, revolutionary thought, correct thought. That is
Mao Tsetung Thought. Only with this thought can we maintain vigorous
revolutionary drive and keep firmly to the correct political orientation..."

In other words, political correctness means there is only one line on any
issue, and we who control the party will tell you what it is. The concept is
profoundly authoritarian, it tolerates no opposition and denies its
adherents the right to think for themselves.

The New Left that emerged in Western universities in the 1960s initially
declared itself opposed to this kind of totalitarianism. However, by the
1980s, when it had expanded its constituency to encompass gender, race and
class and gained widespread control of academic departments of humanities
and government institutions for affirmative action and multiculturalism, it
had reverted to type.

It was the left's attempt to impose its brand of authoritarianism through
various speech codes, racial vilification and anti-discrimination laws that
provoked conservatives into a reaction. All they needed to do was reproduce
the left's own terminology verbatim for most people outside these circles to
recognize it for what it was.

So it is not surprising to find Don Watson provides only a brief mention of
political correctness in his new book Death Sentence: The Decay of Public
Language. The former Keating government speech writer says he has written
this work as an assault on obfuscation and euphemism and to critique the way
people in authority use language to intimidate and manipulate.

As a loyal leftist, Watson avoids a proper discussion of political
correctness, except to try and turn it against conservatives. He lumps both
political correctness and "its equally irritating twin anti-political
correctness" together as a form of language that "inclines to the arcane or
inscrutable." However, Watson doesn't give any examples of either arcane or
inscrutable anti-politically correct language, so it is hard to know what he
means. Later he claims that the label politically correct is a form of abuse
designed to channel "frustrations felt by the politically powerless". But he
gives no clues about who or where these frustrations are channeled nor who
he defines as politically powerless.

Watson is also concerned about several other terms wielded by conservatives
in the language wars, especially elite, chattering classes, café latte and
black-armband historians. Yet his book is an argument against verbal sludge
and in favour of striking and imaginative language. If any
Australian-originated phrase qualifies as striking, it is surely
black-armband history, coined by Geoffrey Blainey, one of this country's
most imaginative writers, and a more impressive practitioner of the art than
poor Don Watson will ever be. Blainey's phrase summed up the entire
left-wing school that had dominated Australian historiography since the
1970s and at the same time told us what was wrong with it. Were Watson less
politically jaundiced and more genuinely interested in feats of verbal
dexterity, he might have grudgingly dipped his lid to Blainey for this one.

Watson's book is apparently selling very well, largely, one suspects, to the
many readers of his earlier eulogy for Keating's Prime Ministership,
Recollections of a Bleeding Heart. No doubt his readers are coming to the
new work hoping for some original, devastating insight into the culture of
the Howard era. They will, however, be disappointed.

Death Sentence is a quickie. It has 198 pages, set in large type and every
second page has a narrower column to fit in drop quotes that illustrate
Watson's thesis. It is a long essay padded out to look like a book. It has
no table of contents, no chapter titles or headings and no index. It has a
glossary of objectionable words and phrases but there are only twenty items
in it, as if the author couldn't be bothered gathering any more examples.
The book has a rambling, incoherent structure and is very repetitive, so
that often the eyes glaze and the mind wanders.

Watson's principal aim is to advise his readers to respect the English
language, to avoid clichés, cant and jargon, and to recognize and denounce
what he calls "managerial writing". He says there is something rotten about
this kind of writing and gives a number of examples of what he means. Here
is his worst case, from a fax by the Department of Finance and described by
Watson as "a true, possible world class, death sentence":

"Given the within year and budget time flexibility accorded to the science
agencies in the determination of resource allocation from within their
global budget, a multi-parameter approach to maintaining the agencies
budgets in real terms is not appropriate..."

He also quotes an example from the English syllabus of the New South Wales
Department of Education to show what high school teachers and students now
endure:

"This module requires students to explore and evaluate a specific text and
its reception in a range of contexts. It develops a student's understanding
of questions of textual integrity..."

Watson is quite right to use these as examples of bad writing but, if he'd
put in a little more work, he could have found many worse than these. Had he
done what he conspicuously avoided doing, and examined the output of his
friends among today's academic left, especially in the fields of cultural
studies, media studies, gender studies and literary theory, he would have
found not just passages but whole books full of the very thing he despises.

The founder of the Arts and Letters Daily website, Dennis Dutton, regularly
lampooned this material throughout the 1990s with his annual Bad Writing
Contest, of which Watson is unaware. In 1994, one of the nominees was Julian
Pefanis of the University of Sydney's Department of Fine Arts. Pefanis only
won second prize but his effort is worth reproducing:

"The libidinal Marx is a polymorphous creature, a hermaphrodite with the
"huge head of a warlike and quarrelsome man of thought" set atop the soft
feminine contours of a "young Rhenish lover". So it is a strange bi-sexed
arrangement giving rise to a sort of ambivalence: the Old Man and the Young
Woman, a monster in which femininity and virility exchange indiscernibly,
"thus putting a stop to the reassuring difference of the sexes." Now the
Young Woman Marx, who is called Alice (of Wonderland fame), is obfuscated by
the perverse body of Capital."

Watson also missed the Postmodern Essay Generator, a satirical website
www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/ that automatically invents pretentious
guff of this kind, complete with pseudo-scholarly footnotes.

Nor did he cite the work of Stuart Hall, the English Marxist who played a
big role in founding the field of cultural studies. Here is Hall trying to
explain what effective communication involves:

"The overall intention of effective communication must, certainly, be to
'win the consent' of the audience to the preferred reading, and hence to get
him to decode within the hegemonic framework. Even when decodings are not
made, through a 'perfect transmission', within the hegemonic framework, the
great range of decodings will tend to be 'negotiations' within the dominant
codes -- giving them a more situational inflexion -- rather than
systematically decoding them in a counter-hegemonic way..."

This combination of meaningless abstractions, leftist neologisms and muddled
grammar is something that Watson must have come across himself, given that
it is a passage singled out in the communications skills textbook I
co-authored in 1988, Writing, Researching, Communicating, from which Watson
himself lifts other lines, though without proper attribution. Watson's
distaste for our book is small-minded since we advocated the same
straightforward prose and decried the same obfuscation that he now does.

Had Watson been genuinely concerned about the condition of the English
language he might have made the current academic spectacle one of his
targets. What little discussion he offers about higher education avoids the
question of leftist dominance of the humanities. Instead, he complains about
the cult of managerialism within universities and the jargon it has
produced:

"achieved learning outcomes, quality assurance mechanisms, international
benchmarking."

I agree with him that this kind of stuff is a menace in these institutions
and is one reason why academic life today has become intolerable. But this
is a small problem compared to the corruption and politicisation of these
institutions wrought by his comrades on the left.

The critique Watson offers has all been said before, many times. Over the
past fifty years there have been any number of books telling people not to
write bureaucratic jargon and showing them how to write plain and effective
English prose.

One of the earliest and best was Ernest Gowers' The Complete Plain Words¸
published in England in 1954. Gowers wrote at a time when both public and
private sector bureaucracies grew to sizes never before experienced,
especially in those British state enterprises nationalised by the Labour
Party after the Second World War. These bureaucracies took on a life and
language of their own.

The management-speak of which Watson complains derives more from that era
than our own. Gowers' book was aimed at ridding these institutions of their
pretentious and often unintelligible prose style. He gave them sound advice:
write as you speak, keep it simple, use active rather than passive voice,
prefer concrete to abstract terms, and the like. However, large
bureaucracies -- both public and private -- seem to inherently foster a
culture that favours circumlocution, jargon and euphemism, which means that
each generation has to address the problem anew.

Instead of recognising the bureaucratic origins of both the problem and his
own critique, Watson tries to give the issue a more contemporary Australian
context, blaming economic rationalism, John Howard, the alleged rise of
xenophobia, the children overboard affair and several other leftist causes
célèbres that came to mind as he dashed off his chapters.

Surprisingly for an author who initially argues that good writing is
essential for a democratic culture, towards the end of his book Watson
offers some very undemocratic thoughts. Language, he suggests, is actually
being corrupted by democracy, especially when it produces inarticulate
"mediocrities" like the current American president. "When George W. Bush
speaks, we're getting the real thing. It is the mass we are hearing - or
more precisely, language that has been programmed for their level of
intelligence and interest."

Death Sentence endorses the stance of Nietzsche who, Watson says,
characterized democracy as "a political system calculated to make the
intelligent minority subject to the will of the stupid". Watson claims we
are now witnessing this in the globalization of culture. Dominated by the
mass democracy of the United States, globalisation is a process of
infantilisation. "When the Texan unfurls his vision in chaotic prose, it is
just as Nietzsche (and Flaubert and all the others) said it would be."

This is a revealing comment. It demonstrates the condescending elitism of
the political class Watson represents. It confirms the accusation of
intellectual arrogance made by a number of conservative authors, especially
David Flint in Twilight of the Elites, and provides a good insight into the
presumptions of Keating and his camp followers. It also confirms the account
offered here about the language wars. They represent a cultural intrusion
that feigns support for those ordinary people the left wants as potential
constituents, but which is actually deeply contemptuous of them.

On that note, let me conclude with some comments about another of the left
elite's currently favoured terms: social justice. This term became publicly
conspicuous after the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission
appointed an Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Social Justice
Commissioner in December 1992. Under the Keating government, the first
holder of that office, Mick Dodson, gave the term a high media profile.

Today, Australia abounds with social justice institutions and policies. As
well as HREOC, the Catholic Church has a Social Justice Council, the Jesuits
have a Social Justice Centre, the National Council of Churches has a Social
Justice Network. A policy on social justice now seems to be mandatory for
any organisation that wants to regard itself as progressive. Institutions as
disparate as the Greens, the National Archives of Australia and the
Australian Sports Commission all have one.

Universities, predictably, are prominent advocates. The Faculty of Law at
the University of New South Wales has a Social Justice Project which
undertakes research, teaching and policy development. The University of
Adelaide has a Social Justice Research Foundation which, it assures
supporters, promotes "progressive research". There are at least half a dozen
academic journals with social justice in their title. Most focus on social
welfare, crime and legal issues, but one from the University of San
Francisco entitled Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, obviously has
a more ambitious scope.

Social justice appears to have originated as a term with similar
connotations to social welfare. In a 1996 article in the academic journal,
Social Justice, Peter Beilharz identified it with the broad objectives of
the Australian Labor Party. However, it has since expanded into a catch-all
concept used by almost anyone with an agenda for social or political change.

For instance, the University of Adelaide defines it as:

"a commitment to sustainable economic development, a fairer distribution of
income, wealth and power, and a recognition of the critical role that
communities, through government, have in forging a more equitable
society..."

Others apply it more to society's have-nots. The Australian Jesuits say
their social justice program is targeted primarily at the poor and
marginalized. It includes work in the areas of Aboriginal rights and
culture, the distribution of wealth in Australia, migration policy, refugees
and asylum seekers.

Yet others see it as focused more on specific political issues. Soon after
Saddam Hussein was captured, the Chairman of the Australian Catholic Social
Justice Council, Bishop Christopher Saunders, urged Australian politicians
not to condone the death penalty for him. The annual conference of the
Australian Education Union last January endorsed a policy of social justice
in education to be pursued through industrial strategies. The Greens
maintain: "Social justice requires ecological and economic sustainability,
real democracy, peace and nonviolence and a respect for the earth." The
Greens' manifesto also rejects consumerism, greed and population growth.

Some even see the concept as explaining the grievances that motivate
terrorists. According to Rick Farley in his Inaugural Human Rights/Social
Justice lecture at the University of Newcastle in October 2001, it was a
lack of social justice that created the conditions that prompted the current
spate of terrorism.

Social justice is thus a very open-ended concept, which is part of the
reason for its current appeal.

It is important to recognise how powerful a political weapon this little
two-word phrase has become. It is a term that few would dare criticize
publicly. This is because of the clever conjunction of its terms. If you are
in favour of justice -- and who is not? -- you will find it almost
impossible not to be in favour social justice, at least in principle. And
because the concept can be tied to almost any policy at all, social justice
is almost as valuable a term for the left as political correctness has been
for the right. Everyone approves it, no one dares condemn it.

Several organisations link social justice with human rights, as though the
two were much the same thing. However, they are quite different. Human
rights are universal, like the concept of justice itself. Both apply equally
to all people. Social justice, however, is a relative term. It is only
applicable to certain kinds of people. In some cases, like eligibility for
social welfare payments, the targets can be identified fairly objectively by
income testing and the process is unobjectionable. But in most cases, the
demand for social justice amounts to little more than political preference.
It hijacks the universalism of justice to serve partisan ideological ends.
It is yet another instrument of Seventies radicalism, the politics of
gender, race and class.

For instance, the notion that women as a category or ethnics as a group
deserve social justice in the form of affirmative action derives from these
interest group politics. The latest constituency is illegal immigrants, who
are now targets of social justice programs from a wide range of
organisations. The idea that these groups deserve special rights that are
not available to others, especially the right to jump queue, undermines the
principle of egalitarianism that the same organisations purport to uphold.
In some cases, social justice policies are in direct conflict with universal
human rights, such as the advocacy of customary law for Aboriginal people
which, if implemented strictly, would deny Aboriginal women the right to
enter marriage freely.

The universalism of human rights was a product of the eighteenth century
Enlightenment and since then has been subject to almost constant debate and
testing in the field of social reality. Its principles have been written
down and refined in declarations and laws, most specifically in the 1948
United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Hence it is possible
to check what they actually say. This is in contrast to the relativism of
social justice, which can mean just about anything its various advocates
want it to mean and apply to any social group they choose. There is no
widely agreed way of ever telling when social justice has been satisfied. It
thus offers an unlimited vista of political appeal. Anything - including
terrorism - can be done in its name.

In an age of terrorism, debates over language might seem rather trivial but
they deserve to be taken seriously. In 1946, just before the onset of the
Cold War, a much more dangerous time for the world than our own, George
Orwell wrote an important essay called "Politics and the English Language".
He began by noting that many people at the time believed Western
civilization was decadent and that the language must inevitably share in the
general collapse. He wrote:

"Political language - and with variations this is true of all political
parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists - is designed to make lies sound
truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to
pure wind..."

Orwell's essay was an attempt to turn this around. He said the English
language was becoming ugly and inaccurate because the thinking of the times
was muddled and foolish. Moreover, the process was cumulative since the
increasing slovenliness of the language itself made it more likely that
people would have foolish thoughts. Orwell argued that if the bad habits of
modern English could be eradicated, people would begin to think more clearly
and thus take the first steps to political regeneration. "The fight against
bad English," he wrote, "is not frivolous and not the exclusive concern of
professional writers."

There can be little doubt that we, too, live in a time of cultural and moral
decadence, especially with an arrogant and authoritarian left dominating so
much of our education, arts and public life. Those who are concerned about
this and want to do something about it should recognize that the language
itself is one of the critical fronts where this struggle will be lost or
won.


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