Why Are Words?

A meditation on the uselessness of language

I am gender-critical. That is, I am critical of gender. That is, there is a concept called “gender”, and I am critical of it. That is, I don’t like the concept of gender. That is, I don’t like the concept espoused by some people, which is called by those people “gender”. That is, some of the people who espouse the concept I don’t like call that concept “gender”, so I am critical of those people. That is, I am critical of people who espouse a concept which some of them call “gender”, but I include in my criticism those who don’t call it “gender”. That is, I am critical of what these people say on the subject of “gender”, or on the subject of the concept which they may not call “gender” but which other people do, but I am not critical of them as people. That is, I am gender-critical to the extent that within the collection of ideas that is frequently labelled “gender”, there are certain of those ideas of which I am critical, and when it comes to those ideas of which I am critical, I am critical of them. That is, I don’t like things that I don’t like.

To put it another way: why are words?

Because I am a very stupid person, I observe quite a lot of arguments on the internet. I’m not as stupid as I used to be: I used to get involved in a lot of arguments on the internet. I hardly ever do that anymore, which proves that homo sapiens is a species capable of learning. But I do observe them and get angry about them, which proves that homo sapiens is a species capable of only very slow learning.

Anyway, while observing and getting angry, I can’t help but notice what a massive proportion of argument online - and here I’m not just talking about people arguing directly with others, but also of posts, tweets and opinions pieces written in defence of one’s own position and attacking the positions of others - is made up of people wasting their intellectual energy by arguing past each other because they are not using the same definitions of words as the people they disagree with. Or sometimes as the people they don’t disagree with but argue with anyway because their failure to agree on definitions leads them to think they disagree even when they don’t.

What does it mean to say someone is “woke”? It might mean they believe society should be working towards eliminating racism, sexism and homophobia. It might mean that they believe racist, sexist and homophobic people shouldn’t be on television. It might mean that they believe anyone who has ever read the Daily Telegraph is a Nazi.

What does it mean to say someone is “anti-woke”? It might mean that they think black people aren’t yet ready for the right to vote. It might mean that they think women shouldn’t take offence if men look up their skirts at work. It might mean that they still laugh at Are You Being Served?

What does “Cancel culture” mean? It might mean preferring that a convicted rapist doesn’t keep his spot on your football team. It might mean telling JK Rowling you want her dead. It might mean demanding someone be rendered unemployable for the rest of their lives because you didn’t like a joke they tweeted ten years ago.

So given that, what on earth is the point of entering into any conversation with anyone involving any of these terms, without finding out exactly what they mean beforehand?

I think about this whenever I see someone online attribute blame for any random thing to “the woke”. If someone defines “woke” as “any development in society of the last fifty years that I don’t like”, it’s pretty easy to rail against it. Some go further, and define woke as “the unseen engine of destruction behind every negative news story”. I think it’s safe to say that if you’re arguing with someone who believes that the US Army is too woke to kill people properly, you’re probably not going to get anywhere productive on the subject of the empowerment of Indigenous communities.

But I also think about it whenever I see a variation of this: “Well, to be woke is just to be compassionate and caring and to stand up for the marginalised, so you know what I AM GLAD TO BE WOKE”. I mean, good for you, but 99% of the people you encounter who criticise “wokeness” are using an entirely different definition, so if you argue with them you’ll get nowhere.

So you end up with one side believing that the other side claims that being opposed to racism is the same thing as Stalinist oppression, and the other side believing that the first side claims that enjoying Friends makes you a de facto Klan member.

All because we absolutely refuse to agree on what words mean before we start throwing them around.

Far better, I think, than giving every event, phenomenon, news story or controversy a label, fitting it into a category, is to simply take things on a case by case basis and explain why we think each is good, or each is bad.

Then when we notice a lot of good things, or a lot of bad things, happening in a short space of time that seem to fit a pattern, we can collect that data, come up with a name for that pattern that accurately describes it, and…

Oh. We’re back at the start, aren’t we.

For fuck’s sake.

The Weekly Plug

Whether you are particularly interested in the US mental health care system I don’t know, but this by Freddie de Boer is really rather brilliant and probably still relevant to people outside the US as well.