Social Justice Warriors on the Intellectual Dark Web // Who Needs the News? // The Nature of Reality

A very overdiscussed topic lately is political correctness, and if there’s too much of it. I propose the following three points:

1. At least some measure of socially ordained political correctness is unquestionably a good thing.
2. There is a point where social monitoring of offensive speech becomes intrusive, burdensome and overall not worthwhile.
3. ‘PC Culture’ is currently unevenly distributed - there are some places which have it in very high levels (many university campuses, say), whereas there are also plenty of places where some pretty offensive things are considered acceptable.

Basically my feeling is that there is a high level of variance among people. Outside of the Western world there is a wild thicket of systems of etiquette, views on race and caste and culture and gender, etc. And even within the West, there is quite a lot of variance. I think this variance is OK, a part of human nature. What the internet has changed is that we see much more of each other’s views, and have more opportunity to take offence, such that people get angrier and more polarised. The internet is less like a global village than like all the villages in the world compressed into one physical space, haphazardly glimpsing each other’s business and getting offended.

I also suspect that a lot of people within places that have high levels of PC aren’t fully on board with the culture, but don’t feel it’s worth taking on. I strongly endorse this hypothetical view, because a) this doesn’t seem like the biggest deal, and b) people’s will probably regress back to a calmer mean over time.

So the late, revered programmer Aaron Swartz, patron saint of the Internet, has a blog post I categorically disagree with. Swartz argues that reading the news is pointless because it doesn’t affect your life, and that it is a form of mindless entertainment.

By that logic, should you read news of scientific developments? It affects your life very little, too, and it’s unlikely that someone outside of a very specialised field will be able to contribute. Why read anything besides technical literature from your profession, and perhaps investment advice? If one is going to read anything, it might as well be keeping up with the world around you, and one might even be able to use it to make small talk with other human beings.

I also think that this argument stems from a time when the media seemed sturdier. Nowadays, the media business model is barely alive, and the media’s role in a democracy doesn’t just work on its own. Swartz argues that if the newspaper criticises the mayor, the mayor will apologise or justify herself or whatever, so why does the reader need to get involved? But nowadays the mayor has her own media. You could still argue, as Swartz does, that one individual’s opinion, or their vote, doesn’t really matter. But one might say in today’s terms that that argument “doesn’t scale”.

English speakers encountering the words for scientific things in other languages often find them somewhat childlike, but that’s only because English obfuscates them with Latin and Greek, because tradition. Just one example: TV in German is Fernsehen, “see-far”; in English it’s the same, but a hideous Greek-Latin hybrid. Leaving aside the Sapir-Whorff hypothesis, it’s beyond a doubt that the solidity of our language hides an enormous amount of uncertainty. Not to get too Kantian, but in a sense scientific models - not just of black holes and quantum particles, but of all matter, consciousness, life! - are weird, hacky concepts, leaky metaphors which partially describe observations of phenomena that multiple people experience. I found this idea of the ubiquity and fundamental nature of metaphor in human experience in a book I’m reading (The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind), and I’ll quote from it somewhat at length.

A random glance at the etymologies of common words in a dictionary will demonstrate [the ubiquity of metaphors]. Or take the naming of various fauna and flora in their Latin indicants, or even in their wonderful common English names, such as stag beetle, lady’s-slipper, darning needle, Queen Anne’s lace, or buttercup. The human body is a particularly generative metaphier [his term for a source of metaphors], creating previously unspeakable distinctions in a throng of areas. The head of an army, table, page, bed, ship, household, or nail, or of steam or water; the face of a clock, cliff, card, or crystal; the eyes of needles, winds, storms, targets, flowers, or potatoes; the brow of a hill; the cheeks of a vise; the teeth of cogs or combs; the lips of pitchers, craters, augers; the tongues of shoes, board joints, or railway switches; the arm of a chair or the sea; the leg of a table, compass, sailor’s voyage, or cricket field; and so on and on. Or the foot of this page. Or the leaf you will soon turn. All of these concrete metaphors increase enormously our powers of perception of the world about us and our understanding of it, and literally create new objects. Indeed, language is an organ of perception, not simply a means of communication.

…This is indeed the nub (knob), heart, pith, kernel, core, marrow, etc. of my argument, which itself is a metaphor and ‘seen’ only with the mind’s ’eye’. In the abstractions of human relations, the skin becomes a particularly important metaphier. We get or stay ‘in touch’ with others who may be ’thick-’ or ’thin-skinned’ or perhaps ’touchy’ in which case they have to be ‘handled’ carefully lest we ‘rub’ them the wrong way; we may have a ‘feeling’ for another person with whom we may have a ’touching’ experience.

The concepts of science are all of this kind, abstract concepts generated by concrete metaphors. In physics, we have force, acceleration (to increase one’s steps), inertia (originally an indolent person), impedance, resistance, fields, and now charm. In physiology, the metaphier of a machine has been at the very center of discovery. We understand the brain by metaphors to everything from batteries and telegraphy to computers and holograms. Medical practice is sometimes dictated by metaphor. In the eighteenth century, the heart in fever was like a boiling pot, and so bloodletting was prescribed to reduce its fuel. And even today, a great deal of medicine is based upon the military metaphor of defense of the body against attacks of this or that. The very concept of law in Greek derives from nomos, the word for the foundations of a building. To be liable, or bound in law, comes from the Latin ligare, meaning to bind with cord.

In early times, language and its referents climbed up from the concrete to the abstract on the steps of metaphors, even, we may say, created the abstract on the bases of metaphors.

It is not always obvious that metaphor has played this all important function. But this is because the concrete metaphiers become hidden in phonemic change, leaving the words to exist on their own. Even such an unmetaphorical-sounding word as the verb ’to be’ was generated from a metaphor. It comes from the Sanskrit bhu, “to grow, or make grow,” while the English forms ‘am’ and ‘is’ have evolved from the same root as the Sanskrit asmi, “to breathe.” It is something of a lovely surprise that the irregular conjugation of our most nondescript verb is thus a record of a time when man had no independent word for ’existence’ and could only say that something ‘grows’ or that it “breathes.” Of course we are not conscious that the concept of being is thus generated from a metaphor about growing and breathing. Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the busy give-and-take of talk have worn away with use.

Because in our brief lives we catch so little of the vastnesses of history, we tend too much to think of language as being solid as a dictionary, with a granite-like permanence, rather than as the rampant restless sea of metaphor which it is. Indeed, if we consider the changes in vocabulary that have occurred over the last few millennia, and project them several millennia hence, an interesting paradox arises. For if we ever achieve a language that has the power of expressing everything, then metaphor will no longer be possible. I would not say, in that case, my love is like a red, red rose, for love would have exploded into terms for its thousands of nuances, and applying the correct term would leave the rose metaphorically dead.