I really like Persuasion, but sometimes the arguments feel a little too nuanced and divorced from the context. Of course people are equating speech with violence, because speech is protected in this country and violence is not. If your opinion is violence, I've made your opinion illegal. People who argue that speech is violence are opponents of the very first amendment to our Constitution. That should be argument enough against it.
If defending the First Amendment were that simple, Persuasion would never have come into being. It's here because, like any simple moral or ethical principle, "freedom of speech" is open to interpretation at the margins. As the article points out, Thomas Paine acknowledged the existence of these margins - namely, at the point where we risk harm to others - and yet declined to elaborate on the immediacy and magnitude of the harm that would justify curtailing someone's rights.
These margins exist, whether we like it or not, and it's at these margins where people do the work of attempting to stifle or discourage free speech. Often this is done with sincere, not cynical intent, and most people have some threshold where they will be inclined to agree. The example of "incitement" is perhaps the most common; disturbance of peace and personal intimidation are others. And we are on an inevitable collision course with having to confront the practice of mass disinformation and how to reconcile this with the idea of "free speech".
In summation, we need to be willing to examine these ideas in detail, and if necessary refute them on any and all grounds applicable. Even when a rationale for some restriction seems misguided, perhaps laughably so, the imperative remains. Remember that we're all gathered here in this forum because we live in an age where increasingly, what was once deemed laughable is becoming disturbingly persuasive.
I think that's fair, but in this instance the person we're attempting to persuade is not you. It's someone who thinks "Silence is violence" or whatever. The idea that some of the articles will be with things you already agree with is somewhat necessary when the goal is to convince/persuade others. Shrug. I still liked it. :)
I like this article and Persuasion, but your point is well taken. I have to resist the urge not to laugh and ridicule those who say that Erika Christakis was being violent. Or others.
For the longest time, I could not see the most obvious fact about the woke and their verbal violence nonsense. But I find myself in good company. Many are discussing whether mere speech can be violent, and none have raised the most obvious examples.
The examples that we all miss are the woke shaming and canceling people. Cancelling, by all accounts, does real, tangible harm. It causes depression, persistent loss of sleep, loss of friends, and loss of jobs and careers. Physical violence is not just kids shoving each other or wrestling. Violence is moving beyond causing temporary discomfort. Sure, it’s hard to draw the line precisely.
But canceling can go far beyond the point of temporary discomfort, and more to the point it is far worse than any of the examples the woke label as verbal violence. So how do we miss it?
Here is an example picked at random from many that are ubiquitous on the web.
“I saw this last night in a TV episode I was watching. A child being bullied finally stood up to the bully, punching him. The bully’s nose was broken. The school punished the child being bullied and forced him to apologize to the bully for punching him. Not one person addressed WHY the child felt the need to punch him, only that it happened. The bully not only got away with being a bully but then got rewarded as the “victim” of an “attack” that was self-defense.”
The woke always, always claim they are the ones being attacked.
Now watch Nicholas Christakis, of the Yale Halloween incident, being shamed and bullied.
He was called a racist and then this was screamed in his face “Then why the fuck did you accept the position?! Who the fuck hired you?! You should step down! … you’re disgusting.” 1000 people on campus signed a petition blamed him and his wife for verbal violence. But after reading a great deal about this incident I did not once find anyone saying this attacker was being verbally violent. Certainly, the woke never admit that even their most devastating attacks are verbal violence.
For reasons I don’t understand, blaming the victim works. Bullies do this constantly, and somehow it blinds people to the reality that is the reverse of their claims. It doesn’t blind everyone, but I still find it shocking how well it works. When Trump lies, or cheats, or incites violence, his first line of defense is to claim that whoever points this out is a liar, a cheater, or has incited violence.
The woke are bullies. Expert bullies. And even though we halfway see through them, we still fail to notice that they are responsible for nearly all of the verbal violence committed in the fights between the woke and the rest of us who are left of center. Any discussion of whether the woke are exaggerating or inventing verbal violence, should begin and end with an examination of woke violence.
Some will see this comment as too critical of the woke because many of the woke are “well-intentioned,” are not bad people, and actually do some good things. That premise is correct but the implication (the “because”) is mistaken.
The chief paradox of human social development is that “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Most people want to be, and think they are, on the side of righteousness. Examples: The weather underground with their anti-war bombings, the LBJ administration with its Vietnam war, and ISIS with its suicide bombings.
No one blows themselves up out of selfishness. Unfortunately, even truly selfless people, when they get some kind of weird religion, can do the most horrible things. Verbal violence is the least of it.
Yes, the woke are using the tactics that have been used against outgroups / minorities now to "support" those minorities. The only reason these tactics work is because they are no longer in that position of minority; they wish to abuse the power they now hold to consolidate that position of power and destroy any dissent, just like any authoritarian does. Everything the far left imagines for the future even suggests exactly the kind of power they currently do wield and will wield even more in the future: there will be a POC majority and a white minority.
I can sympathize to some extent; perhaps they see this as simple justice, the shoe being on the other foot. Perhaps they see it as a means to an end (though I'd love to get a coherent explanation of what end state they are working towards; I cannot tell if they think wokism itself is the correct end state or if it's a path to some idealized society).
As for why blaming the victim works, I think it operates something like this: one of my college professors used to say "people change their minds *because they feel like it* and no other reason." I don't know if I go quite that far, but he was basically suggesting that we make decisions on the basis of our feelings, and that facts and reasoning are primarily justifications for those feelings. Very few victims are in a position where they hold no responsibility for an attack on them (even if that share of the responsibility is comparatively quite small). So if you have a lot of people who don't want to believe the victim is really a victim, blaming the victim gives them the rationalization, the reason to get themselves off the hook for the choice they want to make. It works because of any group of people who dislike acknowledging someone a victim, there are quite a few who simply need the justification, no matter how thin. Much like the jury that doesn't convict the date rapist because their date dressed sexy and had some drinks, much like the Republicans who believe the 2020 election was fraudulent (because someone keeps saying it is, and he wouldn't keep saying it, and saying it so vehemently if there wasn't some truth to it, right?).
Equating everything we don't like or that makes us uncomfortable with "violence" is one of the key authoritarian moves of the contemporary academy. Its twin is the feeling--therefore fact--of unsafety that constitutes proponents' next move. As Rachman points out in his Foucault and Butler examples, this is ironically another top-down move. That is, the equation of discomfort, even intellectual discomfort, with violence didn't spring from the popular grassroots as a shift in language or usage. It's a facet of radical ideology that's deliberately perpetrated by intellectuals. When you ask students about this conception of violence as I have, it's clear that what may have begun as a cynical blurring of the meaning of violence by intellectuals is taken as concrete fact by so many students. They're puzzled that you could think that they mean anything other than, you know, violence. It's VIOLENT to disagree with any dimension of their belief system, they'll assert, as though such an assertion speaks for itself.
Holding these conversations (and knowing their intellectual provenance) is a useful primer for watching Republican elites make the cynical argument that Pennsylvania violated its own laws by extending the time for receiving votes cast by mail while mobs chant STOP THE STEAL.
Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" covered this terrain -- the abuse of language -- many decades ago. The deeper issue is totalitarian ideology and its impetus to breakdown trust mechanisms in society. Language -- or more precisely shared meaning -- is a key requirement of civil society. Without agreement on terms and sanctions for misuse of terms, we are just primate enclaves screaming nonsense at each other and throwing rocks, never arriving at progress or consensus.
There's a lot of truth there but the fact is that language changes over time. We do need to work toward shared meaning. But it's just useless to insist that people stick to old definitions of words, even if it pains us. I think we just have to keep defining what we mean by our own words, and trying to find out (and make clear) what other people's definitions are.
As you probably know there is an entire field of linguistics devoted to "semantic shift". Some shifts are legitimate and done in good faith as society and technology evolve. Many, however, are purposely deceptive and designed to pry out emotion and enhance confusion. The struggle is constant.
I've read a few mass-market popsci books about linguistics, that's all. As I mentioned elsewhere I think Toni Morrison in 1993 Nobel Prize speech really popularized the concept that speech could be violence. I don't agree BUT I don't think she was being deceptive or trying to enhance confusion. I would just say that she was using a metaphor about a topic that was far more immediately painful to her than it is to me. Maybe others have called speech "violence" before she did, I have no idea. When I see those signs that say "silence = violence" I want to yell "no it doesn't!" but the fact is that a lot of people just mean something different by that word than I do. I'm trying to just get used to it...
A couple of points: first, language doesn't change itself; it changes as agreed (whether implicitly or explicitly) usage changes. Agreement is an aggregate phenomenon: what we are doing in this thread is, mostly, disagreeing with a usage of "violence" which has "infected" common usage. We are stating our disagreement with the change and, hopefully, impeding it.
Second: what Toni Morrison intended is interesting but not relevant to this discussion. Her usage, perhaps, riding on the Foucaultian hyperbolic version of faux violence, helped it enter the popular stream AND lent it the legitimacy of her position as a voice of Black American culture. Discussing the speaker's or author's supposed intention sows confusion, intentionally or not :-).
"Butler, writing in The Force of Nonviolence, remarked on how the authorities often label dissenters as “violent” in order to muzzle them, redefining peaceful demonstrations as purported mobs that must be dispersed. “The power to attribute violence to the opposition itself becomes an instrument by which to enhance state power, to discredit the aims of the opposition, or even to justify their radical disenfranchisement, imprisonment, and murder,” she argues."
The very fact that this tactic works for the woke suggests that they are not, in fact, some abused minority. They have enormous cultural power, and this "violence" messaging is coming from a place of cultural power. I'm not suggesting that many of the groups on behalf of which these arguments are deployed are powerful; I am suggesting that those who exercise this power are using the identity of those they purport to protect and lift up as an excuse to commit the same "violence" they claim to abhor. They see themselves as the beleaguered defenders of the voiceless when they are in fact crushing every voice but their own -- even the voices of exactly those they claim to aid if those have the temerity to question the prevailing dogma.
The loathsome gender-reveal parties are really sex-reveal parties, though correctly naming them wouldn't make them any less ridiculous.
I will leave it to Persuasion's writers to further discuss the conflation of the terms 'sex' and 'gender', and the degradation of the meaning of 'woman'.
Language evolves, and frequently we don’t like it. But we can’t stop it. To me, violence means physical harm caused by a physical act. But to others violence only means harm. I don’t like that, it ruins a useful word. But I think all we can really do is try to be clear. Now we have to know to distinguish “physical violence” from “non-physical violence” when communicating. Stupid, maybe, but we can deal with it.
Maybe there are existing laws or rules about “violence” that will have to be reworded, but that can be done.
Now don’t get me started on “lying,” which used to mean “knowingly uttering a falsehood with intent to deceive” and now seems to mean simply “uttering a falsehood.”
For me, there is a distinction to be made between the organic evolution of language, which I will happily accommodate, and the cynical intentionality behind the kind of shift being discussed (really more of a semantic gaming), as when totalitarian regimes call themselves "democratic". Saying it's so and making others pretend it's so does not, in fact, make it so, and I won't pretend it does.
But, then, I see the current semantic shifts as containing less good faith than some people do. In my opinion, there are many people of good faith who genuinely believe in the ideas, but on the whole, I think the changes themselves are manipulatory power moves -- and dangerous ones, at that. Engaging with cynical changes as though they primarily or originally stem from a good-faith difference of perspective is a mistake, in my opinion. I will do my best to engage sincere believers of this ideology with the respect and dignity that anyone deserves, but I will not lend credibility to authoritarian word games.
I truly dislike the definition of violence as including speech, but it's not a terribly new concept and it's not a conspiracy by a totalitarian regime. In 1993 Toni Morrison was saying that words could be violence ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/1993/12/08/toni-morrisons-measured-words/). So if a lot of people agree with that now, I'm a little sad, but that's just life - the definition of "violence" that I grew up with is simply not the only widely used definition any more.
I didn't mean to imply that I think *this* semantic change is the work of a totalitarian regime, rather I meant that I think it is like in kind to that sort of language manipulation. And I do appreciate your point that it isn't new, per se, but it doesn't need to be for it to be a cynical and power-driven redefinition.
To return to my previous example, irrespective of how many totalitarian regimes call themselves "democratic" and regardless of how long that's been going on, it doesn't change the meaningful definition of "democratic" in any way, in my opinion. It's a move in a semantic game, and the entire point is to get others to play on (and to use) their terms.
Stubborn as it may be, I will continue to insist that war is not peace, freedom is not slavery, and ignorance is not strength. And no, words are not violence. It pains me that many have -- and sincerely so, I think -- come to buy into this charade. Yet, to my mind, that doesn't make the struggle over such definitions deprecated, it makes it all the more salient. I hope, obviously, that others will stand with me in continuing to insist on truth rather than truthiness, but either way, I remain stubborn.
The term computer *mouse* is the conventional example of semantic shift, and I think something few would find controversial or provocative. The Toni Morrison example is something I would put in the camp of "artistic license". When poets and writers use evocative and out of place language to help us visualize and emote, there is no reason to assume it is bad faith. It can be real and true to the emotional moment. The problem arises when legislators and other public figures start to press these emotions into the service of their causes. Maybe it starts as a way to win people over, but the law of unintended consequences soon kicks in ...
Is there perhaps a difference between the evolution of language (and knowledge) and revolution against language (and knowledge)? I say they are revolting against the language. It is revolting, I tell ya, revolting! They are doing violence to our language!! But wait! For the same price I can tell you they are doing PHYSICAL violence to our language! As many people are saying, every one of those who use the term violence in this meaningless way are trying to steal the election! It's right there in the kraken of truthiness.
Well written. The vagueness in Mill’s definition of violence speaks to how it has been expanded in scope. I wonder if it would help if we at the very least came up with another term that spoke to this grey area. And reserved the word “violence” for what it actually is.
What often gets lost in these questions is the importance or place of intentionality, in favour of impact. If I took a swing at someone's face, but missed, there'd be no doubt in anyone's mind that I still engaged in violence. Even if the other person was a heavyweight champion boxer and so truly unafraid by my pathetic action, it would still count as violence because of its intent. If, however, I bloodied someone's nose with my elbow while turning around to point at a building, my lack of intention to harm would disqualify this as an act of violence automatically, despite having caused actual pain and possibly even lasting damage.
I reckon we can stretch (and I do mean stretch) a definition of violence to include speech if there is a genuine intent to cause some degree of (emotional) harm or to terrorise. Particularly if also exercised from a position of relative power.
For words that cause harm or offense as a sincerely unintended consequence of expressing one's view, or as "collateral damage" because one knows one cannot make a valid, good faith argument without offending someone somewhere, I think another word should be found. Accident? Bad luck? Not sure, but I am unwilling to concede it is violence, and it feels very much like bullying when it is insisted that I should.
I should add that just because an act of violence is an intentional exercise of power it doesn't follow that any intentional exercise of power is an act of violence. I think maybe that is the philosophical sleight of hand happening with the expansion of the word "violence". I would need to read my Slavoj Zizek again and check.
I think there's room for argument here, but limiting a 21st century definition of "violence" to "a punch in the face" seems pretty unevolved. History is rife with examples of moments when large majorities stood by and watched minorities get physically brutalized or murdered and did nothing. You'd have a hard time convincing me the decision to look away during the holocaust (which many "normal" Germans did) wasn't an act of violence. Or the impulse of nice white folks to remain silent when Freedom Riders were being beaten for speaking out. At what point does condoning violence become equivalent to violence? I agree the word might be overused, but I think this piece oversimplifies the matter.
Not sure about your looking away example, because I think it assumes those who looked away during the Holocaust could have done something otherwise (or perhaps more importantly, felt they could do otherwise) to stop it and chose not to. I am not willing to judge that to be true, given the regime they were living under, and the scale of the violence being committed around them. Were they cowards? Perhaps, though who among us knows for certain we'd do any different without the benefit we have of knowing how history would judge us? So does that mean cowardice is now violence? That's starting to get a bit implausible for me! I think we can agree that violence, whatever form it takes, is an exercise of power over another person. So can it be true that inaction in the face of violence due to feeling powerless to stop it is an exercise of power? To equate acts that permit violence with committing violence is only plausible if one has the certain power to stop it but chooses not to. If I don't stop a house burning down, am I committing arson, or am I just unable to do anything?
Thanks for your comment. My point isn't to judge anyone. I certainly cannot claim to know how I would have responded to such an extreme moment, and I don't think cowardice equals violence. But I reject the idea that un-oppressed people are powerless against tyranny. White Americans had the power to change how Black people were treated here long, long before the civil rights movement. They didn't, maybe out of cowardice, but I think more simply out of racism. And using their racism now to justify their inaction, even if it was consistent with the times, is a pretty weak argument. The effect of their inaction was violent. If I'm being beaten and you stand there and watch, am I supposed to thank you for not participating? "To equate acts that permit violence with committing violence is only plausible if one has the certain power to stop it but chooses not to." I agree. I think my point is that there are lots of examples when white people in America have had the power to speak up about racial violence and have chosen not to. I also respectfully think your arson example needs context. Are you watching someone set fire to the building? Are you alone? Do you have a phone? You don't have to set the fire, if you stand there, watching the building burn with people in it and you don't call for help...my point is, your inaction is a choice that has consequences. If those consequences are violent - in this cast, the deaths of the people in the building - then yes, I think you are at least partially responsible. But there are lots of ways of attacking that problem without you yourself running headlong into the burning building.
Hi, and thanks for your reply. Interesting question! I think we agree that to allow an act of violence when you could (and know you could) stop it is morally tantamount to the same thing. I don't know if I would go so far as to agree that because two things are morally equal to each other we can label them the same, though. Do we want that semantic slippage, or is it helpful to distinguish X is violence, Y is wilful inaction to prevent violence, Y is morally equal to X when one knows one could stop it but it is not X? It's an intention rather than impact question for me.
"The effect of their inaction was violent" - if you had've said the effect of their inaction was violenCE, I'd have no problem agreeing. To call inaction "violent" not only imputes an intention not to act in order that violence takes place (which again is a blanket assumption about past inactive people's intentions I don't think is fair to make retrospectively), it plays into the Kendi-esque anti-racist idea that in-activism is equivalent to racism or oppression, which when you think about it places a pretty high moral bar on all of our activity. For example, I am currently not doing anything meaningful to prevent any number of injustices and violence taking place around the world to animals and humans (neither, I imagine, is Ibram X Kendi). Ibram and I could probably at least donate money to locally-based activists who can act to prevent this violence. Is our inaction violent, or does it merely permit violence?
Good questions here too - I don't know the answers! I know I could be doing more to help the world, and you're right, I don't equate my inaction about any number of issues with violence. I guess my point is that there must be room for the meanings of words to evolve and for our understanding of how our action/inaction perpetuates certain patters of injustice to change. I think it's more complex than "physical violence is the only violence."
And you're absolutely right, "violence" rather than "violent" is a more accurate word choice there.
I really like Persuasion, but sometimes the arguments feel a little too nuanced and divorced from the context. Of course people are equating speech with violence, because speech is protected in this country and violence is not. If your opinion is violence, I've made your opinion illegal. People who argue that speech is violence are opponents of the very first amendment to our Constitution. That should be argument enough against it.
If defending the First Amendment were that simple, Persuasion would never have come into being. It's here because, like any simple moral or ethical principle, "freedom of speech" is open to interpretation at the margins. As the article points out, Thomas Paine acknowledged the existence of these margins - namely, at the point where we risk harm to others - and yet declined to elaborate on the immediacy and magnitude of the harm that would justify curtailing someone's rights.
These margins exist, whether we like it or not, and it's at these margins where people do the work of attempting to stifle or discourage free speech. Often this is done with sincere, not cynical intent, and most people have some threshold where they will be inclined to agree. The example of "incitement" is perhaps the most common; disturbance of peace and personal intimidation are others. And we are on an inevitable collision course with having to confront the practice of mass disinformation and how to reconcile this with the idea of "free speech".
In summation, we need to be willing to examine these ideas in detail, and if necessary refute them on any and all grounds applicable. Even when a rationale for some restriction seems misguided, perhaps laughably so, the imperative remains. Remember that we're all gathered here in this forum because we live in an age where increasingly, what was once deemed laughable is becoming disturbingly persuasive.
I think that's fair, but in this instance the person we're attempting to persuade is not you. It's someone who thinks "Silence is violence" or whatever. The idea that some of the articles will be with things you already agree with is somewhat necessary when the goal is to convince/persuade others. Shrug. I still liked it. :)
I like this article and Persuasion, but your point is well taken. I have to resist the urge not to laugh and ridicule those who say that Erika Christakis was being violent. Or others.
For the longest time, I could not see the most obvious fact about the woke and their verbal violence nonsense. But I find myself in good company. Many are discussing whether mere speech can be violent, and none have raised the most obvious examples.
The examples that we all miss are the woke shaming and canceling people. Cancelling, by all accounts, does real, tangible harm. It causes depression, persistent loss of sleep, loss of friends, and loss of jobs and careers. Physical violence is not just kids shoving each other or wrestling. Violence is moving beyond causing temporary discomfort. Sure, it’s hard to draw the line precisely.
But canceling can go far beyond the point of temporary discomfort, and more to the point it is far worse than any of the examples the woke label as verbal violence. So how do we miss it?
Here is an example picked at random from many that are ubiquitous on the web.
“I saw this last night in a TV episode I was watching. A child being bullied finally stood up to the bully, punching him. The bully’s nose was broken. The school punished the child being bullied and forced him to apologize to the bully for punching him. Not one person addressed WHY the child felt the need to punch him, only that it happened. The bully not only got away with being a bully but then got rewarded as the “victim” of an “attack” that was self-defense.”
The woke always, always claim they are the ones being attacked.
Now watch Nicholas Christakis, of the Yale Halloween incident, being shamed and bullied.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IEFD_JVYd0 (only a minute)
He was called a racist and then this was screamed in his face “Then why the fuck did you accept the position?! Who the fuck hired you?! You should step down! … you’re disgusting.” 1000 people on campus signed a petition blamed him and his wife for verbal violence. But after reading a great deal about this incident I did not once find anyone saying this attacker was being verbally violent. Certainly, the woke never admit that even their most devastating attacks are verbal violence.
For reasons I don’t understand, blaming the victim works. Bullies do this constantly, and somehow it blinds people to the reality that is the reverse of their claims. It doesn’t blind everyone, but I still find it shocking how well it works. When Trump lies, or cheats, or incites violence, his first line of defense is to claim that whoever points this out is a liar, a cheater, or has incited violence.
The woke are bullies. Expert bullies. And even though we halfway see through them, we still fail to notice that they are responsible for nearly all of the verbal violence committed in the fights between the woke and the rest of us who are left of center. Any discussion of whether the woke are exaggerating or inventing verbal violence, should begin and end with an examination of woke violence.
Some will see this comment as too critical of the woke because many of the woke are “well-intentioned,” are not bad people, and actually do some good things. That premise is correct but the implication (the “because”) is mistaken.
The chief paradox of human social development is that “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Most people want to be, and think they are, on the side of righteousness. Examples: The weather underground with their anti-war bombings, the LBJ administration with its Vietnam war, and ISIS with its suicide bombings.
No one blows themselves up out of selfishness. Unfortunately, even truly selfless people, when they get some kind of weird religion, can do the most horrible things. Verbal violence is the least of it.
Yes, the woke are using the tactics that have been used against outgroups / minorities now to "support" those minorities. The only reason these tactics work is because they are no longer in that position of minority; they wish to abuse the power they now hold to consolidate that position of power and destroy any dissent, just like any authoritarian does. Everything the far left imagines for the future even suggests exactly the kind of power they currently do wield and will wield even more in the future: there will be a POC majority and a white minority.
I can sympathize to some extent; perhaps they see this as simple justice, the shoe being on the other foot. Perhaps they see it as a means to an end (though I'd love to get a coherent explanation of what end state they are working towards; I cannot tell if they think wokism itself is the correct end state or if it's a path to some idealized society).
As for why blaming the victim works, I think it operates something like this: one of my college professors used to say "people change their minds *because they feel like it* and no other reason." I don't know if I go quite that far, but he was basically suggesting that we make decisions on the basis of our feelings, and that facts and reasoning are primarily justifications for those feelings. Very few victims are in a position where they hold no responsibility for an attack on them (even if that share of the responsibility is comparatively quite small). So if you have a lot of people who don't want to believe the victim is really a victim, blaming the victim gives them the rationalization, the reason to get themselves off the hook for the choice they want to make. It works because of any group of people who dislike acknowledging someone a victim, there are quite a few who simply need the justification, no matter how thin. Much like the jury that doesn't convict the date rapist because their date dressed sexy and had some drinks, much like the Republicans who believe the 2020 election was fraudulent (because someone keeps saying it is, and he wouldn't keep saying it, and saying it so vehemently if there wasn't some truth to it, right?).
Excellent comment, thanks!
Equating everything we don't like or that makes us uncomfortable with "violence" is one of the key authoritarian moves of the contemporary academy. Its twin is the feeling--therefore fact--of unsafety that constitutes proponents' next move. As Rachman points out in his Foucault and Butler examples, this is ironically another top-down move. That is, the equation of discomfort, even intellectual discomfort, with violence didn't spring from the popular grassroots as a shift in language or usage. It's a facet of radical ideology that's deliberately perpetrated by intellectuals. When you ask students about this conception of violence as I have, it's clear that what may have begun as a cynical blurring of the meaning of violence by intellectuals is taken as concrete fact by so many students. They're puzzled that you could think that they mean anything other than, you know, violence. It's VIOLENT to disagree with any dimension of their belief system, they'll assert, as though such an assertion speaks for itself.
Holding these conversations (and knowing their intellectual provenance) is a useful primer for watching Republican elites make the cynical argument that Pennsylvania violated its own laws by extending the time for receiving votes cast by mail while mobs chant STOP THE STEAL.
Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" covered this terrain -- the abuse of language -- many decades ago. The deeper issue is totalitarian ideology and its impetus to breakdown trust mechanisms in society. Language -- or more precisely shared meaning -- is a key requirement of civil society. Without agreement on terms and sanctions for misuse of terms, we are just primate enclaves screaming nonsense at each other and throwing rocks, never arriving at progress or consensus.
There's a lot of truth there but the fact is that language changes over time. We do need to work toward shared meaning. But it's just useless to insist that people stick to old definitions of words, even if it pains us. I think we just have to keep defining what we mean by our own words, and trying to find out (and make clear) what other people's definitions are.
As you probably know there is an entire field of linguistics devoted to "semantic shift". Some shifts are legitimate and done in good faith as society and technology evolve. Many, however, are purposely deceptive and designed to pry out emotion and enhance confusion. The struggle is constant.
I've read a few mass-market popsci books about linguistics, that's all. As I mentioned elsewhere I think Toni Morrison in 1993 Nobel Prize speech really popularized the concept that speech could be violence. I don't agree BUT I don't think she was being deceptive or trying to enhance confusion. I would just say that she was using a metaphor about a topic that was far more immediately painful to her than it is to me. Maybe others have called speech "violence" before she did, I have no idea. When I see those signs that say "silence = violence" I want to yell "no it doesn't!" but the fact is that a lot of people just mean something different by that word than I do. I'm trying to just get used to it...
A couple of points: first, language doesn't change itself; it changes as agreed (whether implicitly or explicitly) usage changes. Agreement is an aggregate phenomenon: what we are doing in this thread is, mostly, disagreeing with a usage of "violence" which has "infected" common usage. We are stating our disagreement with the change and, hopefully, impeding it.
Second: what Toni Morrison intended is interesting but not relevant to this discussion. Her usage, perhaps, riding on the Foucaultian hyperbolic version of faux violence, helped it enter the popular stream AND lent it the legitimacy of her position as a voice of Black American culture. Discussing the speaker's or author's supposed intention sows confusion, intentionally or not :-).
"Butler, writing in The Force of Nonviolence, remarked on how the authorities often label dissenters as “violent” in order to muzzle them, redefining peaceful demonstrations as purported mobs that must be dispersed. “The power to attribute violence to the opposition itself becomes an instrument by which to enhance state power, to discredit the aims of the opposition, or even to justify their radical disenfranchisement, imprisonment, and murder,” she argues."
The very fact that this tactic works for the woke suggests that they are not, in fact, some abused minority. They have enormous cultural power, and this "violence" messaging is coming from a place of cultural power. I'm not suggesting that many of the groups on behalf of which these arguments are deployed are powerful; I am suggesting that those who exercise this power are using the identity of those they purport to protect and lift up as an excuse to commit the same "violence" they claim to abhor. They see themselves as the beleaguered defenders of the voiceless when they are in fact crushing every voice but their own -- even the voices of exactly those they claim to aid if those have the temerity to question the prevailing dogma.
The loathsome gender-reveal parties are really sex-reveal parties, though correctly naming them wouldn't make them any less ridiculous.
I will leave it to Persuasion's writers to further discuss the conflation of the terms 'sex' and 'gender', and the degradation of the meaning of 'woman'.
I agree totally, but...
Language evolves, and frequently we don’t like it. But we can’t stop it. To me, violence means physical harm caused by a physical act. But to others violence only means harm. I don’t like that, it ruins a useful word. But I think all we can really do is try to be clear. Now we have to know to distinguish “physical violence” from “non-physical violence” when communicating. Stupid, maybe, but we can deal with it.
Maybe there are existing laws or rules about “violence” that will have to be reworded, but that can be done.
Now don’t get me started on “lying,” which used to mean “knowingly uttering a falsehood with intent to deceive” and now seems to mean simply “uttering a falsehood.”
For me, there is a distinction to be made between the organic evolution of language, which I will happily accommodate, and the cynical intentionality behind the kind of shift being discussed (really more of a semantic gaming), as when totalitarian regimes call themselves "democratic". Saying it's so and making others pretend it's so does not, in fact, make it so, and I won't pretend it does.
But, then, I see the current semantic shifts as containing less good faith than some people do. In my opinion, there are many people of good faith who genuinely believe in the ideas, but on the whole, I think the changes themselves are manipulatory power moves -- and dangerous ones, at that. Engaging with cynical changes as though they primarily or originally stem from a good-faith difference of perspective is a mistake, in my opinion. I will do my best to engage sincere believers of this ideology with the respect and dignity that anyone deserves, but I will not lend credibility to authoritarian word games.
I truly dislike the definition of violence as including speech, but it's not a terribly new concept and it's not a conspiracy by a totalitarian regime. In 1993 Toni Morrison was saying that words could be violence ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/1993/12/08/toni-morrisons-measured-words/). So if a lot of people agree with that now, I'm a little sad, but that's just life - the definition of "violence" that I grew up with is simply not the only widely used definition any more.
I didn't mean to imply that I think *this* semantic change is the work of a totalitarian regime, rather I meant that I think it is like in kind to that sort of language manipulation. And I do appreciate your point that it isn't new, per se, but it doesn't need to be for it to be a cynical and power-driven redefinition.
To return to my previous example, irrespective of how many totalitarian regimes call themselves "democratic" and regardless of how long that's been going on, it doesn't change the meaningful definition of "democratic" in any way, in my opinion. It's a move in a semantic game, and the entire point is to get others to play on (and to use) their terms.
Stubborn as it may be, I will continue to insist that war is not peace, freedom is not slavery, and ignorance is not strength. And no, words are not violence. It pains me that many have -- and sincerely so, I think -- come to buy into this charade. Yet, to my mind, that doesn't make the struggle over such definitions deprecated, it makes it all the more salient. I hope, obviously, that others will stand with me in continuing to insist on truth rather than truthiness, but either way, I remain stubborn.
The term computer *mouse* is the conventional example of semantic shift, and I think something few would find controversial or provocative. The Toni Morrison example is something I would put in the camp of "artistic license". When poets and writers use evocative and out of place language to help us visualize and emote, there is no reason to assume it is bad faith. It can be real and true to the emotional moment. The problem arises when legislators and other public figures start to press these emotions into the service of their causes. Maybe it starts as a way to win people over, but the law of unintended consequences soon kicks in ...
Is there perhaps a difference between the evolution of language (and knowledge) and revolution against language (and knowledge)? I say they are revolting against the language. It is revolting, I tell ya, revolting! They are doing violence to our language!! But wait! For the same price I can tell you they are doing PHYSICAL violence to our language! As many people are saying, every one of those who use the term violence in this meaningless way are trying to steal the election! It's right there in the kraken of truthiness.
Well written. The vagueness in Mill’s definition of violence speaks to how it has been expanded in scope. I wonder if it would help if we at the very least came up with another term that spoke to this grey area. And reserved the word “violence” for what it actually is.
"But we cannot understand society by squinting at it; we need to look clearly." love that sentence
What often gets lost in these questions is the importance or place of intentionality, in favour of impact. If I took a swing at someone's face, but missed, there'd be no doubt in anyone's mind that I still engaged in violence. Even if the other person was a heavyweight champion boxer and so truly unafraid by my pathetic action, it would still count as violence because of its intent. If, however, I bloodied someone's nose with my elbow while turning around to point at a building, my lack of intention to harm would disqualify this as an act of violence automatically, despite having caused actual pain and possibly even lasting damage.
I reckon we can stretch (and I do mean stretch) a definition of violence to include speech if there is a genuine intent to cause some degree of (emotional) harm or to terrorise. Particularly if also exercised from a position of relative power.
For words that cause harm or offense as a sincerely unintended consequence of expressing one's view, or as "collateral damage" because one knows one cannot make a valid, good faith argument without offending someone somewhere, I think another word should be found. Accident? Bad luck? Not sure, but I am unwilling to concede it is violence, and it feels very much like bullying when it is insisted that I should.
I should add that just because an act of violence is an intentional exercise of power it doesn't follow that any intentional exercise of power is an act of violence. I think maybe that is the philosophical sleight of hand happening with the expansion of the word "violence". I would need to read my Slavoj Zizek again and check.
I think there's room for argument here, but limiting a 21st century definition of "violence" to "a punch in the face" seems pretty unevolved. History is rife with examples of moments when large majorities stood by and watched minorities get physically brutalized or murdered and did nothing. You'd have a hard time convincing me the decision to look away during the holocaust (which many "normal" Germans did) wasn't an act of violence. Or the impulse of nice white folks to remain silent when Freedom Riders were being beaten for speaking out. At what point does condoning violence become equivalent to violence? I agree the word might be overused, but I think this piece oversimplifies the matter.
Not sure about your looking away example, because I think it assumes those who looked away during the Holocaust could have done something otherwise (or perhaps more importantly, felt they could do otherwise) to stop it and chose not to. I am not willing to judge that to be true, given the regime they were living under, and the scale of the violence being committed around them. Were they cowards? Perhaps, though who among us knows for certain we'd do any different without the benefit we have of knowing how history would judge us? So does that mean cowardice is now violence? That's starting to get a bit implausible for me! I think we can agree that violence, whatever form it takes, is an exercise of power over another person. So can it be true that inaction in the face of violence due to feeling powerless to stop it is an exercise of power? To equate acts that permit violence with committing violence is only plausible if one has the certain power to stop it but chooses not to. If I don't stop a house burning down, am I committing arson, or am I just unable to do anything?
Thanks for your comment. My point isn't to judge anyone. I certainly cannot claim to know how I would have responded to such an extreme moment, and I don't think cowardice equals violence. But I reject the idea that un-oppressed people are powerless against tyranny. White Americans had the power to change how Black people were treated here long, long before the civil rights movement. They didn't, maybe out of cowardice, but I think more simply out of racism. And using their racism now to justify their inaction, even if it was consistent with the times, is a pretty weak argument. The effect of their inaction was violent. If I'm being beaten and you stand there and watch, am I supposed to thank you for not participating? "To equate acts that permit violence with committing violence is only plausible if one has the certain power to stop it but chooses not to." I agree. I think my point is that there are lots of examples when white people in America have had the power to speak up about racial violence and have chosen not to. I also respectfully think your arson example needs context. Are you watching someone set fire to the building? Are you alone? Do you have a phone? You don't have to set the fire, if you stand there, watching the building burn with people in it and you don't call for help...my point is, your inaction is a choice that has consequences. If those consequences are violent - in this cast, the deaths of the people in the building - then yes, I think you are at least partially responsible. But there are lots of ways of attacking that problem without you yourself running headlong into the burning building.
Hi, and thanks for your reply. Interesting question! I think we agree that to allow an act of violence when you could (and know you could) stop it is morally tantamount to the same thing. I don't know if I would go so far as to agree that because two things are morally equal to each other we can label them the same, though. Do we want that semantic slippage, or is it helpful to distinguish X is violence, Y is wilful inaction to prevent violence, Y is morally equal to X when one knows one could stop it but it is not X? It's an intention rather than impact question for me.
"The effect of their inaction was violent" - if you had've said the effect of their inaction was violenCE, I'd have no problem agreeing. To call inaction "violent" not only imputes an intention not to act in order that violence takes place (which again is a blanket assumption about past inactive people's intentions I don't think is fair to make retrospectively), it plays into the Kendi-esque anti-racist idea that in-activism is equivalent to racism or oppression, which when you think about it places a pretty high moral bar on all of our activity. For example, I am currently not doing anything meaningful to prevent any number of injustices and violence taking place around the world to animals and humans (neither, I imagine, is Ibram X Kendi). Ibram and I could probably at least donate money to locally-based activists who can act to prevent this violence. Is our inaction violent, or does it merely permit violence?
Good questions here too - I don't know the answers! I know I could be doing more to help the world, and you're right, I don't equate my inaction about any number of issues with violence. I guess my point is that there must be room for the meanings of words to evolve and for our understanding of how our action/inaction perpetuates certain patters of injustice to change. I think it's more complex than "physical violence is the only violence."
And you're absolutely right, "violence" rather than "violent" is a more accurate word choice there.
Great piece!
Wow! Just spectacular. Philosophically astute.
Wow. Thank You.