This I think is true: most of the problems of the world can be solved with five minutes thought. But thinking is hard, and five minutes is a long time. As we Long Marchers try and retrieve something of value from Britain’s creaking ideological carousel, we need to think carefully about how we use language. It is not easy.
George Orwell wrote best when he was warning against tendencies and impulses which do us damage. One of those was the corruption of the language we use to talk about politics. He warned that unless you take care, language has such power that it will organize your thoughts for you . . . without you having to take the trouble to think. Your phrases will flow beautifully, and that will be enough to persuade you, and maybe others, that they contain genuine thought or emotion.
Auto-correction for the mind.
“Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier — even quicker, once you have the habit — to say ‘In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption’ that than to say ‘I think’.
Britain’s indulgence of political indifference and the neglect of strategic thought which it births, has been helped by triumph of bullshit political language. Bullshit language begat bullshit policies, which begat bullshit results.
At its most extreme, the current corruption of political language nestles up closely to Orwell’s hellish ‘1984’ exemplar: ‘IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH’.
Let’s take a look. First up, and self-selecting, is the trope that diversity is strength. This might be true in some circumstances, but usually it isn’t. If diversity was the key to strength, Lebanon would be great place. If an absence of diversity inevitably made for a dull uncreative society, Japan would be stultifying.
Diversity can be a source of strength, but only if that diversity is helping to foster a new and richer coherence. Mongrels can be usefully scrappy. But diversity usually merely encourages division, which just as surely means weakness.
Second, is the unthought instinct that inclusion must be a good thing. Again, the problem is obvious: the demands of inclusion are usually - not always, perhaps, but usually - at odds with the demands of competence. He/she may not be as good at the job, but he/she ticks right ‘inclusive’ boxes.
We can all think of jobs where competence must trump inclusion - brain surgery, airline pilot etc. That makes the inclusion/competence problem seem like it only applies to high-status jobs. But actually, it’s quite difficult to think of any job where the claims of inclusion should trump competence.
Burger-flipping? If the ‘inclusive’ person keeps flipping them onto the floor, is that useful? Even - or maybe particularly - bin-collecting. If the ‘inclusive’ addition keeps spilling the bins all over the pavement, is that not a problem?
Can you think of any job where inclusion should trump competence? (‘Bramble picker.’) And if you can, is that job truly useful?
One claim to political virtue is ‘sensitivity’. But how often do the claims of sensitivity really mean being sensitive to other people’s feeling and perceptions, not one’s own feelings?
Truth and my-truth. My-truth is that the actual truth matters. Deal with it.
The examples I’ve given come mainly from the ‘Liberal Left’, and I think it’s true that in this particular league of corruption, they need the cuffs particularly badly. The nadir are the petty language-criminals of the Liberal Democrats, whose continued existence is a tribute to the seductive power of corrupted political language over actual thought.
But in Britain, the Conservatives too stopped thinking years, decades ago, but their language hasn’t changed. Can’t change, quite possibly. Their main crimes against political language, and hence thought and policy, are economic. And the linguistic problems grown by the economics profession are dramatic, like mushrooms that have taken over the entire tumble-down hut.
“Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:
We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.”
But that requires an entire essay of its own.
In the meantime, I must remember that I can only think clearly if I observe carefully and quietly, and then write even more carefully. I’ll keep trying.
Michael Taylor / Coldwater Economics / Coldwater Economics Substack