maycocksean
Rock n' Roll Doggie Band-aid
I started to read a book with a really interesting premise, and I thought I'd throw out some of the ideas in the book and see what you all think. The book is called Unspeak by Steven Poole and he raises some really though provoking ideas. Unfortunately the book is unabashedly biased against the Right that I just couldn't get through it. For me, I felt that the book was so heavily agenda driven that I couldn't really take it seriously.
Still the concept is interesting, and I wish the author had made more than a token attempt at looking at how both the Left and Right do this rather than just bashing the Conservatives. I'm hoping we might be able to create a more balanced approach ourselves here.
This is a quote from the introduction (the only place in the entire book that I could find where he acknowledges that Liberals can do this also):
By the way, I'm sorry it's not in a quote box. I'm not sure how to do that without quoting someone else:
"What do the phrases 'pro-choice', 'tax relief', and 'Friends of the Earth' all have in common? They are all names that contain political arguments, in a way that alternative names--say, 'opposed to the criminilisation of abortion', 'tax reduction', or 'a group of environmental campaigners' do not.
Campaigners against abortion in the early 1970s described their position as defending a 'right to life'. The opposing camp known as 'pro-abortionists' then renamed their posistion 'pro-choice', rhetorically softening what they favored. Defending a woman's 'right to choose' whether to have a baby or not, the slogan 'pro-choice' appealed to the apparently invoilable concept of individual responsibility. It sought to cast adversaries as 'anti-choice.' However the phrase carried unfortunate associations with the consumerist ideal of 'choice', as though choosing cereals in a supermarket were an appropriate model for ethics. Indeed, anti-abortionists quickly trumped that linguistic strategy by beginning to call themselves 'pro-life', a term first recorded in 1976. The phrase 'pro-life' appeals to a sacred concept of 'life', and casts one's opponents--those who think abortion should be legally available--necessarily as anti-life, in fact pro-death. In a conceptual battle of two moral ideals, 'life' easily wins out over 'choice.'
To talk of 'tax relief' is already to take a position on socially desirable levels of taxation. One is relieved of a load, or a pain, or an illness. . . So even before you start having a debate about tax levels, the phrase 'tax relief' alrady contains an argument that tax should be minimized whenever possible. 'Tax relief' goes hand in hand with a similar name for what it seeks to reduce: the 'tax burden', which describes something while already arguing that it should be as low as possible. After all, no one likes a burden.
'Friends of the Earth' is a network of environmental groups in seventy countries. The name efficiently consigns anyone who disagrees with their specific policies to the category of 'Enemy of the Earth'. An enemy of the earth must be a very nasty sort of person indeed, a sci-fi villan like Ming the Merciless. Morever the claim that the Earth is the sort of thing you can be 'friends' with smuggles in a further holistic concept of the entire planet as a living organism; a Gaia theory, which carries a large implicit cargo of policy implications.
Each of these terms then-'pro-life', 'tax relief', 'Friends of the Earth'--is a name for something, but not a neutral name. It is a name that smuggles in a political opinion. And this is done in a remarkably efficient way: a whole partisan argument is packed into a sound bite. These precision-engineered packages of language are launched by politicians and campaigners, and targeted at newspaper headlines and snazzy television graphics, where they land and dispense their payload of persuaion into the public consciousness.
Words and phrases that function in this special way go by many names. Some writers call them 'evaluative-descriptive terms'. Others talks of 'terministic screws' or discuss the way debates are 'framed.' I will call them Unspeak."
--excerpted from the introduction to Unspeak by Steven Poole.
So whaddya think? Can you think of some examples of Unspeak? (From both sides of the aisle please!).
Still the concept is interesting, and I wish the author had made more than a token attempt at looking at how both the Left and Right do this rather than just bashing the Conservatives. I'm hoping we might be able to create a more balanced approach ourselves here.
This is a quote from the introduction (the only place in the entire book that I could find where he acknowledges that Liberals can do this also):
By the way, I'm sorry it's not in a quote box. I'm not sure how to do that without quoting someone else:
"What do the phrases 'pro-choice', 'tax relief', and 'Friends of the Earth' all have in common? They are all names that contain political arguments, in a way that alternative names--say, 'opposed to the criminilisation of abortion', 'tax reduction', or 'a group of environmental campaigners' do not.
Campaigners against abortion in the early 1970s described their position as defending a 'right to life'. The opposing camp known as 'pro-abortionists' then renamed their posistion 'pro-choice', rhetorically softening what they favored. Defending a woman's 'right to choose' whether to have a baby or not, the slogan 'pro-choice' appealed to the apparently invoilable concept of individual responsibility. It sought to cast adversaries as 'anti-choice.' However the phrase carried unfortunate associations with the consumerist ideal of 'choice', as though choosing cereals in a supermarket were an appropriate model for ethics. Indeed, anti-abortionists quickly trumped that linguistic strategy by beginning to call themselves 'pro-life', a term first recorded in 1976. The phrase 'pro-life' appeals to a sacred concept of 'life', and casts one's opponents--those who think abortion should be legally available--necessarily as anti-life, in fact pro-death. In a conceptual battle of two moral ideals, 'life' easily wins out over 'choice.'
To talk of 'tax relief' is already to take a position on socially desirable levels of taxation. One is relieved of a load, or a pain, or an illness. . . So even before you start having a debate about tax levels, the phrase 'tax relief' alrady contains an argument that tax should be minimized whenever possible. 'Tax relief' goes hand in hand with a similar name for what it seeks to reduce: the 'tax burden', which describes something while already arguing that it should be as low as possible. After all, no one likes a burden.
'Friends of the Earth' is a network of environmental groups in seventy countries. The name efficiently consigns anyone who disagrees with their specific policies to the category of 'Enemy of the Earth'. An enemy of the earth must be a very nasty sort of person indeed, a sci-fi villan like Ming the Merciless. Morever the claim that the Earth is the sort of thing you can be 'friends' with smuggles in a further holistic concept of the entire planet as a living organism; a Gaia theory, which carries a large implicit cargo of policy implications.
Each of these terms then-'pro-life', 'tax relief', 'Friends of the Earth'--is a name for something, but not a neutral name. It is a name that smuggles in a political opinion. And this is done in a remarkably efficient way: a whole partisan argument is packed into a sound bite. These precision-engineered packages of language are launched by politicians and campaigners, and targeted at newspaper headlines and snazzy television graphics, where they land and dispense their payload of persuaion into the public consciousness.
Words and phrases that function in this special way go by many names. Some writers call them 'evaluative-descriptive terms'. Others talks of 'terministic screws' or discuss the way debates are 'framed.' I will call them Unspeak."
--excerpted from the introduction to Unspeak by Steven Poole.
So whaddya think? Can you think of some examples of Unspeak? (From both sides of the aisle please!).
