Terry Graves on progress, reform, discrimination, toleration, pro-choice, social justice, and other misnomers of the chattering class.

These verbal class distinctions by now should be antique. Words have meaning and, crucially, leave impressions, too often the wrong ones.

In exasperation an earnest young woman once asked me, “How can you be against progress?” For her, no question was merely rhetorical, so I mumbled, “Uh, define progress.” This did not help: she believed in progress and in its identity with her ideas. Perhaps I should instead have said, “By that I suppose you mean improvement. Just how is it an improvement?” But I never did — she and I were dating at the time — and armed with this definition of her politics as progress, she began our every discussion one-up on me.

So it remains: anyone who co-opts and then defines words such as progress and its less ambitious sibling, reform, has won the rhetorical high ground and often the debate without his opponent even realizing he is in one. For casual observers such as voters, journalists, and academics, certain terms such as discrimination then take on connotations of evil, while others such as social programs are presumed to be good. In politics diction may not always be destiny, but we must pause occasionally to peel away the presumptions and false connotations that encrust every public debate, else we keep shooting ourselves in the tongue. Words have meaning and, crucially, leave impressions, too often the wrong ones. As Disraeli put it, “With words, we govern men.” So, never entrust their definitions to your opponents or to (and these are often one and the same) the verbal class that is the American media. 

Most of us have long since learned to be cautious about words like free, expert, activist, hate speech, NGO, and (when referring to street thugs or those who rob banks and murder so they need not work while championing the working class) political prisoners. But not all are so blatant. The most pernicious example of these encrustations is discrimination. It is obvious that every law discriminates against someone. That is the purpose of laws, to separate sheep from goats, perps from victims, more money from some citizens than from others. But it is not so obvious that it is the obvious that we must continually emphasize, else it will be overlooked, like the pattern in one’s necktie. One discriminates in activities as harmless as choosing that necktie; there is other discrimination some consider immoral; and then there is illegal discrimination. The three are not the same, nor should they necessarily be. So, the next time someone screams “Discrimination!” just shrug and ask, “And your point is?”

It has long been apparent that the knee-jerk remedy for past discrimination is to be future discrimination, in the form of quotas — no matter that quotas are punishment for violation of an ex post facto law, something prohibited by Article I of the Constitution. And it is punishment: every affirmative action for one has an equal and opposite negative action for another. Had we instead heeded the liberal Democrat who recommended “benign neglect,” the wounds caused by slavery and Jim Crow might have healed years ago. Instead, we allow, even encourage, journalists, politicians, academia, and the popular entertainment media to continually pick, pick, pick at the scab: a cheap way to feel better about ourselves. Sometimes these opportunists fabricate, often they exaggerate. But to be even minimally plausible, they most often reach back decades or even centuries for their story lines, because the slaves and other victims of the worst of the past discrimination are — I hate to be the one to break this — dead. Too, it is remarkable how many of those who urge quotas (and reparations) upon us also oppose inherited wealth and advantage. By their lights, then, if after 1865 the freed slaves had been allowed to succeed, inheritance taxes should have prevented their passing any gain on to their descendants of the present day.

Soon enough a fallback euphemism for quotas appeared: diversity. By comparison this sounds harmless, but there is only one acceptable, indeed, possible way to gauge diversity: by the numbers. That is, by quotas. The system of quotas will be called something else, such as affirmative action or targeted hiring, but only their camouflage of additional syllables separates them from quotas. (And if diversity is so good, why is divisiveness so bad? Just wondering.)

Also closely related to discrimination is homophobia, a lofty dismissal of any opposition to homosexual activity as an expression of irrational fear or hatred. Here the phobia is merely assumed, as that is far less defensible than moral disapproval. In any case, neither fear nor hatred need be irrational; and even if fear and hatred were involved in the opposition to homosexuality, they follow logically from moral beliefs that have been strongly held for thousands of years by billions of people. 

The confusion about homophobia is but an example of the misuse of toleration. Its proponents are quite intolerant of any exception to the general notion of toleration if the exception is based on personal beliefs — unless it is the proponents’ beliefs. And they automatically disallow any exception based on religious belief. (Moslems will know that their moment has passed, that they have, as it were, arrived in American popular culture, when it shifts from indulging Islam to despising it like any other religion.) Besides, it is not mere toleration that the proponents seek; it is legal protection and social approval: in toto, a privilege they will not extend to those who disagree. Worst of all, they link these for nearly any activity: it must be all of them (tolerated, approved, and legal) or it must be none of them. Or, as T.H. White wrote of the grim society of ants in The Sword in the Stone, “Everything not forbidden is compulsory.”

For an example of something that in less than a generation went from forbidden to compulsory: organizations like Planned Parenthood believe that it is, in the recent words of its president Gloria Feldt, “anti-choice arrogance” for a medical practitioner to choose not to participate in contraception and abortion. Why? It is impossible to know which is the basis for Feldt’s words — rank hypocrisy or a clueless inconsistency. Either way, if there are enough such rogue practitioners to make a significant difference in the availability of contraception and abortion, then they are also enough that their beliefs should be taken into account. But Feldt’s brand of totalitarian paranoia will brook no exceptions — for her, even one dissident suffices for a conspiracy, and somewhere, somehow, someone may be out of line. And for these arrogant anti-choice practitioners who resist the mandate, the director of something called the National Health Law Program has the final solution: “… At what point is it [refusing to perform an abortion] malpractice? If someone’s beliefs interfere with practicing their [sic] profession, perhaps they should do something else.” Ah, no pressure there, no anti-choice arrogance! Apparently being pro-choice is not what abortion proponents want; it is that one makes the correct choice: abortion.

Of course, all of these preceding encrustations stem from one: civil rights. The mere packaging of something as a civil right — by co-opting the jargon, personalities, organizations, presumptions, and odor of sanctity left over from the Movement’s glory years of two generations ago — has come to mean that it is a right, both civil and moral, and should remain so. Also sloughed over is this distinction: unlike the Bill of Rights, these newer rights are not aimed at protecting citizens.