Dishonest Words

Consider first "homophobia," in current usage applied to any negative view of homosexuals or homosexuality. Someone who is opposed to homosexual activity because his minister told him that the bible says it is wicked would routinely be labelled homophobic, as would someone opposed to it because of the much higher rate of diseases, most obviously AIDS, among (male) homosexuals.

A phobia is an irrational fear. It is occasionally argued that the source of negative views of homosexuality is the fear that one might have homosexual inclinations, but it is a considerable stretch to claim that source for all negative views. Labeling all negative views of homosexual as  homophobic falsely implies a single cause for the conclusion, attempts to stigmatize all those who hold it and dismiss all possible reasons they might have.

A second example is the term "racism." In one exchange on my old blog a commenter referred to "racist science" in a context where it meant "(hypothetically) correct scientific research that demonstrated the existence of differences among the races." That was a striking example of the way "racist" is used to mean holding beliefs on racial subjects that the person using the word disapproves of. That usage is an implicit argument and a dishonest one, since the implication again is that the only possible reasons for disagreeing with the speaker's views on the subject are bad ones.

The pattern is not limited to people whose politics I disagree with; libertarians do the same thing. In our context, the question is how to label people who disagree with libertarian views. Two popular choices are "statist" and "collectivist."

Both are wrong. There are lots of reasons why someone might favor the draft, or minimum wage laws, or price controls, or the war on drugs. Worship of the state is a possible reason but not the most likely one. Belief that what really matters is the collective and not the individual is one possible reason but not the only one. Each of those views could readily be held by someone who agreed with libertarians about values, outcomes they wanted, but disagreed about the consequences of particular policies. Most obviously, someone might favor the draft because he believed it was necessary in order to defend the U.S. and want to defend the U.S. precisely because he was in favor of freedom and thought the U.S. was much freer now than it would be if someone else conquered it.

In each of these cases the pattern is the same. We have a conclusion that might be reached for any of a variety of reasons. Someone who wants to attack the conclusion does it by picking one reason he considers particularly unattractive and indefensible, using that reason to label the conclusion, and thus implying that anyone holding the conclusion does it for that reason.

In all of my examples so far it is at least arguable that the word correctly describes a significant fraction of the people it is applied to.  But consider “Trafficking,” used to pretend that prostitutes are slaves, a rhetorical tactic to let people arresting prostitutes pretend to be helping the women they are hurting. The equivalent in the Nineteenth Century was “The White Slave Trade,” the pretense that prostitutes were women kidnapped into Moorish harems — well after the Barbary pirates had been suppressed. “Trafficking” is also used to describe people who sell the service of helping people get into a country that is trying to keep them out. That again is a way of pretending to help people you are hurting.

I have no strong opinion about whether Clinton was a better than average president but when he explained that continuing his predecessor’s policy having the Coast Guard capture people fleeing Haiti for America in small boats and return them to Haiti was being done for their own good, since it would prevent many Haitians from drowning in the attempted ocean crossing, I concluded that he was a worse than average human being.

Weakly Dishonest Words

Warming a stream is bad for trout and people who fish for them, good for sunfish, largemouth bass and bathers. Labeling the effect “thermal pollution” implies that it is bad without making the value judgement explicit, hence without having to defend it.

Describing CO₂ emission as pollution raises the same issues. Increased CO₂ raises crop yields, reduces plant requirement for water, tends to green the planet, all positive effects, most obviously for a farmer. It also causes warming hence sea level rise, a negative effect for someone living very near a low lying coast. The label implies a negative judgement without making it explicit what values or whose are being used to make it.

Sin is an older example of the same pattern; “the sin of X” implies that X is bad, sometimes a debatable claim. The same is true of “virtue.” When Ayn Rand titled one of her books “The Virtue of Selfishness” her choice of words embodied a radical claim. Another example is “poison.” Describing sugar or ethanol as a poison sounds like a factual claim, is in fact a normative one.

"The Difference Between Medicine and Poison is in the Dose" Paracelsus

None of these words is dishonest in the strong sense of implying a claim that no reasonable person believes. Each could be made in a context where the values are obvious and shared by speaker and audience, talk of sin and virtue by a religious believer speaking to fellow believers. All are potentially dishonest because their use assumes a conclusion, that something is bad (pollution, sin, poison) or good (virtue, medicine), without making the assumption explicit and having to defend it.

For a third category, consider “denier.” The word itself conveys no information at all since anyone on one side of a controversy denies some claims made by those on the other side. Including the subject in the label, as in “climate denier,” does not solve that problem. Everyone agrees that climate exists. Some people deny that climate change is a terrible problem, some deny that it is not.

The rhetorical effect of the label comes from the implied link to denial of the Holocaust, widely viewed as both indefensible and evidence of Nazi sympathies. Calling someone who denies something else a denier implies, with no need for argument, that his position is as unreasonable and politically suspect as Holocaust denial. In practice, “denier” usually means someone who denies something the speaker believes is true, with the implication that it’s truth is obvious so can be denied only for bad reasons.

“Progressive” has a similar problem; everyone is in favor of progress, the disagreement is over what changes qualify. At this point the word has acquired a reasonably clear meaning as the label of a political faction so is less ambiguous than denier, still dishonest in its implication that what changes should count as progress is a fact.

A fourth category is a word or phrase designed to make it clear what you mean without actually saying it. An old example would be “rootless cosmopolitan,” meaning a Jew.

Then there are Russell Conjugations:

• I stand up for myself, you won’t take no for an answer, she always needs to get her way.

• I am detail oriented, you don’t let anything past you, he is a nitpicker.

• "I am firm; you are obstinate; he is pig-headed."

C.S. Lewis, The Death of Words

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