The Left is stupid about many things (or is it everything?) but at the bottom of all its other stupidities — fertilising and bringing them on — is its stupidity about language. Words are disobedient. As T. S. Eliot says in Burnt Norton, they won’t stay still. You put them down, somewhere safe, turn your back ... and they’re gone. Heidegger makes the point more fully than Eliot (and without being troubled by it):
“multiplicity of meanings is the element in which all thought must move in order to be strict thought. To use an image: to a fish, the depths and expanses of its waters, the currents and quiet pools, warm and cold layers are the element of its multiple mobility. If the fish is deprived of the fullness of its element, if it is dragged on the dry sand, then it can only wriggle, twitch, and die.
"Therefore, we must always seek out thinking, and its burden of thought, in the element of its multiple meanings, else everything will remain closed to us . . . words are not terms, and thus are not like buckets and kegs from which we scoop up a content that is there. Words are wellsprings that are found and dug up in the telling, wellsprings that must be found and dug up again and again, that easily cave in, but that at times also well up when least expected.”
Which means praise can unpredictably turn into blame, blame praise, insults, honours, silencings, clamour. I don’t know that Jeremy Bentham can be thought ‘on the Left’ but his unintelligence about language is just the unintelligence of modern Leftism, which thinks it can make people think rightly by banning wrong words. Bentham thought (it’s an intellectual’s illiteracy) that a word that “reprobates”, like ‘lust’, can’t “approbate”, except in self-contradiction. But (as he would have recognised if he had been more literate — and married) when the word, lust, was alive as a serious condemnation it was also, and therefore, equally alive as serious praise. When it was available to say “Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame/Is lust in action”, it was also available to say, “And your quaint honour turn to dust, /And into ashes all my lust.” Words don’t have, as Bentham supposes, fixed meanings. Marvell has no difficulty using the word lust to mean something we daren’t reprobate, not this side of the grave. And we have no difficulty understanding him. He has, like Falstaff, just as little difficulty using the word honour to mean something he does reprobate.
Words, like dogs (and people), can turn. Famously, Kaiser Bill meant to insult the 1914 BEF by calling it “Sir John French’s contemptible little army” but, if the insult is remembered today, a century and more after Kaiserdom got dropped into the dustbin, it is only because it was adopted as a badge of honour by the insulted, and then enshrined in Westminster Abbey, as “The Old Contemptibles” who, at the First Battle of Ypres, held back, for months, “a force ten times their number”. Something similar is true of Hilary Clinton’s 2016 description of Trump supporters as “a basket of deplorables”.
Trump supporters quickly adopted it to describe themselves, and the Trump campaign repeatedly used it against Clinton during and after the election. In her 2017 book What Happened, Hilary Clinton herself said that it was a factor in her electoral loss. Boom! Bang! Backfire! And the list of such examples must be (as Wittgenstein probably said of grammatically well-formed sentences) endless.
Not on the list — but it might have been — is ‘nigger’. But world-wide, Anglophone Leftism (which would always rather domineer than think and prefers to cut off its own nose rather than no nose at all) prefers to ban the word from polite conversation, which – if it really wanted to disarm the word’s power to insult and if it had any verbal intelligence — was the last thing it would do.
The way to put Southern Whitey’s racism in its place would have been to adopt ‘nigger’, as some homosexuals have adopted ‘queer’ and ‘dyke’. As recently (i.e. as long ago?) as 2004 and 2006 Reginald D. Hunter did have “Nigga” in the titles of a couple of his shows, of which one was nominated for The Edinburgh Comedy Awards main prize, and one won the Writers’ Guild Award for Comedy. (But, of course, his spelling of the word showed he had a licence to use it; and we have all moved on since then — perhaps he has too.)
Instead of adopting the word, what world-wide, Anglophone Leftism has done is, by making it taboo, fixing it as having only one possible use and that the ugliest possible, a use it never quite had until it was banned and which, while the ban lasts, cannot be escaped. It’s a stain which it looks as if nothing can remove.
Until it was tabooed, the word had a range of possible meanings and uses, as you can see in the Uncle Remus stories; as, almost certainly — for all Whitey knows — it still has amongst black Americans (even one from the Deep South, like Hunter); and as it demonstrably had in 1897 in Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus:
"The nigger was calm, cool, towering, superb. The men had approached and stood behind him in a body. He overtopped the tallest by half a head. He said: ‘I belong to the ship.’ He enunciated distinctly, with soft precision. The deep rolling, tones of his voice filled the deck without effort. He was naturally scornful, unaffectedly condescending, as if from his height of six foot three he had surveyed all the vastness of human folly and had made up his mind not to be too hard on it."
But it turns out, he is a sick man, dying (perhaps from tuberculosis) but won’t admit it. And the crew, almost to a man, encourages him:
"Falsehood triumphed. It triumphed through doubt, through stupidity, through pity, through sentimentalism. We set ourselves to bolster it up from compassion, from recklessness, from a sense of fun. Jimmy’s steadfastness to his untruthful attitude in the face of the inevitable truth had the proportions of a colossal enigma—of a manifestation grand and incomprehensible that at times inspired a wondering awe; and there was also, to many, something exquisitely droll in fooling him to the top of his bent. The latent egoism of tenderness to suffering appeared in the developing anxiety not to see him die."
Of which, whatever else might be said, what can’t be said is that it has any touch of racial ill will in it. Jimmy — called “nigger” by both his author and his shipmates — inspires not just tenderness but devotion:
"It was at this time that Belfast’s devotion—and also his pugnacity—secured universal respect. He spent every moment of his spare time in Jimmy’s cabin. He tended him, talked to him; was as gentle as a woman, as tenderly gay as an old philanthropist, as sentimentally careful of his nigger as a model slave-owner. But outside he was irritable, explosive as gunpowder, sombre, suspicious, and never more brutal than when sorrowful. With him it was a tear and a blow; a tear for Jimmy, a blow for anyone who did not seem to take a scrupulously orthodox view of Jimmy’s case. We talked about nothing else."
And how ought Jimmy to have been spoken of in 1897? Well, 127 years later, we know: as, for example, a-person-of-colour. But ... who could devote himself to that? It’s a moral impossibility. It reduces Jimmy to a circumlocution capable of receiving neither devotion nor insult — to the abstraction the-correctly-spoken-of. It puts the speaker’s concern for his own skin uppermost and dehumanises the man he pretends to speak of more completely than the ugliest use of (what we must now call, in a circumlocution more insulting than the word itself) ‘the N-word’ ever could.
For the foreseeable future, any such possibility of meaning as that Conrad gives ‘nigger’ has gone. The word can now be used, according to Leftist prescription, only as a deliberate insult; and whatever was originally insulting in it, Leftism has augmented by giving it this extra sense of what-mustn’t-be-uttered.
The triumph of world-wide, Anglophone Leftism is, by proscribing the word, to make it newly vicious and nothing but vicious, and to be able to cite its viciousness as justifying its proscription. Leftism’s triumph is so complete that it has not only given the title of Conrad’s novel a retrospective power to insult it never previously had but has made the novel itself, for anyone of a Leftist bent, incomprehensible. (Except, of course, when the power of the novel proves the greater.)
And, of course, if ‘nigger’ is to be banned, then along with it, a host of other things must be banned too, including blacking-up for any purpose whatsoever (including Morris dancing), pictures of golliwogs on jam-jars and books as innocent as Helen Bannerman’s tales of Little Black Sambo.
And then, if we English, in deference to black southern American sensibilities, must ban ‘nigger’, surely, to be fair and anti-racist, we must, in deference to white southern American sensibilities, ban ‘red-neck’ and ‘gringo’? And, even if most English have never heard of ‘the H-word’, they had better shun that one too (unless they want some American honkey complaining about black privilege).
And where does it end? It doesn’t. It can’t. It is a never-ending, ever-spreading cultural revolution, and another of those cures that are worse than the disease. What hasn’t been found to need our sheltering proscriptions today will be found to need them tomorrow. And, today being a day to which tomorrow has already come, ‘slave’ is already under suspicion in university History departments (‘enslaved’ being the safer term used by those seeking publication and preferment) and such terms as ‘asylum seeker’, ‘immigrant’, ‘gay’, ‘homosexual’ and ‘lame’ are now “non-advised” in English courts. And when whatever of opprobrium that is presently attached to those terms attaches itself to their replacements, we shall need another and different set of non-non-advised terms, and so on to the end of days.
It isn’t just that particular words — lots and lots of particular words — become forbidden and that thought is canalised in certain predetermined directions but that, to the extent that we succeed in treating words as if they could and ought to be assigned specific values in advance, we succeed only — to return to Heidegger’s image — in dragging the fish onto the sand to die. And then everything, as he says, remains closed to us. The Left, I think we have to say, is not only stupid about language but shows malice towards it. It wants it on the sand and does its best to drag it there.
Although the Leftists have succeeded in cancelling ‘the N-word’ (now there is an insult) from current polite conversation, they can’t cancel it from the language or men’s minds. Never mind the e-e--a-- in the room, what we have there now — thanks to Leftism — is the -i--e-.
Duke Maskell
This article is also to be published in the Salisbury Review soon.