The Intersectionality of Hate: Name-Magic in the 21st Century
The one who tells the stories rules the world.
--Hopi proverb
"Intersectionality" is one of those words that, like "dynamic", can seem to be (and is sometimes used as) a meaningless buzzword, but which really does have meaning and is a useful descriptor for discussion purposes, namely of the fact that the world is not a bunch of separate unrelated dioramas or displays, everything that exists existing in its neat little compartment to be safely labeled and studied apart from anything else, but rather that Being is more like a game of Pickup Sticks, that everything is touching and tangled with everything else, to the point that it sometimes seems like a pile of jackstraws as created by M.C. Escher, and that trying to deal with any one thing, any one aspect of it, without acknowledging the influence and existence of all the others is a falsification of reality and will only get you deeper into confusion in the end - assuming that understanding, and not the accrual of social power, is your goal.
(--Okay, now you know I was a philosophy major, if you had any doubts; and also that I did not go to grad school...)
There are several different intersections I plan to tackle in this essay, or essay to address in this ramshackle rant, if you will: one of them is the titular, and the other is how public discourse on the matter occurs across multiple societal sets, some of them having no direct connections at all, but eventually influencing each other due to overlap between groups far-ranging and often improbable. And these overlapping influential spheres exist not only on a flat chronological strata, the present ongoing, though spread out across the spatial plane and connected across space by various media of telecommunication, but looping back through time as well, ongoing four-dimensional conversations carried forward by these same means of far-speaking and far-viewing - including "heard it from someone I know who heard it from someone they knew", which can, with the same levels of imprecision as printed page transmission, keep flames of discourse burning on more eternally than any Hestian temple.
(--No, I really can't write any less strangely and manically than this. I've tried.)
I've talked before about the co-option - the deliberate and Orwellian co-option and refashioning - of the expression "politically correct" in the early '80s by rightwing pundits into meaning the exact opposite of what it originally meant, from being an expression that referred to the changeability of what was permitted public discourse based on the vagaries of who happened to be in power at a given moment and which was in fact used ironically and self-critically by those who disapproved of it within the old Left, to a claim of a fixed, unmoving rule of what was and was not permitted by a totally-static heirarchy of power.
This is an illustration of the second sort of intersectionality, as well as being a useful illumination of the first: I happened to know that the expression "not politically correct" predated the common use of it in contemporary politics, and how it was originally used, because my parents used it privately as a joking reference to internal departmental orthodoxies among the conservative Catholic establishment, having picked it up during their younger days hanging with leftists in Europe and at US universities in the '60s. Their odyssey from anti-war radicals to supporters of Reagan and Bush and doctrinaire retro Catholicism - while still playing at being, and flattering themselves at being, so unlike the "squares" around them who were McCarthyite Milton Berle followers in the movement which they had adopted as part of their ongoing "rebellion against authority" into authoritarianism, they being proto-Crunchy-Cons and self-styled non-puritan Bohemians - is something I've tried to explore in past posts, but which remains to me, who lived through it, in part a Rashomon mystery that will never be fully clear because it wasn't clear to them even while they were doing it, altho' I have a better handle on it after having studied it, and found the pattern mirrored elsewhere in other cases.
But anyway, that's how I knew, and how I was eventually able to track down this meme-creation, this act of appropriation and linguistic perversion, right out of 1984 (tho' it took place a couple of years earlier) with the aims of Minitrue, of shutting down conscious thought and dialogue by the substitution of a buzzword.
Which, though carefully analyzed and detailed by Orwell a generation earlier, was nothing more than the old forms of rhetoric as employed by the Sophists, and undoubtedly predating written langugage, since sophistry itself is as natural as speaking, and the forms and modes of it are used by children who cannot even read yet, to try to control each other - either directly, by using language to persuade another to submit, or indirectly, by using words to convince bystanders to support one party over the other.
IOW, "You're stupid," does not do very much, by itself, to win power over an opponent. It can anger your opponent, even into doing something stupid as a result, but basically it's just a venting of opinion and emotion. You need to do a lot more to convince either your opponent that s/he really IS stupid, or to convince bystanders not already predisposed to be on your side for personal reasons, that your opponent is stupid, and should be derided, rather than that YOU are the stupid one making unfounded assertions.
Here is a simple example of a very primitive rhetorical tactic designed to do more than just assert "You're stupid." In this area at least - I'm not sure if it's used in other English-speaking nations, or even in other regions of this one - a popular playground activity is to get someone to join you in an activity of a word-game, in which they must complete a counting pattern:
You: I one (1) the skunk.
Them: I two (2) the skunk.
You: I three (3) the skunk.
Them: Them: I four (4) the skunk.
You: I five (5) the skunk
Them: I six (6) the skunk.
You: I seven(7) the skunk.
Them: I eight (8) the skunk.
You: AHAHAH! You ate the skunk! Hey, everybody, X ate a skunk! S/he admitted it! Hahahah!
Them: [punches you in the head]
Needless to say, this is really clunky, and only works once if it works at all. (I've seen kids get tangled up and trap themselves, frex.) And, similar to the "Are you afraid of a man THIS tall? Haha, made you blink!" power game, it is pretty obvious that this is a half-assed and illogical assertion of superiority, even to four-year-olds. But there are more sophisticated games of rhetoric, although they all pretty much boil down to the "so now you have to give me your PEZ" level of playground debate - but the study of the art of bullshit is a years- long endeavor, and I just want to focus on one particular, altho' I won't be able to do it anything like justice, even with hours of writing.
Many, many years ago, as an amateur history reader, digging through various sides of various historical conflicts, I came up with a formula of human conflict that seemed, to me, to transcend all the specific surface rationales and justifications, to wit:
We want your stuff.
We want our stuff back.
We hate your guts because we want your stuff/our stuff back.
It seemed to me that just about every political, religious, ideological, ethnic, national argument could be tracked back, once all the claims of intrinsic societal difference were shown to be baloney, once all the who did what firsts were scraped off, that you could toss away all the playground taunts of "but they look funny/are stupid/do mean things and so we DESERVE to win" and find under it all, a fight over stuff.
I was much, much younger - I think I came up with this the year after I graduated from college, so we're talking fifteen years, maybe more - and far less worldly-wise then: I would amend it now by saying that
1) Stuff must be understood to include not merely physical property or potential wealth, but also social capital of various sorts - IOW, Power where power can be money and land or it can be fame and acclaim or it can be the ability to make other people do what you want, to hurt other people and get away with it, just like it did when you were six years old floating paper boats in the gutter and stomped on somebody else's boat because they were winning and got away with it because they were the geeky kid that nobody liked and nobody stuck up for and smacked you down for it;
2) Although ontologically, at the base of it, it all does come down to a contest over resources, ideology follows the fight over The Stuff, in real time it's a little more messy and complicated, and the various "becauses" offered as justifcation for the "We hate your guts" part can themselves be the incentive for, or the legitimization of, the stuff-wanting - i.e., who you allow yourself to covet from, will depend on whether or not you see them as valid targets for your dislike, and this is true on the individual and the group basis;
3) We are, as a species, primates and subject to Middle Monkey syndrome - power-worship is our abiding sin, no less than among the baboons and chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys; and so we will by preference as a whole simultaneously look for weaker ones - individuals or groups - to try to take stuff from, while feeling guilty about this as supposedly-rational beings and thus coming up with justifications for why these weaker targets are so unspeakably hateful and deserve to have their stuff taken away and not allowed to have it back.
But yeah, my Theory of History is basically the same as it was before I ever posted a comment under the handle "Philosopher @ Large" just like my Rules Of International Conflict (1. Don't invite someone else to help in your civil war, no matter how tempting. 2. If asked, do not accept the invitation, no matter how tempting. 3. You will both end up regretting it.) and - so long as you bear in mind that Stuff isn't just farms and shops - can be very helpful when asking yourself "Why is this going on? What is happening here? Why can't we indeed, just get along?" - altho' you will need to resort to more specific and in-depth psychology to understand particular basis for specific actions, and actors' decisions.
This applies, therefore, not just to overt wars, not just to things like the Troubles, or colonialism throughout the ages, but also to academic battles for precedence of paradigms, to media and arts rivalries for audience sector, to social struggles for dominance both in and as the ruling clique, and to internal societal struggles over social justice - all of which we have seen intersect in the past week in the debate over William Sanders' behavior and that of his defenders and allies.
Now, I am a big proponent of having it out in public - the "civility" that allows group slanders and injust exclusions to flourish in secret because it's just too painful and unpleasant to talk about can go to the dump, as far as I'm concerned. I don't want to be treated "chivalrously" by some dude who goes on to talk with his buddies about "feminazis" and how giving us the vote destroyed civilization, after he so civilly-held the door as I left the room in which they smirked and smiled and paid me compliments. I would rather have honesty, and know who I should bestow my civility and regard upon, than this dishonest false-seeming to my face, and backstabbing behind it.
Now, from this you might think I would be part of the "anti-PC" brigade, and perhaps if I had not been born an intrinsic Outsider by virtue of my sex I might have been taken in by it. But after years of being raised an anti-feminist conservative Catholic, I realized that no matter how much I bowed and scraped to the men, no matter how much self-othering I committed, no matter how much I tolerated, I would never be raised to Honorary Male status for it, I could never transcend my vagina (even if I wasn't allowed to speak of the thing, even if physical biology was only ever referred to in veiled, 'civil' terms like 'active' and 'passive'--) and all my pretending it didn't hurt, didn't matter, didn't make it so.
But this post isn't about my personal odyssey except in so far as it bears on the intersectionality topic - and one aspect of intersectionality is that we are not Beings Of Pure Mind talking in a vacuum of Ideas apart from our own lived experiences (as is the standard of discourse in much of academic philosophy writing, which is partly why so much of it is incomprehensible waffle, what-on-earth-or-off-it are you talking about?) The point is, I was despite my upbringing, positioned by default to be simultaneously inside the discussion and an outsider to it critiquing it, and while ultimately rejecting it, doing so knowing the code words (many of them, at least) and eke the memes that are taken without analysis inside conservative academics - many of which, in other guises, stripped of the paint-job of cliquish terminology are simply cultural tropes, that have been around forever (or at least as long as writing) and argued about forever, too.
I also had this bad habit of going and looking up what the opposition really said, instead of just taking for granted our authority figures' interpretations of them (which is how I got hooked on Mill eventually), and also of just reading/viewing widely, which made for much cognitive dissonance when, frex, I would read Belloc going on about how the Mongols had contributed nothing to the arts and this proved that Western Culture Was #1, and I'd go "But, but, but, the Mughals made the Taj Mahal and the Shah Nameh and EVERYBODY accepts that those are Great Works of Art, even back when he was writing this they did so, that's why there's those Victorian Romantic landscape paintings of the Red Fort etc in our local museum, that's why the Frick Gallery, how can he write this? how come nobody in our group's going 'this is stupid, Belloc' -!" and so the cognitive dissonance continued to build up, though the moment of realization that I was not, and had never really been much of one, and would never be allowed back as, a conservative was still years distant.
So while I was raised like nearly all nice suburban American white kids to believe that Racism Is Wrong, I was also not taught to recognize what racism was apart from the Obvious Wrongs Of Segregation, and thus I easily accepted that No, our conservativism wasn't racist, we're just being picked on by oversensitive PC types - at least until I was obliged to listen to Limbaugh, and heard fellow cons defending him as "good for the masses," even if they themselves considered him intellectually dishonest and deplorably crude - and then read the National Review's defense of The Bell Curve, and boggled, and had an argument or two with said conservative colleagues, and realized that this was a) the same old determinist racism of the 19th century, repackaged with a lot of the same ideologically-driven pseudo-science and waffle padding to try to ameliorate the impact, b) my people were defending it for what it was, even while the claim was that it was "just misunderstood," just taken out of context, this was NOT in fact the case - and c) damn, if this was the mainstream feeling among movement conservatives, with all it implied, then yes, in fact, as a group we were racist, even if we all tisk-tisked the Klan (hey, they were anti-Catholic too, you know!) and miscegenation laws.
So that was when I started paying more attention and picking up on the code - that you couldn't take I'm not racist at face value any more than I'm not sexist or It's slanderous to say that we endorse a double-standard because the mentally-reserved conclusion of that statement was things like I'm a REALIST and blacks really ARE stupider and eviller than whites or women really ARE stupider and eviller than men or it's not a double-standard - ie hypocrisy - if you're dealling with TWO DIFFERENT THINGS, like women and men, or whites and non-whites-- and sometimes you had to really be good at parsing rhetoric to work out that this was what was being said among all the waffle, especially in the conservative magazines and newspaper editorials, but eventually patterns do emerge.
And eventually one realizes that what one is dealing with, is the present, ongoing, embodiment of this:
Humpty Dumpty took the book and looked at it carefully. 'That seems to be done right --' he began.
'You're holding it upside down!' Alice interrupted.
'To be sure I was!' Humpty Dumpty said gaily as she turned it round for him. 'I thought it looked a little queer. As I was saying, that seems to be done right -- though I haven't time to look it over thoroughly just now -- and that shows that there are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents--'
'Certainly,' said Alice.
'And only one for birthday presents, you know. There's glory for you!'
'I don't know what you mean by "glory",' Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. 'Of course you don't -- till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'
'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument",' Alice objected.
'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master -- that's all.'
Here, decades before Eric Arthur Blair was born, is the essence of Newspeak laid out in print for all to see - and the essence of Rhetoric, as it is commonly understood, the power of persuasion through language.
If someone starts an idiosyncratic usuage of a word, or phrase, it has no power unless it catches on, unless others take it to heart and popularize it. Otherwise, someone who uses words in non-standard ways is simply derided for error, or pitied for ignorance or mental blocks. But if things happen to fall that it catches on - then they have the power to change not simply language usage, but, possibly, even the world, because how we decide how to deal with other people and things depends on how we think about them, and how we think about the world is shaped by our communications. None of us is a tabula rasa, none of us exists as a Being of Pure Mental Energy uninfluenced by the thoughts expressed in words of other human beings. And often we never stop and ask - where does this shit come from? Why do I accept this, why do I assume this, where DID this notion come from, and how did it get everywhere?
And sometimes asking those questions turns out to be "following the money."
Take, for example, the meme of the evils of "revisionist history" so beloved by conservatives, endorsed by Lynne Cheney and many more for many years now.
Here we have as perfect an illustration of the Humpty-Dumptyist mindset in operation as we could wish. In what other field of study is "revision" a dirty word? In what other science, in what other art, is revising past errors considered unforgiveable? Can you imagine anyone denouncing "revisionist chemistry," with its "revisionist tables of elements" or "revisionist biology" with its "revisionist amino acids" or "revisionist astronomy" with its outlandish new stars and comets (Pluto controversy aside!) - or "revisionist medicine" with its heretical new doctrines of biochemical receptors and immunology, "revisionist metallurgy" with its revolutionary new alloys? In fact, the unwillingness to revise is considered antithetical to all of these sciences and applied arts, and the accusation of stagnation, of doctrinaire mindset, is invoked by cranks and frauds as well as legitimate discoverers, to try to shame their fields into giving them credence.*
But this argument betokens the fact that Truth is not what conservatives are interested in, who denounce "Historical Revisionism" [sic] - they are not interested in what was, but in Who Shall Rule - who gets to keep the lion's share of the stuff, IOW. It also reveals their faith in the power of Story, the Wizards' War of competing Narratives, along with their belief that that is the primary purpose of tale-tellers, to validate those who are in power to those who are under them, to help them maintain their power, by glorifying their side and denigrating all oppositions.
This, btw, is why things get so confusing, why you get this battle over artistic freedom vs. censorship that doesn't make any sense, looking at it from the outside, watching conservative pundits debate the Culture Wars. Part of the problem is that - as with Racism Is Bad - everyone, even good little conservatives, knows on one level that Ideologically-ruled Art Is Bad...at least as long as it's an opposing ideology. At the same time, and simultaneously (but mysteriously w/o head explosions) we were supposed to agree that we ought to be able to ban Immoral Art, that The Good And Smart People In A Community - that is, people who thought like us - should be able to put a stop to anything that was vulgar or vile or trivial or that said stuff about people like us that we didn't like, by force of law since the market wasn't doing its job - and then you get interfandom fights over what is or is not Good and Beautiful or Blasphemous and Treasonous and thus you get things like the ongoing wrangle over whether or not Wall-E is or is not a Conservative Film at heart and thus is it or is it not permissible to enjoy it?
--This also explains why they tend to insist that us criticizing them and/or refusing to buy their stuff IS EXACTLY THE SAME THING as a government censor office. It's projection: in their heads, that's what they mean when they say "I think this is bad", that's what they'd be doing, if they had the power to do so. Thus Sanders seeing nothing hypocritical about screeching about being oppressed by liberals, and threatening authors who have disagreed with him that "you'll never eat lunch in this town again."
This is why you get this simultaneous defense of, say, 300 (earlier it was Gibson's oeuvre) as 1) historically accurate and thus proving the Conservative Point about the need for macho aggression against everybody else, especially foreigners, swarthy people, nonconformists, non-jocks, the handicapped, people coded as insufficiently manly by the dress codes of early 21st century North America, and Middle-Easterners;
2) so what if it's historically inaccurate? it's INSPIRING!!!1! (ie it tells a Larger Truth) and it was probably the way it was told around Greek campfires back in the day anyway (and so what if it wasn't, see above re inspirational and shut up about Aeschylus you pussy fag freedom-h8tin traitorz!!1!)
--Or, briefly, HAHAHA YOU ATE THE SKUNK
This is not a new debate either. It was probably old when Plato set down the Ion and the Republic - should we allow stories that show our folk-heroes and the gods of our people as jerks and fools? what will this do to Impressionable Young Minds? was likely an old argument when Jericho's walls were being laid.
And it will help to deal with the whole mess, if you consider that, while simultaneously ranting about the evils of Postmodernism and Deconstructionism they are, in fact, endorsing and working out of a post-modernist, deconstructivist worldview: one which embraces the notion that Reality per se does not matter - not that it cannot be absolutely known, but only through fallible lenses (an argument going back through all of philosophy's history) and that these lenses themselves must be studied, to try to get to what clearer perception of reality we may (even as you allow for and factor in the distortions of the atmosphere, or the glass itself, when making calculations based on observations through a telescope) but that it is irrelevant because all that matters is Who Shall Rule.
You know, that whole "we create our own reality" thing.
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Which makes sense, if you limit "reality" to the human, societal sphere (and have no sense of ethical responsibility to respect objective truth) : obviously, opinion won't change whether the moon is made of cheese - or gold - or not, but if you convince enough people that there's vast amounts of hidden gold on the moon, you might be able to get a lunar colony funded - which would certainly change the physical realm in lots of ways for many years, as well as affecting the lives of many, many millions of people directly and indirectly, quite apart from what would happen when no gold was found - which is probably a story idea, if anybody wants it.
We who have accepted as an honor the soubriquet "reality-based community" scoff at the self-styled makers of reality: but if one regards it as a Wizards' War, a contest of vision-of-reality-shaping words, then scoffing alone is not enough.
Because when it comes to Who Shall Rule, it boils down to who tells the best tale - whose Narrative is most compelling, and that is what Name-Magic in the 21st century looks like.
Part II - "Noman is blinding me"
Because I work for a conservative boss who will be (smarmily, insincerely) polite to non-white customers and then turn around and snark about Affirmative Action or mock their names or accents with his buddies (and yes, this is the same boss with the creepy touching, and yes, I am trying like hell to find another job, part of why I've not been able to keep up with the internets so much lately) as well as my regular writing career, I was musing about the whole "political correctness" whinge even before the Helix Bigot Eruption, and was thinking about how it related to people wanting to be addressed correctly and thinking nothing of it - even the same ones who moan endlessly about "P.C." and what do THOSE PEOPLE want 'us' to call them NOW??? so that when it came out that Sanders was a) one of those whiners and moaners and b) was fussy about being addressed in the way that he preferred, "William" and not "Will" or "Bill", I just went "figures", figures he'd be like that, and figures he wouldn't see the irony, either.
Then when Naamen Tilahun posted a rant about people mispronouncing non-European names it catalyzed it for me: it's Name Magic. It's about power to loose and bind, only it just works a little different IRL than it does in the stories.
See - as I mentioned in comments there - I have a given name that is an ordinary English name, not terribly rare, one syllable, pronounced exactly the way it's spelled according to normal English phonics rules, rhymes (unfortunately) with lots of ordinary nouns, it's not like 'Hermione' or anything - but despite all that, for most of my life I have had to deal with adults pronouncing it wrong on a daily basis. (People who know me IRL will probably be going 'bwuh?' but bear with me, 'kay? It happened just last week again.)
Not all adults - specifically, teachers, bosses, coworkers and classmates, the latter two groups being those who felt some sort of rivalry or were trying to establish their role in the pecking order; in latter years it has been extended to certain customers who deal with me regularly enough to get on a names-basis, and tech support people with whom I deal regularly, too. All of them are native English speakers, btw, I'm not talking about people for whom it's actually a foreign name who might have problems with it. All of these who have done it, either turn it into a diminutive, or a different name altogether, even when I correct them on it, repeatedly. They don't have trouble pronouncing it per se - I've never heard anybody screw it up when talking about celebrities X or Y, or historical figure Z. Eventually I began to suspect it was just petty dominance behavior, and finally I became certain of it, watching these same offenders - mostly male, but some older women too - in their dealings with others. They never screw up the names of people they want to impress favorably.
People who like me, OTOH, don't create nicknames for me and stick them on w/o my permission, or turn my name into a different one and use it despite my wishes. And people who have no interest in playing petty power games? Rarely if ever get my name wrong, and never more than once. Even if they're total strangers. Frex, the other week, at our little local comic con, GOH Khoi Pham remembered my name, and remembered it right, half-an-hour after we'd spent 4-5 minutes chatting about the representation of female characters in the genre (that's another post, btw) even though I was just a random schlubby fangirl as far as he was concerned (if one who had said "I really like your work") so obviously it can't be that hard to pronounce or remember! And yet, all these middle-aged businessmen I deal with on a regular basis, like my old schoolteachers who saw me 5 days out of 7 30+ weeks out of the year, find it impossible to not reduce or change...
What they're doing is saying I can call you whatever the hell I want, and you can't make me stop, because you're no one. And what do you do? I know kids who have given up trying to get teachers to pronounce their names right and just renamed themselves, like Naamen did, only in this case it was their last name, out of despair and exhaustion. In other words, they gave in to the name-magic, allowed themselves to be reshaped, their reality to be negated before the majority around them. I know others who got a reputation for being "bitchy" and "hypersensitive" because they insisted on correcting it. (I have been both, at various times, myself.) These were (mostly) all-white classroom groups, but with distinct insider/outsider divisions based on family wealth, or connections of other kinds. It was herd-animal behavior, expressed in words - which is our chief human form of power-brokerage, the way we get people to give us money or deference or take up the sword for our causes.
Seriously, how hard is it to ask "how do you pronounce your name?" and then say it that way, if you're in doubt? How hard is it not to call your neighbor Sean "Seen" and how often do you hear anyone over the age of eight whining and griping about how unreasonable it is to be forced to say "Shawn" or to refrain from calling Mrs. Sobieski a "Polack" or Mr. Schmitt a "Kraut"--? And yet you will hear the same people who have no hesitation to chide someone for saying "Polack" even innocently (and yes, it did happen in my former circle, I'm not making this example up) themselves turning around and being in the van of the conservative anti-PC charge, without any awareness of their hypocrisies.
In the fantasy tradition of Name-Magic, knowing someone's true name gives you power to control them. IRL, refusing to speak another's true name is an expression of power you have, or wish to have, over them - and this power works by convincing a majority of bystanders to go along with it, to agree that you have the right of it, that the Nameless person is unreasonable, unjust, uncool, outrageous to demand the same respect that the rest of you award yourselves, automatically. You claim the right to "X" them, in L'Engle's terminology, to make them Unpersons in Orwell's, to say I am real, you are not by ignoring them even as you speak about them--
Whoah, I'm only about halfway through this article, and I still have lots to cover (like why I changed 'privilege' to 'hate' in the title, and what David Truesdale's MO is and why he focused on going after Tempest), but I have chores and things to work on, too. Okay, part II later.
Meanwhile, here's a short post by dday at Hullabaloo which illustrates the intersectionality of the different blogospheres and also the intersectionality of the "civility" meme across sections of society, written from a panel on the subject at an ongoing blog con: "Greetings from the Fuck Panel". It succinctly points out the power-grab/power-keep-hold-of aspect of discourse control such as we have seen in the Sanders' Defense this past week - just swap out the specifics and you will find it very familiar.
* NB: I am not saying that scientists or doctors are immune to doctrinaire stagnation, as they are no less human than anyone else; I am simply saying that it is not embraced as a Virtue in science and medicine, any more than Faddism or Bribe-taking are, even tho' those also beset the fields.
--Hopi proverb
"Intersectionality" is one of those words that, like "dynamic", can seem to be (and is sometimes used as) a meaningless buzzword, but which really does have meaning and is a useful descriptor for discussion purposes, namely of the fact that the world is not a bunch of separate unrelated dioramas or displays, everything that exists existing in its neat little compartment to be safely labeled and studied apart from anything else, but rather that Being is more like a game of Pickup Sticks, that everything is touching and tangled with everything else, to the point that it sometimes seems like a pile of jackstraws as created by M.C. Escher, and that trying to deal with any one thing, any one aspect of it, without acknowledging the influence and existence of all the others is a falsification of reality and will only get you deeper into confusion in the end - assuming that understanding, and not the accrual of social power, is your goal.
(--Okay, now you know I was a philosophy major, if you had any doubts; and also that I did not go to grad school...)
There are several different intersections I plan to tackle in this essay, or essay to address in this ramshackle rant, if you will: one of them is the titular, and the other is how public discourse on the matter occurs across multiple societal sets, some of them having no direct connections at all, but eventually influencing each other due to overlap between groups far-ranging and often improbable. And these overlapping influential spheres exist not only on a flat chronological strata, the present ongoing, though spread out across the spatial plane and connected across space by various media of telecommunication, but looping back through time as well, ongoing four-dimensional conversations carried forward by these same means of far-speaking and far-viewing - including "heard it from someone I know who heard it from someone they knew", which can, with the same levels of imprecision as printed page transmission, keep flames of discourse burning on more eternally than any Hestian temple.
(--No, I really can't write any less strangely and manically than this. I've tried.)
I've talked before about the co-option - the deliberate and Orwellian co-option and refashioning - of the expression "politically correct" in the early '80s by rightwing pundits into meaning the exact opposite of what it originally meant, from being an expression that referred to the changeability of what was permitted public discourse based on the vagaries of who happened to be in power at a given moment and which was in fact used ironically and self-critically by those who disapproved of it within the old Left, to a claim of a fixed, unmoving rule of what was and was not permitted by a totally-static heirarchy of power.
This is an illustration of the second sort of intersectionality, as well as being a useful illumination of the first: I happened to know that the expression "not politically correct" predated the common use of it in contemporary politics, and how it was originally used, because my parents used it privately as a joking reference to internal departmental orthodoxies among the conservative Catholic establishment, having picked it up during their younger days hanging with leftists in Europe and at US universities in the '60s. Their odyssey from anti-war radicals to supporters of Reagan and Bush and doctrinaire retro Catholicism - while still playing at being, and flattering themselves at being, so unlike the "squares" around them who were McCarthyite Milton Berle followers in the movement which they had adopted as part of their ongoing "rebellion against authority" into authoritarianism, they being proto-Crunchy-Cons and self-styled non-puritan Bohemians - is something I've tried to explore in past posts, but which remains to me, who lived through it, in part a Rashomon mystery that will never be fully clear because it wasn't clear to them even while they were doing it, altho' I have a better handle on it after having studied it, and found the pattern mirrored elsewhere in other cases.
But anyway, that's how I knew, and how I was eventually able to track down this meme-creation, this act of appropriation and linguistic perversion, right out of 1984 (tho' it took place a couple of years earlier) with the aims of Minitrue, of shutting down conscious thought and dialogue by the substitution of a buzzword.
Which, though carefully analyzed and detailed by Orwell a generation earlier, was nothing more than the old forms of rhetoric as employed by the Sophists, and undoubtedly predating written langugage, since sophistry itself is as natural as speaking, and the forms and modes of it are used by children who cannot even read yet, to try to control each other - either directly, by using language to persuade another to submit, or indirectly, by using words to convince bystanders to support one party over the other.
IOW, "You're stupid," does not do very much, by itself, to win power over an opponent. It can anger your opponent, even into doing something stupid as a result, but basically it's just a venting of opinion and emotion. You need to do a lot more to convince either your opponent that s/he really IS stupid, or to convince bystanders not already predisposed to be on your side for personal reasons, that your opponent is stupid, and should be derided, rather than that YOU are the stupid one making unfounded assertions.
Here is a simple example of a very primitive rhetorical tactic designed to do more than just assert "You're stupid." In this area at least - I'm not sure if it's used in other English-speaking nations, or even in other regions of this one - a popular playground activity is to get someone to join you in an activity of a word-game, in which they must complete a counting pattern:
You: I one (1) the skunk.
Them: I two (2) the skunk.
You: I three (3) the skunk.
Them: Them: I four (4) the skunk.
You: I five (5) the skunk
Them: I six (6) the skunk.
You: I seven(7) the skunk.
Them: I eight (8) the skunk.
You: AHAHAH! You ate the skunk! Hey, everybody, X ate a skunk! S/he admitted it! Hahahah!
Them: [punches you in the head]
Needless to say, this is really clunky, and only works once if it works at all. (I've seen kids get tangled up and trap themselves, frex.) And, similar to the "Are you afraid of a man THIS tall? Haha, made you blink!" power game, it is pretty obvious that this is a half-assed and illogical assertion of superiority, even to four-year-olds. But there are more sophisticated games of rhetoric, although they all pretty much boil down to the "so now you have to give me your PEZ" level of playground debate - but the study of the art of bullshit is a years- long endeavor, and I just want to focus on one particular, altho' I won't be able to do it anything like justice, even with hours of writing.
Many, many years ago, as an amateur history reader, digging through various sides of various historical conflicts, I came up with a formula of human conflict that seemed, to me, to transcend all the specific surface rationales and justifications, to wit:
We want your stuff.
We want our stuff back.
We hate your guts because we want your stuff/our stuff back.
It seemed to me that just about every political, religious, ideological, ethnic, national argument could be tracked back, once all the claims of intrinsic societal difference were shown to be baloney, once all the who did what firsts were scraped off, that you could toss away all the playground taunts of "but they look funny/are stupid/do mean things and so we DESERVE to win" and find under it all, a fight over stuff.
I was much, much younger - I think I came up with this the year after I graduated from college, so we're talking fifteen years, maybe more - and far less worldly-wise then: I would amend it now by saying that
1) Stuff must be understood to include not merely physical property or potential wealth, but also social capital of various sorts - IOW, Power where power can be money and land or it can be fame and acclaim or it can be the ability to make other people do what you want, to hurt other people and get away with it, just like it did when you were six years old floating paper boats in the gutter and stomped on somebody else's boat because they were winning and got away with it because they were the geeky kid that nobody liked and nobody stuck up for and smacked you down for it;
2) Although ontologically, at the base of it, it all does come down to a contest over resources, ideology follows the fight over The Stuff, in real time it's a little more messy and complicated, and the various "becauses" offered as justifcation for the "We hate your guts" part can themselves be the incentive for, or the legitimization of, the stuff-wanting - i.e., who you allow yourself to covet from, will depend on whether or not you see them as valid targets for your dislike, and this is true on the individual and the group basis;
3) We are, as a species, primates and subject to Middle Monkey syndrome - power-worship is our abiding sin, no less than among the baboons and chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys; and so we will by preference as a whole simultaneously look for weaker ones - individuals or groups - to try to take stuff from, while feeling guilty about this as supposedly-rational beings and thus coming up with justifications for why these weaker targets are so unspeakably hateful and deserve to have their stuff taken away and not allowed to have it back.
But yeah, my Theory of History is basically the same as it was before I ever posted a comment under the handle "Philosopher @ Large" just like my Rules Of International Conflict (1. Don't invite someone else to help in your civil war, no matter how tempting. 2. If asked, do not accept the invitation, no matter how tempting. 3. You will both end up regretting it.) and - so long as you bear in mind that Stuff isn't just farms and shops - can be very helpful when asking yourself "Why is this going on? What is happening here? Why can't we indeed, just get along?" - altho' you will need to resort to more specific and in-depth psychology to understand particular basis for specific actions, and actors' decisions.
This applies, therefore, not just to overt wars, not just to things like the Troubles, or colonialism throughout the ages, but also to academic battles for precedence of paradigms, to media and arts rivalries for audience sector, to social struggles for dominance both in and as the ruling clique, and to internal societal struggles over social justice - all of which we have seen intersect in the past week in the debate over William Sanders' behavior and that of his defenders and allies.
Now, I am a big proponent of having it out in public - the "civility" that allows group slanders and injust exclusions to flourish in secret because it's just too painful and unpleasant to talk about can go to the dump, as far as I'm concerned. I don't want to be treated "chivalrously" by some dude who goes on to talk with his buddies about "feminazis" and how giving us the vote destroyed civilization, after he so civilly-held the door as I left the room in which they smirked and smiled and paid me compliments. I would rather have honesty, and know who I should bestow my civility and regard upon, than this dishonest false-seeming to my face, and backstabbing behind it.
Now, from this you might think I would be part of the "anti-PC" brigade, and perhaps if I had not been born an intrinsic Outsider by virtue of my sex I might have been taken in by it. But after years of being raised an anti-feminist conservative Catholic, I realized that no matter how much I bowed and scraped to the men, no matter how much self-othering I committed, no matter how much I tolerated, I would never be raised to Honorary Male status for it, I could never transcend my vagina (even if I wasn't allowed to speak of the thing, even if physical biology was only ever referred to in veiled, 'civil' terms like 'active' and 'passive'--) and all my pretending it didn't hurt, didn't matter, didn't make it so.
But this post isn't about my personal odyssey except in so far as it bears on the intersectionality topic - and one aspect of intersectionality is that we are not Beings Of Pure Mind talking in a vacuum of Ideas apart from our own lived experiences (as is the standard of discourse in much of academic philosophy writing, which is partly why so much of it is incomprehensible waffle, what-on-earth-or-off-it are you talking about?) The point is, I was despite my upbringing, positioned by default to be simultaneously inside the discussion and an outsider to it critiquing it, and while ultimately rejecting it, doing so knowing the code words (many of them, at least) and eke the memes that are taken without analysis inside conservative academics - many of which, in other guises, stripped of the paint-job of cliquish terminology are simply cultural tropes, that have been around forever (or at least as long as writing) and argued about forever, too.
I also had this bad habit of going and looking up what the opposition really said, instead of just taking for granted our authority figures' interpretations of them (which is how I got hooked on Mill eventually), and also of just reading/viewing widely, which made for much cognitive dissonance when, frex, I would read Belloc going on about how the Mongols had contributed nothing to the arts and this proved that Western Culture Was #1, and I'd go "But, but, but, the Mughals made the Taj Mahal and the Shah Nameh and EVERYBODY accepts that those are Great Works of Art, even back when he was writing this they did so, that's why there's those Victorian Romantic landscape paintings of the Red Fort etc in our local museum, that's why the Frick Gallery, how can he write this? how come nobody in our group's going 'this is stupid, Belloc' -!" and so the cognitive dissonance continued to build up, though the moment of realization that I was not, and had never really been much of one, and would never be allowed back as, a conservative was still years distant.
So while I was raised like nearly all nice suburban American white kids to believe that Racism Is Wrong, I was also not taught to recognize what racism was apart from the Obvious Wrongs Of Segregation, and thus I easily accepted that No, our conservativism wasn't racist, we're just being picked on by oversensitive PC types - at least until I was obliged to listen to Limbaugh, and heard fellow cons defending him as "good for the masses," even if they themselves considered him intellectually dishonest and deplorably crude - and then read the National Review's defense of The Bell Curve, and boggled, and had an argument or two with said conservative colleagues, and realized that this was a) the same old determinist racism of the 19th century, repackaged with a lot of the same ideologically-driven pseudo-science and waffle padding to try to ameliorate the impact, b) my people were defending it for what it was, even while the claim was that it was "just misunderstood," just taken out of context, this was NOT in fact the case - and c) damn, if this was the mainstream feeling among movement conservatives, with all it implied, then yes, in fact, as a group we were racist, even if we all tisk-tisked the Klan (hey, they were anti-Catholic too, you know!) and miscegenation laws.
So that was when I started paying more attention and picking up on the code - that you couldn't take I'm not racist at face value any more than I'm not sexist or It's slanderous to say that we endorse a double-standard because the mentally-reserved conclusion of that statement was things like I'm a REALIST and blacks really ARE stupider and eviller than whites or women really ARE stupider and eviller than men or it's not a double-standard - ie hypocrisy - if you're dealling with TWO DIFFERENT THINGS, like women and men, or whites and non-whites-- and sometimes you had to really be good at parsing rhetoric to work out that this was what was being said among all the waffle, especially in the conservative magazines and newspaper editorials, but eventually patterns do emerge.
And eventually one realizes that what one is dealing with, is the present, ongoing, embodiment of this:
Humpty Dumpty took the book and looked at it carefully. 'That seems to be done right --' he began.
'You're holding it upside down!' Alice interrupted.
'To be sure I was!' Humpty Dumpty said gaily as she turned it round for him. 'I thought it looked a little queer. As I was saying, that seems to be done right -- though I haven't time to look it over thoroughly just now -- and that shows that there are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents--'
'Certainly,' said Alice.
'And only one for birthday presents, you know. There's glory for you!'
'I don't know what you mean by "glory",' Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. 'Of course you don't -- till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'
'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument",' Alice objected.
'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master -- that's all.'
Here, decades before Eric Arthur Blair was born, is the essence of Newspeak laid out in print for all to see - and the essence of Rhetoric, as it is commonly understood, the power of persuasion through language.
If someone starts an idiosyncratic usuage of a word, or phrase, it has no power unless it catches on, unless others take it to heart and popularize it. Otherwise, someone who uses words in non-standard ways is simply derided for error, or pitied for ignorance or mental blocks. But if things happen to fall that it catches on - then they have the power to change not simply language usage, but, possibly, even the world, because how we decide how to deal with other people and things depends on how we think about them, and how we think about the world is shaped by our communications. None of us is a tabula rasa, none of us exists as a Being of Pure Mental Energy uninfluenced by the thoughts expressed in words of other human beings. And often we never stop and ask - where does this shit come from? Why do I accept this, why do I assume this, where DID this notion come from, and how did it get everywhere?
And sometimes asking those questions turns out to be "following the money."
Take, for example, the meme of the evils of "revisionist history" so beloved by conservatives, endorsed by Lynne Cheney and many more for many years now.
Here we have as perfect an illustration of the Humpty-Dumptyist mindset in operation as we could wish. In what other field of study is "revision" a dirty word? In what other science, in what other art, is revising past errors considered unforgiveable? Can you imagine anyone denouncing "revisionist chemistry," with its "revisionist tables of elements" or "revisionist biology" with its "revisionist amino acids" or "revisionist astronomy" with its outlandish new stars and comets (Pluto controversy aside!) - or "revisionist medicine" with its heretical new doctrines of biochemical receptors and immunology, "revisionist metallurgy" with its revolutionary new alloys? In fact, the unwillingness to revise is considered antithetical to all of these sciences and applied arts, and the accusation of stagnation, of doctrinaire mindset, is invoked by cranks and frauds as well as legitimate discoverers, to try to shame their fields into giving them credence.*
But this argument betokens the fact that Truth is not what conservatives are interested in, who denounce "Historical Revisionism" [sic] - they are not interested in what was, but in Who Shall Rule - who gets to keep the lion's share of the stuff, IOW. It also reveals their faith in the power of Story, the Wizards' War of competing Narratives, along with their belief that that is the primary purpose of tale-tellers, to validate those who are in power to those who are under them, to help them maintain their power, by glorifying their side and denigrating all oppositions.
This, btw, is why things get so confusing, why you get this battle over artistic freedom vs. censorship that doesn't make any sense, looking at it from the outside, watching conservative pundits debate the Culture Wars. Part of the problem is that - as with Racism Is Bad - everyone, even good little conservatives, knows on one level that Ideologically-ruled Art Is Bad...at least as long as it's an opposing ideology. At the same time, and simultaneously (but mysteriously w/o head explosions) we were supposed to agree that we ought to be able to ban Immoral Art, that The Good And Smart People In A Community - that is, people who thought like us - should be able to put a stop to anything that was vulgar or vile or trivial or that said stuff about people like us that we didn't like, by force of law since the market wasn't doing its job - and then you get interfandom fights over what is or is not Good and Beautiful or Blasphemous and Treasonous and thus you get things like the ongoing wrangle over whether or not Wall-E is or is not a Conservative Film at heart and thus is it or is it not permissible to enjoy it?
--This also explains why they tend to insist that us criticizing them and/or refusing to buy their stuff IS EXACTLY THE SAME THING as a government censor office. It's projection: in their heads, that's what they mean when they say "I think this is bad", that's what they'd be doing, if they had the power to do so. Thus Sanders seeing nothing hypocritical about screeching about being oppressed by liberals, and threatening authors who have disagreed with him that "you'll never eat lunch in this town again."
This is why you get this simultaneous defense of, say, 300 (earlier it was Gibson's oeuvre) as 1) historically accurate and thus proving the Conservative Point about the need for macho aggression against everybody else, especially foreigners, swarthy people, nonconformists, non-jocks, the handicapped, people coded as insufficiently manly by the dress codes of early 21st century North America, and Middle-Easterners;
2) so what if it's historically inaccurate? it's INSPIRING!!!1! (ie it tells a Larger Truth) and it was probably the way it was told around Greek campfires back in the day anyway (and so what if it wasn't, see above re inspirational and shut up about Aeschylus you pussy fag freedom-h8tin traitorz!!1!)
--Or, briefly, HAHAHA YOU ATE THE SKUNK
This is not a new debate either. It was probably old when Plato set down the Ion and the Republic - should we allow stories that show our folk-heroes and the gods of our people as jerks and fools? what will this do to Impressionable Young Minds? was likely an old argument when Jericho's walls were being laid.
And it will help to deal with the whole mess, if you consider that, while simultaneously ranting about the evils of Postmodernism and Deconstructionism they are, in fact, endorsing and working out of a post-modernist, deconstructivist worldview: one which embraces the notion that Reality per se does not matter - not that it cannot be absolutely known, but only through fallible lenses (an argument going back through all of philosophy's history) and that these lenses themselves must be studied, to try to get to what clearer perception of reality we may (even as you allow for and factor in the distortions of the atmosphere, or the glass itself, when making calculations based on observations through a telescope) but that it is irrelevant because all that matters is Who Shall Rule.
You know, that whole "we create our own reality" thing.
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Which makes sense, if you limit "reality" to the human, societal sphere (and have no sense of ethical responsibility to respect objective truth) : obviously, opinion won't change whether the moon is made of cheese - or gold - or not, but if you convince enough people that there's vast amounts of hidden gold on the moon, you might be able to get a lunar colony funded - which would certainly change the physical realm in lots of ways for many years, as well as affecting the lives of many, many millions of people directly and indirectly, quite apart from what would happen when no gold was found - which is probably a story idea, if anybody wants it.
We who have accepted as an honor the soubriquet "reality-based community" scoff at the self-styled makers of reality: but if one regards it as a Wizards' War, a contest of vision-of-reality-shaping words, then scoffing alone is not enough.
Because when it comes to Who Shall Rule, it boils down to who tells the best tale - whose Narrative is most compelling, and that is what Name-Magic in the 21st century looks like.
Part II - "Noman is blinding me"
Because I work for a conservative boss who will be (smarmily, insincerely) polite to non-white customers and then turn around and snark about Affirmative Action or mock their names or accents with his buddies (and yes, this is the same boss with the creepy touching, and yes, I am trying like hell to find another job, part of why I've not been able to keep up with the internets so much lately) as well as my regular writing career, I was musing about the whole "political correctness" whinge even before the Helix Bigot Eruption, and was thinking about how it related to people wanting to be addressed correctly and thinking nothing of it - even the same ones who moan endlessly about "P.C." and what do THOSE PEOPLE want 'us' to call them NOW??? so that when it came out that Sanders was a) one of those whiners and moaners and b) was fussy about being addressed in the way that he preferred, "William" and not "Will" or "Bill", I just went "figures", figures he'd be like that, and figures he wouldn't see the irony, either.
Then when Naamen Tilahun posted a rant about people mispronouncing non-European names it catalyzed it for me: it's Name Magic. It's about power to loose and bind, only it just works a little different IRL than it does in the stories.
See - as I mentioned in comments there - I have a given name that is an ordinary English name, not terribly rare, one syllable, pronounced exactly the way it's spelled according to normal English phonics rules, rhymes (unfortunately) with lots of ordinary nouns, it's not like 'Hermione' or anything - but despite all that, for most of my life I have had to deal with adults pronouncing it wrong on a daily basis. (People who know me IRL will probably be going 'bwuh?' but bear with me, 'kay? It happened just last week again.)
Not all adults - specifically, teachers, bosses, coworkers and classmates, the latter two groups being those who felt some sort of rivalry or were trying to establish their role in the pecking order; in latter years it has been extended to certain customers who deal with me regularly enough to get on a names-basis, and tech support people with whom I deal regularly, too. All of them are native English speakers, btw, I'm not talking about people for whom it's actually a foreign name who might have problems with it. All of these who have done it, either turn it into a diminutive, or a different name altogether, even when I correct them on it, repeatedly. They don't have trouble pronouncing it per se - I've never heard anybody screw it up when talking about celebrities X or Y, or historical figure Z. Eventually I began to suspect it was just petty dominance behavior, and finally I became certain of it, watching these same offenders - mostly male, but some older women too - in their dealings with others. They never screw up the names of people they want to impress favorably.
People who like me, OTOH, don't create nicknames for me and stick them on w/o my permission, or turn my name into a different one and use it despite my wishes. And people who have no interest in playing petty power games? Rarely if ever get my name wrong, and never more than once. Even if they're total strangers. Frex, the other week, at our little local comic con, GOH Khoi Pham remembered my name, and remembered it right, half-an-hour after we'd spent 4-5 minutes chatting about the representation of female characters in the genre (that's another post, btw) even though I was just a random schlubby fangirl as far as he was concerned (if one who had said "I really like your work") so obviously it can't be that hard to pronounce or remember! And yet, all these middle-aged businessmen I deal with on a regular basis, like my old schoolteachers who saw me 5 days out of 7 30+ weeks out of the year, find it impossible to not reduce or change...
What they're doing is saying I can call you whatever the hell I want, and you can't make me stop, because you're no one. And what do you do? I know kids who have given up trying to get teachers to pronounce their names right and just renamed themselves, like Naamen did, only in this case it was their last name, out of despair and exhaustion. In other words, they gave in to the name-magic, allowed themselves to be reshaped, their reality to be negated before the majority around them. I know others who got a reputation for being "bitchy" and "hypersensitive" because they insisted on correcting it. (I have been both, at various times, myself.) These were (mostly) all-white classroom groups, but with distinct insider/outsider divisions based on family wealth, or connections of other kinds. It was herd-animal behavior, expressed in words - which is our chief human form of power-brokerage, the way we get people to give us money or deference or take up the sword for our causes.
Seriously, how hard is it to ask "how do you pronounce your name?" and then say it that way, if you're in doubt? How hard is it not to call your neighbor Sean "Seen" and how often do you hear anyone over the age of eight whining and griping about how unreasonable it is to be forced to say "Shawn" or to refrain from calling Mrs. Sobieski a "Polack" or Mr. Schmitt a "Kraut"--? And yet you will hear the same people who have no hesitation to chide someone for saying "Polack" even innocently (and yes, it did happen in my former circle, I'm not making this example up) themselves turning around and being in the van of the conservative anti-PC charge, without any awareness of their hypocrisies.
In the fantasy tradition of Name-Magic, knowing someone's true name gives you power to control them. IRL, refusing to speak another's true name is an expression of power you have, or wish to have, over them - and this power works by convincing a majority of bystanders to go along with it, to agree that you have the right of it, that the Nameless person is unreasonable, unjust, uncool, outrageous to demand the same respect that the rest of you award yourselves, automatically. You claim the right to "X" them, in L'Engle's terminology, to make them Unpersons in Orwell's, to say I am real, you are not by ignoring them even as you speak about them--
Whoah, I'm only about halfway through this article, and I still have lots to cover (like why I changed 'privilege' to 'hate' in the title, and what David Truesdale's MO is and why he focused on going after Tempest), but I have chores and things to work on, too. Okay, part II later.
Meanwhile, here's a short post by dday at Hullabaloo which illustrates the intersectionality of the different blogospheres and also the intersectionality of the "civility" meme across sections of society, written from a panel on the subject at an ongoing blog con: "Greetings from the Fuck Panel". It succinctly points out the power-grab/power-keep-hold-of aspect of discourse control such as we have seen in the Sanders' Defense this past week - just swap out the specifics and you will find it very familiar.
* NB: I am not saying that scientists or doctors are immune to doctrinaire stagnation, as they are no less human than anyone else; I am simply saying that it is not embraced as a Virtue in science and medicine, any more than Faddism or Bribe-taking are, even tho' those also beset the fields.