On becoming a Vegetarian...
Written in response to a post elseforum suggesting that the appropriate definition for "slave" was simply a self identification - that anyone who claimed the word was one.
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One of the problems with relying exclusively on self identification for labels like this is that the words cease to have any meaning. Your definition simply says that "slave" is a self identification label akin to "george" or "mary" and that anyone who claims the word gets it. I'm not saying you're wrong, and maybe that's the best way to describe this particular word - as having no meaning to speak of. I'm not sure. There's a whole category of such words today like "bi", and "gay", and "het" and "dyke" and "queer" and "kinky" and "lifestyle" and etc.
I keep giving thought to declaring myself a vegetarian. I don't intend to change my eating habits at all and I do eat animals. I just figure that if a "dyke" can be a woman who sleeps with men, builds relationships with men, and doesn't with women, or a "het" person can be a person who does these things with people of the same gender, then what we're really talking about here isn't self identification or behavior so much as politics. Picking one of these labels isn't about describing one's self so much as it is about associating one's self with a group of people, presumably for the purposes of allocating resources, which is pretty much the definition of politics. Lots of vegetarians eat animals today. I'd just be another one of them stretching the envelope a little further.
I don't blame you for using this all encompassing, has-no-meaning definition. OTOH, what's the point, really? If we did this for all words, "anyone who declares themselves to be an elephant is an elephant" or "anyone who thinks themselves a table or a chair is a table or a chair", then won't we need to invent a new class of words for describing the things which seem to be elephants or chairs or tables according to the earlier definitions?
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One of the problems with relying exclusively on self identification for labels like this is that the words cease to have any meaning. Your definition simply says that "slave" is a self identification label akin to "george" or "mary" and that anyone who claims the word gets it. I'm not saying you're wrong, and maybe that's the best way to describe this particular word - as having no meaning to speak of. I'm not sure. There's a whole category of such words today like "bi", and "gay", and "het" and "dyke" and "queer" and "kinky" and "lifestyle" and etc.
I keep giving thought to declaring myself a vegetarian. I don't intend to change my eating habits at all and I do eat animals. I just figure that if a "dyke" can be a woman who sleeps with men, builds relationships with men, and doesn't with women, or a "het" person can be a person who does these things with people of the same gender, then what we're really talking about here isn't self identification or behavior so much as politics. Picking one of these labels isn't about describing one's self so much as it is about associating one's self with a group of people, presumably for the purposes of allocating resources, which is pretty much the definition of politics. Lots of vegetarians eat animals today. I'd just be another one of them stretching the envelope a little further.
I don't blame you for using this all encompassing, has-no-meaning definition. OTOH, what's the point, really? If we did this for all words, "anyone who declares themselves to be an elephant is an elephant" or "anyone who thinks themselves a table or a chair is a table or a chair", then won't we need to invent a new class of words for describing the things which seem to be elephants or chairs or tables according to the earlier definitions?