Week 33: Overcoming Cynicism
Week 33: Overcoming Cynicism
Interrogating the use of bad language, and the soothing balm of Joe Pera Talks With You
This week I published an essay on the use of “so-called” in public communications titled Our “So-Called” Problem. The phrase has become a linguistic contagion, used by people because they see other people using it. I argue that this is not just an inattentive form of writing – that good writing should avoid commonly used terms and phrases – but it is also a phrase that drips with cynicism, and therefore says something about present-day politics. It is used to cast suspicion while feigning engagement, but also as a way of signalling to an in-group.
Over the next weeks I will publish a few more essays exploring some ideas around political terminology. A problem we need to recognise is that our current political lexicon is incapable of describing our current political era. I’m a bit of a broken record on the use of left and right, but with the social and economic revolutions that have taken place over the last thirty years at least, the seating arrangement of the French parliament in the 18th Century is no longer a useful way to understand modern politics.
But beyond left and right, terms like conservative, liberal and progressive all also have major problems (and centrist should blasted into outer space). Oftentimes these terms are used as linguistic ruses, a way of hiding true intent. Or ideas attached to them don’t actually produce the outcomes that a philosophical or good faith understanding of the term would suggest. There is an important civic duty to interrogate the way language is used, and not simply submit to unjustified common definitions. Although recognising the unsuitable nature of our current political lexicon leads to the question of what terms can replace it? This is a problem that may be far more complex to address.
Joe Pera Talks With Us
As an antidote to both cynicism and the unrelating pace of the modern world, I have been watching the final season of Joe Pera Talks With You. The premise of the show is that Pera is a thirty-something man with the demeanour and mannerisms of an elderly man. He is doddering, but also earnest and thoughtful. He seeks meaning in the mundane, and has the wisdom to appreciate charms within the things others may dismiss as inconsequential. He has a casual awe with his surroundings, and a hopeful sense that others will also find interest in the intimate detail of life.
The show is quiet and gentle, it eschews the frenzy of modern technology. Although set in the present, Pera organises his life in a manner pre-internet (although without acknowledging any suspicion of technology). He is social, and has his place in the community, one based around routine, tradition and duty. The show is set in the town of Marquette on Michigan’s upper peninsula, on the shores of Lake Superior, and it advances the idea of a cooperative small town ethos (whether romanticised or not).
There’s a nostalgia to the show, and maybe a rose-tinted one, it does indirectly make one think about lost bonds of community kinship. It projects Pera’s life as slow and contemplative, but not self-involved. It is the contemplation of one’s guiding principles in relation to others, and sociability of genuine courtesy. To not just reject cynicism, but for it simply to not exist. Joe Pera is the soothing balm for our turbulent age.
Two Reports Of Note
There’s two reports issued this week that are worth bringing to your attention. The first is new Action Plan from the Australian government to end violence against women and children. There has been positive steps within Australia recently to take gender-based violence seriously. Although there are often a number of other forces that push against these initiatives. This Action Plan aims to reduce by a quarter each year over five years the number of women murdered by intimate partners. This currently stands at around one murder a week. Meaning the government is conceding that over the next year around 40 women will still be murdered if the plan is successful. This remains a disheartening phenomenon.
The second is a new handbook from the Supreme Court of India on Combating Gender Stereotypes in India’s legal system. This is an important recognition on how the language we use can influence our thinking. As the handbook notes: “Relying on predetermined stereotypes in judicial decision-making contravenes the duty of judges to decide each case on its merits, independently and impartially. In particular, reliance on stereotypes about women is liable to distort the law’s application to women in harmful ways.”
This Week’s Reading
Grant Wyeth - International Blue
“The use of “so-called” feeds this narrative-focused politics – and often narratives that bear no resemblance to reality. It plays to reflex responses and eschews genuine engagement with ideas or even evidence. It rejects the necessity of liberal democratic politics as striving towards – if not always achieving – improvements in standards of governance and personal livelihoods. These ideals rely on a great deal of public good faith and shared commitment to verifiable information. This shared commitment doesn’t limit the variety of opinions and expressions available in society but instead provides a platform on which this expression can be justified.
The incessant use of “so-called” disrupts this civic platform. As a form of doublespeak – language intended to obscure rather than clarify – its purpose is to limit how we think about ideas. In doing so, it diminishes both the writer and the audience, relegating each to the grim emotions of bitterness and mistrust. The power of doublespeak is its ability to become everyday language and for us to accept it as such. The first editor to reject “so-called” as a linguistic device – and implement a blanket ban on its usage in their publication – should be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.”
Where Does Gender Equality Fit Into Australia’s Development Policy?
Grant Wyeth - The Diplomat
“Clearly articulating gender-based violence as the world’s primary security problem is necessary to properly address it. There has been great success with framing climate change as a pressing security concern to move our conceptions of security away from simply military activity and to understand a broader range of destabilising threats. We haven’t quite graduated to framing gender-based violence as as a similar form of human insecurity yet. That probably says something about the value we place on women and girls.
The [forthcoming] gender equality strategy has the opportunity to address another critical aspect that the international development strategy fails to mention: men and masculinities. In recent decades most international development assistance has focused on the improvement of status and livelihoods of women. This is recognised as having exponential effects for overall social health, and Australia’s new development policy has reinstated a target of 80 percent of development assistance addressing these issues of gender equality for investments of more than $1.9 million.
However, there is also now a recognition that female advancement can often trigger a counterforce of male resentment. As I have written previously on managing the backlash to gender-focused development policy:
There is a growing body of disheartening evidence — from Bangladesh, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, India, and Rwanda, just to name a few — that has found that greater female empowerment and agency leads many men to become antagonistic and violent toward their female partners. There is a clear male backlash to the economic, social, and political gains that women are making.
This problem is not restricted to developing countries. Male resentment over female advancement is one of the disturbing mega trends at present throughout the West, and an incredibly fertile platform for authoritarian actors to build their support. It’s an issue we all need to take responsibility for.”
What It Means to Call Prostitution ‘Sex Work’
Pamela Paul – New York Times
“The urge to maintain that illusion is understandable. The term “sex work” whitewashes the economic constraints, family ruptures and often sordid circumstances that drive many women to sell themselves. It flips the nature of the transaction in question: It enables sex buyers to justify their own role, allowing the purchase of women’s bodies for their own sexual pleasure and violent urges to feel as lightly transactional as the purchase of packaged meat from the supermarket. Instead of women being bought and sold by men, it creates the impression that women are the ones in power. It is understandable that some women prefer to think of themselves that way, and certainly a vocal portion of them do.
“Prostitution is neither ‘sex’ nor ‘work,’ but a system based on gender-based violence and socio-economic inequalities related to sex, gender, race and poverty that preys on the most marginalised among us for the profitable commercial sex industry,” Taina Bien-Aimé, the executive director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, told me.
In recent years, language has undergone drastic shifts in an effort to reduce harm. Sometimes these shifts result in contorted language that obscures meaning. Sometimes these shifts make people feel better without changing anything of substance. And sometimes they do move the needle toward positive change, which is always welcome. But the use of “sex work,” however lofty the intention, effectively increases the likelihood of harm for a population that has already suffered so much. To help people hurt by the sex trade, we need to call it like it is.”
Parental Alienation: A Disputed Theory With Big Implications
Hannah Dreyfus - ProPublica
ProPublica have published this week not only a helpful explainer on the use of “parental alienation” as a tactic in family courts, but also a harrowing – and extraordinary – piece of investigative journalism by Hannah Dreyfus on a case of child abuse. The piece highlights how the agencies and legal systems in Colorado designed to protect children failed miserably to do so, being easily swayed by an accusation of “parental alienation” against the mother seeking to protect her child from a dangerous man. This is an all too familiar story.
How the World Can Help Afghan Women Now
Shaharzad Akbar & Melanne Verveer – Foreign Affairs
We must end a cycle of impunity by recognising and prosecuting the Taliban’s crimes. The deprivation of Afghan women’s fundamental rights—including their rights to education, equality, dignity, bodily autonomy, security, employment, political representation, and cultural participation—is a crime against humanity and violation of numerous international treaties to which Afghanistan is a party, including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The U.N. Human Rights Council has affirmed this, concluding in a recent report that the situation in Afghanistan “constitutes gender persecution and an institutionalised framework of gender apartheid.” The first step toward accountability is for the United States and other U.N. member states to officially recognise that Taliban policies constitute gender persecution and gender apartheid through a U.N. General Assembly or U.N. Security Council resolution. This, in tandem with the existing sanctions, would heighten pressure on the authorities by jeopardising their ability to travel and receive U.N. credentials, and expose them to renewed condemnation and monitoring.
We must consult and convene diverse groups of Afghans, and especially Afghan women, when creating policy. Too often, policy is created either without Afghans entirely or without Afghan women. Input from the Afghan people and consensus-building are foundational to countering the Taliban and effective policymaking. International partners should elevate and provide platforms for diverse intra-Afghan dialogue, and all policy discussions on Afghanistan should include Afghans with a wide range of perspectives and ethnic backgrounds, particularly women. Afghan counterparts and international partners can work together to address ongoing humanitarian, economic, and political crises, ensuring that policies do not benefit the Taliban.”
David Brooks – The Atlantic
“Expecting people to build a satisfying moral and spiritual life on their own by looking within themselves is asking too much. A culture that leaves people morally naked and alone leaves them without the skills to be decent to one another. Social trust falls partly because more people are untrustworthy. That creates crowds of what psychologists call “vulnerable narcissists.” We all know grandiose narcissists—people who revere themselves as the centre of the universe. Vulnerable narcissists are the more common figures in our day—people who are also addicted to thinking about themselves, but who often feel anxious, insecure, avoidant. Intensely sensitive to rejection, they scan for hints of disrespect. Their self-esteem is wildly in flux. Their uncertainty about their inner worth triggers cycles of distrust, shame, and hostility.
Sadness, loneliness, and self-harm turn into bitterness. Social pain is ultimately a response to a sense of rejection—of being invisible, unheard, disrespected, victimised. When people feel that their identity is unrecognised, the experience registers as an injustice—because it is. People who have been treated unjustly often lash out and seek ways to humiliate those who they believe have humiliated them.
Lonely eras are not just sad eras; they are violent ones. In 19th-century America, when a lot of lonely young men were crossing the western frontier, one of the things they tended to do was shoot one another. As the saying goes, pain that is not transformed gets transmitted. People grow more callous, defensive, distrustful, and hostile. The pandemic made it worse, but antisocial behaviour is still high even though the lockdowns are over. And now we are caught in a cycle, ill treatment leading to humiliation and humiliation leading to more meanness. Social life becomes more barbaric, online and off.”
The Return of Russian Ethnonationalism
Jade McGlynn & Kirill Shamiev – Foreign Affairs
“Putin is often portrayed as a nationalist, and he has indeed emphasised what he sees as Russia’s cultural exceptionalism, innate greatness, and superior values. But he is better understood as a statist, a leader who subordinates the needs of the people to those of the state. In his view, the needs of the state are primarily imperial. Putin has invoked this vision of Russia to justify wars of aggression abroad and quell dissent at home. He has tried to balance the demands of the ethnic Russian majority with the multiethnic reality of the Russian Federation and his own imperial ambitions. Often, he has ignored the preferences of that majority. For example, he has kept the borders open to Central Asian immigrants to fill gaps in the labor market despite widespread xenophobia, and he has forgiven the debts of African and Asian countries to promote Russian political influence abroad despite growing poverty at home.
Russianness was no longer a way of identifying ethnic Russians; now, it was something open to anyone who identified with a Kremlin-approved worldview, regardless of ethnicity. Instead of signifying the heritage, views, and traditions of ethnic Russians, to be Russian now meant to support and identify with the state; a Russian who opposed the state would cease to be Russian. No wonder that after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament and a former Putin aide, called for those who criticised the war to be stripped of their citizenship.
Most scenarios of a post-Putin Russia involve a great deal of political instability, and in a time of chaos, an ethnocentric nationalism could provide succour for many Russians. Particularly if the war in Ukraine ends in any form of defeat for Russia, then any leader following Putin would have to derive popular legitimacy from something other than imperialism. With the state discredited, he would have to distinguish Russianness from the state—in other words, he would need to recover some sort of popular nationalism. If this remained an inclusive version of nationalism, it could provide a pathway to a more coherent sense of Russian nationhood, one that does not depend on imperialist expansion to hold it together. But in a society traumatised by a war it inflicted on Ukraine, ethnonationalism would have a leg up, since it appeals to the base human desire to feel superior to others and belong to an exclusive group.”
Anarchy Unbound: The New Scramble for Africa
Robert D Kaplan – The New Statesman
“While Africa is now 18 per cent of the world population, it will rise to 26 per cent by 2050, and is projected to be almost 40 per cent by 2100. At the turn of the 21st century, Europe and Africa had roughly the same population. At the end of this century, there could be seven Africans for every European. While the fate of Europe seems today to lie in the east, in Ukraine, as the century progresses it will increasingly lie in the south, as steady migration from south of the Sahara takes hold. Niger isn’t critical only because it is a battleground between Russian mercenaries, a cluster of Islamic extremists, and American forces. It is critical because of itself, because its problems constitute a metaphor for some of our most pressing issues. As technology shrinks geography and the world becomes ever more anxious and claustrophobic, so Africa will loom larger in our consciousness as we increasingly comprehend how we are all part of the same human family.
These Sahelian states are countries that are barely countries. And the fault for that rests not only with the Africans themselves, but with the West and its dynamic interaction with the region going back to the beginning of European imperialism. The Sahel may fade from the news, but it will continue to be central to our ever-smaller world.”
El Niño Is Coming—and It’s Going to Be Bad
Cullen Hendrix – Foreign Policy
“When studying climate impacts on conflict, researchers almost never find a smoking gun. To date, no rebel leader has cited El Niño as their rallying cause. Rather, what researchers find is that climatic factors “load the dice,” making conflict marginally likelier to occur. Again, the impact is hard to detect in any given conflict but emerges from analysing hundreds if not thousands of conflict events over time.
El Niño’s adverse consequences for fisheries also increase the risk of militarised conflict on the seas. Of particular concern are its effects in the East and South China Seas, where the impact on fish populations is strong, fishing pressure is high, and the regions’ major fishing nations—China, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan among them—have tense security relationships in the best of times. While it’s extremely unlikely a Taiwan invasion would begin over a fisheries dispute, these types of militarised conflicts are one of the few scenarios in international affairs where the coast guards and navies of rival countries may come into conflict over the actions of third parties—such as fishing vessels crossing disputed maritime boundaries—that they do not command or control.”