262. The Use of the Word "Uneducated"

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Democracy's faith in the common man gives well-informed, carefully analyzing citizens of democracies a problem when they want to refer to poorly informed, carelessly analyzing citizens.  Ignorance and carelessness on the part of voters can be dangerous, and you want to use words that will discredit it, but you don't want to use words that discredit the common man enough to make you a danger to democracy.  The contempt in Bill Maher's "dipshits" could have made him a danger.  Slurs like his make smart "men on horseback" (macho dictators) an attractive alternative.

Thomas Jefferson freely referred to the masses of the cities of Europe as "canaille," a pack of dogs, which, if given power, would destroy "everything public and private."  Friedrich Nietzsche fought to defend himself "hand and foot" against people who confused him with the "anti-Semitic canaille" of those cities.  But no American can use "canaille" to refer to the masses in American cities.

Once Americans could get away with a term like "Know-Nothings" but not now.  We say "low-information voter," and are happy at not being thought elitists, since the opposite is only "high-information voter."

Plato's "the multitude" refers exactly to the group we are worried about, those who form opinions uncritically, but its discrediting power is lost if it's taken as mere quantification, as those who don't know Plato are likely to do.  The same with his "the many," which could be more strongly elitist, suggesting "we few," we smart ones.  "Masses" won't do since we don't have "classes."  Masses are those lumpen things that swelled up in Europe and got talked about by Karl Marx, that word-poisoner.

Set against those options, "uneducated" looks attractive, but we've got to be careful with it.  We don't want to imply a permanent condition or a kind of people.  Recognize that nobody is educated all of the time and everybody is educated some of the time.  Play safe, maybe, by using it only in combination with "in."  Poets are "uneducated in" worldly consequences. 

The Ukraine crisis gives us an excellent opportunity to see how this usage would go.  Say I sound off about the crucial issue, one way or the other ("NATO is justified in expanding to take in Ukraine." "No, no, it isn't.")  But I don't know much about the back story.  A friend directs me to two articles in the September/October issue of the periodical Foreign Affairs.

The first, by John J. Mearsheimer, is titled "Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West's Fault: The Liberal Delusions that Provoked Putin."  It gives me the history of and reasons for Russian sensitivity to unfriendly powers on its borders, asks me to "imagine the outrage if China built an impressive military alliance and tried to include Canada and Mexico," and shows me how firmly Russian leaders expected Western diplomats to respect their concerns.

The second article, by Mary Elise Sarotte, is titled "A Broken Promise?  What the West Really Told Moscow About NATO Expansion."  It shows me that Russian expectations, at least with respect to a promise supposedly made to get Russia to approve the unification of Germany, had no reason to be so firm.  There was no promise.

After I read these articles I say that I have been "educated in the Ukraine crisis."  And I am willing to say that before reading them I was "uneducated in the Ukraine crisis."  But that makes me say that people who haven't read those articles are "uneducated."   That's too categorical, too much of a knock.  Better say that the readers are "better educated" than the non-readers.

Yes, I think we've got it, an accurate expression that preserves respect or the common man and keeps democracy safe.

Uh huh, and when SS men take over "Aryan" to justify smashing Semites' shop windows I'm going to refer to them as "less well educated" than men who have learned what "Aryan" really means?  I'm making "canaille," even "dipshits," look good.  Discrediting force must count for something in a word.

Such a problem.  The safer I make a word the more I weaken it.  But not everywhere.  How will it go in the circle of Economist, New York Review, and New Yorker readers?  Which would we rather the editors overhear (our constant hope), "Well, the Foreign Affairs editors are certainly better educated than the Economist editors," or "Well, the Economist editors have just joined the Know Nothings...or the canaille," or even, at the end, "gone dipshit"?  Remember, we're talking about that issue with spider Putin on the cover (10 July - 1 August, 2014 — see Post 253). 

I'm not sure of the discrediting force here but I feel sure the former expression, the one that makes them less well educated, will have some force on the editors, and maybe it will have enough to do some good.

Would it have enough to make up for what it fails to do in the streets, the daily media, where we so need good police work?  Have we turned our guys' billy sticks into ladies' fans?  With the SS on their rampage what would we be longing for?  "These guys are dipshits!"  Of course.  And we'd be defending, not jeopardizing, democracy.

It's easy, especially for academics, to undervalue verbal violence.  In skillful hands, in satire, in ridicule, in pointed abuse, it can substitute for physical violence, and make government crackdowns unnecessary.  "Yahoos!" says Jonathan Swift of the rabble in Houyhnhnm land.  "Yahoos!" says Whitney Balliett of the fraternity boys disrupting the jazz festival in Newport.  The sting brings order to the next jazz festival, without more constricting government orders.

41. "Politically correct"

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"Politically correct" is a putdown but how, exactly, does it put down?  I think it's mainly by making a serious human issue a matter of etiquette.  "Correct" is what you are when you avoid criticism by those who have read Emily Post.  Your offenses, as when you use the word "fag," are offenses only against the finicky.  "Considerate" would be a lift-up alternative.  With the word "fag" you aren't considering the feelings of a fellow human being.

Are putdowns ever justified?  Of course.  Every movement has its finicky fringe, discrediting the sensible center, and the more effectively it is mocked the better progress the movement makes.  Liberals can thank James Finn Garner for his Politically Correct Bedtime Stories.  American Protestantism can thank God it had Oliver Wendell Holmes making fun of the moral bully, "yon whey-faced brother,"

Who, though he carries but a doubtful trace
Of angel visits on his hungry face,
From lack of marrow or the coins to pay,
Has dodged some vices in a shabby way,
The right to stick us with his cutthroat terms,
And bait his homilies with his brother worms.

Would that the finicky fringe of every religion could be ripped in this way.

Is down-putting dangerous?  Clearly.  Do it clumsily and you put yourself down.   When a contributor to the Urban Dictionary says that "weak people that don't have the balls to say what they feel and mean are politically correct pussies" he puts himself on the side of he-men standing up to women (like Aunt Polly, and schoolmarms, and everybody's mother) who tyrannically enforce good manners, but in doing that he reveals the sexist basis of his objection, lowering himself and maybe hurting his cause.  He wouldn't have gotten into that if his word "correct" hadn't opened the door.

In some cases the dangers are multiple, and deeper.  Bill Maher said on his show (provocatively titled Politically Incorrect) that the 9/11 hijackers "were not cowards."  The advertisers who dropped his show apparently thought it unforgivably incorrect not to call the hijackers "cowards."  President Bush's press secretary Ari Fleischer thought Maher incautious, noting that he had him in mind when he said, "People have to watch what they say."  

You can see red lights flashing all around this one.  I think, looking at Maher's fault, that Fleischer meant, "Choose the words that tell us you stand with your nation (or this administration) against terrorists."  He and the advertisers are judging words by what they signal.  Maher has signaled an incorrect (disloyal) stance.  Their red light flashes, "Danger to the nation!"

People with loyalty to the language judge words by how well they refer to what they see in life.  We've recently (Post #40) observed them, in this blog, judging that "self-appointed" refers to Laurent Gbagbo very well and to organic-food gurus not so well.

Here those language people (you can really scramble the issue by calling them "finicky") will see that "coward" cannot refer to men deliberately giving their lives for a cause.  They know that there's a whole raft of words that can well refer to them ("monsters," "fanatics," "barbarians," and so on) but "coward" is not one of them. Their red light flashes "Danger to the language!"

Dangers to the nation can be short-term or long-term, major or minor.  In World War II the long-term danger to the language was so outweighed by the major danger of Adolf Hitler that you could say anything about him (or show anything, as the British did with movies of him at the French surrender, doing a jig he never did) as long as it promoted solidarity against him.  That, though, was a short-term, and possibly unique, thing.  On the whole I think the long-term drift from reality begun when signals become more important than reference is the greater danger.