Sunday 30 September 2012

The use of the word “darkie”, feedback loops, Steve Coogan, and the collective unsconscious

A BNP supporter in Stoke got a three-month suspended prison last week for racially aggravated harassment because he used the word “darkie” on his blog for purposes other than to quote the original lyrics of "Ole Man River". His sentence shocked me – and I immediately did a search of my own blog to check I hadn’t used any terms which might get me hauled up before the beak. As I suspected, I’d only used racially abusive epithets in order to discuss racially abusive epithets rather than as a descriptive term.  Phew!

Liberals (the BNP bloke was grassed up by a Labour MP – just imagine how fabulously smug she must be feeling right now) are obsessed with language – and not in a good way. Liberals can’t actually run anything practical, so, unable to point to the success of their deranged policies in reality, one of the ways in which they get us to look at the world through their eyes is by circumscribing the language we’re allowed to use to describe it.

I wonder if they’re right? Years ago, I was shocked when a right-wing academic suggested that inarticulate people couldn’t feel grief as keenly as articulate people because they couldn’t express their emotions in words – i.e. an unlettered working-class person couldn’t feel as deeply as a Cambridge don over, say, the loss of a child. I rejected his theory at the time – and still do: after all, it’s often impossible to capture our response to art or nature or the numinous in words – and yet inexpressible feelings are often the ones that haunt us for years, perhaps because we can’t express them.

You can outlaw language which some people – and no doubt some very nasty, inadequate people – use to express their contempt, scepticism, fear and hatred for certain other groups in society (blacks, Muslims, gays, Catholics, bankers, Jews etc.), but I’m not convinced that makes those attitudes magically disappear. I’m not saying you shouldn’t try to educate people out of certain prejudices – as long, of course, as those perceptions are demonstrably ungrounded in reality: pretending everything’s hunky-dory and that the prejudice-holder is somehow evil or deluded when they evidently aren’t strikes me as far more wicked than merely being prejudiced.

But if you outlaw the means of expressing prejudice, the “unacceptable” attitude or thought doesn’t go nowhere. It will simply take root in the unconscious and fester and grow, over time, into what Jung called a complex – a sort of separately-existing personality which, when the time is right, will burst into consciousness, swamping the existing personality, and potentially resulting in some seriously destructive behaviour. (Think Road Rage.) When a complex forms in the national subconscious – watch out!

The other problem with banning certain words is that the way people choose to express themselves  (rather whan what they’re actually expressing) acts – to use some horrible jargon – as a feedback loop. When someone uses racial or homophobic language in a vehement way, it provides us with a lot of useful information about them: it might tell you whether you want them over for dinner, or whether you should offer them a job, or whether to vote for them. When socialists try to operate an economy without the feedback loop normally provided by free markets, the result is inevitably catastrophic: deliberately jamming the signals that might tell you whether another person is a hate-filled psychopath or simply someone with whose views you violently disagree doesn’t strike me as particularly helpful. For instance, if “pleb” was a proscribed word – it’s no doubt highly offensive to many people, including some plebs – we might not have got the full measure of Andrew Mitchell’s delightfully winning personality.)

Finally, the comedian Steve Coogan was on Question Time the other night spouting hateful leftist drivel about how everyone who goes to a private school ends up voting Tory and calling people plebs. People can’t help having had a private education any more than blacks can’t decide not to be black – so why isn’t Coogan being prosecuted for thoroughly offensive, prejudiced remarks broadcast to several million people, given that the BNP bloke’s racist epithet will only have been read by a handful of people, most of whom will have agreed with him?

Mind you, if Coogan wasn’t able to say these things, we wouldn’t have quite such definitive proof that the man is evidently an arsehole. (Or is that prosecutable as well? One gets so confused).

2 comments:

  1. Mind you, if Coogan wasn’t able to say these things, we wouldn’t have quite such definitive proof that the man is evidently an arsehole. (Or is that prosecutable as well? One gets so confused).

    The considered opinion of Mic Wright, Hall of Fame Grade 2 and rising fast to 1, is:

    Steve Coogan has made his living defining goodies and baddies. But that lack of nuance, that dismissal of grey areas, is a very bad quality to have when discussing education. He’s convinced that people educated at private schools see him as a pleb. But that's the wrong word. He's a prat.

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  2. This is a really good post. Much food for thought -especially Jung references ["When a complex forms in the national subconscious – watch out!" Indeed.]

    Concerning Coogan, he was very funny as Partridge but he turned out to be a one-trick pony [his film career has been disastrous]. I think he has realized his glory days are over and he has become a whingeing sour-puss as he contemplates a career on one of 5000 comedy panel shows on TV and radio.

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