Jason Stanley writes in a chapter titled 'Language as a mechanism of control'-
Since the cognitivist, truth-conditional framework embodies an account of what happens when communication functions well, it allows us precise grasp of what happens when communications fails to function well.Does an account of what happens when a marriage, or a business enterprise, or a class of aspiring philosophers, functions well allow us a precise grasp of what happens when the thing fails to function well? No. Why? There are strategic aspects to that functioning which feature invisible opportunity costs and bargaining problems. In other words, a marriage may fail because one partner now has a different mating opportunity. Nothing intrinsic to the marriage has changed. Functioning has been affected by an exogenous opportunity.
My worry with noncognitivist accounts, or accounts that are unsystematic at their core, is that, while they are sometimes well suited to explain failures of communication, they are ill suited to explain the contrast between well-functioning communication and poorly functioning communication.
Why should this be? Surely well functioning communication is that which has the desired outcome? The contrast between getting what you paid for and having pissed your money against a wall is as clear as the difference between day and night.
If a group is deliberating about a policy or course of action that will affect everyone in the group, fairness requires regarding everyone’s viewpoint as worthy of respect.
This is not the case. Everyone in the group will be affected if I agree to divide my wealth between them. But it is not fair to me that I should listen to other people's views on the matter. I and I alone have a viewpoint worthy of respect unless someone else has a strong moral or legal claim against me- e.g. is the child I callously abandoned so as to win wealth and fame as a Beyonce impersonator.
But this is just to say that it is natural to expect reasonableness to be the norm governing any such deliberation, including those that are intended to issue in democratically legitimate policies.
This does not follow. We may wish the norm to be that of ecstatic inspiration. Alternatively we may wish deliberation to be impassioned or poetic. It is equally possible that we want only nonsense to be talked. Let the fellow who says whatever is most absurd carry off the palm.
A democratically legitimate policy is not the most rational or reasonable policy. It may reflect what is believed to be the voice of God. It may be wholly passional or 'ontologically dysphoric'- i.e. have reference to values not of this world.
On the other hand, a bureaucratically legitimate policy, or one formulated by an agent on behalf of a principal, under a legal contract, may have this quality as may policies suggested by professionals who have a duty to observe certain rules of conduct.
I will henceforth assume that the principle ideal of public reason is reasonableness, rather than theoretical rationality.
Why must public reason have a 'principle ideal'? Surely, if we could get at the ideal, we wouldn't need to bother with the thing itself? Indeed, one justification for Totalitarian rule is that the Dictator can decide what ideally public reason should demand and then supply that demand without going through the fuss and bother of permitting any public reasoning whatsoever.
To say that the principle ideal of public reason is reasonableness is not to deny that there are other ideals of public reason. Politicians must also be, for example, rationally consistent, objective, and logical.
This is not the case. A superior politician would have a 'kairotic' sixth sense and thus be able to change when the winds become propitious for change. Napoleon stipulated for lucky generals, not calculating machines.
One moral of the previous chapter is that demagoguery in a liberal democracy takes the form of a contribution to public debate that is presented as embodying reasonableness yet in fact contributes a content that clearly erodes reasonableness.
That moral was false. Demagoguery in a liberal democracy may have several forms. Firstly, it may be confined to an in-group and thus not represent a 'contribution to public debate'. In this case 'protected belief' may be a defense in law for what might otherwise be hate speech. Secondly, demagoguery may have the purpose of defeating a mindless application of reason such as might give rise to a nuisance or else appear repugnant to the human spirit which- after all- is not that of a calculating machine or Gradgrind. Demagoguery may be comic in tone. It may invoke pathos. It may indulge in ad hominem tactics. So long as it is entertaining, we might feel it is an essential concomitant to democratic discourse.
This form of propaganda is not merely a deceitful attempt to bypass theoretical rationality, on this view.
But this is a crazy view! We don't see demagogues disguising themselves as Super-Computers and saying 'Theoretical rationality says COVID is fake news' in the voice of a Dalek.
It functions via an initial selection of a target within the population.
Then it is not propaganda. It is direct marketing. Propaganda, like certain types of Advertising, is most effective when it is ubiquitous. It wins if you take its claims as 'common knowledge'- i.e. what other people believe other people believe is true- even if you don't believe a word of it. This is like the Keynesian Beauty contest. Only those expectations which you expect others to have create reality. Muth rational expectations arise when you, quite rationally, expect others to be equally rational.
But Stanley's views are not Muth rational. He thinks Language is a mechanism which can have some effect wholly independent of what it communicates. The pay-off for him is that he get to call you a Racist if you tend to say 'we' rather than 'I'. You can get your own back by saying you are Scottish and were referring to his wee little dick.
A proposal is reasonable if it appears so from the perspective of each citizen of the state.
No. It is reasonable if all reasonable people find it so. The opinion of a lunatic does not count.
A contribution is inconsistent with reasonableness if it undermines the capacity or the willingness to produce or be swayed by reasonable proposals.
All contributions not to my liking are inconsistent with reasonableness because they make me lose my temper and thus undermine my capacity or willingness to be swayed by reasonable proposals. That is why, if you want me to buy Life Insurance from you, your opening contribution should not be 'Listen you fat bastard, you are bound to die soon so why not do your relatives a favor and get insured?'
Reasonableness presupposes, at least in humans, the capacity for empathy for others.
This is not the case. By careful study, a sociopath- or, it may be, a self-improving A.I of some description- may give perfectly reasonable advise if only for a self-interested reason.
If I am right, we should expect paradigm cases of propaganda to have as part of their communicative content that a group in society is not worthy of our respect.
You are wrong. Catholic doctrine is the paradigm case of propaganda. It does not teach that any group in society is unworthy of respect. Indeed, great Prelates would bathe the feet of lepers. On the other hand, some soi disant Catholics were into burning heretics big time. Different strokes- right?
So one characteristic way to convey that a target is not worthy of respect is to cause one’s audience to lose empathy for them.
This can be done without demagoguery while, equally, demagogues may praise all manners of beings while venting their spleen entirely on abstractions- e.g. compound interest or fractional reserve banking or the harmful practice of tying a fellow's top knot to the ceiling fan when he has nodded off in the library. My grandfather was a Gandhian/Socialist demagogue of this sort. The police arrested him as a Marxist. They admitted that the cunning Brahmin hadn't actually said anything against the Raj but he had a Marxist book in his hostel room featuring one Comrade Psmith. The British Police Superintendent dismissed the case when he saw the book was by P.G Woodhouse. Bastard! If only my Grandfather had spent a few years in jail he might have become a Minister in the Central Government.
Demagoguery can take both linguistic and nonlinguistic form.
Only in the sense that it can be absent when it is present and can never have existence at the very moment it comes to be. The people may be led by a ghost or a vision which nobody actually saw. Franco appointed the Virgin Mary Captain General of his army. His troops spent a lot of time raping women. This does not mean the Theotokos was a demagogue or had a taste for that sort of thing. Anybody can talk nonsense about anybody else or, indeed, about nothing at all.
Many of the paradigm examples of demagoguery, including demagogic propaganda, are posters, pictures, and architecture, rather than utterances of sentences.
This is true only to the same extent that anything and nothing can be a paradigm example of any shite you just pulled out of your arse.
Any characterization of demagoguery, or propaganda more generally, that is focused specifically on language is clearly too narrow.
Whereas a more commodious characterization which gives equal attention to farts emitted by neighbor's cat may be considered too broad.
My characterization of propaganda is accordingly perfectly general.
My neighbor's cat thanks you. Come the Revolution, you shall sit at the right hand of Chairman Miaow and dine only upon fish-heads.
It is not restricted to propaganda that takes linguistic form. Nonlinguistic images or movies clearly do exploit existing false ideological beliefs demagogically in just the way I have described. For example, pictorial representations of Roma in Hungarian articles about crime, or Blacks in American articles on this topic, will be demagogic if they are employed to justify brutal and unequal laws.
I think Jason means the brutal and unequal application of the law. If the laws themselves were brutal and unequal, there would be little point publishing such an article.
But I am unable to give an account of the mechanisms by which this occurs.
Why? Surely, the pictures are illustrative. They clarify which group of people is being stigmatized.
There is a science of language and communication in place that enables us to gain some precision about the mechanisms underlying linguistic propaganda.
I doubt this is currently the case. I imagine we may soon have quite good 'generators' for this but they would be Bayesian. The precision of an i-language emulator remains a distant grail.
I exploit that account to explain how some linguistic propaganda works. I suspect the same level of detail has not yet been achieved in our understanding of imagistic representation. Therefore, I will focus on the linguistic case. I expect that future research will be able to help us address how the perhaps more important imagistic case works. I will use formal semantics and pragmatics to describe a specific mechanism by which demagoguery in linguistic form plays a role in bringing into the context false ideological beliefs that are apparently not part of the discussion. As we shall see, there is a great deal of evidence that there is such a linguistic mechanism. And perhaps there are analogous mechanisms in the case of images; indeed, the inspiration point in my analysis, Rae Langton and Caroline West’s theory of pornography from 1999, employs similar formal semantic and pragmatic mechanisms to explain the phenomena of subordination with images. But it is not clear to me that all these exact mechanisms can function with images and movies, because it is not clear to me that one can make the distinction between at-issue and not-at-issue content that is at the center of the mechanism I describe.
Jason first spoke of reasonableness in public discourse. Now he is speaking of pornography. It may be that Jason thinks they have a similar aim. His own increasingly hysterical protests against Fascism may have to do with the fact that his students keep jizzing on him. Sad.
My focus is on explaining one way in which demagoguery exploits already existing nonpolitical mechanisms to be effective. This mechanism is well understood in the case of language, so we can describe it with precision. A number of philosophers in the feminist tradition, including Catherine MacKinnon and Jennifer Hornsby, have argued that the function of certain kinds of speech (in their chosen example, pornography) is to silence a targeted group.
Yet women who walk in on you having a wank tend to be very noisy.
The philosopher whose work has most inspired and influenced my own is Rae Langton. Langton argues, following MacKinnon and Hornsby, that pornographic material subordinates women and silences them.
What about Gay porn?
In depicting subordination, Langton argues, pornographers subordinate women. Langton argues that the function of certain kinds of racist speech is “to rank blacks as inferior.”
till they acquire a taste for my jizz.
Langton also argues that pornography silences women, by undermining the felicity conditions of their speech; it represents “no” as yes.
My memory is that back in the early Eighties, Time Share salesman took 'no' as 'yes'. But women in porn were very loud. Things may have changed since then.
My aim in this chapter is to explain some of these effects with the tools of contemporary formal semantics, by applying them to the case of propaganda. Here is one model of how this could work; as is clear from her response to Judith Butler, it is a model from which Langton distances herself. An imperative is a command to act a certain way. The imperative statement “eat your beets!” directed at a three year old is a command to the three year old to do something.
It may be. But then again it may not. Long experience may have taught you that this is the little terror's cue to throw his plate at you.
Pornographic speech could function as a mechanism of subordination by delivering imperative-like orders of some kind.
No. Either the punter jizzes or he returns the video and demands a refund. You then realize that you gave him L'Année dernière à Marienbad instead of 'Annie's derriere in Marienbad'. Also you should have stuck with Chartered Accountancy rather than trying to make it big as a day trader.
The thought here is not that imperatives bring about their truth. Commands must be associated with practical authority in order to have this function. But so too, as I will argue, does subordinating speech.
Why? If I find the person I'm talking to is wiser and more moral than I am, I tend to subordinate myself so as to gain a benefit. Similarly, if we all have to work together to escape from a burning building, we would naturally subordinate ourselves to a person of humbler attainments but who has valuable experience in this regard.
The relation between imperatives and subordinating speech will be a theme of this chapter, as I will draw on both semantic and pragmatic features of imperatives in my analysis of subordinating speech. I will try to square this use of the semantics of imperatives with Langton’s compelling “verdictive” account of subordinating speech. Our discussion to this point suggests that there should be expressions apt for use in a debate that function to exclude the perspective of certain groups in the population.
This is certainly true of jargon words like 'verdictive' which function to keep the layman out of a bogus field of scholarship.
Since demagoguery, like undermining propaganda generally, is masked as embodying the ideals with which it ultimately clashes, we should expect these expressions to operate indirectly.
What Jason is writing is 'masked as embodying the ideals' of 'reasonableness'. But it is crazy shit. Thus it ultimately clashes with with what it purports to be. Sadly, there is nothing indirect about Jason's expressions. They are simply false.
That is, there should be systematic ways of genuinely or apparently contributing to debate, which simultaneously frame the debate in such a way as to exclude the perspective of a targeted group.
e.g. those who think a demagogue can serve any type of cause whatsoever or that porn is about masturbation or that this aint woke shite.
The function of these expressions is to mask the demagogic nature of the contribution, by creating flawed ideological beliefs to the effect that the perspectives of a designated group are not worthy of reasonable consideration.
This may be the function of Jason's rigmarole, but it fails, just as a demagogue who fails to endear himself with his audience would fail. The fact is nobody cares who you think to be unworthy of reasonable consideration unless you are yourself well regarded. But this involves a trade-off. You will be shunned if you disrespect someone others place above you. Of course, you may find an artful way of getting your point across while appearing very respectful to the people's idol.
We should expect there to be linguistic means by use of which one can make an apparently reasonable claim, while simultaneously, merely by using the relevant vocabulary, wearing down the ideal of reasonableness.
This can be done by asserting authority, special expertise, purer motivation, or else by making it clear that those who might object to the argument are sexual deviants who eat dog turds.
Because these linguistic means should be available for use to make any point whatsoever that may come up in debate about policy, we should expect that they function to exclude whether one takes the affirmative or the negative position on the debate. Indeed, if there were no linguistic means of excluding the perspective of certain groups from debate, while simultaneously representing oneself as contributing to the debate, that would raise the suspicion that reasonableness is not in fact the ideal of public reason.
Nonsense! Certain groups may be excluded from the debate by reason of the fact that they simply aren't there. Its like parties given by students of engineering back in the Eighties. Women simply didn't attend. But neither did Gay people. Sad.
If reasonableness is the norm of public reason, we should expect there to be linguistic mechanisms, that is, expressions, with the following three properties:
1. Use of the relevant expression has the effect on the conversation of representing a certain group in the community as having a perspective not worthy of inclusion, that is, they are not worthy of respect.
But is there any such expression? An easy way to win over an audience is to take up an opprobrious epithet that your rival has used and curry favor by claiming it applies to you. Your display of humility has a disarming effect. People may have felt a little intimidated by the other guy. Obviously, you shouldn't take things too far. Don't tell them about that time you soiled yourself in Swahili class.'
2. The expression has a content that can serve simply to contribute legitimately to resolving the debate at issue in a reasonable way, which is separate from its function as a mechanism of exclusion.
The debate may be about what is or aint 'cool'. You won brownie points by admitting to be a 'square' but your suggestion that perhaps the girls from the Nurses hostel might be happy enough to dance with engineering students went down quite well. Obviously, you then have to give a suggestion as to a 'cool' way of doing the inviting. The correct answer is 'Toga party'. In the early Eighties, that was cool. Obviously, you will have to exclude the guy whose suggestion was that everybody jizz upon the hide of a goat freshly sacrificed to His Satanic Majesty Beelzebub.
3. Mere use of the expression is enough to have the effect of eroding reasonableness. So the effect on reasonableness occurs just by virtue of using the expression, in whatever linguistic context.
Repeat any word often enough and it becomes meaningless. However, the same thing happens when Jason uses the word 'reasonableness' coz he be batshit kray kray.
Here is why my characterization of propaganda entails the existence of expressions with these properties. The expressions would have to have the first property, because that would be the property of eroding reasonableness.
So it could be anything but turn out to be nothing.
The expressions would have to have the second property, because they would have to be able to be used in discourse that appears to meet the ideal of public reason.
So the expression must be 'essentially contested' or be capable of being shown to be so.
The expressions would have to have the third property, because they would have to be apt for use, whatever one’s stance on the issue at hand.
Again, this could apply to anything though on closer examination nothing might fit the bill.
Jason has given criteria which can be applied to any type of language. He has omitted the characteristic features of demagogic propaganda viz. an intention to lead people to a dogma by means which appeal to emotive or irrational aspects of the psyche.
Let us now look at a case where Jason thinks 'language as a mechanism of control' is doing something invidious.
On the picture I am sketching, certain words are imbued, by a mechanism of repeated association, with problematic images or stereotypes.
Jason had given examples of phrases like 'illegal immigrant' which had come to be seen as repugnant and thus been replaced by 'undocumented migrant'. The problem here is that some may prefer a term like 'illegal worker' because it points to a type of natural injustice such that a worker contributing to the commonweal is stigmatized like a criminal. Would it not be better to change the law such that all workers are legal workers, unless they are actually harming the community by stealing, rather than pass off the problem as merely a shortage of documents. The word 'illegal' carries imperative force. I may move heaven and earth to regularize my status on hearing myself described as an 'illegal' tenant or migrant or whatever. By contrast 'undocumented' sounds harmless. Yet people who built up lives and raised families have been abruptly deported just because they didn't fill out this form or apply for that certificate at the appropriate time.
My point is that a political process may, according to its own lights, imbue words with some significance of a strategic type but that does not mean any linguistic mechanism is at work. On the other hand if you say 'undocumented' in a weird whiney voice the effect might be propagandistic. But that has to do with phonetics- which is linguistic- and you may not have intended any hostile intention but were just being silly.
One can use these words to express ordinary contents, and explicitly deny complicity with the associated problematic image or stereotype.
And one can accuse the other guy of being Hitler just because he denied being Hitler.
For example, in a debate during the Republican primary presidential campaign in 2012, Juan Williams
a guy who said Muslims on planes make him nervous.
asked a candidate, Newt Gingrich: You recently said, “black Americans should demand jobs, not food stamps. You also said, “poor kids lack a strong work ethic,” and proposed having them work as janitors in their schools. Can’t you see that this is viewed, at a minimum, as insulting to all Americans, but particularly to black Americans? Gingrich answered, “No. I don’t see that,” and received a loud ovation from the audience. He then proceeded to deliver a bromide on the value of hard work, and examples of people who worked extremely hard from an early age. The audience gave him an immense ovation. Williams followed up by pointing out to Gingrich that expressions such as “lacking work ethic” were associated with negative racial stereotypes. He defended his point by saying that Americans across the racial divide understood the associations here, and it was disingenuous for Gingrich to deny them. The audience loudly booed Williams’s response. The interest of the exchange is the intensity of the audience’s reactions. Clearly, this was the most emotionally charged moment of the debate. This is precisely because of the racially loaded not-at-issue content of the discourse, expressions like “work ethic” and “food stamps.” Gingrich was allowed to act responsible just for the at-issue content of his utterance, and feign ignorance of the racial overtones of the expressions.
In Jason's opinion. But that wasn't the opinion of the audience. Why? Both Gingrich and Williams were celebrities with well crafted public personae whose job was to be a little-but-not-too controversial. The audience treated their exchange as they might a staged contest between professional wrestlers. This was entertainment. But, obviously, it was also the Republicans acknowledging they had no chance with the Black Republican vote in the Presidential election. Their problem was that so many Whites, too, were utterly enamored of Obama.
What is important to note is that even the act of raising the expressions to salience by Juan Williams conveyed the negative social meanings, inspiring characteristically strong emotion in the audience.
Williams was seen as being a bit of a 'stirrer'. That was his job and he did it well. Previously he'd got in trouble for suggesting Michelle Obama might be an 'albatross'. Though not a Republican, both his sons are. This isn't a story about a black man calling some entitled white jerk on his bigotry. It is a story about two guys comfortable on Fox News who have written weighty tomes while maintaining celebrity status. Gingrich, of course, was a successful politician but Williams wasn't exactly a hobo.
This is how propaganda works. It is possible to challenge its effects, but even using the expressions to do so runs the risk of invoking these very effects.
There was no propaganda here. It should be remembered that Herman Cain (an African American) was in the lead before sexual harassment allegations surfaced (also a problem for Williams). Cain and Gingrich had made the large number of people on food stamps under Obama a campaign issue. The wider context was tax reform- like Cain's famous 9-9-9 proposal. Economists understand this. But Jason is a philosopher. He thinks that Racists make Black Peeps eat food stamps rather than fried chicken with plenty of watermelon and grape soda. I am not saying I have any evidence against this view. However I do feel Black peeps should be allowed to put a bit of ketchup on the food stamps to make them easier to swallow.
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