There was a time when journalists chose their words with discernment. They looked at life and saw its many hues. Today, the tendency is to see the world in black and white.
At one time, people discriminated between. Now they discriminate against. Discrimination no longer betokens a fine mind but a character flaw and has the connotation of the “politically correct”.
Now, everyone must mind his own or her own pronouns, or face the consequences. A new lexicon is being deployed and foisted on one and all. Each new whim of whoever decides these things is as imperious as the last. A sectarian terminology is fast gaining circulation as new verbal prescriptions are imposed with unobtrusive forcefulness.
In this way, language is being marshalled in the straight jacket of political correctness. No one seems to know where it all started. One can only guess with trepidation where it will end. There is a school of thought that considers this phenomenon as a series of little repudiations of the Western patrimony.
It does not take too close inspection to see the format: profanity, at times even obscenity, is becoming a stock-in-trade. New taboos forbid “racism”, “sexism” and other manifestations of political incorrectness.
Religion is optional, strictly personal and private. It is tolerated only if it is practiced surreptitiously in the underground, preferably in the catacombs.
New interpretation of history
The new interpretation of history is to cast the controversies of the past in anachronistic categories that distinguish between what is “progressive” and “reactionary”.
Thus, the Reformation was a battle between the forces of the Past (the Papacy) and of the Future (Lutheranism). Arcane disputations between philosophers and titanic struggles on the battlefield, are flattened into easily-grasped melodrama and recycled by journalists and fellow-travellers into stories about a broad-based tug-of-war between progressive good guys and reactionary villains.
The journalistic ethic of objectivity and neutrality is swept aside and unmistakable “moral commitment” filters into news stories and press reports on confrontations between governments and dissenters, business and trade unions, rich and poor, male and female. Journalists throw their weight with added authority when they report on confrontations between the Pope and theologians! And each story and press report provides subtle and not so subtle clues, as to which side the “sensible” reader should align himself or herself with.
Of course, the progressive forces are always propelled by the noblest of motives. They are courageous, far-seeing, conscientious, peace-loving and broadminded.
Veterans with a dark past
On the other hand, reactionaries are driven by superstition, obfuscation, hate, greed, ignorance and obstinate resistance to change. These and similar appellations are used instead of the term “right wing” or “conservative”.
Progressives, by the way, do not hate anyone although they may be moved by righteous anger and indignation.
Journalese often betrays the new bigotry without realising it. Without necessarily identifying “right-wing” characteristics and without defining its language, it associates traditionalists, constitutionalists and seasoned veterans with the dark past.
Journalists may try hard to be accurate and objective. When they fall into the trap of the new bigotry, they do not realise they are taking sides. They do not realise that there are alternative categories in life, besides the Black and the White.
Journalists carried away by the new bigotry do not consider traditionalists, constitutionalists and the like as persons with a specific philosophy to be analysed and debated, listened to and considered. The latter are simply people behind the times, wedded to a feudal, obscurantist, oppressive past, from which all enlightened people have been emancipated. The “reactionary” is not so much in error as doomed to extinction, possibly already mummified. Why hold a conversation with a dinosaur?
New buzzwords
The ultimate and overriding alternatives for the ‘progressives’ are not Heaven and Hell, good and evil, peace and disorder but the future and the past. The buzzwords of the new progressives have the aura of chronology: outdated, mediaeval, antediluvian, antiquated, archaic, Neanderthal. This is the language of the new bigotry which delivers unanswerable, ultimate condemnations at the slightest challenge. To the new bigotry, the call of reason is anathema!’
The problem in every controversy is reduced to a simple matter of typecasting. One has only to identify which side represents the past and which the future.
This craze for stereotyping, with its inbuilt predictions as to who is bound to prevail, has been given the lie many times over. Bigotry, being what it is, is impermeable to the truth and to the basics of logic.
The new bigotry is, moreover, a Jekyll and Hyde complex. Progressives stand behind the perimeter of permissiveness.
Moral coercion
They go well beyond toleration for the gay movement. They tolerate nude sun bathing but they are determined to smoke out smokers from public places.
Those who uphold old values are dismissed as old fogies and fuddy-duddies. Those who advocate the break-up of long-held, basic values are depicted as pioneers and members of an exciting young generation set to put the world to rights.
Those who find time to stand and stare, and to look the new bigotry in the face, may find, on reflection, that the new bigotry is not new at all.
It has existed from the earliest times and battered the sea walls of established order in wave after wave. It has eroded some rocks and caused no amount of storm damage. But, if it is any consolation, experience and deep-rooted values somehow prevail over the follies of immature or impatient innovators who use hypocrisy or moral coercion as their weapon.
[email protected]