Herewith a somewhat mischievous piece--though I must say that it do mean it.

An Immodest Proposal

           

   I have been reading how various institutions and associations are working to formulate rules about  what speech is and is not acceptable in their establishments—among them social media sites, broadcasters, colleges and universities, political parties and other kinds of clubs and of course many concerns where people talk about people in print.  This is a big topic and a broad one; and while I will only look at one corner of it, I hope that some of my comments apply to other aspects of attempts to deal with what has generally come to be known as “hate speech.”      

   The goal of  these efforts is to prevent insulting, demeaning, hurting persons by slurring them as members of racial or ethnic or other groups.  It’s OK to call your classmate a jerk or a coward, but it is not OK to call him a mickey or a kike.  The first of these insults attacks someone for what the speaker believes his target has said or done. The second denigrates that person not for an action, but expresses scorn by means of the very group label that is attached to him.

   To attempt such a clean-up may be a worthy endeavor, but the problems with which it is beset suggest that the better part of wisdom is to abstain.  To begin with, it’s a huge job.  It would be ironic if the rules were concocted by a Hitler or a Stalin, both of whom assumed the role of speech policeman; instead they are the outcome  of meetings of many people with different points of view who talk long enough to come to some agreement.                                        

   There is a lengthy and colorful list of ethnic slurs, with—not surprisingly—blacks and Jews copping the largest number.  And the force of these terms have a history.  When I was in high school, dago was the bad word for Italians; today, I believe, it is wop.  I doubt that today anyone is called Aunt Jemima—a black woman kissing up to whites—though that was once a serious insult.  A sheeny—an untrustworthy Jew—is an insult in Britain, but hymie is as close as you get to that in the US.

   Sambo, Tar Baby, and Picaninny are essentially extinct, although coon probably still has real bite.  When Huckleberry Finn was published 125 years ago or so, it was widely condemned for being coarse:  Huck "not only itched but scratched." At the same time, the profuse use of the term Nigger was hardly remarked upon.  Today that term is so torrid that it is most safely grasped with the glove called The N-Word.

   The would-be guardians, let us suppose, come to agree by somehow dealing with the rich historicity of this genre, knowing full well, of course, that history marches on and revisions will ever be needed.  But even more serious are the issues stemming from attempts to enforce the rules that have come out of those high-level pow-wows. 

   Given my ignorance, I stay away from technical issues, but will point to but two big flies in the ointment of such cosmic parental control.  First, any effort will be mighty expensive.  Speech crops up everywhere, in millions of publications and many multiples of that in sites on the internet.  The most clever of systems will require armies of personnel to implement it.  Moreover, however well done, substantial leaks in two directions are inevitable.  There will be plenty of cases the system will not catch and there will be many innocents caught in those nets that should have gone free.  It thus becomes reasonable to ask, Are such huge efforts worth it?  Do these several practical problems indicate that such a project is flawed more deeply? 

   Whatever happened to the old nursery rhyme, “Sticks and stones will break my bones/But words will never harm me”?  Clearly there are people with mental bones that can be hurt by words.  What fraction of any given population “suffers” from such sensitivities?  And for those who are hurt, how painful are the wounds?  These empirical questions remain essentially unanswered, because the spokespeople for parental control have successfully seized the high ground and have effectively silenced us skeptics.

   I hesitatingly propose that we pull back from this questionable enterprise, in the expectation that in time, the original meaning of that nursery rhyme would again come to the fore—no doubt accompanied by occasional clashes and even fistfights.  The suggestion is to move toward the kind of unhampered discourse that characterized much of past American political and ideological polemics and is still to be encountered in London’s Houses of Parliament. It is reported (The New Republic, May 13, 2013, p. 27) that Twitter “has explicitly concluded that it wants to be a platform for democracy rather than civility.”  Bravo, I say.  Bully for Twitter.