I wanna address a common criticism that this show gets. Sometimes on the channel I talk about the
hidden assumptions behind ideas like "race" or "law" or "justice," or
"democracy" and when that happens I inevitably get a tiny number of commenters saying, "You're trying to
redefine the meaning of words! You're altering the language! It's just like what happened in "1984": it's *Orwellian*!"
So okay, I wanna be open to criticism, let's talk about George Orwell and language. If you've never heard of it, "1984" is a dystopian
novel by English writer George Orwell set in a future totalitarian version of Britain in the
then-future year of "1984." The novel is widely considered
to be a) piss your pants scary, and b) pretty darn good. I first read it when I was in high school...
I was once actually in a stageplay of "1984." And we all had to wear sunglasses that were rose-tinted, literal rose-tinted glasses, as symbols
of brainwashing, but they were just sunglasses that the producer had coloured in with red pen
so I could not see a thing when I was on the stage.
"1984" also features something called "Newspeak," the official government-approved language
of the future. The common misconception about the novel is that the government in it change the
definition of words in order to control people. And this I think is where some of my critics
come in. They see me talking about hidden ideas behind words like "race" and "gender" and "capitalism" and they see that as trying to change
the definition of words, which seems weird, and sinister.
But to compare that to Orwell rests on a misreading of "1984." Newspeak dictionaries in the novel don't just have new words in:
the dictionaries themselves gradually get thinner and thinner as words are literally removed from the language. That's
how it's used to control people, because when you limit the number of words you limit the
available thoughts that can be used against you. Or, as one of the characters says themselves:
"The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought. In the end we shall
make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."
The link between words and thinking, knowledge, is what makes language so crucial and the Newspeak dictionaries so sinister.
Epistemology is the study of knowledge, and the philosopher Miranda Fricker says that there's
such a thing as epistemic injustice: a wrong that you do to somebody specifically in their capacity
as a haver and teacher of knowledge. Imagine there's a pool that represents all of knowledge. To be a being that can
add knowledge to the pool or borrow it is a pretty distinctly human thing, and Fricker says when you deny someone the ability to add
or take knowledge to or from that pool on prejudicial grounds you're really doing them a wrong.
There are two kinds of epistemic injustice, depending on whether you're stopping people adding
knowledge to the pool or borrowing it. If you stop people adding knowledge to the pool Fricker calls that
"testimonial injustice." The example she uses is from another novel, "To Kill A Mockingbird,"
in which the character of Tom Robinson testifies in court that he is innocent of the crime
with which he is being charged. But the white jury do not believe him because he is
black. Because of their prejudice the jury stop Tom from adding his knowledge to the
collective pool, and in doing so they kindof objectify him.
They downgrade him from human, the kind of thing that can have knowledge, to object, the kind of thing that can't.
Testimonial injustice can have nasty
side-effects, like Tom goes to prison for a crime he didn't commit, but
Fricker also say it's just a moral wrong in itself.
Often testimonial injustice involves raising the bar of evidence that we require before we believe someone. Different
conversations require different standards of evidence: if you stop me in the street and ask me for directions
you might believe me even if I don't show you a map. But if we're in
a courtroom and we're talking about a murder I might need to provide a little bit more evidence.
In Tom Robinson's case even though he was in a courtroom and the evidence of
his innocence was plentiful the jury requires an even higher standard and they don't believe him.
Another example might be people who say that they are harassed
or assaulted, but are not believed on prejudicial reasons. If a person
says they have been sexually harassed or assaulted and we, outside of a courtroom, don't believe
them, it may be, maybe, that we are misjudging the standard of evidence that is
really required for that conversation, which might be different depending on the context.
Hang on a minute, I think my carrots have overboiled.
Do they look okay to you? Yeah, they look fine.
No, carrots are fine; I'm making haggis for Burn's Night; got a carrot and swede mash to go with it. It's gonna be really tasty. Anyway!
The other kind of epistemic injustice occurs when you stop people borrowing knowledge from
the pool, either by cutting off their access to it or by keeping certain
kinds of knowledge out of the pool in the first place. Fricker calls this "hermeneutical injustice." "The injustice
of having some significant area of one's social experience obscured from collective
understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutic resource,"
that resource is the knowledge pool we imagined. It's when you systematically stop a group of people
from gaining access to ideas and the thoughts that they need in order to understand what
happens to them and take control of it.
The example Fricker uses is sexual harassment. It might be hard for younger viewers to believe this
now, but the term "sexual harassment" wasn't always in the English language, never
mind in the law. But the awful behaviour that these words now describe was very, very real. Fricker tells a story
about a woman named Carmita Wood who was a lab assistant at Cornell University in the 70s, who was
so severely sexually harassed by nuclear physicist Boyce McDaniel that she became physically ill
from the stress and the fear and had to leave her job.
But when she later came to fill out some forms which asked her why she'd left her pervious
employer, there was no box, no option to tick that expressed the
constant humiliation McDaniel had inflicted. It was only when she went to a lawyer, Lin
Farley, who realised that she and a lot of other women had experienced similar things,
that Farley testified in front of the New York City Human Rights Commission on Women
and Work and for the first time in public coined the term, "sexual harassment."
Fricker writes, "Hermeneutical lacunas are like holes in the ozone - it's the people
who live under them that get burned." Until Farley's testimony survivors of
sexual harassment had no words with which to talk about it. A culture of victim
blaming, shaming, and misogyny meant that people just didn't talk about that kind of thing, and so the knowledge
was kept to individuals and systematically excluded from the pool.
So bringing things back around to "1984" - Newspeak is a textbook example of hermeneutical injustice.
Its goal is to literally shrink the pool of human knowledge to limit the number of thoughts that people can use to challenge
the government and liberate themselves. Its goal is to preserve power.
Exploring the hidden ideas behind words like "race," or "gender,"
or "justice" or "democracy" - in other words, doing philosophy about these things - has
literally the opposite goal. The aim is not to preserve power but
to give people the resources they need to challenge power by expanding concepts. By
adding new things to the pool and by enabling more people to add new things and borrow from it.
It's literally the opposite of what happens in "1984." Also, inb4 everybody who's gonna comment "You're changing what happened
in "1984!" It's just like "1984!""
In this video we've learned about a very famous dystopian novel, and we've also examined some of the moral
questions that arise when we look at knowledge. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a Marxist
feminist Illuminati brainwashing seminar to go to. (They give out free wine.)
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