Some Activist Words Explained
The language of political activism, which is invariably promoted by our education system, the media and our other intellectuals, usually incorporates deception or aims to obfuscate or confuse. We should not adopt it.
“Decolonise”
To colonise a place means to bring your people in and take it over, therefore to decolonise it means to take your people out and return it to its original inhabitants. But in the anti-racist usage, decolonising something means taking its original inhabitants out and replacing them with aliens. Thus to “decolonise” an English literature curriculum means replacing Jane Austen by Toni Morrison, Chaucer by Chinua Achebe and Shakespeare by James Baldwin. Yet as soon as the media put the word into common use, even defenders of Western civilisation started using it, wondering what could be made of this process of decolonisation that had overtaken us. They should have spoken more accurately of ethnic cleansing or white replacement.
To give a few more examples, in 2020 the director of the previously reputable Royal Academy of Dramatic Art confessed that it was “institutionally racist” and promised to bring in a team of consultants to advise on a “root-and-branch structural reform” that would put more black people in senior roles. It would thereby be “decolonised”.[i] Other institutions, such as the British Library and the National Trust, set about “decolonising” themselves in a similar fashion.
In 2022 Durham University decided that its mathematics course put too much emphasis on the achievements of white male mathematicians.[ii] It needed to be “decolonised” by the addition of references to some eminent black female mathematicians. Clearly there were no eminent black mathematicians of either sex before white people taught Africans how to count past two in perhaps the 18th century, by which time Leibnitz and Newton had already invented differential and integral calculus. Whether Durham found any eminent black female mathematicians who emerged since has not been stated.
“Decolonising” something can mean no more than taking a feature of white culture out of it. There does not need to be anything to put in its place. Thus in 2020 the BBC proposed simply omitting the words of “Rule Britannia” and “Land of Hope and Glory” from the proms, thereby “decolonising” them.[iii] In the same year a lecturer at Rutgers University argued on the basis of the death of George Floyd that students should no longer be taught grammar. Why? Because the English department needed to be “decolonised”.[iv]
Oliver Twist originally
Oliver Twist “decolonised [v]
“Social construct”
People who call things social constructs think that they are denying that they exist, but this doesn’t make sense. Societies construct things all the time that obviously exist, like roads and hospitals. Or perhaps by “construct” they mean concept. A social construct is just an idea, they might be suggesting, to which nothing in reality corresponds. But to say that something is a concept doesn’t mean that nothing in reality corresponds to it. We have the concept of a table, and tables are really there. To demonstrate that something doesn’t exist you need to make an argument against the idea that it does, and calling it a social construct does not amount to this. A third possibility is that what social constructionists mean when they call something a social construct is that the only reason we think that it exists is that society has agreed that it does, and society is mistaken. But again they would need to show that society was mistaken.
What social constructionists never mean when they call things social constructs, or “just” social constructs, are things that really are just social constructs, like money.[vi] The only reason that a ten-dollar bill can be used to buy things with is that society has agreed that certain pieces of paper are ten-dollar bills, which have this capacity. Otherwise ten-dollar bills would be useless and indeed could not exist. But what social constructionists call social constructs could hardly resemble such examples less. They are referring to brute facts of nature such as the facts of racial or sex differences or the facts of race and sex themselves.
The term “social construct” is only a device for letting people persuade themselves that things they would rather not acknowledge the existence of aren’t really there.
