By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, July 20, 2020
There is some mystery about the generation of names.
“Gay” becomes “gay and lesbian” becomes “lesbian and gay” becomes LGB becomes
LGBTQ becomes LGBTQIAPK becomes LGBTTQQIAAP+. We go from “black” to
“Afro-American” to “African American” back to “black” to “Black,” and then to
BIPOC, and then to whatever that will be five minutes from now.
Political correctness — and I remind you that this is a
term the scolds invented for themselves, not something that conservative
critics hung on them — is a joint neurosis, which, in moments of particular
intensity, can turn into the kind of moral panic we are seeing right now. On
the matter of nomenclature, there is a very long magical tradition holding that
to have access to the true (and necessarily secret) name of something gives one
power over it. (Think of Adam, his dominion over the animals indicated by his
having the authority to name them.) A great deal of psychology and sociology is
built on that superstition: Take a group of behaviors, give them a name, and
treat the synthetic concept as though it were an organic phenomenon. There is
no such literal thing as narcissistic personality disorder or white
supremacy or capitalism, which do not exist in the sense that Mycobacterium
tuberculosis exists, but to give things scientific-sounding names —
“political science” spoke to the aspirations of a particularly delusional
moment in our history — and to treat them as discrete unitary phenomena gives
us a sense of control and power over them.
Another way of understanding this magical thinking of the
great American bourgeoisie is that it is the result of market innovation
offering jaded consumers new forms of psychic consumption.
At a certain level of material abundance, some
consumption shifts away from ordinary goods and services into more experiential
forms of consumption. The lines between these are not distinct: For example,
people who order a $1,000 bottle of wine in a restaurant are not necessarily
paying for old grape juice; often, what they are paying for is the act of
ritual consumption and a passage into the state not of having but of having
had the 1996 Bienvenues-Bâtard-Montrachet. (The fellow who has a taste for very
expensive wines but could not with a gun to his head tell a Bordeaux from a
Brunello is a familiar type, and not necessarily insincere.) Luxury goods may
combine both physical and psychic consumption — an expensive watch is not about
telling the time, and you don’t go to Per Se or the French Laundry because you
are hungry — and at the most rarefied level of consumption dissolve into almost
purely experiential consumption that does not look like conventional luxury at
all: a picture with the president, or a personal audience with the pope or the
Dalai Lama. The great marker of social status is the line between that which is
expensive and that which money alone cannot buy: A Ferrari is one kind of
status symbol, having children enrolled at Princeton is a different kind.
(John Maynard Keynes’s theory of consumption was, by his
own account, a psychological theory.)
That kind of rarefied consumption is not reserved
exclusively for wealthy people. It is one of the benefits that subsidizes
volunteer work in churches and civic organizations, in which people often
associate and form relationships with socially prominent members of their local
communities. Other people are attracted to celebrity-adjacent jobs or accept
relatively low-paying work in elite or elite-adjacent institutions for similar
reasons.
The pseudo-activism of social media and membership in the
self-deputized sheriff’s posse of political correctness provide some of the
same benefits as genuine civic engagement — without the need to attend all
those tedious meetings. The displacement of “Latino” by “Latinx” does not
achieve anything of genuine value for anybody with Spanish-speaking ancestry,
but it does create new opportunities for rarefied psychic consumption, giving a
new generation of consumers (overwhelmingly college-educated white people) an
opportunity to enjoy the taste of being in a vanguard, an exquisitely refined
psychic product that is necessarily rivalrous in consumption.
The pattern repeats. Loosely organized coalitions such as
Black Lives Matter, Antifa, or the Tea Party are rooted not in radicalism but
in Tracy Flick-ism and Max Fischer-ism: Community organizers are people who
start clubs to give themselves something to be in charge of for the purpose of
achieving social status. Civic organizations and political parties have long
operated on a kind of informal seniority system: You volunteer, you do grunt
work, you work your way up, and you wait your turn. The turn against party
“elites” is much more the result of frustrated party activists’ looking
for a way to avoid waiting their turn than representative of a genuine shift
toward populism in either of the two major parties. A car dealer or a jeweler
will arrange lending for customers because those customers want their
consumption now, not in two years, when they can afford it — and we want
our psychic consumption now, too.
Hence the churn.
The generation of new LGBTTQQIAAP+ designations or new
racial nomenclature does not stop, for the same reason that fashion does not
stop — the point of the consumption is to distinguish the fashionable from the
unfashionable, to display one’s good taste or (since that is rare) at least
one’s knowledge of what currently is in style. New markers must be generated to
do the status-conferring work that the old markers cannot do anymore.
It is typical of the great genius of our business
community that even radical changes in fashion end up commodified and made
shopping-mall friendly in a remarkably short period of time: Think of how
quickly the styles associated with punk rock or hip-hop were incorporated into
mainstream fashion. With that in mind, can it be any surprise that the voguish
pseudo-radicalism of our own time not only is embraced by Corporate America but
is generously sponsored by it, with the new Red Brigades outfitted and funded
by Google,
PepsiCo, AT&T, NBCUniversal, Facebook, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, and Deloitte?
Another way of saying “psychic consumption” is “psychic tuberculosis.” All the symptoms of the wasting disease are there to be seen, for those with the curiosity and the stomach to take a good hard look.
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