Wednesday, November 11, 2020

On Remembrance Day

 

After last week's Whole Foods poppy debacle, I found myself unable to participate in yet another installment of the Canadian culture war Kabuki theatre that is Remembrance Day.

We all know the drill – someone does something, anything connected to poppies, and Conservative politicians briefly remind everyone that virtue signalling and cancel culture are not the sole domain of the “Tumblr left”. 

Following this comes the ritual denunciations of Remembrance Day from the left, where we are all reminded that Canada is a colonial settler culture, and that Remembrance Day has been effectively co-opted by the right to gin up patriotic fervour for whatever imperial adventures we’ve decided the tag along with.

The thing is, the specific history of Remembrance Day concerns an unpayable debt that we owe to our ancestors – 106 years ago, this country began to send its young over to die for what was, in hindsight, perhaps the most absurd and pointless war in human history – nearly 60,000 Canadians died so that the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha could remain the most powerful royal house in Europe.  Thanks to this war, the Italians invented fascism, Rosa Luxemburg was murdered and many of the political formations that we find ourselves dealing with today find their genesis in the shadow of this insane expression of nihilism.

So this debt remains, and it seems to me that so much of why we undergo this culture war every year has to do with the fact that, as time has passed, Remembrance Day shifted away from reminding ourselves of this unpayable debt, and towards celebrating those who live, those for whom the debt can, in some ways, be repaid.

It is difficult to argue with this, as the bombers fly over our house today, that despite its seeming solemnity, Remembrance Day has become more of a celebration of military power and glory than an acknowledgement of the emptiness of the vast majority of armed conflicts in which Canadians have engaged.  I think we can now safely include Afghanistan in this calculus - the 200 odd people who died there really died for nothing, and no elegant flight formations, or poppy wearing, can change that.

Like many people on the left, I was outraged and horrified by the jingoistic celebration of “our troops” who we sent off on an errand of revenge after September 11, and that the invasion of Afghanistan was somehow a noble and just war (history has shown us that it wasn’t). 

That being said, there is something to be said for affirming this debt on Remembrance Day, this throwing away of life for nothing, in part because many of those who insist that one must wear a poppy are those who also believe that there’s no need to shut the country down right and pay everyone to stay home. 

That is, the current conditions we live under are akin to a time of war, and instead of the left being in denial of this reality, it is the right who seems to ever increasingly demand that we forget all those who have died for nothing over the past 6 months.  Perhaps if there is value in Remembrance Day, in this Remembrance Day, it’s that if one believes there is value to life, then today is a time to acknowledge that, to acknowledge that we do indeed live in a society, and perhaps expand the scope of Remembrance Day to include all those who have died for nothing, as a result of the neglect of our governments, and our society, and a reminder that we can do better than this.

Thursday, June 18, 2020

Back to Blogging

I went off of Facebook for about six years.  There was a lot going on in my life, and after receiving some particularly depressing news, that desire to present some kind of avatar of myself felt impossible. 

Three years ago, I returned to Facebook.  My motivation for doing so was to in part to make it easier to be included on things with my wife, who had rejoined Facebook.  It also became clear to me that the reasons I went off Facebook were no longer really relevant, and my status as "that guy who doesn't use Facebook" no longer had the cachet it did in 2010. 

So I have been back for about 3 years, and frankly it kinda sucks.  I wound up using it as a quasi-blog, where I'd post links and complain about things, but the reality was that most of the posts that wound up with any feedback were posts where I shared a picture of our dog, or our son, or our son with a dog.

This isn't to say that those things are bad, it's just that Facebook as a social space is pretty unhealthy in some really strange ways, ways that I only ever understand when I go off Facebook, which I did again about a month ago.

My reasons this time were really different - I'm finishing my dissertation and given everything that is going on, Facebook just felt like an unhealthy distraction.

This is all to say that I'm going to try to blog more, in part because I like writing about things, and feel more inclined to do so.  But I tend to say this every few years, and nothing happens, so who knows? 

Monday, February 03, 2020

Plain Language is Bad


I found this old essay by chance today.  It's not bad, and reminds me that I was probably smarter a decade ago than I am now!  The Medicare fraud letter remains chilling, and I still believe that the plain language movement is part of a far larger cultural trend that has immiserated us to no end.  In any case, to the three of you who still read my blog, enjoy!

Government Communications and Entertainment:  a Brief Analysis of the Plain Language Movement

The shamelessness of the rhetorical question “What do people want?” lies in the fact that it appeals to the very people as thinking subjects whose subjectivity it specifically seeks to annul.

Horkheimer and Adorno, “The Culture Industry” Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 116.

There is a certain irony to the fact that George Orwell is both the author of Nineteen Eighty Four and the essay Politics and the English Language.  Nineteen Eighty Four has become a kind of cautionary tale about governments and their relationship to the truth, alerting people to the dangers of “newspeak” and the manufacture of truth by governments.  However, Politics and the English Language, where Orwell extols the virtues of clear and simple language, has itself become the foundational text for the Plain Language Movement.  His six rules for clear writing, such as avoid the passive voice, form the grammatical canon for the movement, which seeks to eradicate “gobbledygook” from legal and government communication, to ensure greater “readability” and “clarity”.  And what began as a movement opposed to government and legal standards of writing has now been fully embraced by those institutions.

Despite the broad aims of the movement, and the depth of its transformative power in shaping how governments communicate with their citizens, it is perhaps surprising how little sociological research has been done to examine the ramifications of the Plain Language Movement on public discourse.   Rather it has been assumed that plain language is good and necessary thing.  My own experience as a bureaucrat can testify to the near universal acceptance of plain language as a good thing.   This brief essay will attempt to suggest some avenues for more closely examining how plain language, far from engaging citizens, annuls that engagement by removing citizens from the democratic process, by focusing on ends to the detriment of means.

What is plain language?  The United State government's Plain Language (www.plainlanguage.gov) website has several definitions[1]:
A word about "plain English." The phrase certainly shouldn't connote drab and dreary language. Actually, plain English is typically quite interesting to read. It's robust and direct—the opposite of gaudy, pretentious language. You achieve plain English when you use the simplest, most straightforward way of expressing an idea. You can still choose interesting words. But you'll avoid fancy ones that have everyday replacements meaning precisely the same thing.[2]
Bryan Garner, from Legal Writing in Plain English, 2001, pp xiv

The next definition is from Professor Robert Eagleson, an Australian scholar of plain language:
Plain English is clear, straightforward expression, using only as many words as are necessary. It is language that avoids obscurity, inflated vocabulary and convoluted sentence construction. It is not baby talk, nor is it a simplified version of the English language. Writers of plain English let their audience concentrate on the message instead of being distracted by complicated language. They make sure that their audience understands the message easily.[3]

These examples illustrate the broad aims of the movement:  To eliminate ornament from language, and to make documents “readable”.  A writer is to find the “simplest” way of expressing an idea, and one is to avoid “fancy” words when “ordinary” words will do.   If one does this, the “audience” will understand their text (or specifically their message, a very important word indeed) “easily”.  It is important to note that complicated language “distracts”, presumably because it forces one to think for a moment about what one is hearing. The focus of both definitions is on economy as the hallmark of clarity.  However, what does clarity mean in practice for the Plain Language Movement?

The dramatic effect Plain Language has on government communications is best shown through an example.  One of the more chilling examples is the following, from US government's plain language website.  It is important to keep in mind that this transformation is being sold as an exemplar of clear, plain language:
Medicare Fraud Letter

The Medicare Beneficiary Services receives a lot of Medicare fraud correspondence every year. To reach their customers more effectively, they took an already short letter and made it even shorter and to the point.

Before

Investigators at the contractor will review the facts in your case and decide the most appropriate course of action. The first step taken with most Medicare health care providers is to reeducate them about Medicare regulations and policies. If the practice continues, the contractor may conduct special audits of the providers medical records. Often, the contractor recovers overpayments to health care providers this way. If there is sufficient evidence to show that the provider is consistently violating Medicare policies, the contractor will document the violations and ask the Office of the Inspector General to prosecute the case. This can lead to expulsion from the Medicare program, civil monetary penalties, and imprisonment.

After

We will take two steps to look at this matter: We will find out if it was an error or fraud.

We will let you know the result.[4]

It is important to note that this is a letter regarding an allegation of fraud.  The first letter goes to some length to explain the process to the correspondent, and the possible outcomes.  The second omits this information, and instead informs the correspondent that they will be told the outcome only when the government has completed its investigation.  An opportunity to describe a government's process becomes a statement of government action.  However, which letter is really “clearer”?

Instead of providing the reader an opportunity to form their own thoughts, the second letter, and indeed, many things written in “plain language” are designed to narrow the interpretive space of communication down to nothing.  Similar to Walter Benjamin’s views on newspaper writing, the government strains to interpret “what the people want”, so no other interpretation but the government’s interpretation is possible.  The second letter in the example explains, while the first letter describes.

This is where the idea of the government “message” is of supreme importance.  A politician, or a government, must remain “on message”, in other words, they must stick to the script which allows as little latitude as possible for interpretation.  However, through plain language, the idea of the message is sold as populist clarity.  The second letter, ominous as it sounds, also leaves a clear message – the government is acting.   The key message of the second letter is the sense that the government is “doing something”, not that the citizen has a role in that activity. 

Thinking of citizens as busy, simple people, who want facts and to see action, is reminiscent of Horkheimer and Adorno’s views on myth and its relationship to Enlightenment.  As they write, “Enlightenment’s mythic terror springs from a horror of myth.  It detects myth not only in semantically unclarified concepts and words…but in any human utterance which has no place in the functional context of self-preservation.”[5]  Plain language adherents see complex sentence constructions and technical vocabularies not as the outcome of complex government institutions, but as needless and wasteful, as a myth of government which plain language can eradicate, at least when communicating to citizens.   Instead, it forecloses the very possibility that governments are complex, restricting that complexity to those who work in government, who are themselves presumably not average.

Plain language in a government setting presumes people are unwilling to want to engage with their government in any more than a rudimentary, “practical” way.  It assumes not only that citizens want their information to be handed to them, without the sense that they, as citizens in a democracy, have a part to play in shaping that information.   It assumes, in effect, that they want to be entertained by their government.

It is telling that despite nearly 30 years of the plain language movement, as well as strong support from the very governments it had targeted, voter turnout is lower than ever and citizen disengagement in Canada has reached an all-time high.  The quote found at the head of this essay seems more apt than ever:  Citizens are less engaged perhaps because they understand that they are not really necessary, except on occasion for reasons of legitimacy.   Through plain language, the activity of democratic government has been replaced by politics as light entertainment, although I appreciate that this brief paper has only offered a glimpse of that.  

However, and perhaps this is the most perplexing question, who would have thought that this alienation would have been cultivated using the very grammatical rules Orwell developed as a caution against it?


[1] I am using the US government’s website for clarity.  Similar examples exist in Canada as well.
[2]    http://www.plainlanguage.gov/whatisPL/definitions/garner.cfm
[3]    http://www.plainlanguage.gov/whatisPL/definitions/eagleson.cfm
[4]    http://www.plainlanguage.gov/examples/before_after/medicarefraudltr.cfm
[5] Dialectic of Enlightenment, p.22

Tuesday, January 07, 2020

Happy New Year!

That's pretty much all I've got.  Just trying to keep the door open.