EthicalDative

Detail from an exhibit of children’s drawings sent to the Charlie Hebdo office after the 2015 terrorist attack. Credit Francois Guillot/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images.

I have a taste for good satire. I also revere an ability to change one’s mind in a considered, informed way. The article quoted here moves me for what it shows of this process, which can be painful, as well as for what it articulates about satire. Mr. Smith, a professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Paris, says that the real problem with satire now is “that it has become impossible to separate it cleanly from the toxic disinformation that defines our era.”

… Satire is a species of humor that works through impersonation: taking on the voices of others, saying the sort of things they would say, using one’s own voice while not speaking in one’s own name.
… I insisted that satire was speech in something like a grammatical mood of its own, as different from the declarative as the declarative is from the interrogative, and that it was therefore subject to its own rules.
… Over the past few years I have been made to see… that the nature and extent of satire is not nearly as simple a question as I had previously imagined. I am now prepared to agree that some varieties of expression that may have some claim to being satire should indeed be prohibited.
… The truth is that the nature and proper scope of satire remain an enormous problem, one that is not going to get any easier to resolve in the political and technological future we can all, by now, see coming.

(Justin E. H. Smith, “The End of Satire,” NYTimes, 4-8-19)

(c) 2019 JMN.

How old are “old Chinese sayings” and how many are actually Chinese? Fewer than all of them, I surmise. However, one I encountered said that wisdom consists in getting things by their right names. It appealed to me because it stressed accuracy in speech.

Awash as we are in mendacity, the article quoted here refreshes by signaling how “cute” euphemisms can cloak misery — in this case, “the chaotic truth of working life in today’s America.” The author recommends that we improve the way we talk about work by shunning cynical, exploitative jargon.

The “side hustle” is one of a growing roster of trendy corporatized idioms, like ordinary household appliances that are now “smart” or plain vanilla businessmen and women remade into the more exotic “entrepreneurs.” Our jobs are now “flexible,” although we are the ones contorting ourselves to work at all hours, or we are professionally “nimble” because we are trying to survive on freelance gigs.

So what can we do? For starters, anyone writing about work… should stop glorifying long hours at work or juggling multiple workplace identities… As workers, we might acknowledge that “side hustle” is an insidious term and resolve never to use it again. More broadly, we must fight other forms of this falsifying new jargon and seek out more truthful language….

(Alissa Quart, “The Con of the Side Hustle,” NYTimes, 4-6-19)

(c) 2019 JMN.

Brexit defies me as much as my native political scene defies me. Anomalies aside, I find here a stretch of forceful writing to savor for language’s sake. I came to attention from “carapace” forward. What follows illumines for me something I see darkly in my own looking glass. “If this be Englishness,” I mused with perverse pride, “the shoe ruefully fits me.”

Undoubtedly, there was a certain fury in many people’s minds, but the carapace of irony and self-deprecation that obscured it brought to mind one of the ingrained aspects of national identity pointed out by the social anthropologist Kate Fox. In her classic book “Watching the English,” she writes about the deep layers of performance and self-mockery that smother even heartfelt misery and anger: “Even if you are feeling desperate, you must pretend to be only pretending to feel desperate.”

More generally, she talks about “perverse obliqueness”, “emotional constipation” and a “general inability to engage in a direct and straightforward fashion with other human beings”.

(John Harris, “Petitions and jokes will not halt this march into Brexit calamity,” The Guardian, 4-1-19)

(c) 2019 JMN.