The meaning of words and the political significance of dictionaries have been, oddly enough, among the most debated topics in Australian politics over the past week. And the word on everyone's lips of late is misogyny.
Unfortunately, as so often happens, the debate soon became mired in its least interesting aspect - namely, the dynamic tension between etymology and popular usage. It should go without saying that words adapt and adopt new resonances and connotations, and moreover, that the widespread use of "misogyny" now exceeds its original meaning. What is far more interesting is not that misogyny has acquired this more general sense, but why it has done so.
Increasingly over the past two decades or so, borderline, well-nigh pathological designations have become mainstream, no doubt for their rhetorical poignancy or "cut through." The result is that our public discourse is now cluttered with glittery, arresting but essentially junk-terms like "misogynist," "homophobe," "fascist," "bigot" and "racist." On one level, this is merely symptomatic of the more general hyperbolization of language today (such that "criticises" becomes "slams," "concern" becomes "alarm," and "affected" becomes "impacted"). But there is something else at play here, it seems to me.
We've reached a point in our national life where our most basic moral disputes over competing visions of what is good can no longer be addressed in straightforwardly moral terms. So, for example:
- Is it better for a political representative to have children, or does the decision not to have children point to a more profound sense of calling and devotion to political office?
- Is it possible to accord full recognition, dignity and indeed honour to homosexual relationships without strictly equating them with a more socially normative heterosexuality?
- Should schooling attend to the inculcation of certain virtues and values (and if so, which ones and why), or is education best restricted to the production of "economically useful machines," as Martha Nussbaum puts it?
- Does the very existence of vulnerable others (such as the stateless refugee, the unwanted unborn, or the high-need elderly) impose a prior moral constraint on our freedom, or are relationships only ever binding when we choose them?
To address such questions requires a degree of patience and empathy (not exactly qualities we have in abundance at the moment). Above all it requires careful discrimination: a recognition and appreciation of differences, and the deliberative judgment of some things as good, better and best - not just good and bad. But as Jean-Claude Michea has argued in his astonishing book The Realm of Lesser Evil, the fundamental wager of liberalism is that disagreement over competing moral visions is best managed by expelling moral criteria per se from the public space. Precisely because moral disagreement cannot be adjudicated - for to do so would be to curtail or somehow diminish one lifestyle choice over against another - the only way to maintain civic equilibrium is to equate both sides of any disagreement as just so many choices; for the social order, in other words, to adopt a position of absolute neutrality.
But liberalism's perpetual "war against all discriminations," as Michea calls it, is not without its collateral damage. This indiscriminate flattening-out of substantive moral disagreement leaves only discrimination itself excluded from public debate, or else vilified under such ubiquitous smears as "misogynist," "homophobe," "bigot" or whatever. When the rhetorical volume gets cranked up to this level, not only does it neutralize any shared capacity for nuance, for appreciation, for persuasion, for authentic disagreement - it also leaves the underlying convictions themselves unaddressed. This is a brutal way, not of settling debates, but of ensuring they don't take place at all.
In other words, far from rendering public discourse somehow amoral or neutral, the effect of what I am tempted to call liberal censorship is a "claustrophobic, oppressive moralism brimming with resentment," as Slavoj Zizek has recently argued.
"Without any 'organic' social substance grounding the standards of what George Orwell approvingly referred to as 'common decency', the minimalist program of laws intended to do little more than prevent individuals from encroaching upon each other (annoying or 'harassing' each other) turns into an explosion of legal and moral rules, an endless process of legalization and moralization."
This brings me to an inescapable paradox. As I recently suggested in a conversation with Waleed Aly, it is precisely the rather promiscuous way that Julia Gillard and many on the left have been throwing around the term "misogynist," along with our inability to talk intelligibly about sexual difference and complementarity, that creates the context within which the kind of chauvinism and sexist innuendo employed by Tony Abbott can proliferate. Likewise, to use a different example, it is the smug dismissal of every moral objection to marriage equality out of hand as somehow "homophobic" or "bigoted" that cultivates the unreconstructed bigotry of the likes of Cory Bernardi and Jim Wallace.
The left ("self-righteous as war," to gloss Les Murray) and the right ("brimming with resentment") are thus both complicit in our current political deadlock; and things are certainly not helped by the sub-rational stampede of social media, which thunders indiscriminately, fecklessly from one glitzy cause to the next.
Over against this suffocating pseudo-moralism, what is needed is to reintroduce authentic moral disagreement into public debate, to risk offending our liberal sensibilities by arguing for a better way, to refuse simply to "live and let live." It is only through such substantive, radical disagreement that a shared moral horizon might slowly come into view.