Question from a Commenter

Posted on September 6, 2014 by Arnold Kling

In your three-languages model of politics, it is usually the conservatives using the barbarism-civilization axis, and the progressives using the oppression-oppressed axis.

But given the recent murder of Sotloff by Islamic State terrorists, the vocabulary being used highly progressive sources to describe the event are very conservative sounding. Just today I heard President Obama, Secretary Kerry, reporters and commentators on NPR and C-SPAN have all talked about the event specifically using the words, “uncivilized”, “barbaric”, “savages”, “fiends”, “monstrous”, “beastly”, and so on.

It seems that they are being quite genuine in using these words as their honest appraisals and not paying lip service to the concepts.

So, what do you make of all that?

I have not been following these statements. Do they apply to the act or to the group? If you call an act barbaric without calling a group barbaric, then you are not really using the civilization-barbarism axis. If the progressives are calling ISIS as a whole barbaric, then that would represent a shift toward using conservative’s rhetoric. I have not seen a similar shift in rhetoric on Hamas–I do not know of any progressives who have described Hamas’ tactics as barbaric. I have not seen progressive use the word “barbarism” in describing Rotterham (Indeed, that story has been easy to miss if you only follow liberal media. The Washington Post put in the “religion” section quoted a member of a Muslim youth group as saying that the police “failed us,” so that the story fits the oppressor-oppressed axis). So on the whole–and again, I have not been following the statements on ISIS–I do not get the sense that progressives have undergone a major shift in their outlook.

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3 Responses to Question from a Commenter

  1. Handle says:
    September 6, 2014 at 9:26 pm

    Thank you for your reply. I think your distinction between acts and groups is a useful one.

    On the other hand, State’s rhetorical strategy seems to be an attempt to try and minimize perceptions on all sides that there is any ideological or group conflict between Western and Muslim nations and cultures by semantically defining any instances of violent disagreement out of the ‘genuine, mainstream’ social current.

    Call it, “No True Muslim”. Even a group that calls itself ‘Islamic State’ must be completely distinguished from ‘True Islam’. I haven’t heard similar vocabulary being used against Hamas or Hezbollah.

    Secretary Kerry:

    … the face of Islam is not the butchers who killed Steven Sotloff. That’s ISIL. The face of Islam is not the nihilists who know only how to destroy, not to build. It’s not masked cowards whose actions are an ugly insult to the peaceful religion that they violate every single day with their barbarity and whose fundamental principles they insult with their actions.

  2. Jeff R. says:
    September 7, 2014 at 9:46 am

    Beheading journalists is objectively pretty savage, no matter your political leanings, so it doesn’t surprise me to see progressives invoking the language of barbarism in reaction to such acts. Conservatives tend to apply the barbarism label to a much wider range of behaviors, though. Perhaps because they’re more sensitive to Jonathan Haidt’s purity/disgust moral dimension? I can’t recall whether you discuss that in the book or not, but it seems a reasonable inference.

  3. Assistant Village Idiot says:
    September 7, 2014 at 7:33 pm

    I think the acts/group distinction is real, but I also noticed the media and Democratic rhetoric being much more reflexively condemning of the barbarity of the individuals than is usual. I attribute this to the profession and region of the victims. Foley and Sotloff were both journalists from New England, specifically New Hampshire – clear Arts & Humanitires Tribe. Liberals would therefore immediately intuit them as tribesmen, in a way that has not been automatic when the victims are missionaries, soldiers, or businessmen.

    I love Haidt, and he is teaching us a great deal, but he gets the disgust part wrong in differentiating between conservatives and liberals. One of his examples was whether one would use an American flag to clean a toilet if there were nothing else. I maintain that if there were a similar question about whether one would use a newspaper photo as toilet paper if it were of some liberal icon, the registering of disgust would be equally great among liberals. He was a mainstream liberal when he made up his original test, and the biases of that group are reflected in the questions. He is more centrist/unaffiliated with liberal leanings now, and much more objective.

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