The Trouble with Pejoratives.
Once the news tried very hard to be 'objective' and tried not to use loaded terms in their reporting, It was frustrating. Often important elements of a story couldn't be reported without using prejudicial terms.
I remember how refreshing it was when the media finally called Trump a liar. The pleasure was short lived. Soon Trump was calling his opponents liars.
A similar thing happened with "fake news'. Originally there was a site that was literally promoting fake news. The site looked exactly like a normal news site but its stories were fake. Now, any news that Trump disagrees with is fake news.
Little kids catch on to the trouble with pejoratives early as in: "I'm not a jerk! You're a jerk".
Pejoratives are a way of expressing an emotional attitude rather than objective information. But also pejoratives can work as a discussion stopper. When a pejorative is cast the discussion can easily get diverted into dealing with the pejorative rather than the matter at hand.
A pejorative can be true and still be a pejorative. Trump really is a liar but it does little good to call him that. In his first 4 years as president the Washington Post counted over 30,000 lies. He didn't care nor did his supporters. That's a bit of a shock to us honest folk. It's kind of an assumption in any reasonable discussion that people are telling the truth.
One effect of pejoratives is to make reasonable discussion more difficult. A pejorative is a power move - It's not meant to be persuasive - it's meant to intimidate. If I call someone a liar I'm saying that I don't believe them and won't be persuaded by what they say.
Again - kids know how to deal with liars. They cover their ears and cry "Liar liar pants on fire". But that rarely leads to a productive discussion.
Democracy evolved slowly from various forms of dictatorship. Dictatorship is a conceptually easy form of governance. Heck - kids live under the dictatorship of parents. But as society evolved dictatorship proved problematic for many reasons and institutions emerged that solved those problems - democracy.
Now 'dictator' is a pejorative. Generally even dictators try to put a democratic gloss on their rule. But there's a problem. Very many people among us think that dictatorship is good. Many among us want to be dictators so the pejorative loses its sting.
We have a new pejorative now - woke. It started out as a complimentary term among progressive people - I think meaning something like 'being awake to social problems'. Unprogressive people feel threatened by moves to solve social problems and so woke became a pejorative. I'd propose 'sleeper' as a new pejorative for unwoke people but that's too positive. Perhaps 'blinkered' would be a better term.
But that doesn't go where we want. We do need to consider our problems in detail and not sweep them all into a term that is basically meaningless.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.