Big Brother on Campus

Mike Mitchell gives a much deserved lampooning to the decision by USC's college of social work (whose staff apparently has too much time on their hands) to henceforth prohibit mention of the word "field."

Here's USC's rationale, to use that word in its loosest sense:

We would like to share a change we are making . . . to ensure our use of inclusive language and practice. Specifically, we have decided to remove the term “field” from our curriculum and practice and replace it with “practicum.” This change supports anti-racist social work practice by replacing language that could be considered anti-Black or anti-immigrant in favor of inclusive language.

Language can be powerful, and phrases such as “going into the field” or “field work” may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign. . . In solidarity with universities across the nation, our goal is not just to change language but to honor and acknowledge inclusion and reject white supremacy, anti-immigrant and anti-blackness ideologies.

Well. Once begun where does this purging of the language end? Mitchell thinks the censors pretty much have an open, ah, field to play in:

If the scholars at the USC college of social work are on the right track, we better also get serious about eliminating other words that may be equally offensive. Why not change the points on the compass to "North, West, East, and That Realm of Racial Oppression"?

As for other verbal injustices, what about the word (trigger warning) "tree," since this was an object used to perpetrate some of the worst acts of racial oppression in the past. I wonder if any social work students at USC will be reprimanded for using the "c" word? Certainly no one in the department would be so morally blind as to wear cotton clothing.

I'm sure we can think of a near infinity of other words and expressions that need to be banned. How about "slavery," "whip," "chains," "rope," "noose," "buy and sell," all of which conjure in a perfervid mind horrific images of historical oppression and injustice.

For that matter, lets ban "oppression" and "injustice" because they might have unbenign connotations in the minds of the descendents of people who suffered at the hands (oops, "hands" is too close to "field hands") of others (and who among us doesn't have ancestors who were the victims of oppression and injustice?)

How about banning the word "mister" which derives from "master"? Or how about "shiftless" and "lazy," pejoratives that've been used ever since antebellum days to stereotype African Americans.

There's no end to this depauperization of the language, which is, of course, what the left is counting on. By constricting socially acceptable vocabulary the left seeks to increase its control over the discourse and thus over the minds of the American citizenry.

In his novel Nineteen Eighty Four, George Orwell illustrates how and why totalitarians of the left accomplish this.

Orwell argues that by controlling the language, the tyrant controls the way people think since with a limited vocabulary, the people are limited in how much they can think as well as what they can think about.

Language is the basis of human thought because it structures and shapes the way we think and the way we see the world. The richer the language, the freer and more fertile are the minds of a citizenry, but freedom of thought and fertility of ideas are anathema to the left.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Big Brother (the state) creates and enforces a truncated, sterile language that facilitates deception and manipulation, and whose purpose is to eliminate freedom and restrict understanding of the real world.

Big Brother's ideological descendents are evidently alive and well today at USC and indeed throughout numerous institutions of our culture.