Split infinitives and liberal intimidation
(Note: This entry started out as a simple exchange about the split infinitive. Everything being connected with everything else, however, the discussion moved on to the subject of liberal ad hominem attacks on non-liberals, then to the liberal labeling of non-liberals as enemies of society and thus to the idea of liberal tyranny. I don’t mean to sound paranoid, but the phenomena of liberalism really are all part of one continuum.)
James W. sent a comment yesterday about Rush Limbaugh’s IQ that I posted. I also wrote back to him:
James, a man who loves the English language as you do should not use the split infinitive when it is so easily avoidable: Your sentence,
“He is easily 140, and to not see that is to show one’s own prejudice.”
is vastly better if changed to:
“He is easily 140, and not to see that is to show one’s own prejudice.”
James W. replied:
I have, generally, taken to heart the need not to cause you extra work, but taking away a man’s split infinitives is a serious thing. Well, I shall find something else to split then.
LA replies:
That’s a funny and charming reply. But let’s just hope that Steven Pinker doesn’t find out about my e-mail to you and the fact that I don’t use the split infinitive at VFR, as he will mark me down as a superstitious, fearful, psychically damaged person under the grip of authority, which is what he said in a New York Times op-ed column in January about all people who disapprove of the split infinitive.
Note how liberals since the 1960s apply the same paradigm to all issues. Whatever they want to push through, whether it’s civil rights, open borders, decadent television, or now even the split infinitive, they portray people on the other side of the issue as prejudiced, sexually repressed, unthinking, “authoritarian-personality” types. They keep using this ploy, because it has been so spectacularly successful. People simply do not want to be told that there’s something wrong with them. They will yield rather than stand up to such attacks.
- end of initial entry -
Gintas writes:
The Soviets institutionalized people who opposed them. From Wikipedia:
In the Soviet Union, psychiatry was used for punitive purposes. Psychiatric hospitals were often used by the authorities as prisons in order to isolate political prisoners from the rest of society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally; as such they were considered a form of torture.
Richard Dawkins has said about people who don’t believe in Darwinism, that “anybody who pretends not to believe in evolution is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked but I’d rather not consider that).”
It’s classic ad hominen. The left has never been interested in what’s right, but in power, and they’ll do whatever works, and ad hominem attacks work all too well, as you’ve noted. We haven’t yet gotten to the Soviet level here, but, in principle, there’s no reason leftists wouldn’t approve of it.
LA replies:
Some may feel that connecting Pinker’s put-down of people who oppose the split infinitive to Dawkins’s remark that critics of Darwinism are insane to the Soviet imprisoning of political dissidents as mentally ill is too big a leap. In fact, it is a single continuum from Pinker to Dawkins to Soviet prison hospitals—it is a central thrust of the built-in logic of the liberal project that culminates in tyranny.
Does that still sound too extreme? Then consider the fact that in Europe, people who believe in intelligent design have already been officially labeled as extremists and “enemies of human rights,” as discussed at VFR in October 2007:
STRASBOURG, France (Reuters)—Europe’s main human rights body voted on Thursday to urge schools across the continent to firmly oppose [sic] the teaching of creationist and “intelligent design” views in their science classes.
The Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly approved a resolution saying attacks on the theory of evolution were rooted “in forms of religious extremism” and amounted to a dangerous assault on science and human rights.
In a comment in that entry, I pointed out the inexorable logic by which liberals must consider critics of Darwinism to be enemies of human rights.
I wrote:
If there is a divine creator who made life, then (1) there is a truth in the universe higher than the human self; (2) the human self is not the sovereign definer of its own concept of existence and of right and wrong; (3) human selves vary in moral worth in accordance with how much they follow or resist a truth that they did not create; and therefore (4) the belief in the universal moral equality of human beings and in non-discrimination as the controlling principle of human relations, as embodied in human-rights laws, is false. Thus to criticize Darwinism on the basis of divine creation or intelligent design is to attack human rights.
James W. writes:
English seems a gutteral, bastard language, plagued with exceptions to its rules. This will shock you, but I did not know what an infinitive is to split it until you told me. My guide is only what sounds right, and your correct use sounds better than my incorrect use, so there is no argument to be made.
You are of a small class of people who are rigid in the use of language. Rigidity is a vice and a virtue. There are certain vocations where a lack of rigidity must be precluded, or we would be forced to pause and consider each time we crossed a suspension bridge.
I would assume your jealousy of language is not what Pinker thinks it is—the mark of the scold and perfectionist—but that of the lover of language and preservationist.
LA replies:
“Rigid” sounds like the very putdown that you are criticizing. People who observe the rule of avoiding the split infinitive are not more “rigid” in their writing than anyone else. For example, David Horowitz never, or almost never, uses the split infinitive. Is his style more “rigid” than that of the scads of journalists and columnists today who are addicted to the split infinitive?
Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 03, 2009 06:15 AM | Send