Panicdemic Thymes

The Futile Quest for the Non-Binary Pronoun

Let us imagine that, back around the time of Beowulf, the speakers of ancestral English had been woke enough to develop an extra, nonbinary pronoun to go with “he”, “she” and “it”, to be employed when the referent’s gender was unknown, unimportant or ambiguous. “Everybody has thoz own opinion”, an Anglo-Saxon warrior might have said (in translation) before deplatforming via decapitation the tho foolish enough to disagree with his own.

Would that linguistic happenstance have spared us the phenomenon that Joseph Epstein wittily ponders in his review of a book titled What’s Your Pronoun? Beyond He and She, published by the appropriately and sanctimoniously named “Liveright Press”?

No, it wouldn’t have. How do I know that? Because our language did have a closely parallel development, and the wokerati wound up hating it just as much as they do the generic “he”.

“Man” and “male” historically weren’t the exact synonyms that they have become (or, to be precise, that bien pensant opinion declares they must become). “Man” was available – and was used – to refer to members of the human race abstracted from their sex. “Male” referred only to men with certain biological features. (This was in olden times, when there were two sexes rather than an infinity of genders.)

It’s obvious why “man” retained an alternative meaning of “male”. In the social conditions that existed until quite recently, the most prominent men, the ones most often talked and written about, were males. If women had been socially dominant, “man” would have assimilated with “female”. If the sexes had filled all roles equally, “man” would have had overtones of neither.

The fate of “man” and “male” would have been inevitable for “he, his, him” and our hypothetical “tho, thoz, thom”. Where tho was uttered, the tho in question would most often have been male. Over time, tho would have become he’s twin, leaving our enlightened age with the same “problem” of binary pronouns, for which the same ugly and awkward “solutions” would be put forward.

The singular “they”, “he or she”, the made-up neologisms (how odd that no one espouses the obvious portmanteau “she/he/it”, run together into one syllable) and so forth are worse than ugly and awkward. The insistence that everyone choose a pronoun set and that everyone else rigorously obey the chooser’s dictate is a symptom of the petty tyrannical mindset that is so endemic to our time. Fie on it, I say. Laissez faire, laissez parler!

Should We Care What “History” Will Say?

The “Verdict of History”, which so many regard as the ultimate judgment on events, is rendered by always ill-informed, and often tainted, jurors. The verdict on the strange year 2020 (has any year ever been so inaptly numbered?) will be no different.

The “instant histories” doubtless started going to press the instant that the media declared that the Biden/Harris ticket had won, if not before. Everybody expects those to be no more than first drafts of history. Most will be lucky to reach the level of zeroth drafts. Yet they will be free from two faults of later accounts: The writers live in the “temporal country” that they describe (“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”), and they don’t know the shape of controversies to come.

After not very long, historians become foreigners, and what they write about the now-alien past inevitably has an eye toward the use to which history can be put by their contemporaries. They may have access to documents and other evidence that became available only after the fact, but vital information – in particular, a clear understanding of the assumptions that everyone at the time accepted – will have vanished.

In 1961, when World War II was a recent event, the eminent historian A. J. P. Taylor wrote a book on its origins. In it, he described the war as an accident brought about by inept diplomacy, characterized Adolf Hitler as a traditional German statesman and praised appeasement as the best hope Europe had for peace.

Taylor’s work was an especially plain instance of adjusting the past to the needs of the present. He was a committed socialist (a communist in his youth) and Labour Party stalwart, writing at a time when one of the greatest issues on the Left was opposition to the American hard line, embraced by Democrats and Republicans, against the Soviet Union. “Munich” was the anti-communists’ bête noire. Taylor’s aim was to show that Munich wasn’t so bad.

On the other side of the political spectrum, consider the origins of World War I. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, when reconciliation with West Germany was a high priority, diplomatic history saw the Great War as stemming from the breakdown of an unstable alliance system, an outcome that no one desired. The clearest message was that nationalism and the nursing of ancient enmities were prime obstacles to peace.

Then, as the Cold War intensified, the analysis shifted. Imperial Germany, historians averred (particularly those who supported anti-Soviet policies), had sought war in order to dominate Europe. Only a firm stance by the other Great Powers could have restrained her.

The Cold War is now a receding memory, and one can’t help but notice that the thesis of “German guilt” has lost traction. Responsibility for the Twentieth Century’s defining catastrophe is being spread around again, and confusion has replaced malevolence as the central villain.

So it will be with Wuhan flu, the Great Lockdown, Donald Trump, Joe Biden and the rest of this year’s turmoil. The jury is out, it will be out forever, and what it decides won’t be worth bothering about.

“Two Nations” in the Future

The idea of “two nations”, politically conjoined but psychologically separate and economically unequal, was old when Benjamin Disraeli used it as the subtitle of his novel Sibyl in 1845. A hundred seventy-five years later, it’s a cliché on both the Right and the Left.

Left and Right agree that this is a deplorable state of affairs. History has shown so many instances of one “nation” extracting forced labor from the other: slavery, serfdom, the nomenklatura dominance in totalitarian regimes.

Interestingly, though, Great Britain wasn’t like that when Disraeli wrote. As Paul Johnson relates in his classic account, The Birth of the Modern, Britain had just set out on the road to unimaginably greater economic and social equality, in the first stage of which the pioneer modernizers became very rich while the rest of what was still a backward and impoverished society lagged behind. To the Luddites, that inequality could be due only to feudal-like exploitation. In reality, it was rendering feudalism obsolete.

It’s easy to see a parallel today, when figures like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos have amassed their billions not by inheriting latifundia but by selling people products that make their lives more comfortable and convenient.

That leads to a persuasive analogy, which I am hardly the first to notice, between the 19th Century “birth of the modern” and the 21st Century stirrings of the post-modern: innovative technologies, entrepreneurs of sometimes unscrupulous character, fortunes dispersed in good living or good works, vigorous rocking of ideological cradles.

And there’s one conspicuous difference. The moguls of two centuries ago, like those of today, strove for political influence. They didn’t all share the same politics, but the great majority promoted policies that made it easier to make money through commerce and industry and resisted policies that “promised abundance for all/ By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul”.

In the 21st Century, the moguls again aren’t unanimous, but most of them, including the most innovative, now back candidates and positions that are inimical to their economic interests. They are the Peters who will be taxed and regulated to enable multitudes of Pauls to live in modest, unchallenging, collective ease.

I’m not going to enter the contention to explain this phenomenon. Jeff Bezos and I are so many degrees of separation apart that you would need a new trigonometry to count them. (But I was a first week Amazon customer, so he’s partly my fault.) What I will offer is a quotation from a history book yet to be written. The author knows our era only from its records, so it’s natural for him to see intention behind accident. I quote:

The Cognitive Elite had no reason to fear socialism. Globalization meant that enterprise on their scale had become invulnerable to the vagaries of national governments. “But when they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another.” Material progress bounded over the speed bumps that governments placed in its path. Those who did the most to accelerate that progress, and who benefited most blatantly from it, were undeterred from associating with public figures who wanted to tear down all that the Elite had built, but couldn’t, and who otherwise agreed with the Elite’s rejection of archaic restraints on individual volition. The reactionaries who advocated laissez faire also pitched self-restraint, modesty, fidelity and other encumbrances to doing what one willed. The Elite were happy that there was no need to collude with them.

Will the society thus portrayed flourish or disintegrate? We will have to leave it to the Future to find out.