A Committed Writer

"The citizen is lost in the labyrinth constructed by his country, ... It was not enough. It will not be enough. Sometimes you do need the master’s tools to dismantle his house." (As Doris Lessing wrote [NYT], "There is a Communist jargon recognizable after a single sentence. ... Powerful ideas affecting our behavior can be visible only in brief sentences, even a phrase — a catch phrase.") 

Concerning a national magazine's resort to such revolutionary rhetoric, conservative Rod Dreher wrote:

Then TNC goes on to draw some sort of black nationalist lesson from his summer at French camp, culminating in this line: “Sometimes you do need the master’s tools to dismantle his house.” OK. Whatever. Reparations scholarships to Middlebury for all!

I snark, but honestly, the idea that the enormous privilege of spending a summer studying a foreign language at a verdant Vermont college should conclude with a resolution to become even more of a militant race man is depressing. Exactly whose house will TNC be burning down as a result of the tools he acquired this summer at Middlebury? François Hollande’s? I don’t get it.

Earlier, a fellow contributor to The Atlantic, struggling to decode TNC's rhetoric, thought his crusade was an appeal to to the good will of his fellow American citizens:

The real importance of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Reparations article, which is still attracting deserved attention, is that it is not mainly about repayment in a literal, financial sense. Instead, as I understand it, it’s about a larger historical reckoning or awareness. “Truth and reconciliation,” you might call it. (Emphasis added.)

Yet TNC had already delivered a sweeping indictment of the very people to whom he was appealing: 

The crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people . . . (Emphasis added)

These articles in The Atlantic are being given a lot of slack because they play the race card. Part of our bargain with ourselves as citizens of a society which supports equality and tolerance is to subject criticism of certain subjects to heightened scrutiny. But doing so can impede reasonable debate, as in the related case:

American Jewish liberals have been intimidated or censored themselves into silence, which has only made matters worse. The reason is the need to somehow credentialize yourself as “pro-Israel”, and any criticism is immediately interpreted as being “anti-Israel”. That’s essentially a loyalty test that impedes reasonable debate – and is designed to.

I don't know if an article series which includes phrases like “Sometimes you do need the master’s tools to dismantle his house” and “A crime that implicates the entire American people” is Communist jargon, but it crosses a line which responsible journalism should not cross (Ref. The Opinions in this Article are those of the Author and Do Not Necessarily Reflect the Opinion of The Atlantic or Its Staff).

As we saw above, a veteran journalist seemed to find it necessary to put words in TNC's mouth in order to put a positive slant on his rhetoric. Previous articles on this weblog have critiqued The Atlantic's series' "mishmash logic and language of innuendo and false equivalence." Lincoln, speaking of the advocates of slavery themselves, noted a similar rhetoric which lowers the level of public discourse:

Accordingly, they commenced by an insidious debauching of the public mind. They invented an ingenious sophism which, if conceded, was followed by perfectly logical steps, through all the incidents, to the complete destruction of the Union.

The sophism of The Atlantic's articles, correspondingly, is their implied proposition that everyone in America now—right now—is culpably burdened by antebellum slavery: “A crime that implicates the entire American people.” Blamed not only for their ancestors, but their descendants: “An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.”

“To think clearly,” said Orwell, “is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.”

“The first point: language.” Lessing explained:

It is not a new thought that Communism debased language and, with language, thought. There is a Communist jargon recognizable after a single sentence. ... the pedantries and verbosity of Communism had their roots in German academia. And now that has become a kind of mildew blighting the whole world. ... Powerful ideas affecting our behavior can be visible only in brief sentences, even a phrase — a catch phrase. All writers are asked this question by interviewers: “Do you think a writer should...?” “Ought writers to...?” The question always has to do with a political stance, and note that the assumption behind the words is that all writers should do the same thing, whatever it is. The phrases “Should a writer...?” “Ought writers to...?” have a long history that seems unknown to the people who so casually use them. Another is “commitment,” so much in vogue not long ago. Is so and so a committed writer? 

A successor to “commitment” is “raising consciousness.” This is double-edged. The people whose consciousness is being raised may be given information they most desperately lack and need, may be given moral support they need. But the process nearly always means that the pupil gets only the propaganda the instructor approves of. “Raising consciousness,” like “commitment,” like “political correctness,” is a continuation of that old bully, the party line. (Emphasis added)

“But the process nearly always means that the pupil gets only the propaganda the instructor approves of.” Previous blog posts have noted that Lincoln in numerous speeches and writings decisively refuted many of the derogatory assertions in The Atlantic's Reparations series (here, here and here, among others.) The Atlantic mentions none of them.

The method is dishonesty and the purpose is deception.