The Long View 2008-05-31: Spelling Reform in the WSJ; The Socratic Struggle Session
John J. Reilly’s 2008 account of diversity training as a struggle session is a classic. He quickly intuited that the objective was mostly to provide legal and rhetorical cover in exchange for some time and money, a strange tax on business.
A final point: Traditional autocracies were concerned with obedience; they actually rather discouraged the participation of their subjects in public life. The totalitarian innovation was to require that the regime's subjects be complicit. That was the point of elections in the old USSR. The outcome was never in doubt, but everyone was made to vote. It was also the point of struggle sessions, which existed in one form or another under every totalitarian regime. America is by no means governed by a totalitarian regime, nor will it be while this saeculum lasts. Still, the Socratic Struggle Session is the American contribution to the totalitarian tradition.
In the decade since, some businesses have gone even further, adopting the political issues of the day as a way to preserve their economic and even political power, Woke Capitalism. I doubt John would have been surprised.
Spelling Reform in the WSJ; The Socratic Struggle Session
Spelling reform in English is no longer quite as obscure a topic as it used to be, but it is not so widely discussed as to be an over-reported news beat. Therefore, in my capacity as a board member of the American Literacy Council (ALC), which has been conspiring for the last century with the Spelling Society of London to bring about the New Orthographic Order throughout the Anglosphere, I was pleased to see this piece on the front page of yesterday's Wall Street Journal:
National Spelling Bee Brings Out Protesters Who R Thru With Through Rewriting the P's and Q's Is Quest Of Group That Prefers Phonetics By REBECCA DANA
The news-hook here was the Scripps National Spelling Bee, which ended yesterday (winning word: guerdon). Actually, this year, the ALC did not send "protesters," but in prior years the ALC and the Spelling Society did send delegations of retired teachers, and ALC members with their own kids, all of whom were very supportive of the Bee participants.
Ms. Dana has written about spelling reform before, and not altogether unsympathetically, though she herself is lukewarm to the idea. Readers are advised to consult the article for the Pros; here I quote the Cons:
Modern critics find a number of faults with the theory of spelling reform. Some consider English spelling beautiful because each word reflects its own evolutionary history. Others argue the idea of phonetic spelling fails to take dialect into account, since pronunciation varies widely from one English-speaking place to another. Finally, the spelling-reform movement has never been able to settle on a single simplification scheme.
The first two points have been asked and answered many times. Regarding the first, the etymological argument: the writing systems of all European languages pay attention to etymology, but you can usually pick up the spelling system in the course of an afternoon. In reality, English spelling preserves etymologies no more reliably than it expresses pronunciation. As to the dialect objection: orthographies usually compromise among regional pronunciations, so that every spelling produces a pronunciation that will be recognized everywhere, even if the word is not pronounced that way everywhere. As for the third point, though, she's quite right. She quotes this as a sample of "reformed spelling":
A fyoo duhzen ambishuhss intelectchooals, a handful ov British skool teechers and wuhn rokit siuhntist ar triing to chang the way we spel.
Yes, there are reform proposals that really are that clueless, and they are defended by their proponents with bug-eyed intensity. My own commendably moderate thoughts on these matter are here
* * *
Meanwhile, this week I attended an ideological struggle session. In China in the 1960s, these tended to end with the lynching of whoever seemed most insufficiently anti-Confucian that afternoon, but such things do not happen in America today; and of course we don't call them struggle sessions. We call them diversity training.
To be fair, my new company has to require its employees to take part in this training. The company will be sued by somebody, sometime, who alleges a hostile work environment or some other form of discrimination. Diversity training sessions provide the defense that the company did what it could; therefore, any untoward behavior was committed by one or more rogue employees who were acting against their instructions.
The costs of the ideology imparted by these sessions go beyond the fees paid to the consulting firms that conduct the sessions, however. The chief lesson I took away from experience is that the cost of diversity is silence.
The session was not a lecture. Each of the dozen participants was given one or more hypothetical situations to analyze, and the analysis was then critiqued by the group as a whole. This is more or less what happens in law school in courses taught by the "Socratic Method." The difference in this case was that there was only one right answer. If the discussion seemed to be taking a different turn, the moderator quickly pushed the discussion back into line.
None of this was abusive, and in fact the session was fun. The annoying part was that we kept being told that the rules which we were being forced to deduce were "the right thing" and not, as was sometimes obviously the case, a kind of weird tax on business. Even if a supervisor could plainly see that an employee could not handle a promotion because of physical or familial obligations, we were told, the employee still had to be offered it. The remedy, we were assured, was that the employee would fail and could be removed. This is insane on its face, but it is arguably the law. In effect, relying on one's own experience has been designated a tort.
And then there was the political-speech hypothetical. The example we were given was of a discussion in the workplace between two employees that was critical of gay marriage. Since there might be homosexuals in the same environment who might be offended by such a discussion, and since homosexuals are a protected group, such discussions were therefore forbidden.
In a law school, even the dimmest class would have spun out terrifying variations on that principle. Suppose there were employees who supported the Free Tibet movement and discussed it in the workplace, to the consternation of a Chinese national who worked two cubicles away and found such talk anti-Chinese? Suppose some employees routinely expressed support for Israel, but Muslims in the same office held that view to be anti-Palestinian? The only real solution to the problem would be to forbid all political discussion in the workplace. This would be a very awkward rule for a news company.
A final point: Traditional autocracies were concerned with obedience; they actually rather discouraged the participation of their subjects in public life. The totalitarian innovation was to require that the regime's subjects be complicit. That was the point of elections in the old USSR. The outcome was never in doubt, but everyone was made to vote. It was also the point of struggle sessions, which existed in one form or another under every totalitarian regime. America is by no means governed by a totalitarian regime, nor will it be while this saeculum lasts. Still, the Socratic Struggle Session is the American contribution to the totalitarian tradition.
Copyright © 2008 by John J. Reilly
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