Double Happiness

by Joe Bennett

  Yet the leader of the opposition Labour Party, David Shearer, has recently stated that, under the current government the number of children living in poverty has increased. Citing figures from the children’s commissioner, he asserts that one in five of our kids is now living in poverty. It’s a nasty charge, and one likely to enhance the perception that the right wing cares only for its rich mates while allowing the runt end of the population to slide into penury. And if true, it’s a legitimate point to raise.

  But it depends on how one defines poverty. And it transpires that poverty is now defined as living in a household with an income less than 60 per cent of the median wage. In other words, poverty is no longer the absolute term of Dickensian misery. It has become a relative term.

  I don’t doubt that Mr Shearer’s heart is in the right place, nor do I doubt that it is no fun living off less than 60 per cent of the median income, but nevertheless Mr Shearer is equivocating. He is exploiting the emotive connotations attached to our conventional definition or sense of poverty, while defining it rather differently.

  Using this definition, more children may indeed have sunk into poverty under the current government but it does not necessarily mean that they have become poorer. It could also mean that everyone in the country has got richer, including the poor, but that the rich have got richer at a greater rate than the poor have got richer. The poor could still have more money than they had before.

  The definition also means that poverty is effectively impossible to eradicate. So if New Zealand discovered vast amounts of mineral wealth and the proceeds were shared around so generously that the median income became $1 million, poverty would still be with us. It would apply to every family earning less than $600,000.

  Three days after an earthquake ruined the Christchurch cathedral and many another church in the city, Peter Beck, the cathedral’s dean, announced that the quake was not an act of god, that the ‘earth was doing what the earth does’. In saying so, Mr Beck was following in a long tradition of ecclesiastical equivocation.

  The problem for the clerics has always been how to square the existence of suffering with the existence of a loving creator. It appears to be a contradiction. God loves us and cares for us and he is all powerful. Yet bad things happen to us. The reason it appears contradictory is that it is contradictory. And when two statements contradict each other, one of them must be wrong. Now, there is no disputing that bad things happen to us. Therefore there has to be something false in the notion of an all-powerful god who loves us. Maybe he doesn’t love us. Maybe he isn’t all powerful. Maybe he isn’t there.

  But if your life’s work is promoting a loving and all-powerful god, none of these conclusions is acceptable. So you have no choice but to equivocate, as Dean Beck did. He can’t have it both ways. If god, as it says in the Apostles’ Creed, is the maker of the earth, he has the same relationship to it as Fisher & Paykel do to my washing machine. If it malfunctions it’s his fault.

  A common defence of god is to invoke mystery. God is transcendent and supreme and faultless. We are muddy little earthlings with tiny hopeless brains. It is presumptuous of us even to try to describe his wonder or guess at his purposes. He ‘surpasseth all understanding’. So there’s an end to your cheeky questions.

  God under this definition is beyond definition. He is a remote thingummy about whom we can know or say nothing. He works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform, ways that are unfathomable to us. He is ineffable, which means that he is beyond our capacity to define him in words. All of which is fair enough so long as you stop there. But I’ve never met a theologian who does stop there. They all without exception go on to describe him in words. They tell you, again without exception, that he is good, and loving, and so on. How do they know? If he is beyond our comprehension he is beyond our comprehension. We cannot know or say anything about him. We cannot know that he is good. He could as easily be bad, or capricious, or forgetful, or a bookcase. We just don’t know.

  The clerics are seesawing between definitions of a word to suit their purposes. They are equivocating. It is bullshit.

  23

  Another word for it

  The euphemism is as old as language. It originated, I suspect, in superstition. Because it was taboo, or just plain dangerous, to mention gods by name, you substituted some saccharine alternative. The Greeks, for example, referred to the Furies, who were grim avenging female deities, as the Eumenides, or Kindly Ones. The exclamation gosh evolved in a similar way, as did darn it, dang it and blimey.

  The most fertile field for euphemism is the political one, and especially when politics gets serious and becomes war. War is messy, bloody and horrible, and unlikely to make leaders popular. So it is understandable that they veil the bad stuff with verbal gauze. The ill-aimed ordnance that blows your own troops to bits becomes friendly fire. The US involvement in the Libyan civil war of 2011 became limited kinetic action. Dead civilians are collateral damage. And holding people under water till they believe they will drown is an enhanced interrogation technique.

  Orwell in 1984 famously highlighted the political euphemism. The Secret Police worked for the Ministry of Love. Anything placed in the memory hole went to permanent oblivion. The parodies were founded on a deliberate and absolute inversion of reality. Yet Orwell was barely exaggerating. The newspaper that pumped out the party line for the tyrants of the Soviet Union was called Pravda, meaning truth.

  Corporations also like to slap on the linguistic make-up. They rarely sack people, but they often downsize, or streamline operations, or rationalize or find synergies going forward. Those who announce the downsizing via a media release are never propagandists. They belong to the communications team or the public relations department.

  Yet the curious truth about euphemisms is that if they work at all they don’t do so for long. Consider toilet. Like water closet, or its abbreviation WC, or convenience, or cloakroom (shall we count the cloaks?), or restroom (zzzzz), or comfort room (!), or lavatory, which means washroom, or washroom, or bathroom, it came into being as a way of shying round the nasty truth that we defecate and urinate (and even those latinisms are euphemisms in their way, a form of pseudo-medical distancing). Yet toilet has gradually made the transition from prissy metaphor to direct referent, has come to mean exactly what it was designed to avoid saying, and is now soiled by association. The same is true of all the others. So that today, for example, if an American child tells his mother that he has just been to the bathroom in his pants, Mom knows immediately that the problem is not that he went to the bathroom but that he didn’t.

  The same thing happens with political and military euphemisms. To execute, in the sense of judicial killing, was once a euphemism. A death warrant was issued and it was the warrant that was executed. But the stark truth of the death could not be smothered. And now the word execute means exactly what it was adopted in order to avoid saying.

  In post-Christian Western countries today it is easier to be openly homosexual than at any time or place in history except perhaps ancient Athens. The change has happened quickly. It is easy to forget that homosexuality was decriminalized in Great Britain only in 1968 and in New Zealand as recently as 1986. There remains plenty of hatred but it is shrinking by the year.

  The campaign that has made things better began when I was at school. One of its first measures to counter prejudice was to hijack the word gay. This made the use of the word in its established sense effectively impossible. It also rendered many a literary text unteachable. Gay had connotations of cheerful nonchalance, which was of course why it was chosen. The idea was for those positive connotations to settle, like a sprinkle of fairy dust, over the notion of homosexuality. So when people were confronted with homosexuality they would see it as, well, gay.

  In one way the ruse worked. Every English speaker now knows that gay means homosexual. But the rest hasn’t happened. The original connotations have floated away like that same fairy dust. The connotations borne by the word today mer
ely reflect the attitude of the person using it. So if the speaker is sympathetic to homosexuality he is likely to find the word at worst neutral. But walk into any school playground, and despite decades of sex education and tolerance promotion, you will find that gay is the condemnatory adjective of choice. Anything from a video game to the most virile PE teacher can be just so gay. The revolution has succeeded but the euphemism has failed.

  The reason is simple. Words reflect the world. Though constantly and wilfully misused, their eventual tendency is towards the truth. And the truth is that homosexual people are no gayer, i.e. no more nonchalantly cheerful, than any other people. Being homosexual doesn’t stop you being misanthropic or splenetic or just plain gloomy. In other words, gays aren’t necessarily gay.

  So if we agree, as we have, that gay means homosexual, it has to stop meaning cheerful. And if people remain wary of homosexuality, as some do, then gay is going to have negative connotations. Changing the word doesn’t change the thing.

  I taught at a school where the English department developed an alternative course for the bottom stream. The head of department, tongue partially in cheek, chose to call the course Limpid Writing. It was a good school and a good course and everyone was happy, including the kids. They were under no illusions about the stream they belonged to. Kids never are. But they were pleased to have a new and distinct identity. They didn’t do English: they did Limpid Writing. It said so on the official timetable.

  The one trouble was that they were unfamiliar with the word limpid. But they were familiar with the word limpet. So that’s the word they used. They referred to the course as limpet writing. The name caught on. In due course the kids took to referring to themselves, cheerfully and quite without irony, as limpets. And everyone else, including the staff, followed their lead.

  A limpet is an unimaginative beast. Its idea of intellectual life is to seize a rock and hang on. In other words, limpet is precisely the sort of label that anyone naming a bottom stream would recoil from. The kids remained the bottom stream, of course. And the connotations of bottom stream were transferred in their entirety to the new word limpet, and everything carried on exactly as before. It still makes me smile.

  24

  Dressing up

  Reason is the enemy of bullshit. So bullshit needs to numb reason. One way to do so is to dress up to look like reason.

  Here’s the text of a television advertisement (though the punctuation is a guess. There is no way to tell from the soothing masculine voice-over where a full stop might come because the words emerge as a warm and unstoppable gush, like velvet vomit. If you are feeling strong you can watch the thing at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-p4azo6aoQ):

  Life starts with tears, but that’s okay because that’s life, so dry those eyes because you don’t want to miss a single second of the joy and frustration and passion to come, the second you decide to stay, to go, to call her back, because we love to talk, we need to talk, it’s not you it’s me but it’s not me it’s us and we’re all right here beside you, so whether … it looks like love or it looks like rain, smile, because life starts with tears but that’s okay, that’s life, and now you won’t miss a single second of it, experience it all on the Smartphone Network.

  The text, naturally, is accompanied by images and you can guess their nature — a soft-lit maternity ward, a love-torn woman, a dithering hunk, a smiling taxi-driver, a weeping girl getting into a taxi, sympathetic friends cheering her up, bright umbrellas blooming in the rain, soft-focus images of pretty countryside, Grandpa in a rocking chair smiling at his cell phone.

  The distinctive feature of the text is the causal conjunctions ‘so’ and ‘because’. They suggest consecutive thought, the sort of thought that has raised the human being from the swamp of primitivism onto the savannah of enlightenment. But there is no consecutive thought here.

  Why is it okay that life starts with tears? Because ‘that’s life’. It’s an intriguing thesis. Whatever happens in this world is okay because it is what happens in this world. Here’s the identical reasoning: ‘My sister has just been raped by Libyan mercenaries, but that’s okay, because that’s life.’

  It’s a circular argument. It begs the question. The reason it gives for everything being okay is that everything is okay. But it looks sufficiently like an argument to have the vague air of wisdom. It also supplies the first ostensible reason for us to ‘dry those eyes’. A second reason is that we ‘don’t want to miss a single second of the joy and frustration and passion to come’.

  Well, call me an oddball, but I’d quite like to miss any frustration that’s coming my way. (And one head-boiling form of frustration that I could very happily do without is that which surges within me every time I ring Telecom. They have an automated reply system that pretends not to be automated. ‘Right,’ says a recorded female voice, ‘let’s see if I can help you. Tell me what you are calling about. You can say things like …’ What infuriates me is not just the jaunty tone, nor yet the irrelevance of the questions that the voice biffs at me, nor even the way those questions are designed to discover whether I want to buy some new service in which case I shall be passed instantaneously to a salesperson, but rather the belittling implication that I might fall for it, that I might believe I am talking to an actual sentient human being. It’s the implicit contempt that enrages me. Though I have discovered that if you swear viciously at it the system rapidly gives up and passes you on.)

  Because appears four times in this ad. But not once does it explain a cause. It just applies a veneer of apparent reasoning to emotive pap. The text combines with the images and the music to solicit a soft and uncritical emotional response, at the end of which we are primed to accept the remarkable instruction to ‘experience it all on the Smartphone Network’. How is not made clear.

  On YouTube several viewers have written comments on the ad. MegaBrittaney calls it ‘inspiring’. Skydive Sabotage ‘loves’ it. And theharrymclean says ‘it is the best telco ad ever’. Sometimes the condemned step cheerfully into the noose and even manage a kind word for the hangman.

  The appearance of reasoning is a staple of commercial promotion.

  ‘New Zealand’s favourite fruit,’ says a well-known former All Black in another television ad, ‘and New Zealand’s favourite sport.’ He then interlocks his enormous hands in the form of a scrum and observes, ‘It’s a perfect match.’ He’s plugging bananas. The particular ones he’s paid to plug are sold by a vast Californian corporation. The repetition of favourite implies a link between the fruit and rugby. But the link is spurious, as can be illustrated by replacing the word sport with tampon. The form of the apparent reasoning remains unchanged.

  Complete the following sentence: ‘If you love life, you’ll love …’ Our outdoor furniture? This mascara? Bali? The indulgence of a hot-rock, healing-crystal and Ganges river-mud therapeutic massage? All wrong, as it happens, but the point is that all are plausible.

  The conditional clause ‘if you love life’ is designed to generate a yelp of assent. And hoping to piggyback on that yelp is what the bullshitter is trying to foist on his victim. The two clauses are related only grammatically. But what is implied is a logical sequence, if x then y. Such sequences are basic to our understanding of the world. They clarify things. This ad seeks to resemble such a logical sequence while doing the precise opposite. It aims to delude by establishing an unjustified and illogical connection. The thing you will supposedly love, as it happens, is a variety of frozen dessert.

  The application of reason leads to science. Science means simply knowledge. We enjoy what it brings into existence but to most of us the science itself is a mystery. We have no idea how drugs work, or televisions, or the electronic mousetrap that sends us a text when it is triggered, but we’re grateful for these things and impressed by them. So one of the oldest devices of bullshit is to suggest scienciness.

  New Mineral Power healthy perfecting blush by Maybelline offers ‘micro-mineral mica’ which ‘amplifies lu
minosity’. The vocabulary here is sciency rather than scientific. Mica is indeed a mineral. The micro means only that it’s ground up small. I’m not sure that it is possible to amplify luminosity, but both words have the ring of the lab to them.

  ‘New Mineral Power powder foundation is dermo-clinically proven to improve your skin.’ These improvements include ‘50% improvement in luminosity, 40% better skin clarity, 39% reduction in redness’. We are to ‘Discover the goodness of micro-minerals in a foundation’. These micro-minerals are ‘triple-refined’.

  This is pseudo-science. It is carefully pitched to impress while staying on the windy side of the law. ‘Skin clarity’ is not defined, nor how to measure it. But the precision of 40 per cent and the phrase ‘clinically proven’ combine to suggest the reassurance of test tubes and bearded boffins in lab coats. They may not be glamorous but they know their stuff.

  The whole is a backhanded compliment to the scientific method. It acknowledges that science does good reliable stuff. At the same time it’s an implicit insult to its readers, whom it assumes will not know the difference between actual science and the appearance of science, who will be impressed merely by the sound of triple-refined micro-minerals and some unverifiable stats. Falsehood nicking truth’s clothes once more.

  25

  Beat it down, in the name of the father

  Reason,’ said Martin Luther, about 500 years ago, ‘is the greatest enemy of faith.’ He was right. So the church that was founded in his name still does its best to wallop reason on the head, and the key to walloping is to get in early. Here’s part of the Lutheran sacrament of baptism.