Connect Eddie HoltIn March 2004 New Internationalist magazine reported on the history of the 18th- and 19th-century European-US slave trade. Adam Hochschild quoted a British advocate of slavery as writing in 1789: "The vulgar are influenced by names and titles . . . Instead of slaves, let the negroes be called assistant planters and we shall not then hear such violent outcries against the slave trade."
Assistant planters? Slaves who were "owned", regularly shot or whipped, had no rights or got no pay were proposed as "assistant planters"! It's tempting to think of "spin" as a 20th- and 21st-century activity. It has, after all, become a huge business. However, it's been used not just for centuries but millenniums. Indeed, throughout history, power has invariably distorted language to mask the truth.
Consider some of the gross management guff of today. The "assistant planters" of earlier times might now be described as "potential stakeholders in the global economy participating in an outsourced investment opportunity for sustainable development, currently moving towards a best-practice corporate code of conduct" or by some other equally absurd and meaningless blather. Among today's jargon there are "mission statements", "going forward", "rolling out", "thinking outside the box", "blue sky thinking", "mission-critical", "pushing the envelope", "human resources", "three-way street", "involuntary separation" and the rest. It may not help workers to talk about "involuntary separation" (redundancy, the sack, layoffs) but it probably makes managers feel better.
What of the change that saw personnel departments renamed as "human resources" departments? Do you consider yourself a "human resource"? After all, the term "resource" implies using, expediency, even exploitation. In one sense then you could argue that the term is more honest than the neutral but accurate "personnel", but its objectification of people is decidedly ugly. Or how about "human subjects"? The designation is used in ethics guidelines for researchers. But why are people not "people" instead of "human subjects"? Is there a variety of human subject that's not a person? At heart, contemporary guff seeks not just the objectification of people but aims for a vagueness (or euphemism) that literally means nothing, but politically means a great deal.
Next time you hear a politician mention a plan to "grow jobs" or "grow the bottom line" or "grow the business" remember (s)he is trying to make a political manoeuvre sound like a natural process. Grass grows, weeds grow, trees grow, vegetables grow, crops grow, fruit grows, even people, animals and insects grow - because they are alive. But jobs? Jobs don't grow and aren't grown.
Vagueness is, of course, useful for politicians or other people with or seeking power. It means they have to hold fewer convictions and can easily adopt another, presumably more politically useful, point of view. Contemporary jargon such as "enhance business performance" really means to "increase profits", but mention of money gives away the aim. Better to keep it as woolly as possible. The politics underlying all this vagueness - most of which are deliberate though some must be because of ignorance - means that, as a proportion of the population, increasingly few people vote. There's got to be a link between the facts that as spin doctors multiply exponentially, more and more people refuse to engage with politics. People come to know when they're being deceived.
In 2002, 62.7 per cent of the population voted; in 1997, it was 65.9 per cent. A similar slippage in the future would mean that less than 60 per cent of the electorate would vote next year. So, as the guff becomes more vague, irritating and idiotic, voters are deserting politics. Where formerly about three in four people voted in Irish general elections, we seem on the road to little more than one in two. There are, of course, reasons other than deliberately vague language for the fall in voter turnout at general elections. There's a perception that the Dáil is now little more than a junior management agency for global capital. There's cynicism at its posturing. There's apathy. But the political effects of the imprecise, woolly, nebulous language favoured by spinners is a reason too.
Jargon is used to make people feel part of a club. This is true in education, trades, professions and even in recreational areas of life. But Irish politicians, perhaps like the middle managers many of them aspire to be, repeatedly use jargon guaranteed to alienate voters. Why all this "going forward", "roll out" and "growing jobs" when formerly even children were censured for similar howlers? No doubt, such language has effects on those who use it (among ministers, Martin Cullen, Dick Roche and Mícheál Martin appear particularly vulnerable) as well as on those to whom it is addressed. Sure, there are arguably bigger questions than the relationship between the elegant arrangement of words and political power. But there are not many, and we ignore the disease at our peril.
So, next time you hear jargon, guff, blather or whatever, remember the "assistant planters". Remember too that managerial guff is to this age what the assembly line and the machine were to the industrial age. It's language as a kind of processing plant. It's dull, dreary and dead. How could you possibly vote for anybody who presumably knows better but insists on talking like that?