For my next trick, I’d like to indulge in a linguistic conceit of sorts. I’d like to use the current political nightmare to speculate about a matter of grammar, of all things, that has long intrigued me:
Namely, why do so many languages codify the conditional mood — also known as the conditional tense — in their grammar? Why do we use ‘should,’ ‘could,’ and especially ‘would,’ in so much of our speech?
Why do we hedge our conversations this way? Why is it more acceptable to say “I would like a cup of coffee” than “Give me a cup of coffee.” Why is one deferential and the other pushy? Why has history passed down this polite form to multiple language groups, in such a similar way? Why is it bad form to use “I want” in a non-confrontational situation? And why does the MAGA crowd insist on such bad form?
I have a speculative answer to these questions, but first let me cavalierly divide the world into two groups of people: Decents and Deplorables.
Goods and Bads would serve just as well, but it’s quite trendy to have adjectives performing as nouns these days. Plus, I like the Hillary reference.
So Decents and Deplorables it is — two words that are highly descriptive in the context of this blog, to the point where I don’t even need to define them. My readers know exactly who — and what — I’m talking about.
The world has always been loosely split between Decents and Deplorables. The Decents have mostly outnumbered the Deplorables, but the Deplorables have ways of making up the difference, generally through corruption, subterfuge, and violence. This is nothing new. And given what we’re now going through, we no longer need to pretend that mankind has put its worst tendencies behind it.
It’s not clear how Deplorables get to be deplorable — both nature and nurture are involved — but it’s clear they’ve always been there, running with the many conquerors throughout history, always on the lookout for rape, pillage, plunder, and insider trading. From the Huns to the Vandals, from the Gestapo to the KGB, from the Wagner Group to the Proud Boys, the Deplorables do get their moments in the sun, which they use to spread their darkness far and wide.
It gets even darker if you buy into the idea, as I do, that history is largely written by the winners. Think about all the atrocities this country has papered over in a mere 250 years — Black enslavement, indigenous genocides, Japanese internment camps, My Lai-type massacres — yet we’ve always thought of ourselves as the Decents. The line between decent and deplorable is fuzzier than we think.
And always has been. Our ancestors’ ancestors’ ancestors’ were apes who had somehow been shaken from their trees. We were forced to live on the ground, where we were no match for the lions, leopards, and assorted predatory types who were stronger, faster, and had sharper teeth.
To compensate, we were forced by evolution to grow and develop our brains, clearly an incomplete process when you consider Trump voters. But we were able to leverage that additional brainpower in novel ways.
We learned how to cooperate with other humans, so we could hunt in teams, a real breakthrough at the time. Going one-on-one with a lion is, even now, a losing strategy, but going ten-on-one improves the odds dramatically. Especially when you add in weapons, the original disruptive technology. Lions don’t do weapons.
So between the weapons and the cooperation, the oddsmakers started moving away from the lions. There was, however, a definite downside to the weapons thing. Because once we could throw rocks and swing clubs, it was but a short step from killing animals to killing humans.
This was long before the ‘Love thy Neighbor’ meme caught on — mostly with the Decents — back when you were more likely to bash your neighbor’s head in. If your neighbor had something you wanted, like a horse or a daughter, head-bashing was thought a legitimate recourse.
The Decents, not surprisingly, grew to question this behavior. They wanted to cooperate. They wanted to band together, to get a leg up on the lions and leopards. This led, over a hundred-thousand-or-so years, to the development of agriculture and the division of labor, which led to social contracts, laws, education, and bigger, deadlier weapons. We now call this civilization.
The Deplorables, on the other hand, wanted everything to be about them, and they were happy to bash any unlucky heads that got in their way. If cooperation could get them closer to their goals, they might play along with the Decents, but they can’t be trusted with the common good.
The dirty secret here is that Decents and Deplorables need each other. Sometimes the Decents need defending, which comes far more naturally to Deplorables. Deplorables, on the other hand, need the Decents to keep food in their mouths, gas in their tanks, and their grandmothers on Medicare, which they could never make happen on their own.
So for the most part, we coexist, in some times more easily than others. But encounters between the two groups have always been fraught. To this day, whenever we meet a stranger, we can’t automatically tell a Decent from a Deplorable. Decents can do deplorable things. Deplorables are capable of occasional decency. You never know when a Trumpy might return your lost dog.
Which is, finally, where the conditional mood comes in.
When we say “I would like,” instead of “I want” or “Give me,” we soften the tone and lower the temperature. We change the “mood” of the room, so a peaceful exchange can now take place. It’s part of a code we humans developed, over eons, to deal with inter-personal tension. It's also part of the origin story of manners.
Because it’s manners — those simple ritual politenesses of daily life — that sand down the rough edges of human transaction. And it’s manners that separate the Decents from the Deplorables. Always have, always will.
There is little doubt that the Deplorables are running the show at the moment — something history tells us never ends well — and their manners, or lack of them, are a leading indicator of their deplorability.
This is particularly evident in the coarseness of their language, in the open aggression of sentences that begin “We want this…” or “We demand this…” as opposed to “We would like to discuss this…”
They are not subtle. Listen to how they avoid the conditional mood. Listen to the sneering belligerence of a Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, Pam Bondi, Karoline Leavitt, Tom Homan and the other Deplorables — not to mention the stream-of-consciousness verbal diarrhea of Trump himself.
And watch how the bullying tone they take shuts down all negotiation, and threatens to shut down all commerce. Their intractability — their my-way-or-the-highway attitude — is all head-bashing, no cooperating. They serve nothing but anarchy.
This dichotomy doesn't stand up to scrutiny. I have "Trumpy" friends who are some of the kindest, most thoughtful people I know. I know some Decents who are absolute jerks.
ReplyDeleteEmotional maturity (empathy, humility, and kindness) have little to do with political views. The deceivers (left and right) in politics are their own breed and almost all of them are playing a game that we didn't elect them for.
Actually it does; maga folks can be seemingly decent on the surface, but vote for eliminating due process, ignoring threat of climate disaster and whole host of disastrous policies in their name, their silent acquiescence is a testament to their underlying lack of character
DeleteI don't think anyone voted to eliminate due process. Maybe that is happening, but it wasn't a campaign platform for anyone. As for climate disaster, there are a lot of people on the left who turn a blind eye to the lack of good data around how the green energy industry fairs with regard to the net benefits. Lithium mining is incredibly destructive to the environment. Many green products have a large carbon footprint that nobody on the left wants to talk about.
DeleteIt's not that most people on the right don't believe climate change is a thing, they just aren't all convinced that the way we're trying to solve the problem stands up to scrutiny.
Again, each side holds beliefs that are wrong and right. Villifying one set of beliefs wholesale without being critical of each one, leaves us in the bifricated state in which our government fails to solve any problems effectively.
Even if people are wrong, calling them evil is unproductive.
Are you kidding? Where do you see anyone on the right talking about climate change at all, let alone with any interest in solving it? You can argue that there are various ways to address climate issues, but you can't argue that only one side is even trying, let alone acknowledging their existence. You also talk of "campaign platforms" as if the GOP has had one, beyond blind obedience to the Fuhrer. As for a "set of beliefs," what exactly would those be among your MAGA friends? Rendition of immigrants? Destroying science and healthcare? Eviscerating the federal government? Tanking the economy? Your continued willingness to excuse Republicans for inexcusable behavior is painting you into a corner.
DeleteWhile I don't share their views, if any of them were here, they would tell you that this country was founded on rugged individualism and that we have become a nanny state in which the government tells us what is right and wrong and takes care of everything for us.
DeleteThey would say we should leave it to churches and charities to take care of the poor and that people can use funds recovered from lower tax rates to pay for the things they support, such as research.
They would also say that publicly funded universities shouldn't be in bed with big pharma (they get huge transfer fees when they hand a drug off to for-profit companies).
Some of them buy into false narratives from Fox news and their political leaders that the Left is coming for their guns and that the country is being overrun by imported illegal criminals. I contend that liberals are guilty of their own false narratives. What are the odds that everything liberals say is 100% accurate and objective, and everything the Right says is a BS lie?
Granted, the Right seems to be far more corrupt than the Left (or maybe they're just not as good at hiding it), so they support corporations that help them get elected. (What a different place the world would be if only we had all publicly financed elections.)
You're bending over backwards defending the indefensible. You can't possibly believe there's an equivalence between Fox News — "all lies all the time" — and anything on the Left. Granted, liberals are not "100% accurate and objective," but do you really weigh the issues based on that? On the other hand, I'd say the odds are beyond excellent that "everything the Right says is a BS lie." I invite you to come up with even a single example of a Republican official, officeholder, or candidate making a public statement about anything that isn't fact-free, deliberately misleading, and/or steeped in bad faith. As for the "views" that you don't share, those are canned talking points from your father's Republican Party. Nobody on today's Right has the brainpower to even formulate such thoughts, let alone believe them.
DeleteThe “rugged individualism” of the right is a myth, as are the welfare ranchers in the western states that could not survive without federal subsidies. The abject idiocy of the right is perfectly encapsulated by a bumper sticker I saw in Grand Teton NP “Smoke a pack a day” with a bullseye over wolves; oblivious to the fact that with tourist dollars, they’d be starving. Likewise with “churches doing welfare”?! How’d that work out before FDR, when we were arguably a more church going populace? Elderly poverty rates were sky high. I work with a lot of magats, and the common thread is cult like devotion to the party lime, a rejection of empirical reality, and a Pavlovian rejection of anything that challenges their worldview. A cult of stupidity
DeleteHaving never been a cattle rancher, neither of us know what it's like discovering the mangled bodies of multiple head laying on the ground as your thin profits disappear in a puff of canine dinner.
DeleteMy “beef” with western ranchers has to do with subsidies for them on public lands, I prefer that my tax dollars support other things. In addition, there are private groups like Defenders of Wildlife who will pay ranchers for any proven losses due to wolf/bear predation (not that these fine gents would ever try to scam…). Note also that the cattle they’re trying to raise in the west are not native, and funny how the native bovines (bison) don’t suffer excessive losses from wolves or bears, having co evolved with them. Bison tastes much better & has less fat also. Don’t get me started on subsidized login roads & old growth forests…
DeleteYou're right, it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. It isn't meant to. I like to think of it as an "amuse-bouche," a palate-cleanser -- a small break from watching vile people being vile. I might get more serious next week.
ReplyDeleteRussia has been deplorable for a thousand years. Why did their culture go to the dark side?
ReplyDelete