Every now and again a new phenomenon emerges in human communication or social behaviour which everyone recognises but none can name, because there is no term for it. There’s a sense that a word or phrase needs inventing. ‘Virtue signalling’ was one such development, and it came in the pages of The Spectator in 2015 from James Bartholomew. ‘Luxury beliefs’ is another, coined by Rob Henderson in the New York Post in 2019.
I watched Peter Kyle MP being interviewed recently by Wilfred Frost on Sky News about the Online Safety Act, and the name of Nigel Farage came up (quite a lot) because he had announced that he would repeal the act in order to protect freedom of expression. This, according to Kyle, put Farage firmly ‘on the side’ of Jimmy Savile. He was a supporter and facilitator of child sex abuse; an ally of paedophiles. Frost gave him a chance to reconsider, but no. End of discussion.
I remember, in another era, David Lammy being interviewed by Andrew Marr in the wake of EU Referendum, when he referred to members of the Conservative ERG (European Research Group) as ‘Nazis’. Somewhat taken aback, Marr gave him space to reconsider or retract the ‘Nazi’ slur, but Lammy doubled down, declaring that Tory members of the ERG were actually ‘worse’.
In both examples, the interviewer was nonplussed by the defamatory hyperbole, if not quite dumbstruck. They caused a moment of panic: ‘time to move on’, just as the ad hom deflection intended. The appeal to Jimmy Savile isn’t quite the new Hitler, but the effect is still for the target to be devalued, disliked, and excluded.
The phenomenon may also be observed in other terms. Try highlighting the over-representation of Pakistani-Muslim men in rape gangs (Islamophobe!); making a defence of marriage being between one man and one woman (homophobe!); insisting that trans-women should not be placed in women’s prisons (transphobe! Terf!).
We all recognise the strategy, but what is the term? I consulted the wisdom of X.
‘There’s probably a German word for it’, somebody quipped.
Verleumdungszuschweigen.
I can’t quite see that catching on.
It is argumentum ad hominem, but it is more. It is character shaming, but it isn’t always sufficiently false to constitute defamation: the antipathy may indeed be based on prejudice or an irrational fear, but it may also be attributed to sincerely-held religious, political or philosophical beliefs. ‘Gaslighting’? No, it is more precise than that. Reductio ad Hitlerum? No, that is (literally) Nazis. C.S. Lewis coined ‘Bulverism’, yet that isn’t quite the fit either because the strategy doesn’t target a person’s psychology but their whole character, if not their entire moral worldview.
It is a type of motive fallacy, but the attacker’s design is to disgrace the speaker or writer with an epithet so unpleasant that their speaking or writing must be shut down. The desire is to generate bitterness or hostility in the listener or reader by asserting a moral deficiency and triggering shame in the target. And this shame is supposed to induce anxiety, with an immediate desire to repudiate the threat against social acceptance for self-preservation.
It is, I suggest, ‘censory smearing’.
‘Censory’ is neither the censor nor the censoriousness: it is the sense of being censored. Thus ‘censory smearing’ is targeted vilification which is designed to ‘SHUT THIS DOWN’; the hyperbolic character smearing which has the effect of censoring.
It is, I suggest, ‘censory smearing’
Some people are so convinced of the superiority of their beliefs or the righteousness of their cause that they must silence or suppress all those who hold or dare to express a contrary view. The most effective way to do this is to ascribe bigotry or ‘hate’. Bigotry used to work, until it became apparent that those who hurl ‘bigot’ tend themselves to be rather bigoted. That isn’t the case with this new raft of smears: those who cry ‘Islamophobe’, ‘transphobe’, ‘racist’, etc, are usually able to convey a sense of moral perfection or self-righteousness because of their own protected characteristics. A gay person could just about be ‘homophobic’, and a Muslim could be ‘Islamophobic’ (and if Dominic Grieve’s ‘Working Group’ on a definition proceeds along the anticipated course, some will indeed be), but it would have about as much traction as the notion of racist black people.
Nobody wants to be accused of being a ‘-phobe’, or slandered with a tainted ‘-ist’, or tarnished as a ‘hater’ or ‘denier’ (cf Holocaust), despite their position or stance being conceptually critical, scientifically sceptical, or categorically unconvinced. Everyone likes to be moral, or to be known as being moral. When the moral person’s morality is impugned, there is feeling of shame or personal failure, even of public disgrace. The strategy has worked so well that some individuals have lost their livelihoods and reputations, and entire institutions have been captured and shamed into foundational self-censoriousness even to the point of causing chronic injustice and great harm.
So the next time Andrew Marr and Wilfred Frost are faced with a politician who hurls ‘Nazi’ or ‘paedo’ at their political opponents in a pompous tone that broadcasts ‘and that is the end of the matter’, I’d hope to hear the immediate retort: ‘That’s just censory smearing. Let’s deal with the substance, shall we?’
And the next time someone calls you ‘racist’ or ‘far right’ or ‘fascist’, you respond: ‘Ah, that is an excellent example of ‘censory smearing’; censory with a ‘C’; the moral shame fallacy. Permit me to explain…’
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