Pronouns are the masks of the culture war
Should we be more intentionally liturgical ourselves?
Quick post here. A friend who is a flight attendant for United Airlines wrote last night that the airline has a new push to ask everyone to put their pronouns on their nametag. It sounded like, for the moment, it’s optional and she has no intention of participating, but most people just do the easy “go along to get along” thing and so I assume we shall soon see them on most United nametags.
But it made me think again that the genius of the pronoun thing was that it introduced this ritual, or liturgy for transhumanism, into potentially every human interaction, while claiming it was just about being helpful. Every time you see a flight attendant can now be a little declaration that “human gender is a choice” or “human gender has nothing to do with biology”. That sort of thing, over and over again, does its work on people. I say it often, but it is true, that the tactic of error today is repetition. You can make a great argument to the contrary three times and then go back to your family and job… error will not even bother to rebut your argument, it will just repeat error a hundred times instead. Error has more stamina than the truth.
Masks were the same way. The primary power of mask mandates was that they forced everyone to take part in a ritual on the front end, and then literally see the message everyone’s face, that said “health is the most important thing, we are all in great danger right now, do your part”. It was probably one of the greatest propaganda victories of all time. And it was compelled speech (the primary point of the mandates was to compel speech) but, if you questioned it, it would be vehemently denied that it was compelled speech. We’re just trying to keep people safe.
Or, one final example, from the last post here - the idea of giving heat waves a name. What does that do? It’s weaker than the above two, but it means now that every time you mention how hot it is, there can be an implied “and this is a great danger” and, ideally, “and humans have caused this danger”. And the ritual will do its teaching. (And yes, long time readers may remember that one of the very first posts here made this point, but it’s worth repeating at least every two years!)
It’s good to point all this out - name and recognize the tactic so you can see it and try to reject it. But the flip side might be, should we be introducing more rituals and liturgies ourselves that teach something true? First thing that comes to mind actually is that in English, we tend to say “goodbye” when we leave someone (although, very much on the point of this post, “stay safe” has become popular lately). But “goodbye” used to be “God by with you” before time smashed the words together and made most of us forget what we used to be saying.
Now maybe, in other languages that still have this, you get so used to what you’re saying that it completely loses its power, I don’t know. But you might imagine that ending every human interaction with “God be with you” would communicate some things, like “God exists and cares for you”. There is a power in telling people “God exists and cares for you” every time you see them, just like there is a power in an implicit declaration about gender made every time you see a nametag. Perhaps truth (and especially in the public square) needs to rediscover the highly effective tactics regularly now used by error.
Compliance rituals began to leak into academic discourse over the last decade and sacralized participation in fields that were previously neutral (like the hard sciences). A funny example is when fields (like climatology or geology) that previously used BP or kya dating began switching *back* to BCE, despite the inconvenience, because it was insufficiently clear that kya was intended as an ideological repudiation of BC/AD date styling.
When my APS subfield national conference (DAMOP) reschedule a meeting just to spite the state legislature for passing a bathroom bill, the act of purchasing a ticket for the new location became a sort of compliance ritual as well. Strong professional gatekeeping message: "Want to get ahead in this field? This is what our world cares about. Keep yourself in line and do the same thing as the rest of us."
Pronouns to masks is a disturbing connecting thought. And this is from being on a vacation?
I don't know what I think about my own proposal, but would appreciate any feedback. Pronouns are a tool of Satan intended for many things, one being the confusion and disordering of language so that it's harder to save folks. Greg Koukl on str.org, said recently that he just noticed in the parable of the sower, the seed on hard ground was received, but not understood. So Greg said, make sure to talk in a way that is understood and he said as an example, he no longer uses the phrase, "to receive Christ" because folks are too biblically illiterate to understand what that means.
So that's what made me think about the Pronouns and that's it's one more hurdle , both emotionally and grammatically, in sharing an understood gospel message.
For example, if I ask a person steeped in the new liturgy if they are perfect like God, like "He" is, then I might be adding static. "What do you mean perfect like He is, how do you know what gender God is?" I get tired even thinking about it.