How to define a woman (really, try it)

And other things liberals force us to argue about

Dear T,

In all fairness to the left wing, when Matt Walsh asked them what a woman is, I wouldn't have said an adult human female. Not that I was out there trying to make babies with Tom Hardy, but go ahead and ask somebody what an orange tastes like. Go ahead and try it. Unless he asks you to bite one, you won't get far. You also won’t get far if he asks you to bite a woman.

Walsh’s argument (in short) is that a woman is definitely something. The leftists shot back and said that in regards to what makes a woman, they weren’t able to name everything.

The list of characteristics was too long, they said, and if you missed something on it you could still be a woman anyway. In one case it might be a uterus. Matt shot back that you would also still be a woman if you added something. In this case it might be a beard. Matt shot again that you can’t check things off a list and suddenly turn into anything else. That means you can’t add fur to a frog and make it a cat. The left shot back and said, who gets to define how we feel about ourselves? Matt shot back and said who gets to tell us how we feel about you?

So round and round they went, until the people who championed "democracy” said one person could dictate to the masses; and the person called "a bigot” asked an entitled person to respect them. And there we came to a standstill. Each of these was the opposite of what they were called. Each side said the other side were assholes.

Not that these are morally equivalent mistakes. The conservative side denies that language is an attempt to define things bigger than our definitions. It denies that communication is difficult and imperfect*, and that raw human experience is not only sometimes beyond our sharing it, but many times beyond our defining it. And yet experience still is. And communication still works. At least for those of us who aren’t playing dumb.

On the other hand the leftist “mistake” is deliberate and pernicious. It's that because we can't define a thing perfectly, it can mean anything their side wants it to mean. It’s that 1) because words are used to explain reality, they can be used to change it. That 2) by changing the word for something you can change somebody's mind about it. And 3) that if you can’t change their mind about a physical thing, and they won't use the word you want them to, you have a right in some way to hurt them.

And they call this state of mind “compassion.”*

Yours,

-J

P.S. Speaking of names, Ron Chernow says that Ulysses S. Grant's name was actually Hiram Ulysses Grant, and as soon as the kids found out, he was called “H.U.G.” This made him look like a weenie, but Hiram wasn’t much better, so he went with Ulysses. Not to be foiled, the kids started calling him “Useless Grant” — which detractors (I’m sure) made use of later; and then a bureaucrat made a mistake and he became U.S. Grant instead of HUG. A move which, who knows, may have given his whole career a big boost, and was seized upon immediately by anyone who cared about him. Not exactly changing things from “man” to “woman,” but even a personal name can change a life.

We're told in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich that Hitler was almost Schicklgruber — due to his dad’s being born a bastard, and not taking on his father’s surname Hitler until later. This would have ruined the parades, to be sure; but not as badly as if he was named HUG.

Kids almost never turn your name into anything good — but when they have a chance to be malicious, suddenly they go full poet. Adults are even more savage when they've never lost the taste for it. I've seen Ashley turned into Smashley — for a woman who had too many men. I've seen it turned into Crashley when a woman couldn't drive. I’ve seen Dallin turned into Dilly-Dallin to suggest a guy’s a half-ass. I’ve seen two guys at work named Christian, and to distinguish between the two of them, the worse of them was called The Anti-Christian. This was more accurate than I would have liked. The Anti-Christian was a real piece of work.

Then there was a short Asian man who showed up to work one day with bleached and spikey hair. From then on he was known as Pikachu. Other men got worse. I've named them worse. Your mom wanted to name one of your brothers Amos. I told her they'll call him Anus.

I told her, you have to be careful. A third-grader will trash any name.

She said no they wouldn’t.

I said go ahead and pick one.

She said Ragnar.

I said Fagnar.

This was the end of the conversation; but to be fair, I cheated. Despite what I said above, I'm not actually in third grade.

*How difficult is language, really?

George Berkeley, in his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, says that abstract ideas don’t appear anywhere in nature unless they’re on something. They can be connected with other things, but never alone; and so movement always needs an object moving, and a trajectory, and a distance, and a speed. But movement in the abstract implies none of these things specifically — an idea which is in itself impossible. Go ahead and think about it. Moving without any object or speed or direction? Silly —and yet we all know what “motion” is.

The same (he argues) goes for an idea of size, which you can readily imagine — but you can do it even without considering whether it’s in a line, a flat surface, or three-dimensional: neither big nor small, black nor white, or even any color at all. So there you have size itself without any characteristics. Another thing that’s impossible, and doesn’t exist anywhere.

So when we come to the idea of “woman,” you can imagine things get harder. We all know, of course, what a woman is. But to strip the idea of any particular woman — the size, shape, voice, hair, brains, and personality, and still, after this voiding out of everything that makes an actual person, come to an agreement that the abstract idea of “woman” exists, is an act of the imagination. There has never been an abstract woman anywhere other than our heads, and she’s usually better looking than the other women. So the leftists say, might as well accept almost anybody. And then they ruined language for everybody.

**How can a leftist bully the majority and think she's compassionate? The same way she’s delusional about every other aspect of her political existence.

Imagine believing you’re anti-racist, and everywhere you go, the race relations get worse.

Imagine you’re “pro-education,” and wherever the world swings your way, the IQ levels start dropping.

Imagine you’re for healthcare while trying to de-stigmatize mental illness and obesity.

Imagine you say “my body, choice,” then force people to take untested medicine, strip them of all legal recourse, and when they get hurt, ban their horror stories from social media.

Imagine that banning these stories about medicine makes you “pro-science.”

Imagine being against gun violence, and every city you take over, the gun violence gets worse than places where people are pro-gun.

Imagine you’re into helping junkies, and everywhere you run things, the drug problem gets worse.

Imagine fighting for "the little guy,” and then, due directly to your policies, strangling the lower classes with inflation.

Leftists are proof that the transgender issue is the least problematic delusion we’re facing. There's a worse failure than the man who believes he’s a woman, and it’s the man who has a platform of helping people — and the harder he tries to help them, the harder he actually hurts them. They fall on their face and call it The Great Leap Forward. They say Black Lives Matter and turned Black neighborhoods into war zones. The feminist believes in women — and leaves them drunken, miserable, soulless, childless workaholics, whose highest highs in life are pets and one-night stands and the occasional escape from her life, at great expense, for almost infinitesimal time, to Tahiti.

Chesterton once wrote, months before World War 1 started, on the subject of “educated” idiots and their failures:

The primary public duty before us to-day is not to educate the uneducated. The primary public duty before us is to uneducate the educated. For they have all been educated wrong, and cannot see with their eyes or hear with their ears or (least of all) understand with their heart. Now, curiously enough, the quickest way of unlearning things really is through calamity. [...]

Disaster does not, as the shallow optimists say, always put a man right. But disaster really is the best thing to prove a man wrong; and that happens to be the one pressing and vital necessity for the sublime modern intellect. It has got to be proved wrong. For that purpose we want great disasters. And we seem to be getting what we want.

But pain doesn’t seem to teach everybody, and that’s its only job. More clear-eyed than Chesterton, who believed too much (I think) in democracy and mankind in general, Solomon says,

The path of the righteous is like the morning sun,
    shining ever brighter till the full light of day.
But the way of the wicked is like deep darkness;
    they do not know what makes them stumble.

The great division of mankind isn’t by white or black or rich or poor or young or old. It’s into classes of learners and fools. The big question of civilization is whether the learners have the upper hand — and not whether they can teach the fools, but whether they can scare them, by custom and law, into compliance.

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