A Whining Pretension to Goodness
17th October 2013
John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, deals with modern cant.
Modern political discourse consists of little more than the Tinkertoy assembly of cant phrases into speeches: Fix the schools! Out of the shadows! Our brave men and women in uniform! The schools are fine; the “shadow” people are demonstrating in front of TV cameras; and the average American mandarin would faint in horror on hearing that his child had joined the military. Yet still they cant….
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Practically anything you read or hear about racism, sexism, and homophobia is cant. The most punctilious anti-racists flee like rats from black neighborhoods; the dearth of female mathematicians, in an age when women form an actual majority of college students, is widely understood to be a matter of female preferences, not discrimination; and sensible parents do not leave their kids alone with sexually eccentric adults. Yet the cant goes on.