The war of social word play has reached a new low

IT’S true that language matters. So let’s fight the social justice warriors to the very end, writes Miranda Devine.

IT feels as if there is an exponential increase in surreal attempts to constrain our language and behaviour by bureaucracies dedicated to nothing but political correctness.

Some of these attempts are so ridiculous that we generally laugh them off as a bad joke.

But they actually are having an effect. The word “Mum” or “mother”, for instance, is starting to take on the baggage of an offensive word, and it won’t be long before decent people hesitate before using it.

For instance, UK supermarket chain Waitrose has started selling “gender neutral” Mother’s Day cards, which delete the dreaded M-word with an absurd new slogan: “Happy You Day”. It’s like a scene from a dystopian novel.

The Waitrose farce comes hot on the heels of Qantas suggesting to staff that they should avoid using words such as “mum” and “dad”, “husband” and “wife”, in order to avoid offending some hypothetical passenger.

LISTEN: Miranda Devine speaks with Dr Jordan Peterson on Miranda Live (part one)

And it wasn’t too long ago that the British Medical Association asked doctors to refrain from using the word “mother” and say “pregnant person” instead. Why? The biological reality is that only women can be pregnant. Only women can be mothers. Propagating an official lie that this is not the biological reality is the sign of a sick society heading into perilous territory.

How did we get here, and does it matter?

I asked Dr Jordan Peterson, the visiting Canadian psychologist and University of Toronto Professor, who has sprung to prominence by refusing to kowtow to these kinds of politically correct lies. It started 18 months ago when he refused to obey a Canadian law mandating the use of gender-neutral pronouns such as ‘ze’ and ‘zir’ instead of he and she. Ever since, he’s been caught in a firestorm of controversy.

It has also made this steely 57-year-old, who grew up in the tiny working class town of Fairview, in Alberta, a hero to millions around the world. His Youtube videos have been watched by 50 million people and his new book “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos” is Number 1 on Amazon.

Dr. Jordan Peterson faced a media storm last year after declaring he will not use pronouns, such as "they," to recognise non-binary genders. (Pic: Carlos Osorio)

He has a gift for straight talk, and a deep knowledge of human psychology and history that compels him to warn us that political correctness is anything but harmless,

And he has a message to Qantas and the other 450 companies playing the virtue signalling game.

“People who are doing this at the corporate level will rapidly get their comeuppance … If you’re operating within a capitalist environment like let’s say the executives and management of Qantas, who are being paid disproportionately well, you don’t also get to be a social radical. And you don’t get to salve your conscience for receiving a pay cheque that’s 300 times the pay cheque of the average worker by pretending you’re a social revolutionary. It’s an appalling sleight of hand.

“In addition, you don’t get to invite the radical leftists into your corporate utopia without opening the door to a major fifth column. If you are naive enough to think that the demand of the radicals for the transformation of your company is going to end with a few requests for language transformation then you’re a complete bloody fool.

LISTEN: Miranda Devine speaks with Dr Jordan Peterson on Miranda Live (part two)

“It’s staggering to me to watch the corporate elite types kowtow to the radical Marxists. They do it to virtue signal or because they’re feeling guilty or maybe because they’re facing genuine pressure and don’t want to stand up against it. But they’re playing a game that will punish them intensely.”

He says the modern scourge of political correctness and identity politics is a ruse of the radical left, a variant of Marxist ideology, even if many of the diversity mavens who push it are clueless.

“In the early 1970s when it became absolutely untenable for anyone with any moral intellectual pretensions to be on the side of the Communists … the same doctrine went underground and transmuted into this postmodern dogma that completely dominates the humanities and social science end of the university curriculum and increasingly plays a determinative role in the legislative process at every level of government in the West. It’s the same old wolf in new sheep’s clothing.”

Marxism “failed in every single country it was implemented in regardless of the cultural context … and it didn’t just fail, it failed horribly and brutally everywhere …

“So when you see the same old thing happening in the West, the radical leftist identity politics approach to the world . you can see it will unfold in exactly the same manner.”

So next time someone tries to sell you a gender-neutral Mother’s Day card, don’t laugh it off. Take a stand, like Dr Peterson.