Elephants and barbarians

I’ve signed this petition requesting that Thailand ban its ivory trade, which provides an avenue for the sale of smuggled ivory from African elephants killed by poachers. Please have a look at it and consider whether you are sufficiently persuaded to sign the petition yourself. I became aware of it through Richard Dawkins’ feed on Twitter, which is often a good source of information about worthwhile campaigns.

I’m not a fan of histrionics over what people say on Twitter, often to fairly small audiences. For example, my own number of followers is now a little over 1600, but the number of people who read any given tweet is doubtless a small fraction of that, and the number of followers has grown even in recent months – it’s not that long since it was only a few hundred with only a tiny number reading any particular tweet. It’s beyond me why anyone would make a fuss about anything I’ve ever said to such a small group of people.

In short, I seldom comment on what I see on Twitter. My general philosophy is that what goes on Twitter stays on Twitter. Something similar applies to interactions on people’s Facebook profile pages.

On the other hand, Richard Dawkins has hundreds of thousands of followers, and doubtless thousands read each of his tweets. When people with very large numbers of followers – in six or seven figures – have things to say on Twitter perhaps it is of some public interest. Dawkins got into trouble with a few people – quite a few – when he published a tweet with the words: “Greedy barbarians slaughtering African elephants.” He started getting replies accusing him of colonialism, racism, dehumanising people, etc.

Words such as “barbarian”, “barbaric”, and “barbarous”, whatever their etymology (which I’m well aware of) are ordinary English words to apply to someone who is uncultured, destructive, brutal, coarse, callous, etc. Whatever other meanings remain, this was clearly the force of Dawkins’ comment. It had nothing to do with dehumanising anybody.

Really these attempts to police the English language – to an extent that eviscerates it – have to stop. That doesn’t mean that no words at all are to be avoided (I have my little list), but most of them are fairly obvious. Beyond plain racist insults and a few other special categories, it can get ridiculous. It can reach a point where we are so busy worrying about whatever case can be made (by fanatics or obsessives) against our word choices and sentence structures that we’re left paralysed.

Good liberal people should not have to walk on eggshells when engaging in ordinary, day-to-day communication, for fear that some usage will attract a flimsy charge of racism or something of the kind. If you’re really tempted to make such a charge against a person who plainly is not motivated by racism, maybe you should think for a moment about what you are trying to achieve. Maybe ask what else you could do, perhaps something more constructive, with that little part of your life.