GARETH VAN ONSELEN: The death of the insult

A good insult should achieve three things. First, it should disparage; that is, leave its intended target smarting. Second, to do this, it needs to have some element of truth to it; for always it is the truth that bites hardest. Third, it should be memorable; in time, the best insults become templates, to be appropriated for future use.

Within these parameters, there is much fun to be had. Innuendo and wit together can be devastating enough. Combine those things with an original metaphor, infuse just enough truth to resonate, and they can come to define someone for life.

In SA, however, all three of these “rules” seem to count for little. And they count for nothing on social media. People want to insult, it’s a full-time business for many, but the online zeitgeist would have it, never to offend. In turn, truth plays no part in insulting, instead the practice is defined by crude and entirely false slander. As for wit and wisdom, they too have been sacrificed at the altar of those base impulses driven more by hate than any desire to offer something insightful or memorable.

It’s a sad state of affairs. Our level of debate is at best described as a perpetual shouting match. Political analysis for one, is devoid of depth, driven instead by the politics of personalities. And evidence and reason, the two pillars of substantive argument, have long since been reduced to rubble, on which people stand and proclaim their own personal and infallible truth.

Perhaps that is to be expected. The idea of “respect”, now a universal synonym for deference, has killed off the insult. In its place, the crude barking of dogs. You are “racist”, “sexist”, “a liar”, “a thief”, “an idiot”. These — for the most part detached entirely from truth — are, ironically, far easier to stomach, for they can just be dismissed out of hand, or dished out as both a first and final psychologically automated response.

For any of them to stick, we have resorted to the brutality of sheer quantity. Shout “racist” enough, generate a big enough army of the unthinking to yap your chorus line along with you, and it will no doubt have some effect. But not because the slur holds any intrinsic truth or forces some more considered defence, merely because the sheer volume of the incessant barking necessitates it be yielded to. In this way, we bully more than influence or convince.

But wait. How could it be, in this age of respect and dignity, anyone could advocate for better insults? After all, what we need is understanding, compassion and tolerance. Certainly, those are the watch words by which the gatekeepers of political correctness monitor all comers. In this utopia, there are no insults — only patience and empathy for each person’s own and unique worldview. In Nirvana, we listen and appreciate. We do not condemn and insult.

Boring, is what it is; a sterile universe of inanity and rhetorical mediocrity. Constrained by their own politically correct linguistic parameters, these gatekeepers have reduced the insult to a series of one-word proclamations that they pronounce like a judgment. They are designed to force you to stop thinking, not to start. 

Poisonous seed

And that, really, is the benefit of a good insult. It holds within it enough truth to demand a response. It might be wrapped up in hyperbole, or its inference cleverly masked by ambiguity, but in its total impact, therein lies its power. A good insult is not so much a statement, as a suggestion. It is a seed, and once planted in the mind, it is almost impossible to prevent it from growing. 

Of all the problems with the current state of the SA insult, the most curious is this strange desire for any insult not to offend. But that is the very point of the insult. You do not insult someone with the purpose of leaving them feeling better about themselves. And yet, quite literally, that will often be the first retort from the wounded: “I find your comments offensive”. No shit, Sherlock.

There is so much pathetic fragility out there. So much ignorance. So much mono-dimensional, binary and puerile thinking. It makes sense that we cannot insult with any flair or sophistication. We cannot argue with meaning or conviction either. Just barking. Twitter, for one, is like an online kennel.

Indeed, so banal is the SA public mind, we now rely on pictures, in the form of a thousand “memes”, to insult for us. If ever there were a measure of how denuded a society’s rhetorical armoury has become, it is when it regresses to visual aids. Few things are richer than the English language. We use pictures. Not because a picture says a thousand words, but because we only have 10 words, and each picture speaks to one of them.

There are a few iconoclasts out there. But no Bierce or Hitchens, Chesterton or Johnson. Many of them have made a profession out of providing a slighter wider array of adjectives for entirely politically correct sentiments anyway. They are celebrated, of course. They give the blunt and crude the veneer of complexity. But they dare only stick their necks out so far. It’s understandable. Any further and they surely would be chopped off.

Uniformity of thought

Look below the surface of SA debate and what you will find will horrify you: a puritanical desire for uniformity of thought. As George Orwell so wonderfully illustrated, the precursor to uniformity of thought is uniformity of language. And we have stripped our collective lexicon down to the bare bones. But newspeak is simultaneously double-speak. And so, we are told, the things we value most are “a diversity of views” and “healthy debate”. 

Even those guttural slurs we bark at each other are now devoid of meaning. It can be conceded we all are racist. For everyone has been labelled racist at some point or another. We all are sexist, stupid, dishonest and disrespectful. In the other direction, none of us is. It is satisfying, on some level, to watch the pack of hounds tear each other part apart over who best can give meaning to the meaningless. Truth be told, it’s only the smell of blood that keeps them going.

So much SA commentary is analysis by personal projection: such and such a thing happened to me, therefore this and that. It is an egomaniacal business that has served to conflate the personal with the public, and anecdote with evidence.

When an idea is infused with a personality, any criticism of it is inevitably deemed first and foremost a personal affront. And so, one column degenerates into three columns, defending the author’s character by setting out in painstaking detail the various traumas they have encountered, as well their innate virtue in overcoming them. In this way, their truth might be refashioned into the truth. Everything is personal.

Pity.

Used sparingly and effectively, a good insult can do more to define an idea or disposition than a 1,000-word testimony. But, again, volume and quantity are what matter here. If you can absolutely drown the world in words, each one chosen to elevate you in the public eye, it doesn’t matter if an insult resonates as true or not. It can always be negated by bucket load of emotional sentiment. That stuff kills all fires.

So, even if we were to learn again the art of a good insult, what would be the point? We have carefully curated an environment in which pain trumps truth, and insults are a cue from which we read out loud the next line of our tortuous autobiography

Debate is now so warped, we wear those judgments issued against us like badges of honour. People these days say they are “proud” to be declared a racist, as if the judge were some fringe lunatic, which we all are.

It is hard to be proud if you are the victim of a good insult. And bleeding personal virtue everywhere won’t help either. It requires sterner stuff than that, to stunt the growth of that sapling. You need something called self-confidence. Not easy. 

But, in the grand scheme of things, the world would be a better place for it. You aren’t going to get rid of the insult, so you might as well try to do it properly. As we have given up on that prospect, best to invest in a set of mufflers, which is what most people have done, as they desperately try to silence the incessant and juvenile whining of all those dogs in their immediate online neighbourhood.

• Van Onselen is the head of politics and governance at the SA Institute of Race Relations.