Someone said:
"Personally, if my priest/pastor is out there in the Real World trying to make a living just like me I have a lot more respect for his opinion than someone who's insulated by not having to earn money outside a church environment."
My first reaction was to be angry - how can someone say that working full-time for a church is "insulated" in a way that other jobs aren't? Who says that churches should organise themselves like businesses? It reminded me of those old 1960s Anglicans and Methodists who used to call church buildings "Plant" as if that somehow put them in tune with the times. My second reaction, considered over about 36 hours, was to get even angrier. This nonsense isn't just messing with the church it is messing with my head, and I don't like that.
It is an example of using words to control others by defining their opinions away.
There are plenty of others. When Tony Blair goes on about "Modernising" this that or the other, he is just defining his plans as "Modern" and everybody who disagrees with him must therefore be Not Modern. And who would want to be out of date, stick-in-the-mud, small-c-conservative? No-one in this man's New Labour Party.
It's an unarguable position. Once you can get your opponent to agree that you are a Moderniser then they must by definition be against Modernisation, and that by definition is bad. You have achieved hegemony over the language of the debate, established an outpost in the mind of your adversary, turned the tools they think with against them.
For example, from a news report a year or so ago: "In an echo of his war on the 'forces of conservatism', Mr Blair warned that resistance from certain sections of the criminal justice system would not be allowed to prevent Modernisation. 'One thing I've learnt in this job is every time we do make changes there is someone who is adversely affected by it and leaps out and says this is monstrous,' he said."
In this case "Modernisation" means turning the clock back to Star Chamber, the Riot Act, kangaroo courts, and the old apartheid pass laws - it is a rewinding of centuries of painful development of imperfect democracy, it stinks of the past. But because it is called Modern all who oppose it must be Resisting Change . And Resistance to Change can be presented neatly as either something people only do out of self interest (as if it was obvious to everybody that juries and the non-stipendary magistracy must be abolished, we all have to have our DNA typed by the police, and that we must carry government ID cards at all times, and anyone who was against it must somehow be getting a cut out of crime) or else as a kind of original sin, a fundamental human flaw, something that must be expected, but never given in to.
The bosses of the company I used to work took that second view. They were always prattling on about Resistance to Change, which was an evil disease that affected everyone except them. They had a Plan - more than that they had Visions and Values and a Mission Statement - and anyone who thought differently wasn't disagreeing with them, they were just Resisting Change . And Resisting Change was to be expected. Everyone did it at first. The company would help you get over it. They would send you on team-building courses building bridges over muddy lawns and getting pissed afterwards, time-management courses with cute Japanese cartoons and life-changing stationery, this-that-and-the-other awareness courses given by embarrassed academics earning a bit on the side, they would bore you with hour-long pep-talks from some board member or other with only soft drinks afterwards so as not to scare the Americans, they would give you Psychometric Instruments (TM) and fill your in-tray with heaps of patronising psychobabble; all to expunge from your mind that nasty Resisting Change meme, and get you to fit in as a happy cog in a well-lubricated wheel that was turning in the exact direction and at the exact speed that the management wanted.
All this talk of Resisting Change and Modernisation means nothing more than "I'm in charge and you had better do what I say".
There is worse - take the pop-psychologist's favourite, "In Denial ". Take it as far away as you can and let me never see or hear it again.
It's great when someone who disagrees with you is In Denial . You don't have to understand their other's opinions, never mind argue against them. What would be the point? They are In Denial . You don't even have to listen to what they say - it will be meaningless anyway, they are In Denial , they are refusing to acknowledge the basic truths of their situation so anything they say or do founded on false perceptions and is likely to be Inappropriate. Before they can be any use at all they have to agree with you on what is really going on.
The US government did a good line in defining arguments away just before the invasion of Iraq when they redefined the word "Credible" twice over. Again and again the Iraqi government refused to Provide Credible Evidence that they no longer had the weapons we now know they no longer had - though how you provide any evidence that something doesn't exist is beyond me. But the opposition of France and Germany to the war were also defined as were Not Credible, and the demands of the Palestianians were Not Credible. By the end it became pretty obvious that what Credible now meant was "I've got a nuclear bomb and I'm prepared to use it".
The Real World is all this in spades.
What is the Real World for those who use this hateful phrase?
It is almost always business. The Real World means growing out of your childish delusions, putting on a suit, and working as the someone else's servant in return for of money. Sometimes it is small business, sometimes it is big business (each can have great fun accusing the other of Not Living in the Real World) but it is almost always business.
Academics, especially scientists, are no part of the Real World. The Real World apparently doesn't include stars and planets and clouds, and the seas are not part of the Real World. It doesn't have trees, flowers, animals, plants, living things in general, unless owned by a corporation and sold for money. And it would have to be owned by a corporation - peasant farmers in poor countries, or marginal hill-farmers or small-scale part-time farmers in rich ones aren't part of the Real World . The Real World doesn't include getting your hands dirty by making things grow, only selling yourself to others so that they can sell stuff to you.
Art isn't part of this Real World, unless sold for money by these Modernised corporatist Gradgrinds, or used in an advertising campaign, or used as an excuse for cheap white whine and crunchy prawn balls by some Corporate Hospitality Consultancy. Education isn't part of it, though training is - but they have renamed training as education which is now meant to Guarantee the Nation's Future by Enabling our Young People to Compete in the Real World .
Even politicians and journalists aren't quite part of this Real World . Teachers are on its margins, social workers somewhere beyond its borders. Ministers of religion are well into the outer darkness, somewhere the other side of Elfland. You never know what kind of unReal nonsense those people might pick up from all the sorts and conditions of folk they meet, speak to, argue with, or care for, almost every day of their lives. Its much safer, much Realer, to live in an airconditioned house in some suburb, drive to an airconditioned office every day, only communicate to other Real people through an airconditioned phone, drive straight home again in the evening, calling in at the airconditioned supermarket for you airconditioned microwavable HealthyMeal and watch airconditioned TV till you fall asleep.
Business has become the paradigm of all communal activity. Colleges have Business Plans, government has Core Business, nations states become UK PLC and USA Inc. It's become the model for everything. Even the church.
The Real World doesn't include birth and death, it doesn't include sex and marriage, other than as entertainment; it barely includes cooking and gardening and then only as consumer lifestyle choices, paying their tithe to Reality at the garden centre or the SpecialLuxuryFineTreat supermarket shelves. In fact it hardly includes anything that was once regarded as the particular province of women or children. To be part of the Real World you must grow up, get out, get a job, earn money. Everything else is just Kinder, Kuche, Kirche.
But in reality (though not Reality(TM)) Kinder, Kuche and Kirche are the Real World (though not the Real World). (And along with politics and art science they provide most of the subjects worth thinking or talking about). That once-upon-a-time woman's world - family, children, gossip, food, sex, religion, is where most people live most of the time, in their heads if not their bodies, and it is the way our society reproduces itself, literally.
There was an old idea that men created the external world of affairs - business, politics, warfare - in opposition to and to make up for their exclusion from the Real World of sex and family, which were constructed as the woman's world. That's probably nonsense, but it is certainly true that there were families before ever there were schools or churches, and there were schools and churches (well, temples I suppose) before ever there were nations or businesses; and there will probably be families, schools and churches still when there are no such things as nations or businesses.
And anyone who says different is In Denial .