Gaslighting, dog whistles, and cannibal rats

Is Raoul Silva gaslighting James Bond?

Alan Jacobs has a very good post about gaslighting, a term I have been sick to death of pretty much since it entered our political discourse. As Jacobs notes, the use of the term has had “pernicious” effects on that discourse—which was none too healthy to begin with—especially since accusing someone of gaslighting has become “the default explanation for disagreement. Nobody just disagrees with me anymore, they’re trying to gaslight me.”

One of the things I’ve always hated about the term gaslighting is its ambiguous referent. Having studied World War II too much, I always vaguely connect it with poison gas first and have to force the correct definition into my mind. Any term that provokes that habit is a useless one. (This is why I hate any word the meaning of which I have to work to remember—limpid, diffident, inchoate, etc. Some of you will be unsurprised to learn that I have a list.) Jacobs reminds us that gaslighting comes from the plot of the 1938 play and 1944 film Gaslight—the latter a noir thriller in which a man tries to trick his wife into believing she has gone insane—and helpfully connects the way the term is currently used to a kind of non-argument first named by CS Lewis. Jacobs:

To say that someone is gaslighting you is to say that they know you’re right but are pretending not to. They’re maliciously trying to get you to doubt yourself. They are dishonest, deceitful, manipulative. The charge of gaslighting is an extreme form of Bulverism: Instead of claiming You say that because you’re a man or You say that because you’re an American it’s You say that because you’re a moral monster. 

Follow Jacobs’s link to the Wikipedia page on Bulverism, or watch CSLewisDoodle’s animated version of the essay in which Lewis introduced the term here. It’ll illuminate a lot of our current trouble.

Why would people argue this way? For one thing, it’s easy, especially once you have developed not only a habit but a taste for it. For another, as Jacobs writes,

It’s a useful tactic to deploy if you’d prefer never to think about whether any of your assumptions are correct. Your opponents are not only wrong, they are wicked, and why should you engage with arguments that are obviously made in bad faith and for evil purposes?

A similarly annoying and bad-faith term is dog whistle, which denotes anything meant to give a silent signal, like a Cold War-era series of identifying passwords, to fellow travelers—being, like a dog whistle, something only fellow dogs hear. Theoretically.

Two things irritate me about the term dog whistle and the accusations it is used to make. First, the idea of dog whistles stokes the intense paranoia already characteristic of all sides of our current political scene, not just accepting but encouraging a conspiratorial mindset. The person listening for dog whistles runs everything they—the opposing side—say through a heuristic of Stalin-level suspicion in order to find signs of the person’s hidden meaning. This is how we get a bunch of juvenile college students playing a juvenile game on TV read as a glimpse of the secret white supremacist cabal that is lurking around every corner, behind every bush, under every rock—in all the proverbial hiding places. Examples could be multiplied endlessly. Like gaslighting, it assumes the evil of your opponents, and like gaslighting, it helps “keep your echo chamber hermetically sealed.”

Second, for something that is only supposed to be audible to other dogs, so to speak, a whole lot of non-dogs can apparently hear it. In fact I’d say it’s mostly non-dogs that are picking up on alleged dog whistles these days. It’s a stupid metaphor. Like gaslighting, it needs to go away.

But go away where? Jacobs, after noting that both sides deploy the term gaslighting to attack the other, has a suggestion:

It’s one of the many ways in which the far left and the far right are continually borrowing language, rhetorical strategy, and in some cases even direct political strategy from one another. It would be nice if we could ship them all off to their own island where they could fight it out, or, perhaps, discover that they can’t tell one another apart.

I like this suggestion a lot, but I can’t read it without thinking about Raoul Silva, the Bond villain with the greatest introduction in the series. The first time we see him, he delivers a monologue about the rats that infested his grandmother’s island, and how they went about solving the problem. It’s unforgettable.

But I have to wonder what you do with rats that already only have a taste for rat and that we cannot ship to their own island to fight it out, and whether there will be even two survivors left in the end.