A Reply to Steve: Lost and Found in Translation

I admit that when I read the title of Steve's post below, I assumed it would be about other aspects of the rhetoric in Michael McConnell's op-ed about the constitutional aspects of the debt limit debate. In an environment in which our rhetoric is permanently at risk of inflation, such that I believe there is value in putting even (what one thinks are) true statements and strong judgments in deliberately calm and moderated tones, I would have preferred that McConnell avoid a phrase like "dangerous nonsense"--even if he thinks the argument is dangerous nonsense. I say so with some reservation, since I admire the bluntness with which writers like Noel Annan delivered their judgments, with confidence and without any pretense that they were doing something other than delivering their judgments. And I too enjoy the occasional sharply delivered judgment. On the other hand, I don't think the language served a useful persuasive purpose in this particular forum, in which heated rhetoric is likely to succeed only when its purpose is to preach to the already-faithful; I think our rhetorical environment is already so polluted with sharp language that there is an overall net value in moderating it; and I frankly do not trust Americans (Annan was English) with dangerous weapons, including sharp language. That includes educated Americans. (Possible case in point: the headline writer who repeated that language. I am assuming only for these purposes that that person would count as an educated American.)  

One thing I feel fairly confident about, though, is that what Steve is actually interested in--the use of the phrase "That is not a bad thing. It is a good thing"--is not either an accidental or an ironic quotation of Chairman Mao. The general locution simply conveys a common-sense idea or argument: that, contrary to one's first impression, some purported bad thing is actually a good thing. The locution itself is English because we are dealing with a particular English translation of the original Mandarin text. I don't doubt that one could find similar phrasing in the literature and daily speech of any language. But it is never surprising to find that a translation uses phrasing familiar or sensible to the speakers of that language. (As a somewhat roundabout example, one of the quotations in chapter 5 of the Little Red Book says, with quotation marks, "War is the continuation of politics." One has to assume Mao was quoting von Clausewitz. I don't know whether, in the original Mandarin, Mao was quoting von Clausewitz in the original German or using the common English translation of that famous phrase. But whatever the case, it can't be surprising that a translator would have used what had become a common English-language version of the phrase--or that an English-language translator would use a fairly banal pairing like "bad thing" and "good thing.") It is not surprising that a phrase like this appears in either Mao or McConnell because it is not surprising that any English language speaker would use a matched pairing like this. 

If I am wrong, then the Maoist or Maoist-ironist conspiracy runs far deeper. Fifteen cases in the "all cases" database on Westlaw use similar language; in many of those cases, the language came not as part of a considered writing process but in oral statements offered in passing in court by judges, attorneys, and laypeople. (For instance, the defendant in one criminal case, who said in court about his offer to turn his children over to the state, "It's not a bad thing. It's a good thing." Or the physician who testified in an insurance dispute, "If you've got a limb that's partially paralyzed, exercise is not a bad thing for it. It's a good thing for it.") Using a conservative (if I may) estimate, close variants of the same phrase have appeared over 50 times in the law review database on Westlaw. While it is pleasant to entertain the suspicion that the legal academy really is filled with Maoists, Occam's Razor suggests that this is just a phrase that oft was thought and also oft expressed. (In fairness, Jack Balkin was one of the writers who used this locution. Still, that doesn't account for the other 49 or so times.) I am confident that the writer who, when speaking about expert evidence, said that "looking directly at the science seems a good thing, not a bad thing" was simply using readily available language, not sending a signal to the revolutionary cadre. As for irony: speaking as a Canadian, I must say that the good-money bet is always against any American speaking ironically, let alone that many Americans and still more that many American academics. It's a sadly uncultivated, sorely missing skill in these parts. That was true even back when a young Jed Purdy was, wrongly, arguing against it. 

Finally, I might note that a Google Ngram search suggests that the phrase or close variants of it have been used by English speakers long before 1939 and on any number of occasions since. I am reasonably confident that neither the writer in Youth's Companion magazine in 1900 ("The desire to excel is not a bad thing but a good thing"), nor Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer and later Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone speaking on the hustings in 1865 ("And that was not a bad thing, but a good thing for the constitution"), nor Matthew Arnold, nor the commenter in the Illustrated London News in 1918, were Maoist belle-letrists avant la Maoist belle-lettre. 

In this instance, I believe, the cigar is just a cigar. 

Like Steve, I take no position on the merits. Although, having pronounced on McConnell's language, I cannot resist pointing out that it doesn't hold a candle to the vitriol of the commenters on his op-ed, and that McConnell's op-ed seems to contain far less irony, or whatever it should be called, than Laurence Tribe's op-ed of a week ago.