Posted on 5/2/2020 by Charles R. Bernard
I spent my childhood in Bountiful, Utah, a small suburb of
Salt Lake City. Nestled in the craggy bosom of the Wasatch Mountains, Bountiful
(during the years when I lived there) was an intensely and devoutly Mormon
place. My family isn’t Mormon, but as I grew up it was impossible not to absorb
a great deal of the ambient culture of the place – including the peculiarly
fastidious and fussy attitude the Mormon Church cultivates regarding words.
Now, we’re not talking “expand your vocabulary” words here, although there is
evidence that Mormons
as a population are better-educated (and, I suppose, one would
assume better-spoken) than average Americans, and that tracks with my own
anecdotal experience. Vocabulary aside, however, I’m referring here to their attitude
regarding swearing, obscenity, indeed, even words that a devout Evangelical or
Catholic might be able to say without blushing. Mormons hate swearing.
Undoubtedly, there are deep cultural reasons for this –
roots that go back to the origins of Mormonism as a community, and tracing them
would be a fascinating project, but it’s not my intention here. I bring up my
upbringing in the Land of Heck (“Hell” being the very strongest, paint-peeling
curse a Mormon can usually muster) to point to the relationship between
language and religion, between one’s deeply-held beliefs and how one chooses to
express one’s self. The collection of body languages, verbal tics, intonations,
etc. that are common features of many devout (and especially older) Mormon
communities – what I call “the Mormon Affect” – is a much broader topic for
another day as well, but it’s worth noting that it’s not solely defined by
exclusion. The exclusion of obscenity and adjacent words from their vocabulary,
however, constitutes a big part of the affect.
Are there certain words and modes of expression that are
common to Satanists? Undoubtedly. Whether those are mere cultural signifiers or
actually bear some relationship to deeper Satanic principles is the topic we’re
going to address today. Thinking back to my youth in Bountiful, and then
reflecting on my own religious journey over the years, I started to wonder: is
swearing – obscenity – a Satanic practice? If one sets out to define obscenity
(no easy task), then examines the role of hierarchy in obscenity and the role
of obscenity in upsetting hierarchy, as well as those phenomena’s relationship
to the principles of Satanism, it becomes apparent that that the answer is “yes.”
Swearing is a deeply Satanic practice, and one that Satanists should engage in
(should they wish) unapologetically and even with an air of – dare I say it? --
celebration.
As we begin, it’s probably best to define our terms to some
extent. I say “to some extent” because obscenity is to an extent subjective; as
any Utahn will tell you, there are many words that are considered significantly
more obscene here than in your averaged community (terms on this list are
largely, but not exclusively, religious – “goddamned” and “hell,” for example,
are considered to be quite strong obscenities by many members of the LDS
Church). George Carlin’s famous
“Seven Words,” first articulated in 1972, are a good place to start
when defining the hard outlines of obscenity: shit, piss, fuck, cunt,
cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. Obviously, these seven were chosen by
Carlin in part for comedic effect and in part for the truth that they
represent. They were in no way intended to be comprehensive, nor even
completely representative, and while the rules regarding some (“tits,” “shit,”
and “piss” for example) have loosened a bit since Carlin’s day, a half a
century hasn’t removed any of the starch from “cunt” or “motherfucker,” which
should tell you a little bit about how starchy those words were to begin with.
The FCC has their
own list of criteria regarding obscenity, one that is actually
rather revealing and gets to the root of the matter in some surprising (and
unintentionally illuminating) ways. Frankly (and this is a shocking statement
coming from me) I was impressed by the amount of thought the FCC put into this
definition, even if I don’t necessarily agree with it:
The Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) defines indecent speech as material that, in context, depicts
or describes sexual or excretory organs or activities in terms patently
offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast
medium.
What do I find so insightful about that? Note where they
emphasize “sexual or excretory organs or activities.” I find that fascinating:
when we look at what “bad words” represent, in terms of concrete nouns and
verbs, excretion and sex do appear to be the two dominant themes. Piss, shit,
and fuck, right? So why is that the case? Why is it that humans reach for these
particular words when we wish to fling harm at each other? That’s a question
for another day, but I suspect that the evolutionary roots of humans and our
more apelike tendencies explain about 90% of it. For our purposes here, we
neither need to figure out the roots of obscenity nor even define it too
specifically – we simply need to establish the broad outlines of what we mean
by “swearing,” and I think between Carlin and the FCC, we have a sufficiently
fleshed-out idea.
If, however, we are in search of a more academic and
specific definition, the one offered by Jay and Danks in their 2008 paper “The
Pragmatics of Swearing” should suffice:
Swearing is the use of taboo
language with the purpose of expressing the speaker’s emotional state and
communicating that information to listeners (see Jay 1992, 2000). In contrast
to most other speech, swearing is primarily meant to convey connotative or
emotional meaning; the meanings of the words themselves are primarily construed
as connotative (Jay and Danks 1977)
Just as the FCC is getting at something with their emphasis
on the excretory and the sexual, Jay and Danks’ definition leans away from the
literal and toward the emotional. Most curses are not meant literally, nor are
they meant to convey any specific meaning beyond their emotional charge. And
yet – there is something to why we swear the way we do. At one point in the
evolution of the English language, “God’s wounds” (later shortened to “zounds”)
was considered a fairly potent curse. In that case, the use of “curse” as a
descriptor is more accurate, as the emotional heft of the statement came from a
religious/magical malediction rather than a biological one Don’t be fooled into
thinking such curses ever truly escape the biological or scatological, however
– another popular curse of that time period was “God’s bollocks” (testicles).
So: an expression of an emotion, often explosive, in a manner
that is usually biological or scatological and not intended to be taken
literally. How has such a ridiculous mode of expression come to have such power
over the incensed imaginations of prudish people everywhere?
The answer is hierarchy; hierarchy and control. With cursing
(as with so much of language), the determination of what is and isn’t
acceptable is a form of control. Whether that control is mild or severe
generally depends upon the degree of authoritarian stricture to which a society
is accustomed in other areas. On one end of the spectrum, governments
have outlawed entire languages (always with the intent of
ethnic cleansing). On the other end of the spectrum, liberal
democracies often have fairly laissez-faire attitudes when it comes to the state
monitoring of expression, and rely on custom (and economic forces) to enforce
higher-lower hierarchical relationships through language – for example, a shift
manager is given leeway by a franchise owner to regulate how formal his
employees are going to be with customers during their shift, how much cursing
will socially lubricate the kitchen without allowing the anti-hierarchical
properties of swearing to “get out of control,” and other similar decisions.
While it doesn’t match the
overt brutalism of state regulation of language, corporate control
of our lexicon can be even more insidious for its subtlety and the illusion of
choice and “buy-in” that it presents.
Hierarchy – its origins, effects, probable outcomes, and the
like – is a broad and fascinating subject, and one that we can’t delve into in
complete detail here. For the purposes of our consideration of swearing, we
will define hierarchy in simple terms. The definition offered by Google will
work quite well (and there’s also a bit of wry humor in using Google – whose
search technology is in no small part based on hierarchy – to define the word).
Their definition is:
A system or organization in which
people or groups are ranked one above the other according to status or authority.
As social apes that live and interact in large groups,
humans are highly attuned to social hierarchy. Since we have evolved past mere
grunts and postures, so too have our languages co-evolved many complex ways to
reflect hierarchy, including the use of taboo. So-called “curse words,” as
taboo expressions of emotion, are generally acceptable when directed by a
person with a position of high status
toward a person in a position of low
status. The low-status individual may be the target of the words or simply an
audience; either way, using taboo language in this way reinforces status and
hierarchy and therefore is acceptable. If, however, obscenity is directed the
other way, from low-status toward high-status, outrage and opprobrium are
sure to ensue. Swearing among peers and fellow workers, on the other hand, has been
described as a form of solidarity and an example of pro-social
communication. Indeed, the only type of “objectionable” speech that is truly
objectionable is swearing that crosses the boundaries of propriety – at least,
the bounds of propriety as defined by economic or cultural elites.
(Although it relates to film ratings and not swearing, the
question of what, exactly, constitutes obscenity undergirds the documentary This Film is
Not Yet Rated, which is an excellent expose of the arbitrary
nature of many of these distinctions.)
That word – “arbitrary” – is key. Satanism is comprised of a
diverse set of interlocking and related philosophies, but they share some
common characteristics and one of them is a celebration of rebellion against
arbitrary tyranny. Many iterations of Satanism – including the one to which I
subscribe – also promote the tearing down of hierarchy and its
replacement with more egalitarian forms of interaction. In both of these
regards, swearing is a Satanic act:
it defies arbitrary authority over language and the chaining of words, and at
the same time defies hierarchy by refusing to acknowledge the higher-status
lower-status dynamics that ordinarily hold salty tongues in check.
Earlier, I cited the example of a shift manager charged
(implicitly) with regulating the amount and severity of cursing in a kitchen.
The manager in my example has to allow some swearing for the purposes of
increased solidarity and a “fun work environment,” but at the same time can’t
allow the anti-hierarchical properties of swearing to “get out of control.” The
use of “out of control” here is quite deliberate: whether in the workplace or simply
an environment of complicated social hierarchies, swearing (or, rather, not-swearing) is about the regulation of
language, and the regulation of language is about control.
The same is true in a family environment. A parent or
guardian may seek to regulate a child’s language consciously, as a means of
control – “my house, my rules.” Or, the desire to regulate which words a child
uses may be expressed in terms of propriety or social norms: “Watch your
language in front of your elders! Grandma is in the room!” What this amounts to
is a twofold exercise of control: social norms (“society”) controls the parent,
and the parent (as the most local representative of those norms) exercises
control over the child. Hierarchy and order are maintained without corporal
punishment – without even making the hierarchical nature of the exchange transparent.
This same argument could be applied to vast swaths of parenting: in most cases,
that would be accurate. Not all subtle societal coercion need be thought of as
arbitrary, and that’s a much longer essay for another day. For our purposes
today, let’s return to swearing.
Swearing (in and of itself) does no harm. It does no harm,
that is, unless you count the disruption of rank and role that it creates,
which constitutes a “harm” not to persons, but to hierarchy and social control.
That is to say that the primary “harmful” effect of swearing, the consequence
that social gatekeepers seek to avoid, is damage to propriety and therefore to
the established order. While it may disrupt propriety, swearing (as we’ve
already discussed) increases social
bonds and promotes solidarity. In addition to this, swearing and, indeed,
obscenity in a larger sense, have been used for millennia to satirize those in
positions of religious and political authority, to blaspheme, and to otherwise
go against the established order. Swearing is, at its core, a pro-social,
anti-authoritarian mode of communication. Therefore, swearing is a Satanic practice, when artfully
employed; an emotive mode of communication that seeks to disrupt the
established order.
There is, in conclusion, one additional benefit to swearing:
it’s a lot of fucking fun.
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