#MeToo, Post-fact and the stories behind three other well-known phrases

We all talk about #MeToo, Prophets of Doom, Post-fact, the National Debt, and Resilience. In Keywords for Our Time, Michael Rosen’s guests spark off debates by looking at five well-known phrases from the national conversation, exploring their origins and what they really mean now.

Introduced by Helen Lewis, deputy editor of New Statesman

On October 15, 2017, actor Alyssa Milano posted a screenshot on Twitter: “If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote #MeToo as a status, it might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.” In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein allegations, a trickle of responses became a flood – within a week, 1.7m tweets included the phrase, with 12m mentions on Facebook. The succinct hashtag – coined in 2006 by the civil rights activist Tarana Burke – rapidly came to stand for decades of abuse in the film and other industries. The beauty of #MeToo is that it enables any individual to become part of a massive story. #MeToo is easier to say than #ItWasHim and is “helpfully vague” as it avoids the use of the graphic language required to describe what sexual assault is – so it can be shared in political debate without risking the prurient censorship of broadcast and print media.

"#MeToo has a similar problem: it airbrushes away the brutality of what is happening. That might make it easier for victims to speak out, but it diminishes the impact of their confessions.

"And there is another danger to the opacity of the phrase: the definition of 'inappropriate behaviour’ is inevitably a culturally and historically specific one. I don't have much sympathy for the inevitable hand-wringing about whether a man can ask a colleague out, because it seems obvious to me that that is not what #MeToo is about. Asking someone from work out for a date: fine. Repeatedly messaging a junior colleague when they have made it clear they are not interested in you - not fine. Then turning up at their hotel room unannounced at a conference - not fine. Making a lunge for them at a Christmas party after you have already been turned down - not fine. We can all make others feel uncomfortable by accident - the grown-up thing is to apologise and not do it again. #MeToo is not a witch-hunt. Witches don't exist - harassers and abusers do.

"Still, I do have a persistent niggle that feminism can be too hard on the casual bystander whose fault is ignorance rather than malice. Some of the revelations which followed the #MeToo movement have sounded more to me like bad dates than any kind of criminal matter. And perhaps that shows the power of a hashtag in shaping a narrative out of a series of individual very different statements. In that case, what's needed is more communication between the communication between the sexes, and more precise communication. #MeToo is a powerful way to begin an overdue conversation about the interaction of sex and power. But it can't be the end."

Introduced by Alex Deane, PR consultant and former chief of staff to David Cameron

For his pains, the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, who predicted the fall of Jerusalem, was persecuted. In our time, we too have plenty of pundits who outdo themselves with predictions of woe. Notwithstanding the political doom-saying of Brexit, the phrase "Prophets of Doom" is used mainly in the field of economics. In 1966, a pundit said that the stock market had predicted "nine of the past five recessions”. This was witty, but also very nearly factual: the previous nine bear markets had led to just thee recessions – an underestimate. Four decades on, a similar US analysis held that 13 recent bear markets had led to seven recessions – the same exaggerated, negative view.

But... in the last 200 years, new technologies have improved our wealth and circumstances at a blinding rate: medicine, energy, food are abundant, millions of lives have been rescued from poverty; a few have enriched themselves in the process. The gap between “the west and the rest” is actually closing. Every day for the past 25 years, 137,000 people have been lifted out of poverty. The number of democracies around the world has increased from 31 in 1971, to 103 at the last count.

The media would have us think otherwise. For example, boring, peaceful places outnumber disaster zones, but you wouldn't know that because doom-mongers hold great rhetorical power. Something in our nature inclines us to pessimism, perhaps to avoid disappointment. Happy prophecies are all alike, but every unhappy prophecy is unhappy in its own way. We prefer bad news stories to good news stories. In a time when the prophets of doom objectively could not be more wrong, they not only survive, but thrive, because we pay for them to do so. We get the media we deserve.

Introduced by David Wootton, professor of history at York University

Do elephants have knees? Aristotle said they didn’t. In 1646, Sir Thomas Brown set out to insist they did by appealing to reason and authority. How else did they walk? Later, he revealed that an elephant had been brought to England and anyone could see that it had joints. Not knowing how to argue from experience, he began by turning the question into a philosophical problem and only secondarily into a matter of observation.

We take facts for granted. Without them, we think and argue differently. Originally a fact was a “deed”, often shorthand for a crime, the veracity of which was decided in law courts – the term persists in the phrase “accessory after the fact”. Juries deciding on facts were infallible, giving rise to the idea that you can’t have a false fact or an alternative fact.

In the 17th century, scientists began to question the authority of unchallenged classical pronouncements, such as that the Babylonians cooked eggs by whirling them around in slings. The new science was based on observed experience: courts established facts through the testimony of witnesses – science would do the same. In 1660, the Royal Society was founded to promote experimental sciences, concentrating on establishing matters of fact – the best form of knowledge because facts trumped reason and authority. The printing press was a factor in spreading knowledge in a stable, reproducible form.

We live in a new age where information spreads through the internet, unchecked and uncontrolled. The first scientists with their printed books were like people selling on eBay – their reputations were at stake. But behind the anonymity of Facebook and Twitter posts, nobody checks the reliability or integrity of the sources. We are back in the world of rumour, gossip and opinion, the world that facts were supposed to eliminate, the world of authority where any fool can be an author. Much of modern culture from post-Modern philosophy to populist politics is designed to dispute the very possibility of reliable, honest, impartial information.

Facts are tools for thinking, our way of grasping the real. Without facts we are lost. We need to redesign our technology before it is too late. The survival of democracy may depend on it.

Introduced by Oliver Kamm – journalist, language columnist and former City man

The idea that economic language is mumbo-jumbo, designed to mystify the public and obscure common-sense principles is corrosive. In the 1990s, the then shadow chancellor Gordon Brown’s reference to the “growth of post-neo-classical endogenous growth theory” was greeted with populist hostility, but was only jargon, perfectly well understood by its target audience – economists.

Plain English campaigners don’t distinguish between a reasonable call for clarity and an unhealthy suspicion of ideas. Economic essentials can’t always be boiled down in homely analogies, eg “The National Debt”. Margaret Thatcher’s call for the national budget to be run as if it were a household budget with the aim of disposing of debt and accruing savings, didn’t make any sense because a government’s income and expenditures are contingent variables: unlike the domestic situation, if a government cuts spending, the consequence is often reduced income. Therefore, the government's requirement for urgent, front-loading of cuts was based on a false premise.

Framing economic questions in simple or plain language may seem like a good idea, but it really isn’t. It is better to accept that public policy will have its own terminology and jargon which is meaningful, and try to master it, rather than dismiss it. Complex ideas may need specialist language if they are to be understood. Livings standards and jobs depend on grasping this linguistic issue.

Introduced by broadcaster, author and GP, Farrah Jarral

Think of resilience, and we tend to think of hard things, like a storm-tossed battleship, or the flex and twang of a willow tree in the wind. Increasingly, the term is applied to organisations, communities, economies, eco-systems and… people – a magical, self-generating substance that, for example, NHS staff and care workers are expected to create within themselves and crank up on demand in response to mounting pressure.

In classical antiquity, its meanings were to do with – literally and metaphorically – leaping back, or returning. In the 17th century Francis Bacon used it to mean echoes, bouncing back; 200 years later, it was in heart surgery, watchmaking and mechanics; offshoots appeared in manufacturing, sidestepped into ecology and hitched a ride with anthropology to appear in child psychology in the 1950s. So resilience has flowed from the human realm into physics and back into society, making it strangely brutal in the process: in material science, resilience is a material’s capacity to absorb energy under mechanical stress and back to its normal form when the stress is released. If stress is too great, the material will deform permanently and eventually break – a convenient analogy for human trauma.

But in the social sphere, resilience has many meanings, some of them internally contradictory. Is it a process, a state of being, or an inherent quality? Today it is commonly about absorbing, adapting to and overcoming stress. It does not feature in the everyday discourse of human experiences – it smacks of corporate-speak, an empty buzz-word, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, wearily familiar to people working in medicine, law, finance, IT and teaching, and cousin to “grit” and “growth mindset”. It can also be a mask for tolerating absurd, unsafe working conditions, unreasonable demands or outright bullying. Beloved of the HR and self-help industries, it hides the structural problems behind so much human suffering and places the blame for misery squarely on the shoulders of the person who “needs to be more resilient”, promoting anxiety and feelings of inadequacy.

Resilience’s descent to humans from mechanics is not helpful. Humans aren’t like steel rods – we are tender, complicated creatures, and words affect our hearts more than we know.

Michael Rosen discusses these introductory essays with the speakers in Keywords for Our Time. You can listen now.