"The Cake" is a Lie

The Supreme Court has been deciding all sorts of stuff lately. Stuff about unions, about domestic violence, about voting rights. I’ll be honest - I’ve read the headlines but not the articles. (I’m saving them for when it feels right. You don’t want to force these things.) 

‘Tis the season, I guess. After all, it was June when they ruled on Obergefell v. Hodges, effectively making same-sex marriage legal nationwide. (I remember it clearly; it’s one of those strange “where-were-you-when” flashbulb memories for me, even though the ruling has absolutely no bearing on my personal life. I was on a public bus on my way to Rochester, New Hampshire to pick up my car, which had just had its windshield replaced after several months of procrastination - mine, not the car's - when I happened to see the news.)

So without actually looking into it, I feel like I can say with some confidence that June is the Month of Supreme Court Decisions. But since June is also the End of the School Year and The Weather Finally Not Being Total Crap Month, it can be a bit hard to keep up with what RBG and her crew have been up to. (Despite not being the Chief Justice, RBG is undeniably the leader of the gang in public perception. I think this is largely due to the pleasant rhythm of her name: “Ruth Bader Ginsburg” is just fun to say in a way that “Samuel Alito” is not. Nevermind “Sonia Sotomayor,” whose name is actively un-fun to pronounce, especially for liberal white people who are terrified of both under and overemphasizing its Spanish elements.)

But there is one recent decision that I have paid some attention to. In fact, I’ve been anticipating it for months, the way that normal people might look forward to the next Star Wars movie. This is the sequel to that 2015 blockbuster, Obergefell v. Hodges. The one about whether it’s lawful for a baker to refuse to provide a cake for a same-sex wedding, whether that counts as discrimination or not.

You know exactly why this is here.

And as this article points out, this sequel, like so many others, has been rather disappointing. Instead of considering the larger implications of the case and setting a precedent, the Supreme Court made a decision in Masterpiece v. Colorado that really only applies to this one particular bakery, this one particular cake, and this one particular wedding. Which is a shame, because I think this case touches on some very important philosophical questions.

Now, I know many people think this case is about religious freedom and/or civil rights. But it’s not. It’s about questions much deeper and more fundamental than that.

For instance: is there such thing as a “gay cake?”

That is: is “being-for-a-gay-wedding” a property that a cake can have?

Put in more general terms: are human intentions for objects somehow embedded in those objects?

One step further: is there such thing as objective reality, or is it all just perception?

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Our guiding principle right now is that a business can deny someone service because of something about the product he or she requests, but not because of something about the customer. (Or not because of certain traits, anyway. You can deny someone service because you don’t like their shirt, but not because of their race, which, though well-intentioned, seems a bit silly to me. Certainly it's a great way to get a whole bunch of racists to rebrand themselves as shirt-haters.) So the baker made the point that he wasn’t discriminating against the customers for being gay; he would have refused to sell a “gay cake” to a straight person as well. Neil Gorsuch concurred.

Perfectly legal to discriminate against this guy.

But to most of us, the idea of a “gay cake” sounds absurd. We are inclined to dismiss the baker's argument, to say that a cake is not "tainted" by its future association with a same-sex wedding any more than a particular gun is defined by the fact that it will be one day used to commit a crime (see: why The Right hates the term “assault weapon.”) An object having a destiny is just mystical, fantasy-book nonsense. 

We want to say what Sigmund Freud almost definitely would not: “sometimes a cake is just a cake.”

But cakes are not born; they are made.

*

As it happens, I recently ordered a cake. In fact, the very next thing on my to-do list for the evening is to go pick up said cake. This cake is for the eighth-grade graduation at my school, a fact that I was compelled to divulge to the woman at the grocery store when I placed the order. And now that she knows the cake’s future, she cannot help but see the cake as an “eighth-grade graduation cake.” It can no longer be “just a cake” in her experience of it.

Of course, I could have ordered the cake without explicitly telling her what it was for, and so could anyone who wants a cake for a same-sex wedding. But there will always be clues. Some are pretty obvious: in my case, the words “Congratulations 8th Graders” are going to be written on the cake in green icing, along with a graduation cap and balloons. (Picture two miniature plastic grooms, or a photo of the couple, or the words “Happy Wedding Day Steve and Adam.") Others are more subtle: in my small town, everyone knows (or could find out pretty easily) that I work at the school, so the fact that I was the one who ordered the cake could be used to infer its purpose. (A same-sex couple walking into the bakery holding hands; stereotypes about lisps or clothes that fit.) Sometimes these assumptions might be mistaken - as when I order a large pizza and employees assume that I am going to share it with at least one other person - but they are always present.

Picture Steve Harvey as "Steve"
just because he would hate it.

A gay couple trying desperately to keep a homophobic baker from finding out that the cake they’re ordering is for their wedding would make a decent plot for a sitcom episode (or a mid-tier Adam Sandler movie, a sort of reverse Chuck and Larry, which I’ve never seen.) For all I know already is one. And in that episode, you just know that the baker would find out the truth at some point. And when he did, that knowledge would undeniably affect the way he saw the cake. Perhaps we could argue that it shouldn’t stop him from making or selling the cake (for one thing, it seems like a poor business decision) but that’s a different question. What’s undeniable is that his way of perceiving the cake is altered irrevocably.

Because there’s no such thing as “just a cake.” We always imagine objects as having some purpose, some use, some connection to a human being, whether that is ourselves or others. That’s how we make sense of them. The only way we can make sense of them. Before the sitcom-baker knew the cake was for a gay wedding, he saw it as a cake for a straight wedding or a bar mitzvah or a birthday party or whatever. Since cakes are made-to-order, it’s not really possible to distinguish between what is part of the cake and what is part of the customer. All we can ever actually access is our experience of the cake.

And it goes further than this. Even if you work on an assembly line, churning out identical cake after cake, you would still see them as something other than “just a cake.” You may see them as a means to earn your paycheck, a symbol of the gluttony and excess of American culture, an item that will bring joy to countless people around the world, etc.. This would all depend on your attitudes and feelings about not just cake, but also things like capitalism, Henry Ford, your childhood, children in general, and frosting. (My own feelings on these topics, in order: for, mixed, against, for, mostly for, and mostly against.) But a cake is never just a cake.

*

So what does this mean for Masterpiece v. Colorado? Weirdly, I think it means that the baker was kind of right. (Which, even more weirdly to me, also makes Neil Gorsuch kind of right). It was a “gay cake” to him. The distinction between attributes of the product and attributes of the customer breaks down when you consider it phenomenologically, when you consider the way that humans actually experience things. It’s text and context, basically. You don’t read a book, watch a movie, or listen to a song in a vacuum; your experience is always colored by your pre-existing ideas, biases, associations, and memories. As uncomfortable as it is to think about, there's no such thing as perceiving something "the way it actually is." 

The same-sex couple was also right, though. The baker was being discriminatory. But there's another uncomfortable truth we have to consider here: a Supreme Court decision isn’t going to end discrimination. It’s only going to make the forms of that discrimination subtler and more insidious. Look at what happened after Brown v. Board of Education. Schools desegregated reluctantly, then resegregated quietly. What we really need are people who don’t mind making a "gay cake." People who don't have any desire to turn away customers who are gay, or black, or even those who wear Ed Hardy shirts. People who genuinely value diversity. And there are no shortcuts to that.

Another point: I wouldn't want a cake that the baker only made for me because he was legally required to. His resentment would be baked right in.

The "Rhetorical" Question

Some of my students have finally caught on (after probably, like, five years, but still) that they will get in trouble if they call each other “retarded.” So they have started calling each other “rhetorical” instead.

On the one hand, this is kind of brilliant. It kind of reminds me of all those clever poets and bards from the middle ages who got around the rule against criticizing royalty by inventing characters who were just-similar-enough to their real kings and queens - or the way that Arrested Development mocks Google (one of our overlords) by calling it things like "search" and "something." 

And they have chosen a word that is a) so similar-sounding to the original insult that there is little doubt that the intended target won’t “get” the meaning and b) already commonly used in my classroom. (This, by the way, is for two reasons: the obvious reason that I teach writing, and the more unique one that my students and I have something of an ongoing battle-slash-inside-joke where they constantly accuse me of asking rhetorical questions when I believe I am asking actual ones [which could make a whole post in itself, possibly with the same title].) So, as long as they don’t slip up, they have plausible deniability. If anyone tried to call them out, they could just reach for a dictionary (okay, dictionary app) and smugly read out the definition. "Rhetorical: relating to or concerning the art of rhetoric." 

(The authority of the Internet is final and unimpeachable to these kids; it’s their Bible, the Literal Word of God That Settles All Debates.)

I'm pretty sure the only reason we never had a scandal where
 a conservative commentator called Obama "niggardly"  is
  because it goes against the whole "big-spending liberal" thing.

But the whole thing also puts me in a bit of a pickle as a teacher. I know what “rhetorical” means in this context. And they know that I know - it's not a dog whistle. (Just to be clear, my problem with the epithet “retarded” is not that it is hurtful to the student at whom it is directed, since that student is pretty much always “in on the joke”; it’s that it perpetuates a stigma against the intellectually disabled.) 

And yet, anything that I could do to stop the practice would probably just make it worse (I could imagine them rebelling by either starting to use “rhetorical” to describe literally everything, or switching to a new code word, quite possibly my own name) - and would make me look absolutely ridiculous to anyone on the outside. Can you imagine the articles that would be written if some parent got upset enough to contact the press? I’d be painted as the enemy of free speech. A poster-child for “political correctness run amok." Some hippie, leftist, vegan, trophy-distributing, multi-gendered communist with a peanut allergy.

Because when you zoom out to the larger context of the English language, the word “rhetorical” is a totally innocent one. It has acquired a new meaning through the way it is being used within this particular speech community of eighth-graders at one school in a small town in New Hampshire.

I think this anecdote illustrates two important points about language. First, this is what happens when you try to restrict speech by fiat. The euphemism treadmill gets fired up and new words slide in to replace the old, as smoothly and neatly as if by ctrl-F, ctrl-R. (Unless you're Michael Scott and you leave one, revealing "Dwigt.") Look at all the other ways kids have gotten around the prohibition of the word “retarded.” When I was in elementary school, it was “sped” (or sometimes just “special” in a certain tone of voice.) These days, what I usually hear is "autistic." In any case, nothing has actually changed except for the word. The stigma is still present.

My response pretty much every time
Jordan Peterson opens his mouth.

But I’d argue that this is equally true of any attempt to change the language people use, regardless of whether that comes from an authority figure or social pressure. Language is a function of worldview - a “symptom,” if you will, of the way we conceptualize things - but we often conflate the two. We assume that someone who uses “she” to refer to a transgender woman does so because he perceives her as a woman. But it could also be the case that he is just yielding to the social pressure to use everyone’s preferred pronouns. (I still think this is a respectful thing to do; I’m not going Jordan Peterson on you here. The point is that getting people to change their language alone doesn’t actually accomplish much.)

All year, I have been trying to get my students to stop talking about how to “fix” their writing and instead discuss how to “improve” it. (I'd say "fix" is a subset of "improve.") I have even written the word "fix" it on my board in a circle with a line through it as a visual reminder. Now, my real goal is that my students come to understand the writing process differently, but I'm not so naive as to think that this will happen just because they swap out one word for another. I mean, half the time it’s this: “Mr. Hebert, what do I need to fix -- uh, I mean improve.” 

And, hey, it may even be counterproductive for me to focus on the word they use. Because at least if I left the language alone, then I would have a clear sign that a student was conceptualizing his or her writing in a process-oriented way if he or she dropped an “i-bomb.” Now, all it signifies that this student is saying what I want to hear.

By the way, this was the third such circle on my board; “fix” joined “finished” (which I three-quarters-jokingly refer to as “the f-word”) and “done” (“the d-word.”). Of course, after these initial bans were issued back in September, it led to a proliferation of the word “completed” (which I felt like I couldn’t quite get away with calling “the c-word” because of, you know, the real “c-word”) - which I guess is another illustration of my point.

*

I also think this is a good demonstration of the way language really works. The meanings of words shift and evolve constantly. And they do so in particular speech communities (or "interpretive communities" to Stanley Fish, who I find very persuasive on linguistics) and particular contexts. It would be absurd to claim that “rhetorical” is an offensive term now. The only thing we are justified is saying is that it has now acquired an offensive meaning when used in a particular way by a particular group of people in a particular place.

Way back when “Facebook pages” were still a thing, in 2009 or so, I “became a fan” of a page entitled: “If gay isn’t a synonym for stupid, then it doesn’t mean homosexual either.” This isn’t as bad as it could be. I was getting there. At the second panel of the exploding-head meme, I guess. (The first panel would probably be that Hillary Duff commercial where she pops out of a clothing rack and tells two “don’t say gay” and then asks (rhetorically, in two ways), "What if I were to call things 'girl-wearing-a-skirt-as-a-top" as if that makes any sense.) I understood that the meaning of words could evolve over time, but I still assumed that evolution was linear and sequential: once a word gained a new meaning, it became its own autonomous being, like Athena springing fully-formed from the head of Zeus. The new meaning of “gay” had no connection to the old one. They were just homophones, as far as I was concerned.

Pictured: Athena springing from the head of Zeus.

I figured it was the exact opposite of what had happened to “faggot." No one (in America, at least) hears that word and actually thinks of a bundle of sticks. That is only a disingenuous excuse offered by the dictionary-thumpers. (Although I do remember a South Park episode where the kids had established a speech community in which “faggot” only meant someone who rode a motorcycle and had literally no sense that it also meant a gay person.)

I guess my mistake was putting too much faith in my own intention as a user of the word, and not enough stake in the way the word would be heard by others. Sometime in my college career (okay, who am I kidding, it was the spring semester of my freshman year, the first few months of 2011) I took a linguistics class and learned about polysemy: the phenomenon where a word can have multiple meanings that are tied together because of a historical connection, a past-oneness. (I suppose traditional birth, mother and child, works here as a metaphor.) And I remember asking what I still think was a pretty smart question: “Can you have something start out as polysemy and turn into just a pair of homophones over time?” Yes, you can. Third phase of the exploding-head meme.

(Of course, even homophones can evoke each other’s meanings in certain contexts - intentionally in puns or other forms of wordplay, and unintentionally when a listener misinterprets the word. My favorite example of this is the first part of The Sound and the Fury (yeah, yeah, I know) where no one can figure out why Benjy, the mentally-rhetorical Compson brother, is getting so upset, and it turns out because the golfers nearby keep yelling “Caddie!” and it’s reminding him of his sister, Caddy. Now, there’s clearly no relationship between the word “caddie” and the name, but to Benjy’s simplistic mind, the sound has only one meaning.)

Definitely the coolest S&F cover I've seen.
Also, apparently James Franco made a
movie of this a couple years ago, because
of course he did.

Now, the fourth stage, the one where the head has really exploded, is realizing that polysemy and homophony can exist at the same time in different contexts and/or communities. And that is where I think we are at with “gay” today: sometimes it only means homosexual, sometimes it only means stupid, sometimes it means a blend of the two, and then every once in a while (usually only at Christmas or productions of West Side Story) it really does mean bright and cheerful and happy.

*

Meaning is usage. I think of the phrase “all lives matter.” Taken at face value, there is absolutely nothing objectionable about those words, and trying to make the argument that they are offensive often feels an awful lot like trying to explain to an eighth-grader why he shouldn’t call his friend “rhetorical.” But what’s significant is the context in which they appeared, their history. They were a response to the statement “black lives matter.” And moreover, I believe that is the context in which they are still used most of the time. (Although I did see a “social justice board” in a nearby town yesterday, which bore the message “All lives matter - black, brown, white, tan, and gray.” Yeah, I’m a bit thrown off by gray, too, but this is northern New Hampshire, so I’m mostly just glad they didn’t write “red” or “yellow.”)

Picture a family at a restaurant. They’ve been waiting a while for a table and are starting to get restless and impatient. One of the kids whines, “I’m hungry.” And one of the parents snaps, “We’re all hungry.” The meaning of that second utterance is to dismiss the first, to render it unimportant. So too with “all lives matter.” We cannot pretend that the meaning is something intrinsic to the phrase itself (and if we want to get really postmodern and Fishy with this, we could talk about how it is only because we are members of a certain speech community that we can make sense of words like “lives” and “matter.") The meaning of the utterance is not something that we find by dissecting it, breaking it down into its component parts and then putting it back together. No, meaning is a holistic feature of the language. Remove the context, you remove the meaning.

So what do I do about “rhetorical?” Not too much. My go-to line whenever I hear something I find problematic in my class is, “Please don’t use that word like that.” And so far, no one has pressed me too much on “like what?” But at least now I have a decent answer.