“Arbitrary”

A lexical nitpick.

In contemporary journalistic as well as postmodern academic writing, and various intersections thereof, there is a habit of using the word “arbitrary” to describe what is anything but. In its usage, it is intended to denote or connote something both random and irrational. But invariably the referent is neither. There are always “reasons why,” and almost never are the reasons self-evidently wrong or bad. The author simply doesn’t accept them as persuasive. That doesn’t render the phenomenon arbitrary, though. It just makes it conventional, or arguable. But what isn’t?

I’ve seen this trend applied to weeding treatments in one’s lawn; to the distinction between men’s and women’s sports; to clothing style; to rules in a game; to questions of propriety or decorum in public spaces and in online images; to methods in biblical interpretation; and to much more besides. It’s a weird trick and usually a cheap one. It’s often unclear whether the author knows the inapplicable unfairness of the usage, and both options are bad: either dishonesty or superficiality.

There’s something else going on, too. Typically the author makes clear how magnificently aware he is of the social constructedness of everything in our common life. This, that, and the other thing is a social construction; ergo, it’s turtles all the way down; ergo, it’s all arbitrary anyway—nothing but a choice of arbitraries: ecco homo, behold the human condition.

But that is either the wrong conclusion to draw, or the author hasn’t followed it to its logical conclusion. If the former, then what he means is that social and cultural and political life is unavoidably and essentially contingent—and that is true. But contingency does not mean arbitrary. Whereas if is the latter, then absolute and irreducible arbitrariness as a feature of every aspect of reality entails that the author’s preference for (non-arbitrary) X over (arbitrary) Y is a nonstarter. He’s sawed off the branch he was sitting on. There’s no longer any argument to be had. In which case, he should drop the rhetorical gamesmanship and accept that his opponent’s position is no more or less arbitrary than his is.

Unless he already knows that, and is using words as a mere means to the end of getting what he, arbitrarily, wants. No inconsistency there, albeit at the price of reducing language to power and exalting the ego’s desires as final. The price, in other words, is nihilism as a social, political, and rhetorical philosophy. Which, if we’re honest, is sometimes what lies behind the public writing of academics and journalists today.