Amid the culture war, there has been an ongoing debate over publicly acceptable speech. This should be of no surprise to chroniclers of the decline of the West, because it is when civilizations lose faith in their moral certainties and founding beliefs that they are susceptible to existential challenge and collapse. Foreign and domestic enemies undermine the shared stories we tell ourselves, diminishing our ability to describe our past and narrate our present. It is reasonable to interpret the muddled thinking across the Anglosphere, pertaining to the liberty of lawful speech, as the chief symptom of an Age of Confusion. In a forthcoming volume edited by Daniel Pitt and Ferenc Hörcher, Intellectual Conservatism: From Burke to Scruton (Routledge, 2025), I develop this line of argument in an essay entitled, “Thought, Speech, and Action: Marxism and the Culture War.”

　　Many people are engaged in reauthoring our language. For example, we now have government documents that refer to “chestfeeders” instead of mothers, a page on the UK’s National Health Service website dedicated to “Chestfeeding if you’re trans or non-binary,” academic journal articles using the language of “people who menstruate,” and airlines ceasing to address passengers with the customary speech form, “Ladies and Gentlemen.” Because language necessarily evolves and adapts, the liberal-minded reader may shrug his shoulders. But when such linguistic innovators do so with ideological ends in mind, then the time for shoulder shrugging has passed and the time to respond has come.

　　But how to respond? First, it is necessary to discern the ideological character of the linguistic innovators. Downstream of classical Marxism, and on from Maoism, are forms of neo-Marxism nested in the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences. Notable examples include Critical Theory and its offshoots: Critical Legal Theory, Critical Race Theory, and Critical Discourse Analysis. Whilst distinct, these radical intellectual approaches share a belief in the importance of the role of language as a tool for “decolonizing,” “emancipating,” and “liberating” individuals from established modes of thought, speech, and behaviour. These are the main weapons in the culture war; a war primarily waged at the level of ideas and beliefs and in which opponents of the Western tradition commandeer the language of others and, by so doing, disarm supporters of liberty and self-government.

　　After discernment, the next step is to respond by refusing to cede our own words. Our words—and here one is naturally referring to dignified speech—are our thoughts, birthed in the public sphere. If we cede our words and transition to a new “liberative” and “correct” grammar, we cease in any meaningful sense to be the authors of our own speech, of our own self-government.

　　This scenario is perhaps at its clearest with reference to the social pressure to display online, and to declare in meetings, one’s pronouns. Couched in terms of good manners, the pressure to conform to this “trans-inclusive” practice has built over the recent years. And whilst some may think this is peripheral or ephemeral and that few, if any, are truly forced to display and announce their pronouns, a key marker of the centrality of the boundaries of publicly acceptable speech is the liberty to non-conform. Non-conformity to the new pronoun protocol is akin to resistance towards DEI mantras, emphasizing justice rather than social justice, politics as opposed to identity politics, and individual rights over group rights.

　　From here, a counter-reaction will likely occur, with many progressives and radicals taking offense and leaning into moral arguments meant to show the wrongness of retaining established patterns of speech. In my experience, such arguments take several forms.One common type is an appeal to a form of pragmatism. Complying with new linguistic practices, we are told, costs little or nothing and yet it means a lot to minorities such as transgender, non-binary, and gender-fluid people, and their allies. For those of us rooted in the Western tradition in general, and its conservative school in particular, the truth comes with an exceedingly high price tag, which is why it is regarded as precious; a pearl of great value.

　　When individuals lie to one another about moral facts by “correcting” the meaning of words, the ethical thread that binds individual to family, neighbor, community, and nation, degrades and frays.

　　Another mode of argument is utilitarian in character. If the new linguistic etiquette brings greater happiness to more people in a particular company, club, church, or sports team, then it is ostensibly the ethical approach. However, if truth is objective it cannot meaningfully be subject to that kind of utilitarian calculus, nor culturally contingent relativism. The truth of our sexed nature is evident in the dimorphic character of maleness and femaleness at the following levels of observable analysis: genetic, chromosomal, neuroscientific, and secondary sex characteristics. Moreover, the fact about our sexed nature speaks to the truth that human beings are embodied and exist in space and time, and therefore have a history, and necessarily, an age. While for some these facts might present an inconvenience, sex is one of many defining properties of our being and is immutable, an ineliminable part of being human.

　　A further intellectual appeal asserts that by not complying with the new grammar actual harm is done. The speaker is therefore responsible for the actions that a distressed individual may commit as a consequence. In this topsy-turvy reasoning, words are placed in the same category as violence, while the absence of the preferred words is treated as a form of harm. The infantilization of publicly acceptable speech can be detected here.

　　Finally, a common argument deployed against individuals who refuse to comply with contemporary speech codes can be understood as the appeal to personal truth. This radically autonomous claim to knowledge has something of the Gnostic heresy about it. The fact that the individual claims to have a special knowledge of their identity that is unavailable to others who inhabit the same time and space, let alone the same-sexed nature, is for some interlocutors the most difficult claim to refute. But if one takes a similar, if slightly more hyperbolic, example to illustrate the point it may provide clarity.Let us say a teenage boy announces that his parents are not his real parents and only he truly can know this. Those who care for him might point out the visible physical similarities that he shares with his mother and father, draw attention to mutual traits of personality and sensibility within the family, and attest to having known him as a child of his parents from his earliest days.Soon the boy will be challenged to evidence his assertion via history and science (the two great means of human knowledge). Frustrated that he cannot transcend such examination, he sulks, and nothing more is said of the silly spasm of thought.Does this sound familiar? Yes, and, no. The silly spasm of thought is all too familiar among adolescents, but sadly, the reasoned response by the adults in the room is not.

　　The historical record attests that when individuals consistently lie to one another about moral facts through “correcting” the meaning of words, thereby altering the definitions of ideas and objects, the necessary ethical thread that binds individual to family, neighbor, community, and nation, degrades and eventually frays. After a while, the habit of deception becomes so deeply established that people swear that down is up, and that night is day. If, in the Anglosphere, we consistently lie to one another, and declare that a man can be a woman or a woman a man, the moral fact of manhood and womanhood is blurred. And the door is thereby opened to a plethora of confusions and calamities through which the most vulnerable walk, down the fateful path to victimhood. The Age of Confusion carries a heavy cost.

　　Suppose indeed theAge of Confusionis the effect of the culture war over publicly acceptable speech across the Anglosphere between intellectuals and politicians drawing on the tradition of neo-Marxism, and especially utilizing critical theories and disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. In that case, the next obvious question is: why?Why confusion? Why language and culture rather than economics?Why expend such energy? Is there really a sense across the Anglosphere that individuals are not sufficiently at liberty to adequately describe themselves and narrate the life they wish to pursue?

　　A single, all-encompassing answer eludes me. However, what I have found through teaching and research on the culture wars is that there are a series of reasons behind the subtle madness of our age. Different actors in the culture war hold to different motives. Some, following Marcuse, seek the replacement of the Judeo-Christian moral ethic with a liberative socialism; some have misconstrued bounded liberty in a democratic community under the law with a childlike conception of freedom as the appetite and emotion in a given hour on a given day; some are motivated by envy of the so-called “lucky people” that seem to have it all; and some further still, want to burn the house down. These pitiable folks are the new products of the Age of Confusion.

　　Sit certitudo.