About halfway through Frank Furedi’s The War Against the Past, the reader is presented with a selection of words deemed unacceptable by the Local Government Association of England in its Inclusive Language Guide. The words include mum, dad, homeless, second generation, and lifestyle choices. Similarly, the University of New Hampshire’s Bias-Free Language Guide would have us erase old people, overweight, and tomboy. Reading these lists, I realized that—whether by direct instruction or by some kind of psychosocial osmosis, or more likely through some mix of the two—I was sufficiently well schooled in contemporary assumptions not to have to seek explanations for why any of these once innocuous terms could be treated as troubling holdovers from our wretched, prejudice-riddled past.
Furedi has assiduously recorded examples of the left’s victories in changing how the world thinks and talks. On the broadest canvas, the Council of Europe wishes to narrow history education to lessons in what is either “directly applicable to the personal aspirations, interests, or cultural experiences of students” or “connected in some way to real-world issues, problems, and contexts.” At the micro level, in 2019 the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists changed its name to the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England, “in recognition of the problematic connotations that are widely associated with the terms ‘Anglo-Saxon.’” From his own life experience, the author recounts, quite dismally, how a hospital overruled his outdated, inclusion-endangering desire to be recorded as the son of his dying mother. He was instead her “carer.”
