Power of conflation is a threat to separation of power
An entry in the language blog TheBetterEditor reveals the darkening soul of an originally innocuous term: to conflate. It is now a device with which to sow confusion and to exploit innate prejudices.
The blog, written by Christopher Daly, was the top result of my Googling of the phrase “conflating the issues”, which arose because of a straw-man trick played by just about everyone with a podium and an axe to grind.
The trick is performed by beginning an oratory with an emotive issue — say, land — and then conflating it with a straw man of one’s choosing so duplicitously as to modify the meaning of the first term.
Thus, when SA’s land issue is argued, farmers who see themselves as vulnerable to land reform will roll out food security as though food, and not land, is the issue under discussion. Others might evoke “the economy” or “rights” or any number of things to match the podium thumper’s agenda.
To conflate, writes Daly, is not the neologism. The Oxford English Dictionary cites an example from 1583 as meaning “blown together” as though by the wind. These days it has come to mean the mixing of two or more things resulting in a new and homogenised entity.
Take the apartheid regime’s propensity to conflate profoundly contradictory ideas, of which the cynical naming of the department of separateness as the department of co-operation and development is the perennial example.
There is nothing wrong with the idea of co-operation, or with development, but the conflated whole produced a different outcome than its constituent parts might have suggested.
Daly cites reports about the US’s Affordable Care Act, in which commentators conflated the ideas of health care and health insurance, “treating these two very different issues as a single idea when in this case they’re probably best kept as distinct as possible”.
This means conflate has grown a whole new meaning. Conflation, itself a conflation in linguistics, has begun to translate as confusion, which is also a conflation where “con” means together and “fuse” means combine.
If this is confusing, it kind of makes the point: conflating the issues is a phrase that now mostly occurs in a political context and usually in a negative and misleading sense.
Conflate is the kind of word George Orwell might have used. His novel 1984, which gave us the ministries of love, peace, plenty and truth in which these aspirations were twisted to mean hate, war, scarcity and lies, also gave us a clue about the duplicitous intent of its practitioners.
Underlying their cynicism is the sure knowledge that people’s prejudices tend to provide the meaning they want to derive most from a concept.
While the National Party was brilliant at this kind of logical buffoonery, the ANC government has elevated the practice to an art. First, it conflated the movement with the liberation struggle, post facto, so that the two are now held as synonymous. That meant the ANC gained the moral high ground long enough to become a political party and hold on to power since 1994.
Second — and this was the ANC’s biggest trick — it conflated the party with the state, which politicised government departments and perverted laws of general application to that of particular application.
President Cyril Ramaphosa convincingly demonstrated his powers of conflation when he sidelined the parliamentary plebiscite on the desirability of amending the constitution to permit expropriation without compensation and presented it as virtually a fait accompli. And he did this in the sure knowledge that poor people would take expropriation without compensation to mean redemption from misery.
Former president Jacob Zuma advanced the ANC’s conflation project by holding parliament in contempt. And now Ramaphosa is conflating the legislature with the executive, which ironically is a throwback to the Westminster system of SA’s colonial past.
Now all that prevents the end of the doctrine of the separation of powers is SA’s robust judiciary, but with verdict after verdict against the state for violating the constitution, the pressure to conflate the courts too will mount.