Nothing I know about Tom Cruise makes me think that he is, overall, a good guy. That said, single-minded, cultish people may be good leaders of certain kinds of projects. And I found myself siding with him when I heard the leaked audio of him yelling at crew members of the next Mission: Impossible movie, which has gotten special permission to shoot in Britain so long as everyone involved followed certain COVID-19 protocols.
He raves about “thousands of jobs” and “the future of this f—ing industry” hanging on their following of the rules. Again, I don’t mean to praise Cruise’s general character or to suggest I even know whether the protocols in place on this set are good safety guidance. It just didn’t strike me as abusive screaming that had no point; it sounded like a good pep talk to focus minds on what had to be done, given the stakes.
The reason it is in the Word of the Week, though, is because of one prominent response to it, which inhabits a trend in activist lingo that I have been tracking for a while. Director and actor Lexi Alexander took to Twitter to critique Cruise’s rant and the coverage around it: “For every Tom Cruise screaming there have been 20 First [assistant directors] making that same speech 2 months before he even arrived on set and while under threat to get fired. Stop listening up, start listening down.”
It occurs to me that if one were to “listen down,” one implies that there are people “beneath them.” Before about one or two centuries ago, to “condescend” did not entail doing something rude or “wrongly or illegitimately presuming oneself the rightful superior when talking to others,” as we understand it now. Everyone so fully accepted that there are stations in life that place people above and beneath one another that “to condescend” had almost the opposite meaning: It meant to be accommodating despite this reality, to treat someone in a friendly manner despite one’s societal position, and to ignore how decorum dictated you might act. Only in a society where we presume every individual is rightfully equal in dignity does the way we use condescend now even make sense.
But the mental furniture of many of today’s activist thinkers is, of course, not humanistic in the classical sense. So, one “punches up,” “punches down,” and apparently listens up or down, too. All of this comes naturally as little turns of phrase to people who think in group hierarchy and in stereotype. These verbal tics are often conscious dodges, too. In my encounters with activists, I hear people taking pains to say they are “calling in,” not “calling out” people and behaviors they seek to highlight and punish. Smith College professor Loretta Ross coined the phrase as part of her excellent work critiquing callout culture. But in real-world usage, it often simply replaces “callout” as a way to deny engaging in “callout culture.”
Examples abound. “Safe spaces” were broadly mocked as a bad idea for being locales where freedom from certain speech would be maintained. So, activists invented “brave spaces,” which is the same thing with a more courageous-sounding coat of paint: Now, activists can think themselves brave for only permitting speech they agree with. Newspeak is exhausting, and it is bad writing. But it is also revealing.
