Sticks and Stones...

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Words have a strange ability to survive the circumstances that created them. Their meaning changes, sometimes dramatically, but they rarely arrive in the present completely untouched by where they have been. A word can begin as a description, become an insult, be reclaimed by the people it was used against and eventually acquire a meaning that would have been almost unrecognisable to the person who first used it. Other words lose some of their power simply because enough time has passed that the experience behind them becomes less immediate. That evolution is one of the things I find fascinating about language, although it also creates a slightly uncomfortable question about how much responsibility we have for understanding what the words we choose have carried before they reached us. When a pop star recently released a song called Patient Zero, this thought was front and centre in my mind.

I should probably say immediately that I don’t believe this pop star is homophobic and I have no idea how the title of their latest single was chosen, what conversations happened around it or whether anybody involved stopped to consider its history. I also don’t think any of those things completely resolve my discomfort with it. “Patient Zero” is inseparable, at least for me, from one of the ugliest myths to emerge from the AIDS crisis: the story of Gaétan Dugas, a gay Canadian flight attendant who was falsely turned into the man supposedly responsible for bringing AIDS to America. What had originally been “Patient O”, meaning Outside-of-California, was misread as a zero, and eventually became a story in which one gay man could be positioned as the beginning of an epidemic that had already been spreading for years. The story was wrong, but it fitted rather neatly into a period when gay men were routinely portrayed as irresponsible and dangerous, which may help explain why the myth proved so durable.

I realise that many people now hear the phrase differently. “Patient zero” has entered everyday language as a way of describing the person or thing from which something else originated, sometimes so casually that there is no reference to disease at all. Language does evolve and I don’t think every use of a phrase requires us to carry a complete historical bibliography alongside it. But there is something about taking language born from the vilification of a gay man during an epidemic that killed millions of people and using it as the title of a pop song that I find incredibly difficult to experience as neutral. Calling the choice homophobic does not require me to believe that the person who made it hates gay people. For me, the problem sits in the casualness with which a piece of profoundly homophobic history can be separated from the people who lived through it and repackaged as something clever, provocative or culturally interesting.

That distinction between intention and impact is uncomfortable partly because most of us would prefer our intentions to have the final say. I know I would. I have absolutely been the person who has reacted defensively when somebody told me that something I said or did had affected them differently from how I intended it. There is a particular kind of irritation that comes from feeling misunderstood when you know what you meant, especially when the interpretation being offered back to you feels completely inconsistent with the person you believe yourself to be. My instinct has sometimes been to explain myself more clearly, as though enough additional information about my intentions could somehow override somebody else’s experience of what actually happened.

The problem is that the other person never had access to my intention in the first place. They only had access to what I said or did, the context in which it happened and whatever history they brought to that moment with them. I may be able to explain what I meant afterwards, but I don’t get to decide retrospectively how somebody should have experienced me. That does not mean every interpretation of our behaviour is automatically fair, because human beings misunderstand one another constantly. It simply means that intention belongs to the person acting and impact belongs to the person receiving it. Pretending we control both seems to me like asking for a level of authority over other people that none of us actually possesses.

Living in America has made me more aware of another version of the same tension, because freedom of speech occupies a particularly powerful place in American culture. The First Amendment is frequently invoked as shorthand for the idea that people have the right to say whatever they like. Legally, the protection is more complicated than that, but it is also extremely broad. The constitutional law element is far less interesting than the cultural interpretation that has seemed to grow around it, where having the right to say something becomes confused with having no responsibility for saying it.

I probably notice that more because I spent most of my life in Europe, where the legal language around expression is constructed slightly differently. The European Convention on Human Rights protects freedom of expression under Article 10, but explicitly describes those freedoms as carrying “duties and responsibilities”. Privacy is separately protected through Article 8, and European courts have repeatedly had to balance those rights against one another rather than treating either as automatically supreme. I realise my preference for that approach is partly cultural and somebody raised within the American constitutional tradition may see the balance differently, but I like the underlying recognition that rights rarely exist in complete isolation from the people affected by our exercise of them.

Legality is also a fairly low threshold for deciding how we want to behave towards one another. There are countless things I am perfectly entitled to say that I would still choose not to say, not because I am being censored but because the fact that something is permitted tells me almost nothing about whether it is kind, accurate, useful or necessary. Freedom gives us considerable room to decide how we behave within it, but responsibility begins somewhere inside that room rather than at its legal boundary.

Online culture tests this constantly because provocation has acquired an economic value that it did not previously possess. Somebody says something deliberately inflammatory, people become angry, they reply or repost it, and the original statement travels much further because thousands of people who despise it have helped distribute it. Rage bait only works because anger holds our attention particularly well, and attention has become one of the most valuable commodities available to anybody trying to build an audience.

I, like many others, have participated in that cycle and there have certainly been moments where I have seen something ridiculous online and felt an almost physical need to explain why it is ridiculous. Sometimes those conversations have been worthwhile because disagreement can expose assumptions I hadn’t realised I was making and there are people whose perspectives have genuinely changed mine. The difficulty is recognising the difference between somebody interested in an exchange and somebody whose only objective is to keep the exchange going. I don’t think every provocation deserves a response simply because it successfully provoked me.

I want to give people more grace than I once did, partly because I have needed that grace myself. Nobody enjoys being told they are wrong and I certainly haven’t always responded well when somebody has challenged me. Defensiveness is an incredibly seductive response because it allows us to move almost instantly from considering what we may have done to examining everything the other person has done incorrectly in raising it. We can question their tone, timing or interpretation and, somewhere in all of that activity, avoid the much less comfortable possibility that there may be something worth hearing.

Grace matters to me because I don’t want to live in a world where every badly chosen word becomes permanent evidence of somebody’s character. That would leave almost no room for any of us. People inherit language without understanding where it came from, repeat ideas they have never examined properly and occasionally behave in ways that contradict the values they genuinely believe they hold. I would be a liar if I said I hadn’t. Giving somebody the opportunity to understand what they missed, apologise where necessary and behave differently next time seems considerably more useful to me than deciding that one mistake permanently defines them.

Where I struggle is when that opportunity is repeatedly declined. There is a difference between making a mistake and becoming invested in defending it, just as there is a difference between somebody who did not know something and somebody who has decided they do not particularly care once they do. I used to think continuing the argument might eventually produce understanding, but there comes a point where my participation is no longer producing anything except more of the same argument.

That matters more to me now because I have become increasingly conscious that attention is finite. There are only so many hours in a day and only so much emotional energy available within them, particularly once work, relationships, family, friendships and the basic administration of having a life have taken their share. I don’t want whatever remains to be automatically claimed by the person who has been most successful at irritating me.

There was a time when walking away from an argument could feel like conceding it, particularly if I remained convinced that I was right. I don’t feel that obligation in the same way anymore. Somebody else is free to continue believing whatever they believe, and I am free to decide whether changing their mind deserves another hour of my life. Sometimes the relationship or the subject matters enough to stay in the conversation. At other times, continuing simply gives more of my time and attention to something that has done very little to earn either.

That is what bothers me most about Patient Zero. It isn’t simply the title of one pop song, and I don’t believe the answer is to decide what that person is or is not allowed to call their music. It is what the choice represents to me: how easily language can become detached from the people whose lives gave it meaning, and how quickly a conversation about impact can become a conversation about whether the impact was ever intended. We will all get that wrong sometimes. I certainly have, and I probably will again. What matters more to me is what happens when somebody tells us that we have.

I cannot control everything other people put into the world, any more than I can control everything they take from what I put there. But I can be more thoughtful about what I contribute, give people the grace to learn when they get something wrong, and recognise when they have no interest in doing so. My time and attention are valuable, as are everyone else’s, and I would rather give mine to the people and things that have earned them.