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Key points
- The degradation of a country begins with the degradation of its language.
- Violent political language can corrupt an entire culture.
- Classic writers like Twain, Swift, and Orwell recognized the power of political language to undermine rational thinking and problem-solving.
It’s happening everywhere: Americans hear something over the internet, social media, or television, and they become immediately angry and hostile. It is Pavlov’s Dog on steroids. They do not check to determine if what they have heard or read is true; they simply respond to it without thinking. Once the anger kicks in, it is the permanent response to an issue—even if subsequent events prove it to be undeniably wrong and based on faulty information.
People I know have indicated that they experience this often in cellphone texts, where the recipients read only the first few lines and then respond as though it is the complete text. Their minds latch on to the most provocative words and react viscerally, not rationally, to what is being expressed. Sometimes this leads to profound misunderstandings and even hostile exchanges rather than quiet considerations of what the entire message is actually communicating. I have no personal experience with this because I have a flip-top phone and I refuse to text, but I have heard it often enough to believe it is true.
Politicians are undoubtedly the worst offenders who have contributed to the inevitable corruption of language as a tool to destroy, not communicate. They often sound more like 3-year-old children having a temper tantrum than political leaders who have carefully reflected on the alternatives to difficult issues and then try to communicate them persuasively to an audience (my apologies to 3-year-old children). Sadly, many of our politicians are more likely to find a word or phrase they don’t like and then build a bombastic rant against what they want the entire message to say so they can batter the offender like a Piñata doll deserving of capital punishment.
Some politicians have elevated the abuse of language to the level of a nefarious art form, and they use it with religious intensity (and sometimes with the very language of religions) to paint their opponents with the broadest brush of negative hyperbole. Any miscreant who crosses their path will walk away with the verbal equivalent of being tarred and featured.
Other politicians condemn books and authors they have never read, but only know through a few short phrases they have heard. We hear their rants on the nightly news as they lash out at authors and books they badly misquote. Their followers subsequently pick up on those rants and seek only to destroy those with whom they disagree. Their condemnations often set into motion mob-like frenzies that bypass all the necessary stop signs urging careful consideration as they unleash their anger and hostilities on an imaginary enemy.
We should never expect linguistic purity from politicians. That is a world that never was and never will be. However, the 18-century Enlightenment tried to pull the human race away from the disastrous trend toward irrational, hyperbolic forms of thinking and communicating. Authors like Jonathan Swift tried, not always successfully, to use the wit and wisdom of critical thinking, augmented by clear and clever prose, to awaken a deeper level of responses from his readers. Swift understood the power of language to elevate or destroy. He also recognized the dangers of a society, and especially a government establishment, that weaponized language and used it to achieve political power.
Swift’s low regard for the political establishment of his time and their abuse of language is reflected in a character in Gulliver’s Travels, who said: “Whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.” Swift had equally strong opinions regarding the importance of critical thinking and the essential role of reason in forming ideas and opinions: “No person can disobey reason, without giving up his claim to be a rational creature.”
Mark Twain, still one of the most quoted Americans, shared Jonathan Swift’s high regard for critical thinking. Twain cleverly disguised his preference for clearly stated prose and rational thinking in aphorisms that disguised his low opinion of politicians and their use of language. He wrote, “All Congresses and Parliaments have a kindly feeling for idiots, and a compassion for them, on account of personal experience and heredity.”
Perhaps the most famous literary work that addresses the political corruption of language and its consequences is George Orwell’s classic essay, Politics and the English Language (1946). Orwell identifies several different types of political abuse of language that try to conceal otherwise unjustifiable assaults on the human race. He argues that political abuse of language often erodes basic moral and ethical considerations, thus contributing to totally untenable actions like the slaughter of entire ethnic populations. Orwell’s essay further identifies what today we refer to as “political gaslighting” that obfuscates nefarious intentions behind polite, innocuous, and deliberately ambiguous words and phrases. He writes of this practice in his own time: “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”
Orwell warns us that language can be as dangerous as any weapon of mass destruction. It has the power to save or destroy entire nations. It has launched more assaults on the human race than any army. Swift, Twain, Orwell, and others warned us that politicians will usurp a nation’s language and then use it to destroy their real or perceived enemies to gain power.
Over time, those abuses of language can lead to even more irredeemable acts of violence, which leads to even more corruption of language—and so the cycle becomes irreversible and contributes to the mass slaughters we have seen throughout human history.
Earlier authors recognized the potential for political language to destroy and destabilize a country. Americans today, especially in politics, need to find ways to temper their anger and explore what Swift suggests are more rational and pragmatic approaches to problem-solving.
We have far too many challenges ahead of us to be lost in the swamp of violent political rhetoric.
References
Mark Twain, Autobiography
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"
