The ConserveLiberty Blog  

Offered by David Apollo

We all are aware of Technology, and its roll in enhancing or restricting Liberty. Taken for granted is a technology that has been with us for a very long time that has an enormous impact on personal and societal Liberty. And that is the technology of Language.

Perception and Communication are essential for living things. Even the most primitive of organisms responds to environmental changes in temperature and chemistry. Respond appropriately, and you continue living, thriving, reproducing, adapting, evolving. Respond inappropriately and the impact might be dire indeed.

Language is used by higher organisms in order to cooperate and to deceive. It is used for both purposes, and indeed works very well for both types of intentions. When intended cooperatively, it can result in mutual advantage, and enhanced outcomes for all involved. When intended to deceive, the advantage goes to the intentional deceiver, at the expense of the deceived.

At ever sophisticated tiers of higher organisms, such as in humans and other animals, the use of language in voice and body language, or in writing (which is uniquely human) becomes ever more complex and nuanced. Still, distilled down to the basics, it is used for cooperation or deception.

How important it becomes, then, to have good judgement in deciding which communicators to trust (and under what circumstances,) and which ones to mistrust. Most crucial of all - how important it is to agree on what the words and phrases being used actually mean.

For reasons which will be discussed elsewhere, any two people rarely agree on exactly what the words and phrases they are using actually mean. We compensate for this by trying to understand each other "close enough."

The best partners at this are very detail oriented, careful, skeptical, and aware of what they know and don't know. This does not describe most of us, who generally make a go at communication with a certain degree of unquestioned faithfulness. It works both ways. Some sources we trust unquestioningly. Others we mistrust unquestioningly. Usually we just assume we know what is meant by the words and phrases being offered. This lack of care, or candidly, obsessiveness makes it quite easy for those wanting to "manage" us to use language to "move us in the direction they would like for us to go."

This is called marketing. Contrary to other declarations, Marketing is in fact Nature's Oldest Profession.

With the above as an introduction of sorts, ConserveLiberty reproduces an excerpted version of The Goldberg File from 12 Sep 2014, written and distributed by Jonah Goldberg. Consider thoughtfully:

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The Goldberg File
By Jonah Goldberg
September 12, 2014

Dear Reader (Including the millions of poor souls staring at their TV like a big dog whose food bowl has been moved, disappointedly expecting me to be on today's installment of Outnumbered),

People ask me all the time, "Isn't it awfully early to be drinking straight gin like that?"

I'm kidding. Only British hookers and Martin Landau in Rounders drink warm gin straight.

But they do ask me, "Hey, when's your next book?"

I'm often tempted to make my first response, "Did you buy my last book? Because if you didn't, who the #$%^ are you to nag me to write another one? It's because of people like you I can't have nice things."

[... test abridged for brevity and relevance ]

The Rectification of the Names!

In the course of my developing this whisper-of-an-idea for a book, my AEI colleague Michael Auslin pointed me to a Confucian concept called "the rectification of names." Maybe you know all about it because you're a smarty-pants Confucian scholar, which would be an interesting twist on who I imagine you, my "Dear Reader," to be. But it was new to me and it's really an exciting idea because it connects a lot of different exciting ideas into a potentially fully functional Death Star, I mean book, idea.

Anyway, the gist is that society goes ass-over-teakettle (to borrow a phrase from the academic literature) when names no longer describe the things they are assigned to. Take it away Confucius:

A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve. If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot. Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.

Now, I'm just starting my reading on all of this and, so far, I don't much care for the way the concept was used to justify castes and classes in feudal China or any of that jazz. And, yes, I am aware that a similar concern was in fact a central point of my last book ( Now out in paperback, noodle-salad-eaters ). It's central to Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" — never mind to 1984 — and Ludwig Wittgenstein had much to say on the subject as well. And anyone who ate funny brownies in college has grooved on the relationship between words and reality (and the puzzle of the Skipper & Gilligan's limited wardrobe).

But I very much like the idea that societies get themselves into trouble when language becomes a tool not for describing reality but concealing it.

This is one of the many reasons I loathe the self-described pragmatists who insist they want to solve problems by getting "beyond labels." You cannot solve problems if you cannot describe the problem — and the solution — accurately. Try fixing a flat tire with a wet hamster. Now, call the hamster a "tire iron." Has it gotten any easier? Shakespeare tells us that a rose by another name will smell just as sweet, but if you can't tell sh*t from shinola, your shoes are going to smell awful.

When Facts Are Treason

The disconnect between names and the named becomes most pronounced in totalitarian societies where words become weapons of the State. When language ceases to be a tool for labeling reality and higher truths and becomes one for upholding the agenda of a regime, the society rots and invites revolt. Try as they might, tyrants rarely have much success at persuading miserable people they are happy or hungry people they are full. As a result, regimes feel required to tighten their grip on society even more. Use of the wrong word — or the right word the wrong way — becomes ever more damning evidence of disloyalty or treason. And you know what? The tyrants are right: It is disloyalty and treason to an evil regime to accurately tell the truth.

I think there's something very profound about the Chinese idea that revolutions are primarily an effort to bring about the rectification of names; that the demand for justice is first and foremost a demand that words and reality come back into alignment. Nothing is more infuriating than to be told not to believe your lying eyes — or your empty stomach. Take a moment to ponder various revolutions around the globe over history and ask yourself if there isn't something to that.

One last point before I fulfill my obligation to put some news-related content in this "news"letter: Free societies are not immune to this problem, it's just that we have better antibodies. We have more opportunities and mechanisms to get words and things lined up properly. In a society where children won't be beaten or executed for pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, the nakedness of the emperor will be a much more frequent topic of conversation.

But that just means it takes longer — and more work — for names to get messed up. Who can dispute that political correctness is, to a large extent, an organized effort to keep truth from being applied to the problems of reality? Who can deny that our politics is shot through with words that don't line up properly with what they are supposed to describe?

[... remainder omitted ]

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