The War on Language

[Joanne98]

There is a scene in “Othello” when the Moor is so consumed by jealousy and rage that he loses the eloquence and poetry that make him the most articulate man in Venice. He turns to the audience, shortly before he murders Desdemona, and sputters, “Goats and monkeys!” Othello fell prey to wild self-delusion and unchecked rage, and his words became captive to hollow clichés. The debasement of language, which Shakespeare understood was a prelude to violence, is the curse of modernity. We have stopped communicating, even with ourselves. And the consequences will be as extreme as in the Shakespearean tragedy.

Those who seek to dominate our behavior first seek to dominate our speech. They seek to obscure meaning. They make war on language. And the English- and Arabic-speaking worlds are each beset with a similar assault on language. The graffiti on the mud walls of Gaza that calls for holy war or the crude rants of Islamic militants are expressed in a simplified, impoverished form of Arabic. This is not the classical language of 1,500 years of science, poetry and philosophy. It is an argot of clichés, distorted Quranic verses and slogans. This Arabic is no more comprehensible to the literate in the Arab world than the carnival barking that pollutes our airwaves is comprehensible to our literate classes.



The reduction of popular discourse to banalities, exacerbated by the elite's retreat into obscure, specialized jargon, creates internal walls that thwart real communication. This breakdown in language makes reflection and debate impossible. It transforms foreign cultures, which we lack the capacity to investigate, into reversed images of ourselves. If we represent virtue, progress and justice, as our clichés constantly assure us, then the Arabs, or the Iranians, or anyone else we deem hostile, represent evil, backwardness and injustice. An impoverished language solidifies a binary world and renders us children with weapons.

How do you respond to “Islam is the solution” or “Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior”? How do you converse with someone who justifies the war in Iraq -- as Christopher Hitchens does -- with the tautology that we have to “kill them over there so they do not kill us over here”? Those who speak in these thought-terminating clichés banish rational discussion. Their minds are shut. They sputter and rant like a demented Othello. The paucity of public discourse in our culture, even among those deemed to be public intellectuals, is matched by the paucity of public discourse in the Arab world.

This emptiness of language is a gift to demagogues and the corporations that saturate the landscape with manipulated images and the idiom of mass culture. Manufactured phrases inflame passions and distort reality. The collective chants, jargon and epithets permit people to surrender their moral autonomy to the heady excitement of the crowd. “The crowd doesn't have to know,” Mussolini often said. “It must believe. ... If only we can give them faith that mountains can be moved, they will accept the illusion that mountains are moveable, and thus an illusion may become reality.” Always, he said, be “electric and explosive.”

Belief can triumph over knowledge. Emotion can vanquish thought. Our demagogues distort the Bible and the Constitution, while their demagogues distort the Quran, or any other foundational document deemed to be sacred, fueling self-exaltation and hatred at the expense of understanding. The more illiterate a society becomes, the more power those who speak in this corrupted form of speech amass, the more music and images replace words and thought. We are cursed not by a cultural divide but by mutual cultural self-destruction.

The educated elites in the Arab world are now as alienated as the educated elites in the United States. To speak with a vocabulary that the illiterate or semiliterate do not immediately grasp is to be ostracized, distrusted and often ridiculed. It is to impart knowledge, which fosters doubt. And doubt in calcified societies, which prefer to speak in the absolute metaphors of war and science, is a form of heresy. It was not accidental that the founding biblical myth saw the deliverer of knowledge as evil and the loss of innocence as a catastrophe. “This probably had less to do with religion than with the standard desire of those in authority to control those who are not,” John Ralston Saul wrote . “And control of the Western species of the human race seems to turn upon language.”

Continued>>>
http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-War-on-Language-by-Chris-Hedges-091001-294.html

[annabanana]

1. Brilliant piece. Thanks for posting it!. . . n/t

[BlooInBloo]

2. Right, but confused.

[Chef Eric]

3. Thanks for posting this! nt

[Bluenorthwest]

4. Such a clear and perfect peice

Probably will get criticism from those who are currently invested in redefining 'option' to mean 'last resort' or 'a thing you are not allowed to select'. They love to redefine choice to mean a lack of choice, war to mean peace, etc

[BabbaTam]

5. WOW

Yeah, what she said!

[Igel]

6. He's right.

At least in part.

The "educated elite" are also at war with language. The Right is at war with language, but they came late to the game; by the time they got involved, the Left had already overrun its Maginot Line and were advancing on language's Paris.

The Islamists are at war with language. But so are many of the defenders of Islam, who proudly claimed--for a while--that "jihaad" did not mean "holy war", and that "Islam" means "peace." Well, "pacification" also means peace--"pax" does mean "peace", after all--and we were in Vietnam to pacify it, to bring peace to the country.

Of course, "war on language" is as bad or worse a metaphor as "war on terrorism", and yet it is just as easily understood and just as meaningful with even a modicum of thought.

Whenever you use language to mask, to disguise, to hide intent not by lying but by misleading, encouraging people to draw wrong conclusions from the discourse pragmatics, from the syntax, from using ambiguous words or repurposing words for your own ends without clarifying that you've redefined your terms, you're at war with communication and either encouraging ill will or being parasitic on good will. You're using language to manipulate, not by convincing and persuading, not by argument and reason, but by duping and obfuscating until resistance is difficult.

Of course, it's the life-blood of such valued profession as ad men, used car salesmen, snake oil vendors, and politicians, and, unfortunately, in the way that lawyers talk to the general public. oh, and more than a few academics. Clinton's problem was that he spoke like a lawyer when he intended it to be understood by non-lawyers. Bush II did it at times, although he's not a lawyer. (Lawyers are usually worse, however, since they're trained to do it.) Other politicians do the same thing, and it always winds up rankling with non-lawyers who feel tricked.

I think Hedges engages in some of the same game, to be honest, even as his stance of moral purity pushes us into assuming that he can't possibly be playing the game.

[evenso]

7. Thanks for this great article

[anonymous171]

8. Educated elites have alienated themselves.

There I said it. Educated people should have the ability to speak both languages (the language of the elite and of the common man.) This academic chauvinism is incredibly stupid.