Sticks and Stones
An old Scottish nursery rhyme suggests that "names" or in a more general sense, "words" can never hurt anyone. It misses the point that language can be carefully crafted to control and manipulate an entire nation into a state of social conformity. This can have disastrous consequences for any country. British historian A. J. P. Taylor echoed this viewpoint when he wrote "Power over words leads easily to longing for power over men."
It is a truism that whoever controls the language controls that society. Every student should read George Orwell's prophetic vision as outlined in his 1948 classic, 1984. The book depicts a future society where an autocratic government controls the thoughts, feelings and minds of its subjects by not only managing the language but by deliberately distorting it. Orwell called this tyrannical language "Newspeak." Its use of blatant contradictions and arbitrary changes in word meaning gradually reduced the people's thinking to unmitigated mush. As one of the characters proudly proclaimed, "It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words . . . Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think."
The inherent dangers are immediately apparent. The reduction of a people's ability to reason clearly and think critically lays the bases for a despotism, which relies more on sensations than logical arguments. Marshall McLuhan's dictum "the medium is the message" underscores this concept. In McLuhan's global village, which was an exercise in communal group-consciousness, society was based on a more primitive and tribal way of thinking. A society with limited skills in verbal communication will eventually be reduced to a brainless mob controlled by its emotions. This was an early concern of Benjamin Franklin and the other Founding Fathers who feared a "mobocracy."
A Nazi Lexicon
Nazi Germany's Adolph Hitler and his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels provide an excellent example of this manner of controlled language. It was Goebbels who perfected the "big lie." Germans were much more inclined to believe a horrendous distortion of reality than they were a series of minor fibs. According to social critic John Wesley Young, the Nazis wanted to produce a citizen, who "could never exert himself to think critically about the regime." The Nazis used the language to manipulate their people's emotions and distort their understanding of the inherent evil of their policies. According to Hitler's Mein Kampf, the only thing that this national brainwashing had to do was "to unforgettably brand the Nazi way of thinking in each individual's mind."
The Nazis developed a lexicon of euphemisms that should ring familiar to many Americans. The invasion of Poland in 1939 was called a "police action." The withholding of money from the worker's paycheck for government programs was touted as a system of "voluntary contributions," a tautology that was last heard echoing in the Clinton White House. The razing of a Protestant Church was called "urban renewal." Himmler's SS did not arrest people and confiscate their property; they took them into "protective custody" for the purposes of securing their property.
Revolution by Other Means
To understand fully what has happened to language in the United States, it is prudent to consider the philosophy of Michel Foucault. A French intellectual, Foucault is considered the patron saint of Deconstructionism. Deconstructionism is a form of literary analysis that breaks down the text of a document to the extent that exact word meanings get lost in a stream of linguistic relativity. In other words, it is Deconstructionism that led a president to question the meaning of the word "is."
While a professor at the prestigious College de France, Foucault published Madness and Civilization. He believed that insanity was a modern invention. He thought the world was a richer, a more interesting place before doctors tried to separate the mad from the sane. Foucault's revolutionary notion implies that there is no such thing as "facts." The mad are just another example of the variety of the human species, like an "alternate life style," in an historical context. This is more than moral relativity; it is the annihilation of the transcendent moral and intellectual order.
Foucault also had a profound effect on the Paris student population, which ultimately led to the riots of 1968. Because of their nihilistic disdain for rules and regulations — any rules and regulations — Foucault's students attempted to subvert the old social order without having any idea of how to replace it. His ideas were successfully transplanted in the United States. American students and intellectuals saw the best and the brightest of the Lyndon Johnson administration tailor facts and events to suit their purposes in the Vietnam War. They concluded that information carried ideology and that there was no absolute knowledge. Foucault's ideas and perception of reality became nothing less than an assault on Western civilization. In rejecting an independent reality, he was rejecting the founding principles of the West. Nothing underscores the powerful effect that the deconstruction of language can have on the ideas and principles that shape the reality of American society. According to Dr. Lynne Cheney, it is nothing less than "revolution by other means."
The belief that reality is nothing more than a social construct has had a profound impact on both the civil rights and women's movements. Foucault's thinking lay at the heart of the shift from logic, consistency, factual accuracy, and absolute truth to emotional and subjective feelings. While the goals of these two movements had once centered on acquiring equal opportunity and achievement, the new social construct now focuses on equality of result. If test scores and aptitude tests stood in the way of minority or female success, then the tests and the scoring criteria had to be changed or removed so as to allow for minority empowerment. It is a pernicious type of relativity that argues that standards have no objective truth but only serve to perpetuate the preferences of the power structure. The traditional Western standards, they argue, such as a concentration on success, achievement, and objectivity, are masculine in origin and merely perpetuate the subjugation of minorities in this country.
A Tower of Babel
As a result, Americans are losing sense of the language. There was a Babylonian city called Shinar in the Book of Genesis, which degenerated into a "land of noise and confusion." When verbal distortions and feelings reign, how long will it be before America is like Shinar's "Tower of Babel," where no one is able to communicate because there is no common language?
American educational bureaucracy has also contributed to this intellectual confusion. Some call it the "dumbing down" of American students. It is a mental downsizing that bodes ill for this nation's future. When schools devalue education by replacing the traditional disciplines of science, math, foreign language, history, literature, religion and government with self-esteem, value clarifications, and "feel good about myself" courses, students will be much less able to understand the nuances of conflicting words and ideas. An uneducated public will find itself easily swayed by the emotionally laden jargon of the media. The country is fast becoming a nation of mindless robots who put more faith in the distortions of a TV anchor than they would in an afternoon at the local library.
The Language of Death
The most sinister agency in this battle for the language is the abortion lobby, which has expropriated several traditional American ideas and perverted them to support a hidden agenda of social disruption and family breakdown. No greater abuse is evident than the perversion of the word "choice." Everyone is pro-choice when it comes to marriage, work, food, or recreation. The evil genius behind this euphemistic expropriation ranks with the Nazis' "final solution." This clever verbal machination has allowed basically good and honest people to believe they can morally walk on both sides of the street.
Many pro-choice advocates refuse to acknowledge the basic humanity of the unborn child by referring to the fetus as a "potential child." Just what is a potential child? Is not a child a potential teenager, and human by conventional standards? In this twisted metaphysics of choice, the pro-abortion lobby says that the child has the right to be born into a welcoming family. Where does the child get this right? Humans cannot confer rights on any other being. They are either with them from the moment of their being or they do not exist.
It is apparent that the abortion debate has influenced the way Americans perceive the elderly. The language of the culture of death has already infiltrated the national discussion. It is reported that the comatose, the sick and dying, and people with long, yet not terminal diseases, are not living full and productive lives. It is only a matter of time until the "death with dignity" lobby constructs a word such as "senilitus," to depersonalize the elderly. Then it will be much easier to terminate them, as in an unwanted pregnancy.
A Sensitive Culture
Americans used to refrain from public displays of profanity. The movie culture from Hollywood has changed all that. In place of clever dialogue, Hollywood has gratuitously incorporated a stream of obscenities and profanities that have robbed many movies of any intellectual content. The makers of these films have desensitized the American public to accept the vulgarity and offensiveness of such language and now these have become virtually part of the cultural mainstream. When mixed with violence, such as films directed by Quentin Tarantino, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, actual violence is often just a step away and civilization is now "slouching — not towards Bethlehem, but towards Gomorrah, the biblical city burned to the ground for the sinfulness of its people."
As America has become increasingly desensitized to verbal and visual profanity, tolerance and sensitivity are being touted as substitute core values. Verbal sensitivity has risen to the level of an ideology. A new nomenclature of words and expressions that were thought to be playful, cute, innocuous and devoid of any double meaning, have now been singled out so as not to offend people who may be fat, short, bald, or ugly. All of these words, which are implicitly negative value judgments, have been said to cause social pain, distress, and embarrassment. A new language of social sensitivity has been written to wash away the "hurtful" sediment from the vestiges of the past. According to its moral underpinnings, words that hurt, so-called "hate speech" are more dangerous than actions that maim and even kill. For example, obese victims are "horizontally-challenged." while short people are "vertically-challenged." An ugly person is "cosmetically different."
Verbal Cleansing
PC, as political correctness has become known, refuses to impose any judgment on people's abilities or their behaviors. Tolerance of a host of pathologies, such as abortion, euthanasia, pornography, and homosexuality has reigned as the cardinal virtue in the PC morality. Drunks are known as "sobriety-deprived." Thieves and con men are "ethically disoriented." There is no such thing as evil in this amoral utopia, only "morally different." Drugs addicts are readily referred to as those with a "pharmacological preference." Actress Wynn Ryder is not a "shoplifter," but a "nontraditional shopper." Promiscuity means "sexually active." Prostitutes are "sex-care providers." The homeless are "under housed." A murderer in PC argot is someone who engages in the "arbitrary deprivation of life" or as defined by a CIA pamphlet "life alternation."
The walls of academia have not been immune from this artificial tampering with the language. In fact, many teachers have been willing participants in the abuse of language. Grading and evaluation systems have become geared so as not to offend anyone who might not measure up. A person who cannot read or write is not illiterate. He is just "alternately schooled." No longer can teachers refer to a student as "stupid," only "cerebrally-challenged." To fail is to "unmeet your objectives." On the college campuses, an Orwell Ian "thought police" reigns and reports any university code violations against minorities, women, and gays. According to author Charles Sykes, the heart of this totalitarian disregard for the First Amendment is the fact that PC is Marxist in origin, in that it is attempting to redistribute power from the privileged class (white males) to the oppressed masses. It is a spurious form of linguistic corruption where everything is seen through the prism of race, gender, or sexual orientation. It is not surprising that cultural Marxists seem to be on the scene whenever an important pillar of American society is under assault.
In 1994 the Los Angeles Times promulgated its guidelines on acceptable language for all of its reporters. As verbal gatekeepers, the Times attempted to purge its lexicon of all insensitive and ethnic terms. Noxious terms included "hit list," "Chinese fire drill," and "to welsh." It is ironic that a newspaper's traditional role has always centered around communicating the objective news of the day. The politically correct way of thinking makes communication much more difficult as newspapers and other media are forced to invent phrases that spoil the richness and beauty of a language to the extent that the communication of truth is lost in the exchange.
The historical pendulum may well be ready to swing back to simpler times when there was a clear distinction between the cowboys and the Native Americans. Lucid and objective language can bridge the communications gap that Deconstructionism and Political Correctness have created. While Orwell's ultimate vision is encapsulated in his book 1984 final image, that of a boot stomping on a human face, the author places more weight on the importance of language manipulation than he does on the threat of brute force. "War is Peace!" and "Freedom is Slavery," has a more devastating effect on the human spirit than all of "Big Brother's" police. Americans have to be ever vigilant or they may not be too far from a modern version of Orwell's dustpan vision.
William A. Borst holds a Ph.D. from St. Louis University. He is a weekly talk show host on WGNU radio and the author of the book, Liberalism: Fatal Consequences.
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