Load ‘n Lock Language
Blood libel, eh? Shows what happens to a person who owns a Thesaurus to look up cool sounding words, but neglects to look them up in a dictionary (or in this case even an encyclopedia). Does the speaker know what a blood libel is? Which is more chilling? ignorance? Or whatever the option is?
I am rereading Umberto Eco’s address to the Italian Parliament called On the Press. This is from his book Five Moral Pieces which I highly recommend for all five pieces in it. Migration, Tolerance, and the Intolerable, and Reflections on War are also awfully relevant right now. I then found a free copy of George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language on-line, and reread it.
Just to ground myself even more securely, I also revisited Aristotle’s Rhetoric to make sure I was correct in remembering that most political speech (writing) falls under the special topic of “Deliberative”. The purpose of Deliberative rhetoric is to persuade somebody to do or not to do something. Appeals used in Deliberative rhetoric fall under two heads: 1) worthy vs unworthy or 2) advantageous vs disadvantageous. Aristotle recognizes what centuries of deliberative rhetoric have since proven, that most human beings, especially at the cultural and intellectual level most useful to politicians, “the advantageous” whips “the worthy” nearly every time. What this means is that we would be as wrong to expect a high level of discourse from politicians on the prowl as they would be wrong to try to appeal to the desires and fears of their constituencies to be good or worthy rather than to be rich or safe.
Aside: Our president presented a beautiful example of another special topic: epideictic (ceremonial). Its subtopics are honor or dishonor, or praise or blame. Funeral orations are a familiar example of the type. Most common items of discussion in ceremonial speech are the following virtues or their corresponding vices: Courage, temperance, justice, liberality, magnanimity, prudence, and gentleness. As you view, hear, or read the orations honoring the victims of the Tucson massacre, look for the use of these rhetorical devices. Notice that each topic area comes with a vocabulary. One cannot think or cause another person to think a certain way without a certain vocabulary.
There has been, for a considerable time in our country, a vocabulary of mistrust, anger, fear, hatred, racism. etc. Notice that all of these appeals are loaded with emotional content. In short, the arguments that use this language are not rational appeals to our better selves, but most of them appeal directly to deep-seated emotions and fears. In short they are all logical fallacies, and would not be accepted in any rational argument.
I believe that it is extremely naive to suppose that the language of a discourse doesn’t make any difference. Such a naive assumption negates two thousand years of grammar, rhetoric, and semantics. Hundreds of men and women have written about the influence of language on thought and action, and the activities above (rhetoric, et al), and that certain uses of language can permeate a whole national tone (Orwell chastises England for allowing the degeneration of their language). When the most popular and biggest “news” organization habitually appeals to fear (immigrants, blacks, Hispanics, lesbians and gays, socialists, atheists, Democrats, etc.) and maintain in almost all stories a sense of anger, rage, mistrust, etc., then I believe that the general tone of the discourse will have the same undesirable flavor. When a communication medium concentrates on presentations that are trying through negative emotions to affect what we do, rather than what we know or understand, then they are no longer news organizations, but political/religious organizations. When they manipulate us by preying on our basest and least worthy instincts, they are despicable.
For most people thought consists of internal monologues or dialogues. Of course these thoughts are normally made up of words. The thinker has to use a language, and the language one uses (vocabulary, tone, etc.) is determined by the vocabulary one knows. Most politicians, for example, don’t know the vocabulary of most sciences, and thus, usually make perfectly irrational statements if they feel the urge to speak on scientific matters. I cannot talk intelligently about quantum physics because my physics training was Newtonian with a nod toward Einstein.
If the only political-speak I had heard consisted of logical fallacies based on strong, base emotions, then all my thoughts about politics and politicians would be expressed with this vocabulary. If, perchance, I were an unsettled young man suffering from paranoia or schizophrenia, whose thought processes are tangled in all kinds of ways we would have trouble imagining, and who has shown a obsession with language and how language means — if I were that young man in that environment, might I not act out my fear and paranoia with a gun?
There is nothing definite about this. The young man was insane, and insane people do inexplicable things. So one cannot blame the incident entirely on any or all of the purveyors of political garbage. But it is very unlikely that the incident occurred in a vacuum. The young man, just by being on the street, going to school, etc. was bombarded by this violent emotional tension every day. I cannot but believe that the political atmosphere of the last few years limited his options.
The great shame is that it is much easier to buy an assault weapon with a super magazine than it is to get help for a desperate and ill young man. A major topic for further discourse should be the availability of health care for everyone, and emphasis on mental (or brain) disorders. This would include the need to improve the way we are currently treating returning military people with serious head injuries. Instead, we are getting the same old language — “kill Obamacare”, for example.