I often write about our need for paying close attention the the rhetoric used by our politicians, media, and, most especially, those in higher education. Perhaps I am beating a dead horse, but I view this as one of the fundamental obstacles facing a serious conservative rebirth. And I found this article rather interesting:
Subject the current political chieftains of either party to Orwell’s lens and the wispiness of their rhetoric is laid plain. Start at the top. Regardless of one’s political proclivities or whether or not one just happens to like the personable Barack Obama, it’s clear that the president relishes the vague metaphor, adores the illogical argumentative sequence, and luxuriates in making words mean what only yesterday they didn’t. He does not merely redefine words, in fact, but on occasion undefines them, wiping them of their meanings — say, by insisting that words such as conservative and liberal are insignificant. The liberal president surely knows better but, as Orwell wrote, “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”
When I was first learning how to write, a professor told me that if I couldn’t express my idea clearly, then I didn’t have a clear idea. In many ways, man thinks in words. A failure of expression is a failure of thought (this of course only goes so far: Zeus himself had birthing pains when Athena lept out of his head…). But it is important when considering how man uses words. A freshman in a comp course fails to express himself clearly because of a lack of education and a lack of clear thought. Obama and many of our politicians, on the other hand, do know how to express themselves, and their lack of clarity is not so much a failure of thought, as it is the insincerity that Orwell points towards.
The article goes on:
…battling bad English is no “sentimental archaism” as is generally supposed. Language does not merely reflect but also shapes societies, and so Orwell writes that far from being futile or irrelevant, defending the integrity of English is indispensable for the right functioning of the society that speaks it. When people countenance vagueness in speech they welcome into the mix every sort of distortion and lie, which can’t be spotted in the general haziness and so come off as facts. This is never truer than in politics, he writes: “Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder sound respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
How right. Do not today’s politicians (and yesterday’s) avoid clarity precisely to pseudo-solidify their windiest decisions and pronouncements? The president is on this count surely not alone in his culpability, but he is alone in his obscurative prowess and propensity. As to Orwell’s warnings about verifying lies and prettifying murder, Obama’s secretary of homeland security, in recent testimony before Congress, referred to cases of terrorist violence as “man-caused disasters,” an intentionally anodyne lexical concoction. And while George W. Bush’s “Global War on Terror” was a murky concept, Obama’s substitution — the “Overseas Contingency Operation” — is even murkier.
I just completed a course on the history of the English language, and it was a fascinating mixture of the amazing historical evolution of our language, and ideologically bound talking points from liberal academia: “there is no ‘right’ way to say anything;” “the only reason we have most of our grammatical rules is because some renaissance thinkers though that English ought to function like Latin,” etc (of course, that same professor will still mark down a poorly written essay, because, when I pressed him on it, “that is the world we live in”…it is as asinine as the Transcendentalists declaring that traditional liberal arts education ought to be dropped, all the while referencing the Western Tradition throughout their works).
But when it comes to political thought, rhetoric (the art of persuasion) is of preeminent importance. As Orwell rightly points out, language can shape society, and the examples the article offers of the Bush and Obama terms for our conflict are perfect examples. These titles for our military engagement are not the result of a president’s inability to express what he thinks; they are purposefully vague, intentionally obscure, abstract in the extreme.
This point is not new, and has been made by the more thoughtful conservatives since Bush so poorly named our endeavors. Yet it still bears repeating, because each of us ought to reflect on the language that is used all around us. Unless we can insist on political rhetorical consistency across the board in our discussions, they will never become more than hot air blown between disagreeing sides (this is, I think, one of the great achievements of the pro-life movement over the past decade: terms have started becoming defined, and with these definitions, more and more people describe themselves as “pro-life”…but this is the subject of another post).
If you are interested in Orwell, I urge you to read the rest of the article, though Liam Julian has some bones to pick that I don’t agree with (I don’t really care for Orwell in general, because his horrible essay on Dickens still has me rankling). But think about the words used: what is a czar? What does Obama mean when he says, “Let me be clear: America wants a strong, peaceful and prosperous Russia”? Why do we want a strong, prosperous Russia? What does it mean when (h/t Michelle Malkin):
And you think that all of this thought about rhetoric and public presentation of thought is overblown? Then why does Obama care so much? “Barack Obama’s White House is spending more than $80,000 a week to staff its old and new media offices. Add the price of speechwriters and the White House communications tab reaches nearly $100,000 a week, or nearly $5 million a year-and that is for salaries alone.“
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