Politics & the English Language Revisited

(Yet another essay for my school paper, the Volante. Find the published version here.)

Reading Matt Hittle’s column last week, I found myself nodding in agreement. Writing and speaking well are valuable skills, not only in the business of passing exams, but in the businesses of the world outside these college walls as well. Unfortunately, they are also skills to be had at a premium among many college students. However, I believe that being able to write and speak well are important for other reasons as well.

In his seminal essay “Politics & the English Language”, George Orwell argues that sloppy writing is reflective of sloppy thinking. Although the essay was written in 1946, Orwell’s thesis remains valid today, perhaps in the current age of Twitter more than ever.

Allow me to use a metaphor familiar to many college students to illustrate Orwell’s point. When I pour a can of condensed soup into a saucepan, lurking amidst the amorphous chunks of potato and reprocessed meat lumps may be a host of preservatives and trans-fats of which I am totally unaware. If I had read the label carefully, I would have known all about the soup’s nefarious contents. But I was too lazy to do so, and now all those nasty chemicals are going into my body.

So it is with writing. Take a common word like “democracy”. Most of us would probably agree that democracy is a good thing, that our political system is democratic to one degree or another. But what precisely does democracy mean on an etymological level? On a practical level? Does it just have to do with elections? With the rule of law? Is capitalism a necessary part of democracy? Does it mean the same thing as “freedom”? If not, why not?

These are all important questions. Yet many people uncritically use democracy as a catch-all, without considering what it is they might actually be saying. And if we do not really understand our own words, how much more difficult is it for others to understand us?

That is not the end of the story though. “If thought corrupts language,” Orwell wrote in 1946, “language also corrupts thought.” To use another metaphor, if you want to become a professional accordionist, you cannot practice diligently every once in a while and muddle through the rest of the time. You must practice diligently every day. If you leave off practicing for, say, six months, when you return to the instrument, you will have to work twice as hard now to bring your skills back up to snuff.

So also language. When we allow ourselves to indulge in poor writing, we not only dull language’s usefulness in communicating with our fellow human beings; we dull our own ability to think critically and meaningfully about the concepts language expresses.

This insight was the basis of Newspeak in Orwell’s classic 1984. By trimming down English to a few hundred words and reducing complex notions to mere slogans, Big Brother used language itself to destroy people’s critical thinking skills and, thus, their capacity for resistance. By forbidding people from talking about things, the government forbade them, in a very real way, from thinking about them.

In this age of instant messaging especially, we have become our own Big Brother. Our digital conversations consist of monosyllables punched mindlessly into a cell phone keypad, if they consist of words at all. The fact of the matter is that critical analysis is not so easy when we confine ourselves to 140 characters. When even our politicians – people we expect to have thoughtful discussions, seeing as how they are running our country and all – begin to Tweet, we know something has gone drastically wrong.

By using muddy, unthoughtful language, we become muddy, unthoughtful thinkers. And when that happens, it becomes all too easy for others to use language to manipulate and dominate us. When we force ourselves to write well, on the other hand, we force ourselves to really think about what we want to say. We become not just better potential employees (although that we do become), but better citizens and better people as well.

Less Debate, More Dialogue

(Another article I wrote for the campus newspaper at the University of South Dakota, the Volante.)

Election Day 2010 has come and gone, and South Dakota has dispatched a new congressperson to aid in the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives. Regular readers might be able to guess my feelings about the election results. However, this is not a screed about how Republican rule will destroy America. Truth be told, the changeover in the House will not greatly affect politics in this country. Government will not all of a sudden become more efficient or less corrupt. Problems like poverty and war will not miraculously vanish. And our leaders will still bitch at each other instead of finding real solutions to our problems.

For proof of this, look no further than our very own campus. A week before the election, the Political Science League held its annual party debate. Neither the College Republicans nor College Democrats offered any novel answers to problems such as education and health care. Instead, they mostly spent their time regurgitating party slogans and attacking each other. If these are the leaders of tomorrow, I see little reason to believe that a transient alteration in the makeup of the House is going to change anything.

It doesn’t have to be like this though. Author and peace activist Louise Diamond draws a marked contrast between debate and dialogue as two different modes of communication. When we debate, she explains, we focus on positions, which are usually mutually exclusive. When we dialogue, however, we peel away the vituperative veneer of opinion to focus on the needs and concerns, the hopes and the fears that underlie our politics. The former is adversarial and antagonistic, whereas the latter is respectful and constructive.

Being something of an amateur linguist, I decided to look into the roots of these two words, to check if Ms. Diamond's distinction was appropriate on etymological as well as conceptual grounds. It turns out the word debate originally comes from the Old French verb debatre, which means "to beat, to batter". Dialogue, on the other hand, derives from the Greek dialogos, which consists of the Greek dyo "two" and logos, familiar to any Biblical scholar as "word" but here meaning "speech, discourse".

That makes sense. Instead of coming together to talk, to engage in a productive dialogue, our leaders seem bent on battering one another into submission. If we take the word at face value, there is no such thing as a “healthy” debate.

As citizens and students, we are far from guiltless in perpetuating this culture of discord. How often do we embroil ourselves in a heated wall-to-wall on Facebook, knowing full well that neither party is going to budge? Therefore – as ever – any change in the government is going to have to start with us. When we discuss the latest news with our friends, or with our enemies for that matter, we must learn to be respectful of differing opinions. Reconciling deeply held opinions is not terribly important. Recognizing the needs that undergird those opinions is.

As I face the disheartening prospect of members of the Tea Party in Congress, however much I may disagree with them, I must recognize that they are not raving lunatics; they are real people with real concerns. Because I believe their policies to be misguided does not detract from the intensity of their passion and the reality of their fears. They are not acting out of spite. They are acting out of genuine concern for the well-being of themselves and their loved ones. They are afraid that their families, their religion, and their livelihoods are being threatened. They need to know that they have control over their own lives, just the same as I do.

Our task, not just in the political sphere but also in our everyday lives, is to find ways to address those needs and desires, shared by us all alike. What we need is dialogue, a conversation where the participants are more concerned about finding a solution than getting their way, where doing the right thing means more than being right. That means we have to start listening for what lies beneath the surface. Once we learn to do that, we may discover, much to our surprise, that we have more in common than we would ever have thought possible.