Mark Kingwell is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto whose latest books are On Risk and The Adventurer’s Glossary.
If you follow these things, you will know that the current book of choice among public-policy types is by American think-tanker Jonathan Rauch. In his The Constitution of Knowledge, from last year, Mr. Rauch offers a “defense of truth” against the background of what he and many others see as an “epistemological crisis.” Public discourse has been blighted and twisted, the traditional foundations of facts and knowledge – research, testing, constant review – are under siege by forces of misinformation, ideological perversion and downright stupidity. The truth doesn’t matter, maybe doesn’t even exist. You can blame postmodernism, or populism, or the internet – or all three.
Mr. Rauch and other self-described members of the “reality-based community” are so alarmed by the deterioration of truth norms that they see this as a wholly new challenge, a matter of unprecedented cracked foundations and unstable edifices, not simple marginal costs of post-expertise democratization of ideas. Social media and online mobilization have altered the terrain of public life drastically, as have pile-on cancel campaigns and predatory learned journals publishing bogus science.
But it’s worth recalling that disdain for this same reality-based community was articulated by a senior official in the George W. Bush administration, allegedly Karl Rove, though he denies it. Whoever he or she was, this Orwellian spokesperson gleefully celebrated the post-truth power of action over thought, reinforced by revisionist history:
“People like you are still living in what we call the reality-based community. You believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
It’s a small step from wacky, internet-fed conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate or continuing vaccine horror stories to false-flag military operations, edited photos and censored newspapers. The examples may be new but the problem isn’t.
One might say that Pontius Pilate set out the nefarious agenda early when he said, according to John 18:38, “What is truth?” and did not stay for an answer. The basic problem is older even than Scripture. Recall Plato’s distrust of the demos in his Republic. People will believe anything. Vestiges of “proof,” no matter how contrived or phony, act as window-dressing, spurs to action and sham justification all at once.
Public language is the prominent symptom of any epistemological crisis, as George Orwell knew very well. His famous essay Politics and the English Language (1946) is an indispensable primer. Orwell vividly describes the debasement of language under political pressure, the way lines of opposition are shored up by weasel words, jargon and distortions both intended and subconscious. The essay remains essential reading even in our era of open-the-floodgates, no-holds-barred nonsense, where one can lose hope that there is any cure for the twin afflictions of mendacity and ignorance.
All ideological fudging involves slight but sly shifts in emphasis rather than outright lies.
I mean everything from contradictory exaggeration (“It was literally mind-blowing!”) and euphemism (“Where are the facilities?”), to smoothly worded evasion, technical bafflegab, dog whistles, deflection to other topics, misdirection, false equivalencies, slippery slopes, bad analogies, tu quoque and ad hominem fallacies (“what about you?”), floating signifiers, and hasty hashtagging. Debates are now won and lost by how quickly you can skew the terms, deploy some scare quotes or coin an insulting but catchy label for your opponent: “lamestream media” comes to mind, since here we are in a “national” newspaper article written by a “philosopher.”
So: Anti-vaxxers are “vaccine-hesitant,” whatever that means. Prince Andrew “renounces” his royal privileges rather than being stripped of them by his mother, the Queen. A fired coach or executive is said to be “stepping away,” spending “more time with family.” Scandals are styled as “distractions” to more important topics. Apologies are offered for “errors in judgment” or “oversights,” not actual bad consequences, all delivered with a self-serving dollop of offended integrity. Passive-voice constructions are indispensable: “Mistakes were made!” “Plans went awry!” Also useful are table-turning manoeuvres, such that treating a rich celebrity just like everyone else is construed as “harassment” and “unfairness,” and charges of hypocrisy are ever met with a rebound.
Any such orchestration of favourable lighting in the public square relies on basic techniques straight out of Speechwriting 101. Never admit real guilt; never answer the question you were asked; avoid specifics; keep the glow rosy and redemptive. If possible, use coded racist or antisemitic shorthand to divide and conquer (“inner cities” or “articulate”; “international banks” or “globalist”). Sprinkle with handy overused insult-tags (“woke,” “snowflake,” “pearl-clutching”) and wannabe-cheeky first-name disrespect. Lawrence becomes “Larry,” Tabatha is “Tabby,” and the prime minister is “Justine” because, you know, not a real man. Oh, the wit!
Now terrorists may become “freedom fighters” and anti-abortion activists “pro-life.” Hazy abstractions are preferable to more forthright language. The recent self-described “freedom convoy” is not an anti-vaccine spasm of yahooism, just a calm expression of pro-liberty feeling. Never mind that the unvaccinated, whether militant or hesitant, are a public-health risk to themselves and others, or that the freedoms invoked here – to blockade and occupy public city spaces with diesel force, to harass workers and other citizens – are neither legally protected nor feasible as mechanisms of change.
The air of bozo entitlement on view will recall to some an old Simpsons episode that features the Do What You Feel Festival. The event is celebrated by, among others, Homer Simpson dressing in his bathrobe and bear-claw slippers, and the person who didn’t feel like double-bolting the bandstand where James Brown is to perform. It all ends in calamity and riot. Before that, though, local TV anchor Kent Brockman had noted that the Do What You Feel Festival “will be a welcome change from our annual Do As We Say Festival, started by German settlers in 1946.”
That’s a pretty good joke, but the underlying binarism is inaccurate and unhelpful. True freedom is not doing whatever the hell you want, based on whatever selective website list, subreddit, talk-radio feed, comments section or closed-window chat group you happen to favour. Nor is the absence of total and random liberty a form of fascism.
There is such a thing as the public interest, not to mention both reputable science and trustworthy policy. It seems necessary to say what might have been thought obvious: Freedom entails responsibility, and it means nothing if not enjoyed by everyone equally. Otherwise both word and concept become shadows of themselves.
Indeed, “freedom” is a central case – or let’s say a casing – of what the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein called “language on holiday.” Its misuse is a symptom of very deep epistemological and political malaise.
The writer Jennifer Egan, in her Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), highlights a character who studies “word casings”: the shrivelled husks of once-meaningful words that remain in common usage even as they are comprehensively hollowed out.
“English was full of these empty words – ‘friend’ and ‘real’ and ‘story’ and ‘change’ – words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like ‘identity’, ‘search’, and ‘cloud’, had clearly been drained of life by their web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had ‘American’ become an ironic term? How had ‘democracy’ come to be used in such an arch, mocking way?”
We have not yet reached this dystopian point, but signs are hardly encouraging. Language is forever being debased, like bad currency still in circulation, even as more and more things are considered speech.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision (2010) made campaign-contribution money into a form of speech. More recently, the Republican National Committee in the U.S. declared that the criminal and maybe actually treasonous Capitol Hill insurrection of Jan. 6th, 2021, was “legitimate political discourse.”
Legitimate discourse apparently includes defecation in congressional office space and resorting to hate speech, assault, and vile symbolism, just as freedom permits doing the same things in an Ottawa shopping mall or street. I guess these freedom fighters couldn’t find the appropriate facilities. Freedom!
Sorry to bear bad news, but Isaiah Berlin’s much-quoted distinction between “positive” and “negative” liberty will not help here. The distinction is not bogus but flimsy; it collapses under scrutiny. A program of negative liberty (freedom from external constraint) is always a blueprint for a certain ideological way of being, thus becoming positive (freedom to enact a specific conception of life). Likewise in the other direction: sketching a full account of the good citizen must include at least constraints on the state and one’s fellow citizens.
Meanwhile, it’s easy to make fun of heightened sensitivity to language, as in the case of the CBC’s much-mocked list of prohibited locutions. But such examples should at least make us stop and think about how speech-acts do cause offence and harm. Metaphor is everywhere; language cannot exist without it. The challenge is finding good versions, startling but also engaging. Final word, then, to a novelist and not a policy wonk, journalist, or “philosopher.”
In a 2001 book, The War Against Cliché, the word-giddy English writer Martin Amis urged open hostility against three kinds of cliché: of language, of thought and of the heart. The first is the most insidious, obvious and yet elusive. Importantly, it underwrites the other two form of bad habit. Worn-out locutions disengage thinking and feeling, pressing down a clutch of mindless repetition and knee-jerk reaction on reason and sympathy. The engine is being gunned but the car remains motionless. Any results may look like discourse but are in fact mere detritus, an accumulation of husks, exhaust without progress.
We need real lovers of language and thought, novelists and poets, to break new linguistic ground, unearth new and striking metaphors. Here’s one that you might have been wondering about: Jennifer Egan’s “goon squad” is the way time’s passage punishes us in sudden, unexpected ways.
As a figure of speech, that’s vivid, forthright, and memorable: the trifecta of communication. Revel in its revelatory sharpness; that’s the only thing that gives language a chance of being an honest broker of meaning, in politics or anywhere else.
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