If you can no longer come up with a word for an idea in your mind, soon you will no longer be able to think that idea. A shrinking vocabulary leads to a crippled imagination. Read glossaries. Beware of slogans, because they are a conscious assault on your ability to speak or think outside the prescribed cliches of your own movement's indoctrination (via their news sources, pulpits and podcasts). And that's on purpose. Learn words.
Freedom requires imagination.
Imagination requires thought.
Thought requires words.
Learn words.
This from Orwell's 1984:
"'Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. ... Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. ... By 2050--earlier, probably--all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron--they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How can you have a slogan like 'freedom is slavery' when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness. ... Zeal was not enough. Orthodoxy was unconsciousness."
"As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving rapidly up and down, Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man's brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was noise tier in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck. ... Duckspeak."
Today, Duckspeak sounds like political slogans, religious cliches, intstant retweets, abbreviations (I C U, ur my bff - ttfn) and communication by emoticons. If that helps you text while driving, fine. But please ...
Learn words.
No, it's far worse than that. More dangerous than texting through an intersection. Duckspeak calls political propaganda "alternative facts," freedom of press an "enemy of the state," and so blurs the lines between comedy satire, "fake news" and government press conferences that we can only express our outrage as laughter and our resistance as mocking memes posted to our social-media echo chambers. I guess that's something. But please...
Learn words.
Amos Elon, in The Excommunication of Hannah Arendt, the introduction to Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, writes:
"[Arendt] insisted that only good had any depth. Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet — and this is its horror! — it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil." (Cited in Christopher Lydon, "Hannah Arendt and the Banality of Evil").
The banality of evil flourishes in the current climate of party polarization and religious-political rhetorical hybrid. And these rely on incapacitating our will to think be shouting down words.
Campaign crowds and religious services are easily led in antiphonal chants:
"Victory! Salvation! Victory! Salvation!"
And until someone translates that antiphony back into its originary German language and context, the phrase "Lest we forget!" becomes nothing more than another recruitment slogan for the publicly elected clients of arms dealers, rather than a call to actually remember, to think, to imagine and to speak a better word than Orwell's "Two-minute Hate."
This too requires thought.
It requires setting a very high value on freedom-of-speech.
Beware: it's actually the extremist who seeks to absolutize freedom-of-speech so that hate-speech is enshrined as a human right. "I can say whatever I want. It's a free country."
This fails to see that some speech not only incites violence--some speech is itself an act of violence, where 'violence' is defined as 'harming the other.'
When we recognize that speech itself can be violent, we seek to put parameters around those freedoms, just as you would with 'the right to bear arms.' Yes, you may have a gun. No, you may not shoot your spouse in the face. Yes, you may use words. No, you may not use words to harm others. For example, a number of nations have made it illegal to explicitly deny the Nazi holocaust of Jews and other groups in World War 2. That's because they feel to do so is a form of hate-speech that causes harm.
On the other hand, the other end of extremism calls for "politically correct" speech that becomes slippery and oppressive. So much so that we see a backlash of mutually offended opponents, competing for the highest step on the victims' podium:
"If you say this, I will be offended! You're victimizing me!"
"If you say I can't say this, I will be more offended! You're victimizing me!!"
"But you're attacking me with hate-speech!"
"But you're attacking freedom-of-speech!"
"You're a xenophobe!"
"You're a fascist!"
"No, you're the fascist."
And thus grows the resentment. Typically,
- neither party knows what freedom-of-speech includes and does not include;
- neither party knows what hate-speech includes and does not include;
- neither party knows what political correctness includes and does not include;
- neither party even knows what 'fascism' means;
because all these words have been reduced to cliches--slogans infused with a history resentment rather than meaningful content.
Might we invigorate our imaginations with ideas and language that transcend this downward spiral of polarized mindlessness?
One of my sons texted me the following information on Post-millennialism that has raised my hopes ever-so-slightly. (Note: some of what follows includes research he was forwarding. Citations welcome):
Postmillennialism (introduced in 2000 by American cultural theorist, Eric Gans) identifies postmodernism according to the resentment of those who identify as victims towards their perceived oppressors. In the US, this thinking is completely mutual now. Postmillenials, on the other hand, are inclined to transcend victimary thinking and renounce resentment in order to engage in constructive dialogue.
I see this manifesting in two ways at our local university:
1. The pluralists are resisting the secularists. The secularists want only their -ism to rule the roost and to silence all other convictions, esp. faith. The pluralists are pushing back in the name of inclusion, demanding a seat at the table (including academic chairs) for the competing -isms, including Christianity and other faith. We don't know who will win in the end, but they are seeing the hypocrisy of the fundamentalist left's intolerance of convictions in the name of tolerance.
2. In class, my son's teacher has identified the resentment between those raised in PC (politically correct) language and those who are less semantically sensitive. Rather than shutting down or shouting down either group, she is training them in empathy towards the reality of the other as they are (acceptance) … that the ideologies of acceptance must reach across boundaries of what we deem acceptable in order to embrace the unacceptable other.
To me, this kind of insight secures a greater freedom that transcends the close-mindedness of the culture-wars. It requires creativity in the public sphere, which requires mindful thinking, which requires words. And it requires seeing my first enemy is the fear and hatred of the other that resides within me and how these are blurted as words through my thoughtless larynx or reactive tweets.
So we pray, "Lord have mercy," but must also learn to actively cooperate with that mercy.
And that, in short, is what this article is proposing.
Freedom requires imagination.
Imagination requires thought.
Thought requires words.
Learn words.
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Brad Jersak has written or co-written 4 political philosophy texts focusing on the Canadian political philosopher, George Grant, and French political activist, Simone Weil:
Canada's Lone Wolf (with Ron S. Dart)
Crucial advice Brad. We are dangerously close to the point where “By lack of understanding they remained sane.” And we are already at the point this sentence warns us about: “…. when ‘The Times’ referred to one of the orators of the Party as a DOUBLEPLUSGOOD DUCKSPEAKER it was paying a warm and valued compliment.”
Viva those postmellennials - I hope your are right!
Posted by: Bev Mitchell | February 24, 2017 at 10:13 AM