Language affects our way of thinking and perceiving the world and, therefore, what happens in it; That’s why I worry less about the current plight of the planet than about the words we use to describe it.
For example, we use the word “war” to describe a phenomenon that exists regardless of the term we assign to it… but if we continually describe and perceive the world as a hostile place, it tends to be so. Likewise, when we claim that we are on the brink of World War III—as many do, lately—that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I began to consider the impact of language developments on ideas in the 1970s, after reading George Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language; At that time I was struck by the increasing vagueness of politicians’ language.
Writing in 1946, Orwell noted that for the terrible events of his time—the mass atrocities of Nazism, Soviet Communism, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—it was necessary to use doublespeak as anesthesia: “Political speeches and writings “, he wrote, “consist largely of defending the indefensible” (as examples, Orwell cited the euphemisms “population transfer” and “border rectification,” which were used to describe the forced relocation of millions of people).
For Orwell, these absurd euphemisms were a disease for democracy. “When I hear some tired politician mechanically repeat familiar phrases,” he wrote, “I often feel something curious: that this is not a living human being, but some kind of doll.”
By the 1970s, many writers shared Orwell’s concern about the deterioration of government language: although the world had undoubtedly improved since the 1940s, the proliferation of euphemisms had intensified. Paul Johnson characterized that tendency as “the effort of the well-intentioned not to hurt the feelings of others.” Why, I wonder, did we become so sensitive?
The vagueness of government language has increased markedly in recent decades, think, for example, of the aim of the Royal Society for the Promotion of the Arts: to promote a “resilient, rebalanced and regenerative” world; or in the commitment of Ian Hogarth, head of the UK government’s AI Foundational Models working group: to forge a “nuanced” policy that “manages the risks of downsides while simultaneously protecting the positive trends of this technology.”
These missions make us wonder if government communications professionals are handed manuals crammed with adjectives, acronyms, and correctly phrased phrases to create, in Orwell’s words, “expressions put together like the sections of a prefabricated chicken coop” or if they simply imitate those. practices they consider the best among their peers.
In his dystopian novel 1984, Orwell explores the control of ideas through the manipulation of language, to prevent “criminals” or thought crimes. Certainly, Big Brother’s telescreens – successors to Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon – represent a technologically advanced surveillance system, a prelude to the now ubiquitous closed-circuit television cameras; but Orwellian’s greatest contribution to dystopian literature was not the description of the modern surveillance state, but “newspeak”: if everyone used only the words authorized by Big Brother, laws and surveillance would be unnecessary.
The task of Winston Smith, the novel’s protagonist, is to rewrite history. Among other tasks, he was responsible for altering the previous day’s news to match the latest political changes, removing obsolete inscriptions, statues, tombstones and signposts, and burning old books. Meanwhile, his colleague Syme was responsible for “destroying hundreds of words a day,” or translating them into Newspeak, the only language “whose vocabulary is shrinking every day.” As Smith explains, “in the end we will make thought crime literally impossible, because there will be no words with which to express it.”
Orwell considered the purification of thought through language to be the hallmark of totalitarianism… but, as evidenced by the cancellation and humiliation of people for using “inappropriate” expressions, not even democracies are immune to such practices. In the novel 1985, published in 1978 by the Englishman Anthony Burgess, the author observes that “if I, a writer, use words that betray discrimination, even if it is grammatical, I run the risk of being legally punished.”
Although much language policing today is a deliberate act of social engineering, that is only part of the story; What we face is not the newspeak generated by the state, but the politically correct vocabulary that emerged from the mechanisms of liberal democracy itself.
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville warns against the unfettered power exercised by the majority in a society free of traditional constraints and dedicated to equality. In traditional society, he noted, “few new words are coined, because few new things are done”; But democratic countries embrace change itself, a characteristic that is not only evident in their politics but also in their language.
Furthermore, Tocqueville observed that such societies often assign grandiose titles to modest occupations, apply technical jargon to everyday objects, change the meaning of words to make them more ambiguous, and replace idiomatic expressions with abstract ones. He states: “I would rather the language be made horrible by the importation of Chinese, Tatar or Huron words than for our own words to lose their meaning.”
Unlike the largely homogeneous American society described by Tocqueville, today’s linguistic excesses result not from the tyranny of the majority but from minorities, or pressure groups claiming to represent them, seeking “equal recognition” of their inherent or chosen identities. This change implies a moral obligation for those who do not belong to these minority groups to use language that avoids “mental discomfort” to those who do belong to them.
Democratic governments begin to regulate the language to prevent unrest from turning into political disorder, which is why the category of “hate crime” was incorporated into the legislation.
But the biggest problem with today’s democratic rhetoric is its tendency to frame international relations in moral terms and divide the world into “good” and “bad” countries. While that dichotomy may boost morale, it hinders efforts to achieve world peace. In the words of the British historian A.J.P. Taylor: “Bismarck fought ‘necessary’ wars in which thousands died, while 20th century idealists embark on ‘just’ wars in which millions die.”
Robert Skidelsky, member of the British House of Lords, is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick.
Translation: Ant-Translation. Copyright: Project Syndicate
