The Necessity of Political Language

It would seem reasonably uncontroversial that our ability to discuss a subject in a clear and rigorous way depends on our having a vocabulary adequate to permit that, not least by furnishing us with a satisfactorily extensive lexicon of terms with precise, coherent meanings for reference. However, many seem to see "political language" as serving no purpose whatsoever, and indeed something to be attacked on sight.

Why is this the case? Let us first of all admit the fact that a good deal of language is, from the outset, muddled at the level of conception, with thinkers coining words and phrases that ultimately fail to illuminate, or which they may even deliberately intend to obscure, to confuse, to manipulate. While we are at it let us also get out of the way the reality that a good deal of usage of terms that do not originate that way can end up being used that way. (Alan Sokal, you may remember, got pretty far stringing together favored buzzwords of people in certain categories of study in the humanities and social sciences in totally nonsensical fashion for the sake of exposing the game. Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity indeed! It's the sort of phrase that a stupid person might come up with when trying to imagine how the intelligent speak.)

Yet all this is very far from the whole issue, and to focus on it can be misleading. After all, these are problems not just with political language, but all language, despite which we generally manage to get along. But many play them up where politics is concerned for the most dubious of reasons. One is laziness, of course. Dismissal of the value of a body of knowledge is easier than actually acquiring it before we make our judgments. ("We'll never need math anyway," says many a frustrated student. Or grammar. Or spelling. Or anything else for which there seems to be an app. They are likely to find out otherwise.) Even those pursuing a bit of intellectual distinction can take the lazy route themselves, being all too familiar with the sorts of cheap maneuvers that impress the simple-minded--for example, dismissing existing categories of thought as if they have somehow transcended them--saying "Look at me and how much smarter I am than everyone else because I have seen through their bugbears! Look at me thinking outside the box!"--when in reality they have not done any thinking at all. When they have not even looked at the box or its contents, let alone managed to think outside them (and likely not even realized that "thinking outside the box" has degenerated into yet anothr atrocious corporate clichè whose utterance strongly suggests that the speaker is not doing what they presume to be doing).

However, other factors seem to me more consequential, not least the prevalence of a postmodernist intellectual orthodoxy that takes a very dim view of the capacities of human reason. This goes only so far in the realm of the physical sciences--one can't argue (very much) with the accomplishments of physicists, for example. But they have more scope to do so in the social realm, where one not only gets away with, but is lauded as displaying the greatest profundity for, doing what would be the physics equivalent of "All that matter and motion and energy stuff is probably incomprehensible, and looking for patterns in it or explanations for it is pointless and pernicious. Best not do it and stick to as superficial a reading of things as we can."

This orthodoxy extends to a dim view of human language's descriptive powers, which has them dismissing all language as "language games" and words--and especially words with heavy political meanings--as therefore meaningless, often in a tone suggestive of this being indisputably obvious to all. That even amid all the superficiality and misuse and abuse of terms words like "conservative," "liberal," "socialist," "capitalist" (or "neoconservative," "neoliberal," "fascist," "centrist") these can still denote real, meaningful and important concepts or sets of concepts, and that even the shallower, diverging or outright erroneous usages may reflect and evoke and reinforce those patterns in telling and important ways, is something they steadfastly refuse to acknowledge--not least because these cheap and shabby evasions may serve their purposes, which is not in furthering a conversation, but undermining a conversation they do not want to see happen at all.

Indeed, blanket attacks on political language are often a shabby cover for attacks on someone else's political language, for the sake of promoting one's own no less political nomenclature. I recall, for example, running into a recent discussion of centrism on Twitter. When the Tweeter in question raised a particular analysis of where centrism sits within the political spectrum one of the first people to respond sneeringly dismissed the left-to-right political spectrum as meaningless and incoherent and declared that people should think in terms of statism and anti-statism. What he suggested, of course, was our narrowing the political dialogue to a single issue along a single axis (most people at least let us have two!) apparently divorced from any intellectual premises whatsoever in an all too blatant attempt to shut down the conversation that Tweeter was trying to start and have one more congenial to him. As the person in question was a professional renewable-energy basher with endorsements for his book from certain high-profile figures his biases here were all too obvious. Simply put, he wanted to make it a matter of "libertarians" as the champions of "freedom" (he didn't define either term, of course, but anyone can guess what he had in mind) against everyone else.

Whatever one makes of his views, his unfortunate intervention (which smacked of that online discourse policing--that heckling--that I disdain regardless of who does it--and which can only seem at odds with any pretension to respect for freedom of speech) only underlined how we never get away from our reliance on a political vocabulary, and that rather than dismissing it in that lazy and pretentious way as so many do, what we ought to do is work to make that vocabulary useful.