Language and the Politics of Power
In his Address to Members of the Diplomatic Corps, Pope Leo XIV reflects on the tenuous state of words and language in modern society:
Language is no longer the preferred means by which human beings come to know and encounter one another. Moreover, in the contortions of semantic ambiguity, language is becoming more and more a weapon with which to deceive, or to strike and offend opponents. We need words once again to express distinct and clear realities unequivocally. Only in this way can authentic dialogue resume without misunderstandings.
According to the Holy Father, something alarming is happening to language. It seems to be breaking down, and this deterioration calls into question the possibility of authentic dialogue among human beings today.
Communion, understood as a drawing together of mind and heart unto truth, is a primary effect of language. When language is healthy and words convey truth, human beings foster and develop communion with one another. The Holy Father’s concern, however, is that in our day language is increasingly becoming a means of coercion, a tool of deception and offense, instead of something that brings us together. Language risks becoming yet another instrument in the service of the politics of power, in which truth is set aside in favor of violence and force.
In other words, the more violent our speech, the more violent our society. The Holy Father’s address is remarkable in helping us to see clearly the connection between deformed language and an increase in social violence. Wherever language and words are bent away from truth to the purposes of power, Pope Leo warns, the threat of war increases:
War is back in vogue and a zeal for war is spreading. Peace is no longer sought as a gift and a desirable good in itself, or in the pursuit of “the establishment of the ordered universe willed by God, with a more perfect form of justice among men and women.” Instead, peace is sought through weapons as a condition for asserting one’s own dominion. This gravely threatens the rule of law, which is the foundation of all peaceful civil coexistence.
The Holy Father’s address offers an occasion to reflect anew on the nature of language and its relation to our political and social interactions. What is language, and what is it that words accomplish? Why does the degradation of language lead, slowly but inexorably, to an increase in violence? What are the prospects for a recovery of language?
A number of modern philosophers share such questions and have written about the irreplaceable value, but also the fragility, of language.
Josef Pieper is an example of a Catholic philosopher whose reflections on the nature and purpose of language offer a touchstone for thinking about our modern predicament. In a short essay, “Abuse of Language—Abuse of Power,” Pieper argues that language has an inherent twofold purpose:
First, words convey reality. We speak in order to name and identify something that is real, to identify it for someone, of course—and this points to the second aspect in question, the interpersonal character of human speech.
Pieper notes that the first purpose or accomplishment of words is to name reality. There is a correspondence between the thing “out there,” say, the tree, or the airplane, or the beautiful sunset, and the word that names the reality. Words name things. The naming of things is not an imposition, but simply the appearance of the thing in the intellect. Words are the means by which reality appears in the human mind. Words take reality, as it were, by the hand, allowing it to become articulate to the mind. Through words, reality becomes intelligible and the truth of things becomes manifest to us.
Hence the interpersonal nature of language, which is its second accomplishment as listed by Pieper. We speak to and with one another. Because words convey reality, they bring about communion—once again, the union of mind and truth. Through language, we can come to understand one another as “datives of disclosure, as those to whom things appear,” to borrow a phrase from the Catholic philosopher Robert Sokolowski. Reality is disclosed to us only in language, and the truth of things becomes manifest only in speaking to one another.
Each of these accomplishments of language can be frustrated, according to Pieper. Instead of naming the truth, words can be made to lie. When this happens, we cease to speak to or with others, and instead speak at them. In this way, the interpersonal end of language is frustrated. This deleterious situation, according to Pope Leo, has become a feature of our modern world.
When words are used with the deliberate aim of misleading the other, real communication ceases. Following Plato’s argument in the Gorgias, Pieper writes that the communion fostered by dialogue presupposes that the other person is an equal, another individual in search of truth. If this is so, then the deliberate misuse of language to deceive involves a denial of the other’s full humanity. I no longer see the other as my equal in the search for truth, but as an obstacle that I must overcome. Pieper’s argument is quite forceful:
Whoever speaks to another person—not simply, we presume, in spontaneous conversation but using well-considered words, and whoever in so doing is explicitly not committed to the truth—whoever, in other words, is in this guided by something other than the truth—such a person, from that moment on, no longer considers the other as partner, as equal. In fact, he no longer respects the other as a human person.
The abuse of language always involves—in fact, presupposes—a dehumanization of the other, a denial that truth is a constitutive good of the human person. Veritas principaliter est in intellectu, truth resides principally in the intellect, says Thomas Aquinas. The deliberate falsification of language renders communication impossible, because it denies that the human intellect has any claim to truth. This is the reason, according to Pieper, why Socrates harshly criticized the sophists of his day. They bent language to the purposes of flattery and spoke always from an ulterior motive that sought to manipulate their interlocutors.
The connection between our humanity and the health of our language is brought out quite clearly by George Steiner, the great literary critic and intellectual. In an essay on the miracle of speech, he notes:
Much of the best that we have known of man, much of that which relates the human to the humane—and our future turns on that equation—has been immediately related to the miracle of speech. Humanity and that miracle are, or have been hitherto, indivisible. Should language lose an appreciable measure of its dynamism, man will, in some radical way, be less man, less himself. Recent history and the breakdown of effective communication between enemies and generations, as it harries us now, shows what this diminution of humanity is like. There was a loud organic and animal world before man, a world full of non-human messages. There can be such a world after him.
Steiner is an important voice here. As a Jew who escaped the Holocaust as a young boy, he spent much of his intellectual career reflecting on the complete brutalization of language that occurred in the twentieth century under Nazism, and that was the basis of so many of the black horrors perpetrated by that regime. In a powerful and disturbing essay, “The Hollow Miracle,” Steiner takes an unflinching look at the total degradation of the German language under Hitler:
For let us keep one fact clearly in mind: the German language was not innocent of the horrors of Nazism. It is not merely that a Hitler, a Goebbels, and a Himmler happened to speak German. Nazism found in the language precisely what it needed to give voice to its savagery. Hitler heard inside his native tongue the latent hysteria, the confusion, the quality of hypnotic trance. He plunged unerringly into the undergrowth of language, into those zones of darkness and outcry which are the infancy of articulate speech, and which come before words have grown mellow and provisional to the touch of the mind. He sensed in German another music than that of Goethe, Heine, and Mann; a rasping cadence, half nebulous jargon, half obscenity. And instead of turning away in nauseated disbelief, the German people gave massive echo to the man’s bellowing. It bellowed back out of a million throats and smashed-down boots.
Just as Pieper warns that language can be twisted away from the truth and thus away from its interpersonal aim, Steiner sees in the complete corruption of the German language under Nazism “a political weapon more total and effective than any history had known, and [a degradation of] the dignity of human speech to the level of baying wolves.”
The language was pressed completely into the service of a regime of death, and its words hollowed out in support of hell:
Languages have great reserves of life. They can absorb masses of hysteria, illiteracy, and cheapness (George Orwell showed how English is doing so today). But there comes a breaking point. Use a language to conceive, organize, and justify Belsen; use it to make out specifications for gas ovens; use it to dehumanize man during twelve years of calculated bestiality. Something will happen to it. Make of words what Hitler and Goebbels and the hundred thousand Untersturmführer made: conveyors of terror and falsehood. Something will happen to the words. Something of the lies and sadism will settle in the marrow of the language. Imperceptibly at first, like the poisons of radiation sifting silently into the bone. But the cancer will begin, and the deep-set destruction. The language will no longer grow and freshen. It will no longer perform, quite as well as it used to, its two principal functions: the conveyance of humane order which we call law, and the communication of the quick of the human spirit which we call grace.
Law and grace, says Steiner, are the two principal functions of language, what Pieper names truth and communion. Law is but the order of truth, and communion that mysterious, mutual disclosing of reality to the intellect. Both were completely undone in Nazi Germany.
What about the state of language in our current society and political discourse? Here, Roger Scruton can guide us. The modern attempt to coerce language into conformity with a pseudo-reality (what Orwell termed “Newspeak”), is, for Scruton, a unique form of superstition:
Newspeak occurs whenever the primary purpose of language—which is to describe reality—is replaced by the rival purpose of asserting power over it. The fundamental speech-act is only superficially represented by the assertoric grammar. Newspeak sentences sound like assertions, but their underlying logic is that of the spell. They conjure the triumph of words over things, the futility of rational argument, and also the danger of resistance.
Examples of Newspeak are multiplying in our society. On one hand, slogans such as “reproductive rights” or “the right to choose” operate under the logic of the spell, as if the deliberate destruction of innocent human life in the womb can be made agreeable simply by renaming the act. So also in matters sexual, where even biological reality is suddenly up for grabs, as in transgender ideology, and the nature of marriage itself is said to be open to redefinition.
On the other hand, the violent rhetoric coming from the highest levels of the current administration is equally mendacious. The logic of the tweet is also the logic of the spell, the attempt to construct reality simply by fiat. The cavalier dismissal of the death of a protester as a “domestic terrorist” before any investigation, the degrading rhetoric aimed at undocumented immigrants, the slogan “FAFO,” which has come to govern both foreign and domestic policy, are all examples of violent speech calculated to uphold not truth, but power.
Increasingly in our society and politics, the value of life has been subordinated to the aims and narratives of manipulative discourse. The Holy Father is right to warn us of this danger. He calls us to work courageously for peace in our society, to turn away from the superstitions of power, and to live in the truth. For Christians, such peace is found only in Christ, the one whom Scripture names the Word, and whose truth frees us from the darkness and error of sin, enabling us to be more authentically human.