Note: The past three issues of Eco Nomy (Spring, Summer and Autumn 2013) serialized my article. “Freedom in the Commons Brings Ruin to All.”
Sunday, January 12, 2014
The Rectification of Names and The Manipulation of Language
by David B. Sutton, Ph.D.
Confucius once advised, If we hope to repair what’s wrong in the World, we best start with the rectification of the names. The corruption of society begins with the failure to call things by their proper names and the renovation begins with the re-attachment of real meaning to precise concepts.
While it may seem ironic to hear such a plea for clear communication coming from the same cultural tradition that has so carefully codified the exact opposite behavior behind their face-saving mask of vagueness and ambiguity, it does represent a universal concern of intellectuals, scholars and philosophers for centuries for the misuse of language and the distortion of meaning.
For centuries, political philosophers from most of the World’s cultures have discussed how those in control name and define things as they would like them to be because of their vested interests. The culture and values of the economic elite – the bourgeoisie – become indoctrinated as ‘common sense’ for all, allowing for the maintenance of the status quo through misplaced belief.
Karl Marx argued that a false consciousness arising from capitalist exploitation allows the ruling class to maintain domination over the working class.
Jacques Ellul wrote of the desire of the rulers to achieve conformity in the way that the ruled act.
In his essay “Politics and the English Language (1946),” George Orwell observes that political language serves to distort and obfuscate reality. His description of political speech in his classic novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four has led to the contemporary understanding of what has come to be known as the ever-present “doublespeak” in our lives (1).
Doublespeak is language that deliberately disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. Doublespeak may take the form of euphemisms (e.g., “downsizing” for layoffs, “servicing the target” for bombing), in which case it is primarily meant to make the truth sound more palatable. It may also refer to intentional ambiguity in language or to actual inversions of meaning (for example, naming a state of war “peace”). In such cases, doublespeak disguises the nature of the truth. Doublespeak is most prevalent in advertising and economic and political rhetoric.
In 1971, The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Committee on Public Doublespeak was formed, in the midst of the Watergate scandal, at a point when there was widespread skepticism about the degree of truth which characterized relationships between the public and the worlds of politics, the military, and business. They were to study the relations of language to public policy, to keep track of, publicize, and combat semantic distortion by public officials, candidates for office, political commentators, and all those who transmit through the mass media. (2)
As the former Director of NCTE, William Lutz puts it, “There is more to being an effective consumer of language than just expressing dismay at dangling modifiers, faulty subject and verb agreement, or questionable usage. All who use language should be concerned whether statements and facts agree, whether language is, in Orwell’s words ‘largely the defense of the indefensible’ and whether language ‘is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
More recently, modern scholars like Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman have talked about the structural nature of the use of this doublespeak. In their book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media they argue that people in modern society consist of decision-makers and social participants who have to be made to agree. The mass media and public relations industry actively shape public opinion, working to present messages in line with their economic agenda for the purposes of controlling of the ‘public mind’. Contrary to the popular belief that indoctrination is inconsistent with democracy, Chomsky goes so far as to argue that ‘it’s the essence of democracy’ saying that in a totalitarian state, it doesn’t much matter what people think because you can control what they do. But when the state loses the bludgeon, when you can’t control people by force and when the voice of the people can be heard, you have to control what people think. And the standard way to do this is through propaganda — by manufacturing of consent through the creation of necessary illusions.
In his book, Beyond Hypocrisy, Herman, a political economist and media analyst, has highlighted some examples of doublespeak and doublethink in modern society and describes the principal characteristics of doublespeak;
“What is really important in the world of doublespeak is the ability to lie, whether knowingly or unconsciously, and to get away with it; and the ability to use lies and choose and shape facts selectively, blocking out those that don’t fit an agenda or program.” Beyond Hypocrisy also includes a doublespeak dictionary of commonly employed media terms and phrases into plain English.
While many have tirelessly fought the word-smiths of the “military-industrial-government-financial-media complex”, it is shamefully clear that now more than ever there is a need for what Confucius called for — for calling things by their proper names and attaching real meaning to what we are doing in the World today.
Doublespeak on the Environment and Sustainability
We see this misuse of language to distort first in the fields we know best. My first realization of it was in my chosen environmental field.
My mentor, Garrett Hardin often spoke of the “word magic” of the economist and tried to rectify their deceptive misuse of language with real living world definitions. For instance, in living systems things “grow” and “develop” to maturity where growth ends and further “development” is represented by the continued refinement of structure (making things better not just bigger) and maintenance of the system not continuous “growth.” In living systems unending growth only occurs is a terminal cancerous disease.
Environmental and social costs are real cost he continually pointed out. Naming them “externalities” in no way legitimizes them being left out of our accounting. Likewise “side-effects” are nothing more than effects (perhaps those we didn’t count on but effects nonetheless). Birth defects are as profound an effect of the drug Thalidomide as the expectant mother’s tranquil sleep (Filters against Folly: How to Survive Despite Economists, Ecologists and the Merely Eloquent).
He was the first to give me the realization of deceptive use of the economist’s doublespeak.
At the beginning my academic career, during the first Earth Day (in 1970), I was asked to name our most serious environmental problem. Then the concerns in the press and the public mind were, air pollution, the poisoning of our food and water, and the loss of forests and biodiversity. Few were talking about global warming, although knowledge of it had been known for a hundred years. So you can imagine the questioner’s shock when I singled out “Mind Pollution.” as the most dangerous environmental problem.
Simply defined: Mind Pollution is the contamination of thought by out-moded, myopic, selfish, and ultimately suicidal ideas about our relation to our environment and to one another.
Mind Pollution was and remains the ultimate cause of all other environmental problems.
I went on to explain the origin of this mental contamination from the curious religious beliefs that confers human dominion over all on earth, to success in conquering one frontier after another and the increasing power of technology over nature. And most importantly the doublespeak of a flawed economic mind-set that distorts all meaning to its own ends.
Mind pollution is about forgetting that we are members, not the masters, of the intricate interconnected network of living and non-living things we call the environment and that human welfare depends on the welfare of the whole.
As the famous naturalist Aldo Leopold put if over 60 years ago:
“Civilization has so cluttered elemental man-earth relation with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry.”
Leopold is reminding us that we need to appreciate our place in Nature and our absolute dependence on the natural processes that sustain us. Technology may give us the tools to more effectively interact with natural process but brute force technology forced upon the living landscape is not wise “scientific development” and certainly not sustainable.
All of this, of course, is second nature to the Taoist who knows it in their bones that we are inextricably connected to Nature’s ebb and flow.
China has its own brand of face-saving doublespeak that is used at its worst to lie and deceive and at its best to universally prop up image based on shallow or no substance. Right now the country is awash with “green” messaging — “Low-carbon” products and processes, “green” design and integration companies, hundreds of touted “eco-cities.” Most of these are not what they pretend to be. They are essentially “greenwashing” doublespeak which only serves to undermine the credibility of any legitimate examples that do exist.
In China, the indigenous natural philosophy was replaced by the human contrivance of a Confucian heavenly order. In the West, it was the fictitious conventions of Divine Providence and the market’s “invisible hand” that supposedly orchestrate things for the common good. The simple fact is (and should be blatantly obvious now with the present global economic meltdown) that we are in the grip of the flawed surreal economic worldview, where everything is commodity and human greed and device have no limit. We have lost the Way. Mind pollution still prevails.
I have recently written in this publication of the economist co-opting the unequivocal conclusion of the need for regulation in the commons with their need for privatization. The idea of Sustainability itself has also been co-opted. To too many it has become an economic concept. But it is not, it is an ecological one !
Sustainability is and always will be fundamentally an ecological concept of limits. Like all living things, the human species and their systems of operations must adapt to the limits of earth’s natural life-support systems. All the human device and accord in the world cannot transcend those limits.
Human industrial and economic systems are not sustainable. In a finite world the one-way industrial processes of extract, make, use and throw-away must end. There is a limit to resources available as well as the capacity for the earth’s life-support systems to absorb the impact. The myriad of environmental problems we are experiencing today is a manifestation of reaching these limits. Calls for moving towards sustainable development come from such an understanding.
Sustainable Development is not about technology and economics; it is about a state-of-mind. It is about having a mind clear of mind pollution – one that remembers what we all once knew.
Sustainable living is mindful living – being conscious of how we are involved with, how we affect and are totally dependent upon our planet’s life-support systems by using proper ‘names’ and attaching precise meaning to reality.
But that concept and term have also been co-opted to the benefit of financial interests. The idea of “ Ecological Carrying Capacity” is not nearly as flexible as economists would have you believe. Its limits are set by biophysical reality within what the ecologist calls the living system’s “range of tolerance.” These are not conditions open to negotiation, they are conditions absolutely necessary for life to exist. Once you start playing the economist “word games” about changing the carrying capacity to accommodate financial concerns (defined by them as human wants and desires) you are moving from biophysical reality. You are changing what you are ‘carrying’ not the environment’s capacity to carry it. This may seem like a minor point but to me it is just another example of economics taking over and controlling the language we all use.
This is why the concept of “sustainability” has become so confusing. It is constantly changing to accommodate the concerns of each new player. To me, there is no room in the concept of ecological sustainability for the economist’s “word magic ” of “infinite substitutability” — of presuming you can just keep changing one value for another. This is just one of the many major fundamental flaws of an economic world-view that leads the world to where we are now at the brink of ecological collapse.
The kind of thinking that a distorted economic definition of sustainability leads to is reflected in these two examples that I have recently encountered. First, once while giving a talk about sustainability to a group of educators I was told by one of the private school participants that their school was totally sustainable. Oh, I said, how so ? We are completely endowed she replied.
Another, even more frightful example involves a book published a number of years ago on the ‘most sustainable cities in the US. In the top ten of the book’s listing was Las Vegas. Unbelievable but yes, Las Vegas !
The ability to pay for the books, teachers and energy bills, to pay for the importing of virtually all necessities for living on the desert Nevada moonscape is no more sustainable than paying for the treatment of terminal cancer.
A faulty mind-set shored up by a bogus financial calculus is
no substitute for dealing with the real limits imposed upon human activity by the parameters of its ecological life-support systems.
In a future column I will deal with the false accounting that goes along with the wordsmiths of economic doublespeak.
The implied definition of economics and the economy itself is a distortion of reality. They imply that it is an all-inclusive view of the world, sufficient upon which to base all important public and private decisions. It is not. It is nothing more than the limited view of an elite that have only their own interests in mind.
But as Wendell Berry, one known for his honest and elegant clarity, has so eloquently stated,
“Economy in its original—and, I think, its proper—sense refers to household management. By extension, it refers to the husbanding of all the goods by which we live. An authentic economy, if we had one, would define and make, on the terms of thrift and affection, our connections to nature and to one another. Our present industrial system also makes those connections, but by pillage and indifference. Most economists think of this arrangement as “the economy.” Their columns and articles rarely if ever mention the land communities
and land-use economies. They never ask, in their professional oblivion, why we are willing to do permanent ecological and cultural damage “to strengthen the economy?”
Berry again further indicting with his vivid imagery:
“ No amount of fiddling with Capitalism to regulate and humanize it can for long disguise its failure to conserve the wealth and health of Nature. Eroded, wasted, our degraded soils, damaged, destroyed ecosystems, extinction of biodiversity (species) whole landscapes defaced, gouged, flooded or blown up. Thoughtless squandering of fossil fuels and fossil waters, of mineable minerals and ores. Natural health and beauty replaced by heartless and sickening ugliness. Perhaps its greatest success is an astounding increase in the destructiveness and therefore the profitability of war.”
Yes, indeed there is a need for the rectification of names and clarification of language and its meanings.
NOTES:
(1)Doublespeak is variant of the term double talk referring to deliberately ambiguous speech. The term “doublespeak” probably has its roots in George Orwell’s book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, although it was not used in the book. The book’s central concept was “doublethink.”
(2)The NCTE Committee on Public Doublespeak took on the awesome task of combating the advertisers, the politicians, and the major manipulators of public language in our society. They took on the study dishonest and inhumane uses of language and literature by advertisers, to bring offenses to public attention, and to propose classroom techniques for preparing children to cope with commercial propaganda.
The Doublespeak Award is an “ironic tribute to public speakers who have perpetuated language that is grossly deceptive, evasive, euphemistic, confusing, or self-centered.” It has been issued by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) since 1974. The recipients of the Doublespeak Award are usually politicians, national administration or departments such the United States Department of Defense, which won the award three times in 1991, 1993, and 2001 respectively. For the 1991 award, the United States Department of Defense ‘swept the first six places in the Doublespeak top ten’ for using euphemisms like “servicing the target” (bombing) and “force packages” (warplanes). Among the other phrases in contention were “difficult exercise in labor relations”, meaning a strike, and “meaningful downturn in aggregate output,” an attempt to avoid saying the word “recession.”