Language Games

One of the tenets of the postmodern drift is that "language is a mask to power".   I've been chewing on a brief post at Powerline for a few days that tersely dismisses that postmodern credo as a failed canard.

Basically, the claim of the secular progressive academia has often been that truth is determined by cultural consensus.  Different cultures make different truth claims.  Since ultimate truths are beyond the reach of reason, if they exist at all, we are left with the uncomfortable suggestion that whoever has power gets to control the language, and as a result gets to impose its version of truth on everyone else.  So the "rich" usually have the most power, thus they are usually the oppressors who control the language, creating words and destroying un-words according to their whim.

What they don't tell folks until they have been indoctrinated, is that their remedy to this injustice is for someone else to control the language.  (More)

This article "12 Phrases Progressives Need to Ditch" spells it out.

First item on the list, replace the term big business with unelected government.   Like I said, whether the notion comes directly from Marx or not, the assumption is that business is evil.  I get it.  There is no question business might be evil.  Heck, the mafia sees organized crime as a business opportunity, at least that's how they talk in the movies, right?

But the list goes on.  Free market capitalism gets re-labeled privatized profits.  Government spending changes to investing in America.  Illegal aliens should now be called undocumented residents.

What is telling is not what these terms say, but what these terms hide.   Privatized profits suggests that the profits rigthfully belonged to the public and do not belong in the private sector.  Profits were immorally hoarded by individuals.  What assumptions are hidden behind that turn of a phrase? 

Investing in America suggests there is a government run market of sorts where those who pay certain premiums will reap a benefit, but who has profited most from government controlled money such as green energy, the bank bailouts and Obamacare?   Doesn't seem to me that government controlled money gets broadly distributed any more than private money.

Undocumented resident suggests that certain individuals are merely missing a piece of paper due to a clerical error.  This hides the minor detail of the existing laws that may have been violated to become a resident.

Pro-life has been re-tagged as anti-abortion for decades, or worse anti-woman.  Nothing new.  Of course right-to-work has to be shifted to anti-Union, so that folks who aren't in Unions can be forced to pay the dues that fund the political activities of the Union leadership.  Non-union folds have less "rights" than union folk - so how is that a "right" when it only applies to a select group?    Gun control laughably retooled as gun violence prevention hides the statistical reality that wherever gun control is tried, violence goes up.  It also makes the original phrase - control -  an unword.

The point is, controlling the language is clearly a tool to shift the debate and win politically.  Language games.   A mask to power indeed.   Accomplished by shifting focus from the objective realities to the desired perception of a particular group.


Steven Hayward didn't have much patience for this sort of thing.

• Out in the further reaches of the critical theory left, the necessity of denying objective reality extends to language itself.  The deep-dish post-modernists declaim that language is just another subjective tool of the (white) power structure.  Whenever I hear such drivel, I usually ask not only why are we having this argument, but how are we having this argument? 

Good point.  If language has no objective value and is only a subjective tool, how does the postmodern use language to argue his or her case?  I have suggested before that international banking and an international space station are vivid monuments to the proposition that different cultures are perfectly capable of common understanding despite language barriers. 

Of course, one doesn't have to look too far to smell the lingering stench of Saul Alinsky.  "The issue is never the issue".  If language can be defined as a "mask to power" in order to demonize an opponent, language can also be a tool to obtain power - which is the ultimate goal.

I would, in a rational world, argue that If there is higher truth, objective truth, then we have the potential for common understanding that can unite.  But a higher truth would be something we cannot change to serve our own purposes.   This is, I think, what Alinsky hated.   This is perhaps why he dedicated his Rules for Radicals to Lucifer - better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.  To be objective is to submit to truth.  Submission to anything at all is something Lucifer, and Alinsky, found distasteful.

I have long mourned the push to see language as subjective only.  If truth is defined only by one's culture and different cultures ultimately cannot understand each other because of the prison house of their own language and culture, then all that is left is tribal warfare.   One group in political battle to assert its version of truth over others.

But that is not what postmodern power brokers fear, it seems to be what they want.

Oh the rank and file are not the problem.  They are likely true believers in the "drivel" of language games.   But I strongly suspect, behind the scenes, someone is orchestrating just enough chaos to divide and conquer.

Using language not to clarify, but to obscure, ought to tell us a lot about the character of those who write the new definitions.