Politics and Language
In 1946 George Orwell published an essay called “Politics and the English Language”. In it he expressed his distress over the state of the English language, arguing that academic double-speak and rote, tired and inconsistent metaphors contributed to an epidemic of unclear, misleading prose. More specifically, he despaired over the state of political language. I would paraphrase here, but he expresses it much more elegantly than I am capable of:
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.
The implication, of course, is that if insincerity destroys clear language, politics relies upon deception, and everything is political, the clarity and precision of the way we communicate with each other is under constant assault. Whether we point to made up words in academia (e.g. “Post-Fordism”) that ensure that only those with the requisite training can effectively engage, or towards the debasement of words with specific, precise meanings (e.g. democracy, fascism, socialism etc.) into crude signifiers, Orwell demonstrated a frightening prescience. This is, of course, hardly news (which makes it all the more alarming).
I have little to add to Orwell’s excellent piece. I considered, briefly, trawling through news articles from both sides of the aisle and trotting out pertinent examples of the misuse of words like “democracy” and “communist” but that seems to be pretty low hanging fruit (yes, that’s three mismatched metaphors…I’m going to have to do a better job of this) and anyone with the desire to do so can easily satisfy themselves. Instead, with an acknowledgement that I quite love academic doublespeak, and am doubtless going to engage in it fairly often, I’d like to establish clarity as a core goal of any of the writing that will go up on this blog. Let me know how I do. Also, read the essay—I’m going to try to keep it at the forefront of my thoughts anytime I write anything.
I read that essay over the summer in CA and have started to use it’s rules as a guideline for all of my writing. It’s too damn good.
It’s really phenomenal. I don’t always do a good job at keeping it in mind, but I try to remind myself from time to time. The bigger thing is I think college, in a lot of ways, deincentivizes clarity. Last year I took a contemporary art history class (which meant we were talking about a lot of political things in the context of art, like globalization) and it was the professor’s first year, so I made an effort to just load my papers with as much technical academic doublespeak to make it as dense and hard to follow as possible while still being coherent. The result? I got an a on all my papers, even though what I was saying was pretty ordinary. And to me, that was a predictable outcome–saying big words masqueraded for genuine knowledge, and I think it works that way a lot of the time.
So that is why I have a hard time understanding the younger generation….this must be a new thing in college. Wait until you’re working…and you have to ask people to “dumb it down”, sometimes they can’t, simplify it or explain it.
Well, I wouldn’t describe that as the norm, and in higher level classes it’s certainly not a strategy that will get you a good grade. That being said, one of the things Orwell rails against in the essay-decades and decades ago-is the tendency of academia to create its own specialized language. Doing that serves to both cut people out of dialogue and to obfuscate what’s really being said sometimes, and if we take Orwell at his word it’s been a serious problem for at least six decades-so I’m not sure it explains whatever dysfunction might be unique to my generation.