(With apologies to Richard M. Weaver)
"The corruption of man," said Ralph Waldo Emerson, getting things as backwards as ever, "is followed by the corruption of language." Which came first, the corruption of man or of his words? Which may strike some as a futile quest, but there's no question that our words have lost their power to compel. What was once imperative has become optional, just another choice on a multiple-choice test. ("Do you believe in telling the truth (a) always, (b) now and then, (c) never if at all, (d) or even if there is such a thing as truth any more?")
Note the power that an oath once had, for a man could lay his hand on a tattered old book and command belief. He was laying his honor on the line--"He's a man of his word," people used to say--almost with a sense of awe, an awareness of the solemn undertaking they were embarking on. Now, in these post-Clintonesque times, our words have become but bargaining chips in another courtroom melodrama that's more drama than anything else. What was once a solemn undertaking has become nothing but a lawyer's game.
Wittgenstein has succeeded Socrates as our guide, and it is no improvement. Quite the contrary, for the immutable has become the mutable, the permanent the transient, the expedient our highest value. Now the very word Truth, if we dare use it at all, must appear in scare quotes, as if the very concept were dubious. And it soon enough becomes so when when expedience takes precedence over any sense of honor we once had. If we can still remember what a sense of honor was.
Only the uneducated may now use the word Truth without qualification, which says a lot about the quality of our "education" in these verbally depraved times when the Private Option has come to mean the public one; the Medicaid rolls are padded in the name of providing the poor with better care when they're just being funneled into worse; running up the public debt is called investing in the future; and, in the best tradition of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs that led to the Great Depression, a mossback like Bernie Sanders is hailed as the advance guard of the Revolution.
So just whom are we fooling? Ourselves, of course, because when our words lose their meaning, so do our lives. And we wind up lying even to ourselves, and worse, not knowing it.
We may begin by thinking we're lying only to others, but wind up by lying only to ourselves. And not even being aware of it. Or as Hobbes noted, "words are wise men's counters--they do but reckon by them--but they are the money of fools." And like a country that has devalued its currency until it is worthless, our inflated language has lost all meaning. It can no longer define or compel but just lie there, like a used-up inner tube--stale, flat, and unprofitable. It happens when our words are created not only equal but interchangeable. For nothing will always equals nothing, and that grim mathematical truth cannot be evaded however much we twist and turn.
We can only be saved by faith, hope and charity. And of these, charity remains the greatest, for only it can offer a refuge from the harsh ideologies that are the bane of our times and many another.
Editorial on 03/23/2016