;)
Thursday
Aug292013
War, Words & Wittgenstein
This commentary by Akhilleus appeared near the end of yesterday's thread. In hopes of giving it a wider readership, I've copied it here:
On the use and misuse of language for political purposes.
A piece in the current New Yorker by Teju Cole on the ways in which clichéd approaches to language result in trite and defective thought processes led me to consider the way political expositions are currently being used in the run up to whatever the hell it is we are planning in Syria.
Akhilleus, August 29, 2013
It also reminded me of two old friends who have expressed similar trepidations regarding language and thinking, George Orwell and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein concerned himself with the limits and uses of language in two of his most important works. As a gunnery soldier in WWI he spent much time considering the problems of locution and propositions thereby expressed. This work became the “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”. He later, in his “Philosophical Investigations” reexamined much of his thinking on language and explored how inaccurate use and understanding of the limitations of language could lead to unsound and imprecise thinking.
George Orwell, in an essay on “Politics and the English Language” reached pretty much the same conclusions albeit in a more congenial fashion. He was concerned that sloppy, unclear language begets similarly sloppy thinking and demonstrates (hilariously) how clichéd political language is used to hide rather than rectify spurious thinking underlying terribly erroneous decisions.
Our contemporary political discourse is not much better. Euphemisms such as “collateral damage”, “limited strike” “Shock and Awe” and “symbolic attack” obscure the linguistic landscape in clouds of dusty metaphor. But if you’re talking about dropping bombs as a symbol, I’d have to say that most symbols I’m familiar with don’t kill people. Poor or willfully misleading expressions of bad ideas lead inevitably to regrettable outcomes (see: War, Iraq).
If we are intent on sending a message of international disapproval, because that’s pretty much all this is (no regime change intended, at least so we say), specifically because of the use of chemical agents, then why have we not sent “messages” to other regimes whose intentions and actions toward their own people have been equally nefarious and deadly?
A more accurate and careful use of language, that is, an approach that jettisons clichés and anodyne, mystical euphemisms would demand clearer, more nuanced thinking. Defaulting to political bromide-speak serves only to cloud the goals and methods and offers little opportunity for judicious, rigorous thought. And if such issues have already been carefully parsed then the employment of political, euphemistic language to sway public opinion presents its own set of problems, namely, that of inaccurately describing intentions and methods, as ruefully seen during the Bush debacle.
A sidebar on chemical warfare: I’m not entirely convinced that chemical agents are that much worse than bombs, bullets, and rockets (but I’m open to opposition on this). Granted it’s much harder to protect oneself from a chemical attack, but if one’s house has rockets raining down on it there ain’t a much better chance of surviving attacks by conventional weaponry. And consider this, we didn’t care when Iraq gassed the Iranians. In fact, we helped. We didn’t care when Saddam gassed the Kurds. We shrugged our shoulders. Sure he was an evil prick, but he was our evil prick. And there are plenty of other evil pricks in the world besides Assad. Do we go after all of them? No one cared about genocide in Rwanda or the Congo or Cambodia (conventional weapons like machetes and AKs are equally useful for killing hundreds of thousands, even millions). So why here, why now? (The question is rhetorical.)
Chemical warfare has been used for centuries dating back to the use of poisoned arrows, which does not, of course, make it okay (don’t ask me to explain what part of any war is “okay”), but is rather an acknowledgement that chemicals in war have a long history. The original (fictional) Akhilleus, was felled by a poison arrow. German tribes being attacked by Roman Legions poisoned their water supplies, a move first decried then gleefully adopted by Rome. In 1899, a Hague Convention declared the use of chemical warfare out of bounds, with only one nation voting against it, the United States, whose representative was the influential military envoy Alfred Mahan. Captain Mahan's rationale for opposition was the desire not to tie the hands of future US weapons makers, improvements in the industrial manufacture of cool new chemical agents offering many exciting options for killing a shitload of people at once.
And after all, would a cloud of sarin gas have been worse than the firebombing of Dresden? The end result would still have been tens of thousands killed.
But, as I said, this is a sidebar. This isn’t to say that the Geneva Conventions should be set aside, but let’s be clear. It’s a weapon. It kills. That’s its purpose. Sure it guarantees a maximum impact against the enemy with little or no exposure (so to speak) for those using the weapon. But drone strikes do something similar (not on the same scale, of course).
And if we attack a country that offers us no imminent threat, other than some made up bullshit, then this is no better than what Bush and Cheney did in Iraq. It doesn’t take an enormous facility with clear language and clarity of thought to arrive at that conclusion, but it would help us think through this situation and perhaps allow us to either defenestrate this plan and come up with something that we (and the world) find more acceptable (such as what Marie suggests), both strategically as well as philosophically and politically, or find a clearer, more supportable rationale for moving ahead with the current plan of “symbolic bombing” , minus the weasel words and threadbare thinking.
It’s clear that the Obama administration feels that they are in a "damned if they do, damned if they don’t" situation, but that’s just another way of defaulting to clichéd thinking. There doesn’t have to be only those two outcomes. Clearer heads may very well come up a way of thinking and talking about this problem that will pry us free from clunky ideas and poorly examined options. And keep Orwell from another spin cycle in his grave.
And what would Wittgenstein say? He famously concludes his Tractatus by declaring that there are things that even the best language cannot accommodate:
“Concerning that of which we cannot speak, we must remain silent.”
In other words, just because you CAN say something, doesn’t mean it should be said or that it has any useful meaning in the world.
Advice rarely followed by politicians. Or political commentators.
Share Article
Comments for this entry have been disabled. Additional comments may not be added to this entry at this time.
Reader Comments (13)
I can't agree with Orwell if he meant that politicians should speak in clear and unmistakeable language. I've always understood that the seasoned politician would not be caught dead making a simple declarative statement concerning future events. Things change and the future is always misty. Obama's big mistake was the political theatre of drawing a line in some imaginary sand and daring Assad to cross it with dire, unspecified consequences if he did. And not having an actual plan in place. Was it less than a year ago that Bibi stood before the UN and drew a line for Iran to cross on a piece of paper or does it just seem that recent? Watching Obama extricate himself from this will make interesting political theatre for the next few weeks.
Two sources of language corruption I find most objectionable are both American. Number 1 is the Republican party which demonstrates a genius for obfuscation. Whenever they propose a bill to improve some legislation you just know the real intent is to emasculate it if existing or defer its enactment to somewhere beyond never never land if just proposed. Number 2 is the US military which must deploy a battalion of English majors inventing ever less applicable language to warfare. My current favorite example is the 'collateral damage' that translates into the smoking heap of old men, women and children on the other side of the wall. Especially when any male who looks 16 years old is automatically counted as 'armed assassin'. Perhaps the military should be listed as number 1 because as a revered American institution it is accorded a degree of unquestioning latitude that it doesn't deserve.
Re: @Cowichan; And; my good Canadian friend from the frozen tundra land, that is why we call going out to birthing zones and clubbing baby seals with spiked hammer blows to the head to protect the fur pelt for the fashion trade, "harvesting"; A?
Cowichan,
I think it would be helpful to actually read Orwell's essay before disagreeing with him.
His contention is that so much of the default language, the automatic, almost mindless resort to standard tropes and tired idioms worn out to the point of nonsense, has seriously degraded political and public thought. Orwell's hope is to rescue political discourse from hollow cant in order to advance the cause of clearer thinking. Or as he puts it "...the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."
I do agree that few politicians are wont to cast their thoughts in simple declarative sentences, but this is not always the case. The goal of political language is (or should be) to put forward a convincing argument, to lay out the rationale whereby this or that program or course of action should or must be adopted. And on occasion such objectives are well served by direct, declarative sentences, and political orators and writers from Pericles to Jefferson to Martin Luther King have used just such direct language. "We hold these truths...", "L'etat c'est moi", "We shall fight on the beaches...", "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" all are unambiguous statements of intent or desire with little room for misinterpretation.
As for your comment on Republican uses of political discourse, I couldn't agree more. In fact, I'd like to add a lot more but that will have to wait for another time.
Military euphemisms like "collateral damage" I discussed above and agree that their worst offense is not their use as linguistic antiseptic but the suppression of clear thought and accurate representation.
And that, in a nutshell is Orwell's argument.
AK: Simply scintillating if I may say so and I do say so.
Re: your mention of Sylvia Plath with whom I was immersed in during my salad days: She was a sick cookie and got sicker as she grew older. Reading many of her poems now that pathology practically jumps out, takes hold and likens to strangle you. Her poor son who got away from all this mess as far as he could get–-Alaska––finally ended up hanging himself. Sylvia left a legacy like a death knell.
PD,
Kind words. Thank you.
As for our friend Sylvia, the July 11th NYRB has a well done review of several bios and a look back at the previous spate of battling biographers who all seem to have drunk whatever it was that Sylvia quaffed by the gallon.
Plath, at least for me, has never been a poet I could curl up with and read for hours at a stretch (like Wordsworth). A little goes a long way with Sylvia. Some of her poems are so drenched in pain, crazy, eye-rolling pain that seeps into your bloodstream and infects your soul, that I have to put her down until my vital signs normalize. Then I can return later for another hit.
See what you think:
The Mad Girl
Yes, I read "The Mad Girl,"–––that a poet like Eavan Boland, who has such a love of humanity and nature would find that same hint of same in Plath tells you that the old adage of seeing what one wants to see––a bit of the old projection––is apparent here.
Tech question: How do you make your links assessable here on R.C.?
PD,
A techie hint for adding links to comments:
Here is a link to a basic line of HTML (hypertext markup language) that anyone can edit:
Check this link for the line of HTML code. It's right at the top of the page.
So, first you copy the href element on this page. Paste it into your comment window. Then copy the URL of the site you want everyone to check out. In my earlier post it was:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jul/11/sylvia-plath-the-unbearable/?pagination=false
This entire link goes between the quotation marks in the first part of the reference. Then type in whatever description fits your mood in the second part of the line, which in my post was The Mad Girl. Make sure this description goes in between the inequality symbols, starting with the greater than symbol (>) and ending at the less than symbol (<) that precedes the /a>.
There are additional elements you can add that will automatically open the link in another window or a different tab but I'm lazy and I figure it's easy enough to right click and "open link in new tab".
So there ya go. Once you get the hang of it, you can do it without thinking about it. Plus you get points for aesthetics AND one more chance to editorialize via snarky, smartass link descriptors.
Give it a shot.
Ha...sorry..I should have disabled the line of code...
here is the line again only broken up. Remember this should all be on a single line. (Hope this one works--or rather, doesn't.)
This is a link to an example website
Okay, well, I might need to break up that line of code so that it doesn't work. I know there's a way to do this but I forget what it is offhand.
So let's try this:
This is a link to an example website
Remember, this should all be on a single line. If this doesn't work I'll just point you to another page.
Chemical and biological weapons can exterminate a population in a region without damaging infrastructure. A big plus for a dictator who wants to reward his supporters with property.
Chemical and biological weapons are orders of magnitude more lethal than bullets or explosives on a weight basis and are cheaper both to manufacture and deliver. A civilian population has no defense from them.
If you don't deter their use, they will be used by governments against their own populations. If you don't base your politics and philosophy on scientific fact, you aren't working in the classical-enlightenment traditions no matter how many allusions you make to the work of people who were.
Mike,
Thanks to you and Haley, who responded yesterday on this subject.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by scientific facts in the context of a reliable philosophy. And neither Wittgenstein nor Orwell fit into classical enlightenment traditions, so I'm not sure what that means either, in this context. Also, who says that the classical enlightenment tradition is the only basis for an effective political philosophy? Certainly not me. Which in any event doesn't rule out respect for science. Wittgenstein was not an enlightenment philosopher but he worked for a time as an architect which, I'm guessing, does not exactly put him on the side of detractors of science. He came out of the analytical school which boasted many mathematicians in its ranks, some of whom relied on mathematical precepts in their work on logic.
If you mean that science demonstrates the awful efficacy of chemical warfare, who could dispute that? All warfare is horrible which is why we need to be on firm footing if and when we decide to pull that lever, which is my larger point.
I do realize how terrible chemical warfare can be and as I said, I realize they are not the same as conventional weapons, but I don't want to blind myself into thinking that if they ain't using chemicals, it's not all that bad. It's all bad.
I suppose what really rankles me is the way we pick and choose which actions will generate a response and which we can just ignore even if, despite the absence of chemical agents, the actions by despots against their own people have been horrific, and in many cases where chemical based attacks have been pursued, other countries, including the US, have done next to nothing, the point being we need clearer thinking on these issues and some set of standards if we're going to continue to be the world's police power. It can't simply be "Well, the guy is using poison gas. We've got to do something! (but not always)" but if genocide is being conducted using conventional weapons, land mines, machetes, child enslavement, and rape gangs, we can leave it alone.
I recognize also that every situation is different and such standards might not always fit each case neatly, I'm hoping however that, given the many fiascos we have engaged in, we might be more perspicacious in our pursuit of foreign adventures.
@Akhilleus: Both you and Orwell must possess a degree of comprehension so far in advance of mine as to render me barely sentient. A politician speaking in even a pale imitation of Orwell's examples has lost me before the first tortured sentence is complete. My reaction is "What the hell is he talking about?" and I, a political junky, am on to the next channel. There is no degradation of political thought because no thoughts have been transmitted. Your examples are from the other extreme, the master communicators. I just listened to J Kerry talking about Syria. Normally listening to him reminds me of my mothers stew. There is meat in there, it's just hard to find. Today he was clear and concise. Love those short declarative sentences and lack of embellishment. The typical politician falls somewhere between you and Orwell and even if typically a lawyer trained in logic and clarity (I presume) I am willing to cut them some slack. I don't expect the typical speech to rise much above what I hear everyday in the local coffeeshop. My anger is reserve for those who deliberately construct names which have been consumer tested to camouflage the poison within. The Canadian seal 'harvest' is a pale example. At least meat packers are honest enough to own slaughter houses.
I too find myself wondering why great suffering inflicted by chemical weapons is unacceptable compared to the terror of bombs, rockets, guns, rape, and torture.
“The horror! The horror!”