It has become blatantly obvious that the far left both in the United States and abroad is doing two things with regard to words and language.
1. They are redefining words that already exist. Words such as love, hate, man, woman, tolerance, and marriage have had their real meanings changed in order to weaponize language and redefine reality into something that is ultimately utopian and disconnected from reality.
2. New words and phrases have been introduced to our language despite having no truth in meaning or evidence from the real world. Words such as white privilege, intersectionality, cisgender, heteronormativity, and positionality.
Not only are such phrases and concepts disconnected from reality and science, but conformity to them is now increasingly being demanded by the hard left. Any group, people, government, or other influential body that would require and force you to accept certain language and speak certain phrases, and refrain from speaking others; is by definition totalitarian. We know this, because if you refuse to comply, they will cancel you.
The importance of language on popular thought can be overstated as much as it can be underestimated. For example, words today are considered to be acts of violence, and yet malleable enough for us to manipulate in service of our preferred agenda. Either way, they are a sort of weapon—threatening to wound us in our nebulous sense of self, or else a type of revolutionary shot fired—a proclamation of our existence against a world that is against us. Each of us is ruler of his own constitutive reality—distrustful but needy, fragile but hot-tempered. At least as the Left sees it.
A breakdown in our common understanding of words leads to a society in chaos and frustration, inevitably miscommunicating and plagued by distrust.
You doubt me on this? Whether you are person who sees things from the right or the left, conservative or progressive; how often do you find yourself listening to the speeches and communication by presidents, elected officials, or media personalities; then finding that you are having to look for the hidden meaning in what they’re saying. More often than not, when the left is speaking about some policy or program they support, we later find out what they are actually pushing for is precisely the opposite outcome of what they promoted.
It is becoming more and more obvious that there is an enormous chasm between two sections of America. One section is trying to remain anchored to reality, while the other section is hell bent on disconnecting themselves from reality and using powerful government and cultural forces to make the rest of us conform. One group of Americans understands the world the way it is, that much of our understanding of life and the world around us come from history and science. The other group of Americans his completely disconnected from how the world actually works. They are reality and science deniers. And rather than face the difficult questions and the possibility that they are wrong in their views, they demand that you be silenced as they are introducing new meanings for words and entirely new words that are disconnected from science, nature and reality. This is dangerous for our culture, for a healthy society, and is ultimately dangerous for our politics and governance.
We become suspicious, not only of each other, but of ourselves and our ability to grasp reality. Rather than a fallible people struggling imperfectly toward a harmonious common good, we are becoming a cacophony screaming fools across a chasm for recognition and moving through the world without a destination, unmoored from common sense and reality.
In his book The Beginning of Wisdom, Leon Kass writes of the breakdown of common language at the Tower of Babel.
“And because language also bespeaks the inner world of the speakers, sharing one language means also a common inner life, with simple words accurately conveying the selfsame imaginings, passions, and desires of every human being. To be ‘of one language’ is to be of one mind and heart about the most fundamental things.”
(Leon Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom (University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 223.)
When our shared language becomes compromised, we lose not only the utility of it, which enables us to convey basic facts about the practical realities of daily life, but also lose any common and universal meaning toward which our daily lives and our interior lives might point.
It does not take much convincing to see our society as it currently stands is experiencing this crisis of meaning, not just in the form of communication or means, but also about ends and purposes—our understanding of which indicates and informs our understanding of everything else. Increasingly, this crisis not only threatens the relationship between Christians and secularists but fractures all communities, Christian or otherwise, from within.
We cannot build any tower, even were it not a doomed and arrogant enterprise, because we are arguing over the building blocks!
Consider how drastically we have altered the meaning and usage of simple words like love, hate, man, woman, and marriage. Consider the new vocabulary that we have introduced into our cultural psyche (the day before yesterday): words such as white privilege, intersectionality, cisgender, heteronormativity, and positionality. Not only are such concepts suddenly everywhere, but conformity to their proper use is increasingly demanded by totalitarians among us. But it is not just the building blocks that are corrupted; the purpose of the project is obscured entirely.
Of this, George Orwell writes:
“Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause, and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. [Here is an example.] A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. This is the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible.”
(George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell.ru, Accessed June 10, 2021, https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit).
Far from a peevish culture war, this is an attempt to revolutionize the way in which we see the world in and around us and the meaning imbued within those realities. Once we cease to see words as having a power to reveal reality, they are reduced to reflections not of reality but of ourselves, and our selfish desires. Rather than a bridge of communication, we are left with a staircase to nowhere as words become unintelligible altogether, and our culture and society collapses.
This is the clear and present danger being promoted by the Left as they work overtime to redefine words and phrases in ways that no longer communicates reality and the real world we live in.
For further reading see, “Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology” by Noelle Mering.