Language and Crisis

My academic career began on an occasion such as this; it was called Matriculation rather than Convocation, but it was the same sort of thing. On that occasion we were addressed by some boring old geezer, who, as far as I remember, began by telling us how clever we were; how clever they were; how lucky we were to be at the University; how lucky they were to have us; how smart we all looked (all the men had to wear black suits, dark socks, dark shoes, white shirts, white bow ties, gowns and mortar boards); how pretty all the women looked (they said those sort of things in those days); how well the mothers looked (he seemed to be inordinately interested in the mothers)… He droned on and on and on…. which really started to annoy me after a while because I had to get to the university soccer trials (anyone who knows me will know that this is a serious matter)…. Well, I am not going to bother with any of that old geezer malarkey. Suffice it to say this: you are here, you are welcome, and you belong. Also, I’m not going to go on and on… I promised the president that I wouldn’t talk for more than two hours and I won’t…. Instead I’m going to talk to you today, with the seriousness which both you and my topic deserve, about language and crisis.¹

Let me begin by reading to you something which a previous president of Scripps cited on the occasion of a celebration of the humanities during the 25th anniversary of the College in 1952. It is a warning by Lewis Galantière:

When a nation… attains to world leadership, it preserves that rank only so long as its culture – which is to say not merely its achievements in the humanities but also its manners and beliefs and civil institutions – commands respect and some degree of emulation. For although leadership is [procured] by power it is maintained over a significant span of time only with the free assent of the led; and free assent is given only to moral and not to material authority…. These are the conditions of world leadership. Without them wealth and might lead only to hatred, conspiracy, and revolt against the physically dominant power.²

I wonder how America stands in the world today: respect, emulation, moral authority? Or hatred, conspiracy and revolt?

In four days time America will remember the fifth anniversary of the vicious and despicable attack of the 11th September. Five years ago, in the days following the attacks, Americans enjoyed the compassion of the world, or at least that huge majority in the world which rejects the use of such violence for political ends. Believe me when I tell you that in Europe this summer I noticed that it isn’t like that any longer. I was not surprised to hear the anti-American sentiments which were passed, since that is nothing new; what struck me was how vehement and sustained they were, with what anger and despair they were expressed, with what contempt and ridicule they were accompanied. I am talking about people well-disposed towards America, people who profess to share the putative American values: freedom of speech, the rights of the individual, transparent justice and open democracy. Today, out there in the world, these are not the values which people associate with America. Instead they think of Guantanamo Bay and the suspension of habeas corpus (the basic principle of justice); of secret prisons and torture ; of disregard for the international community; of bullying and self-righteous hypocrisy; of a culture marked by authoritarianism; of a government which taps its citizens’ phones, scans their bank accounts, and creates a climate in which it is possible for policemen to think that they are doing their duty by spying on college professors… Never has the good will of so many, for so many, been squandered by the actions and decisions of so few.

There are important issues to be weighed. This country is at war in Iraq, a war which involves approximately 140,000 troops at any one time, though with rotation it means many more Americans have again directly experienced the horror of modern warfare. The war will have cost $318.5 billion by September 30th;³ in it, as of this morning, 2660 Americans have died, 19,773 have been wounded⁴ and countless numbers of Iraqis have been killed (I say countless numbers because the U.S. government says it doesn’t count the figures; the most conservative figures put the number of civilian dead at the end of August as 63,100, not counting those killed in the initial six weeks of combat; last month was a grisly record in Iraq – there were more than 3,500 civilians reported killed).⁵ Iraq is in a state of civil war, Iran has become the dominant player in Middle eastern politics while simultaneously moving closer to a nuclear weapon, the threat from terrorist organisations world-wide has markedly increased, the causes of terrorism – poverty, illiteracy, historical and contemporary injustice, and the anger, bitterness, and alienation which arise from them – have been fostered rather than addressed. And in Afghanistan, the Taliban are back – you know, the ones who lock women up, don’t allow girls to be educated, stone people for extra-marital sex; they’re back. But don’t worry, despite the fact that American foreign policy might be described as the practice of making enemies faster than you can kill them, we are told that all is going well. Diplomacy is a bit like certain forms of scholarship – it requires training, dedication, application, patience, a willingness to get inside the mind of another, the clarity to know your own mind…American diplomacy? It reminds me of Mahatma Ghandi’s comment when asked what he thought of British civilisation; he said he thought it would be a good idea. (Last week an opinion survey conducted for The Guardian newspaper found that 1% of those asked thought that Britain’s involvement in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had made the country safer. I wonder what the response would be here in the United States, and why).⁶

Earlier this year I heard a senior U.S. diplomat argue that Europeans had to realise that they would have to accept the ‘realities’ of the American social and economic model if they were to prosper. I wonder what he meant. Would it be the fact that 12.7% of the U.S. population were living below the official poverty rate in 2004 (in case you don’t know, the rate is $20,000 for a family of four)? That’s 37 million people. Or the fact that 17.8% of all children lived in poverty in this fabulously rich country – fabulously rich in so many ways – in the same year (the figure was 33% of black children)? Would it be the reality that 11% of Americans fell under the category “food insecure” in 2002? – which means that at some point in that year they did not know where their next meal was coming from.⁷ Perhaps he was thinking of American health care provision – in 2002 15.2% of the population had no health insurance at all (43.6 million people, altogether, including 8.3 million children).⁸ Maybe he thought Europeans should adopt the policies of American criminal justice. There are over 2 million Americans incarcerated (at the end of 2003 this meant that 1 in every 143 Americans was in prison – the comparative figure in Britain – which has by far the most punitive system in Europe – was one in 1400; imagine what these figures look like if you break them down by race); from 1977-2003 prison spending went up by 1173%, compared to 505% on education.⁹ In 2004 the US took its place alongside China, Iran, and Vietnam in accounting for 97% of the State executions recorded world wide, though I note that since last year the US has stopped executing offenders who were children at the time of their crime.¹⁰ Perhaps my friend was referring to the fact that in a recent survey in the American Sociological Review, Americans say of themselves that they work such long hours, with such limited holiday entitlement, that they have fewer close friends and confidantes than they had a generation ago.¹¹ Or, that is now the case that less than 50% of Americans believe that today’s children will be better off than their parents.¹² I wonder if these are the sort of American realities which anyone should accept?

The causes and consequences of our crisis are not confined to America, of course, as even smug Europeans know; please do not misunderstand what I am saying as a paean to Europe, it isn’t. The crisis is real, it is profound, it is structural and long-term, it is global, it affects us all. In Africa, 16,000 children die per day from hunger-related diseases, one every five seconds; this figure excludes children who die from Aids, and more particularly, malaria; the global annual figure is 10 million wholly preventable child deaths.¹³ They are at the centre of our crisis, though they are, of course, largely invisible.

Given the depth of the crisis, what are we to do? The first response is to want to get out there and take action, to do something, which is of course a proper reaction; there are many immediate things to do. But we have to be careful. As the great educational thinker Paolo Freiere warned us, activism per se is not the answer. What is required is action which encompasses critical reflection in order to move from a naïve knowledge of reality, and a sort of pained response to the world, to a higher level, a level which enables us not simply to know how things are, but to know why things are as they are. How do we get to that point of critical reflection, to start to make sense of the complex and difficult historical situation in which we find ourselves, to reflect upon it in clear, analytical and transformative ways? Of course you already know the answer – through education, a process in which you are, comparatively, already far advanced; I say comparatively because it is simply a comment on human history to make the point that gathered together in this room are some of the most literate, knowledgeable and educated people ever to walk the earth. That says little about us, and a lot about human history.

As you move on in your education, as you start to take courses, perhaps specialise a bit, something will happen to you which is really just an extension of an aspect of the normal human process of learning. You will begin to acquire new words and concepts, or sets of words and concepts, and new ways of using them; as you develop your interests you will acquire discourses and sub-languages, jargons in fact to use the technical term (jargon is not necessarily a pejorative term), which are specific to your disciplines. This is, simply an inevitable part of the gaining of knowledge, it’s a good thing, and it repeats what we do as we become individuals through the socialisation process. But unlike the acquisition of language which you underwent when you were children, this new procedure is different. For now, at this higher level of education, you will be learning new terms and some of them will need to be explored, made sense of, challenged, questioned, weighed up, judged, taken on board and possibly rejected. It can be, and it will be a difficult, confusing and complicated process; it is also of course exciting and fun, though it is not without its dangers. My point is that this activity, the weighing of terms, the discussion and consideration of their use, the ways in which we see if they make sense or not, is not simply a key to advancement in the disciplines, it is also central to our understanding of our place in the world, our path to critical reflection, the means by which we come to think for ourselves using the terms which others gave us. Because by a sort of back loop, what the best type of education will lead us to do is not simply to acquire and test the new technical words which we need to be able to take part in our fields of knowledge, but to apply the practices of weighing and considering and judging to the terms which we have already learned in our growth as human beings. It forces us to consider the terms we already have, and the use we make of them, in the language of our everyday, common life. Put another way, I am saying that in such a critical time, one way of finding out how the crisis itself might be addressed and confronted, is to subject our language and the language of others to criticism and ultimately critique (crisis, critical, criticism and critique are of all course linked in their derivation from the Greek root krinein – to separate, divide, choose, judge, discriminate, select, question, put on trial….).

The power of language is enormous, but it is a sort of neutral power. It can be used for good, to provoke thought and illuminate, to clarify, to lay bare and to be open and honest. And it can be used to prevent reflection, to halt discussion, to obscure, to hide and deceive. In and of itself, language is open and neutral – but in use it is always performatively rhetorical, persuasive, forceful, interested. When we use language, we do things with words, and what that means, is that it is necessary to have a critical edge when thinking about the language which we and others employ. Do not underestimate the power of language – it is the medium by which possible worlds are built. If you don’t put yourself in a position in which you have some control over it, then it’s more than likely that people who do have control over it will have power over you. Virginia Woolf put this point well when she said that poverty in an age of affluence is not being able to write and having others write about you. But do not mistake my point: I am talking about a method, a traditional method in fact, a training if you will, in how to think (not what to think – which is none of my business); I have no illusions that it will change the world; but it may put you in a position where you can decide whether you want to change the world or not.

I’ve been reflecting on language in America these past few months; I’m going to tease you. I say nothing about the way in which Americans misspell what James Joyce calls Good Old English words; nor about the way in which they mangle meanings (“moot” for example, meaning “irrelevant” rather than “to be discussed”); I pass over the way in which they make incredibly ugly verbs from nouns (“to nounize” I imagine this is called). I heard “to conciseify” in class yesterday. I won’t even mention the relationship which some Americans seem to imagine holds between language and space: if there is an empty space it should be filled with loud speech. I remain quiet on the answer “I am good,” in response to the question “how are you?” (surely the most morally confident replacement of an adverb with an adjective ever). And I comment but hardly on the oppressive refrain “have a great day” (which is, I think, a sub-variant of the phrase – “have a nice day”); except to wonder what mood of the verb is being used. Is it subjunctive – “I wish you would have a great day”? Or imperatival? Jussive perhaps – “have a great day – whether you want one or not”? Exhortatory – “you should have a great day”? Admonitory – “have a great day or else”?

I’m teasing you… But there are serious linguistic issues to reflect upon. One way in which language is powerful is when it’s not used, when it falls silent, and perhaps the best example of that is in the media, specifically when events, facts, processes are simply not described or reported. I give you one example. On the day of the bombing by the Israeli Air Force of the apartment block at Qana in Lebanon recently, during the war between Israel and Hezbollah, I watched the evening news on prime time TV. The first item that day was the arrest of Mel Gibson; the second was a report on obesity and weight loss; the third was the Qana story. What I did not hear in that story, and I listened very closely, was the accusation, made by the Lebanese government, British journalists throughout the day, and later by the independent Human Rights Watch, that this bombing, which killed at least 28 civilians, 16 of them children, was a war crime. If the accusation of war crime is to be leveled, as it should, at the launching of Katusha rockets into civilian areas of Northern Israel, then that same charge must be made in relation, for example, to Israeli Air Force attacks on Red Cross Ambulances and civilian convoys heading away from the conflict, and to the dropping of cluster bombs in civilian areas in the last hours of a war.¹⁴ The failure to cover such matters in the American broadcast media serves the American public very badly; people cannot of course be blamed for not responding to things that they don’t know about, but the silence is nonetheless heard all around the world. (I note that the U.S. Command in Baghdad is funding a $20 million project over the next two years to monitor the tone of Iraq news stories filed by U.S., International and Middle Eastern media; I presume they want to make sure we know how well it’s going).¹⁵

There are other examples of the ways in which language can be revealing. After Katrina last year, I was in Britain and I was struck by the incredulity shown when American citizens, within their own country, were described as “refugees.” “Refugee” was a term word coined in the late seventeenth century to mean someone fleeing to another country to escape religious or political persecution; in the twentieth century its use has been to refer to those forced to leave their homes by the fear of attack, persecution, or, mainly, war. I wonder if they would have been called refugees if they had been predominantly rich and white? “Community” is an interesting word in its use in American public discourse; a positive, feel-good word, it contrasts markedly with the word “society.” a term which is highly problematic and characteristically used to refer to a space which is the source rather than the site of conflict. Popular American usage seems to veer between “community” and “nation” as the good twins, with “society” as a sort of loutish relative best forgotten. Or again, think of the way “the economy.” or “the market” are used in the media in such a way as to suggest that these are organisms which have minds, wills, moods, feelings, the ability to make decisions; the effect is to eliminate human agency and to make it seem as though shifts in the money market, or commodity prices, are not the consequences of human decisions and choices, but those of some non-human agency beyond our control. “Diversity” is a peculiar word in American political discourse, since it doesn’t appear to mean diversity but only certain forms of difference; “colour” too when used of race is awkward and ill-fitting (what does it mean?); both are embarrassingly unsatisfactory, but perhaps that’s appropriate given where we stand in history. There are less important words of course, but significant in their own way. “Celebrity” – can someone remind me again what it is about Paris Hilton that we are celebrating? And why exactly is it that we are to “idolize” the winner of a glorified talent show? When exactly did “Big Brother” lose its sinister connotations? And how did George Orwell get to name a TV show? Why do we use “personality” now to mean not the condition of being a person, as opposed to an animal or thing, but to mean a particular group of special people? By definition we all used to have personality, the quality of personness, but now that attribute has been restricted to only a few of us – to personalities. I left the most powerful example till last – “terrorism.” I ‘m not going to enter into the debate about the meaning of the term, since my method isn’t that of establishing the “real” meanings of words, whatever that process would be, but simply that of establishing critically how they are used. What interests me in that term is the way it serves, as Harold Pinter pointed out in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, as a prime example of how “language is actually employed to keep thought at bay.”¹⁶ “Terrorism,” just the very use of the word, seems to be enough to mesmerise people (Mesmer was a late C18th hypnotist). It’s an interesting word in its origins though – it was coined to mean “government by intimidation” – originally to refer to the French Terror in the 1790s. I wonder if the initial “shock and awe” of the assault on Baghdad (“awe” – now there’s a word whose meaning has shifted from its divine origins) was experienced by Iraqi civilians as “terror,” or whether that reaction is reserved only for certain people. I wonder if they found it “awesome”?

I hold a chair in the humanities, a term which refers both to a set of disciplines, and, at least in my understanding of it, to the diverse groups of human beings which inhabit our common global space (not abstract humanity but specific humanities). At the centre of our exploration of the disciplinary humanities, I am arguing, would be the sceptical study of language. I say sceptical because the aim is to make sceptics of you, in the modern sense of the term – doubtful enquirers – rather than cynics. We don’t need cynics; the cynics were a group of philosophers whose name reflects their origins; it has the same derivation as canine and they were so-called, at least in some of the stories about them, because their antagonism towards what they saw as corrupt social norms meant that they refused to wear clothes and were shameless as dogs. Our aim is to produce questioning thinkers – sceptics – rather than naked students peeing on the fence – cynics. Informing that sceptical study of language study would be this belief: that men and women make their own history and, as part of that process, make their own language, but they don’t do so in circumstances of their own choosing. That’s an important point because it suggests the way in which we are all beholden to the past, but also endowed with creative and open capacities for the present and future. And so, as you go on your own paths, learning new language, reflecting again on the language you already have, making your own language and your own history, I wish you well. I wish you well because we need your help. I’ll leave you with a couple of very un-American questions and a familiar quote. First, I know that America is famous for its encouragement of a dream, but wouldn’t it be a good idea if all of us stopped dreaming and instead faced our common reality? Second, might it not be such a bad idea if Americans actually didn’t ask what they could do for their country, but asked instead what their country should be doing for them and for the world? To finish then, the familiar but, begging her pardon, slightly amended words of Ellen Browning Scripps: our mission is to develop in you the ability to think clearly and independently, the ability to live confidently and courageously, and, hopefully, the ability to do something about the crisis in which we find ourselves.

Footnotes

1. Given that this was a talk, the style is somewhat less formal than for an academic piece; I have, however, furnished references for the figures and details which I quote.
2. Frederick Hard, Our Faith in the Humanities, The Humanities at Scripps College 1927-1952, Views and Reviews, Los Angeles, Ward Richie Press, 1952, p.5.
3. Congressional Research Service, Report for Congress, 16 June 2006; the actual figure may be higher given spending requests currently under consideration.
4. The latest figures on American casualties can be found at Iraq Coalition Casualties.
5. Iraq Index cumulative estimate using Iraq Body Count and United Nations data, May 2003 through July 31, 2006: 59, 600; in August over 3,500 died, giving a total of 63,100. These figures do not include the numbers of civilians who died in the first six weeks of major combat operations.
6. The Guardian, August 22, 2006.
7. All figures taken from the National Poverty Centre at the University of Michigan, whose research uses Federal statistics.
8. Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2002, U.S. Census Bureau.
9. Figures taken from U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.
10. Figures taken from Amnesty International.
11. “Nation No-Mates,” The Guardian, June 23, 2006
12. Pew Research Centre.
13. UNICEF.
14. Report on the bombing of Red Cross Ambulances by the Israeli Air Force, Los Angeles Times, July 25, 2006; bombing of civilian convoys, Los Angeles Times, July 24, 2006; “Cluster bombing of Lebanon ‘immoral’ UN official tells Israel,” The Guardian, August 31, 2006. There is, evidently, a distinction to be drawn between the lack of coverage in the broadcast media, the means by which most Americans still gain access to the news, and the more reputable daily newspapers.
15. The Guardian, August 31, 2006; Los Angeles Times, September 1, 2006.
16. Harold Pinter, “Art, Truth and Politics,” Nobel Lecture 2005, reprinted in PMLA, vol.21, 3, May 2006.