Words and Things

By Crispin Sartwell

 

One of the basic claims of the philosophical trend known as "postmodernism" is that our language creates our reality. Running through the normal history of philosophical theories, this notion has gone from seeming radical and ridiculous to being a universally accepted truth.

    The biggest question about Iraq, it appears, is not how to get a grip on the situation on the ground, not how to negotiate between rival groups or stop the bloodletting. The main question is whether to call the conflict a "civil war."

     As we ponder the problem of immigration, the question is not how we're treating human beings or what the economic effects of various approaches might be, but whether our opponents' or our own policy should be called "amnesty."

    There was a time when the main proponents of the omnipotence of little squiggles of ink and bleating tiny noises were leftists. They held, for example, that one of the main vectors of gender oppression was the fact that men called women "girls." And they held that true liberation could be pushed forward by requiring people to yap in the approved mode.

    Now the proponents of incantatory magic appear from the right. I heard the immigration opponent Tom Tancredo on the radio yesterday: Amnesty! It's amnesty! Look it up in the dictionary!

    The resort to the incredible power of words is an index of the incredible powerlessness of human beings over actual things and one another. The Bush administration cannot decide the outcome of the Iraq conflict; there are a thousand factors entirely outside its power. But its spokesmen can control whether the sound "civil war" comes out of their mouths.

   We can't stop people from entering the country, nor remove the ones that are here, without an infinite expenditure of resources we don't possess. But we can control our use of the term "amnesty."

    We continuously compensate ourselves for our real impotence by our verbal omnipotence.

      We're all in roughly this position: it's hard to change anything substantial, starting with ourselves, but it's easy emit slightly different noises from time to time. If emitting noises created realities, we'd all be little gods, and the theory that we are little gods is a great comfort to creatures as pathetically powerless as we actually are.

    Combine this deeply idiotic yet sort of touching situation with a politics based on focus groups and polling, and you've got the formula for an entirely empty political discourse, a discourse that is committed only to controlling "perceptions" by flapping our little gums in unison.

     A few months ago, as you may recall, some study proclaimed that the American people support wars when they sense that victory is possible. Within minutes, every administration spokesman was mumbling "victory victory victory," while Bush appeared on stages festooned with the word. Perhaps they were surprised when this had no effect on anything at all.

    Nor, of course, is this merely a disease of the Republicans. I remember Al Gore in 2000: his entire criticism of Bush's plan to privatize Social Security was to incessantly chant the phrase "risky scheme." 

      This may be cutting edge philosophy (or cutting edge philosophy circa 1985), but it's deeply primitive superstition, the kind that wins love by writing two names in a heart and then folding the paper just so, the kind that casts spells and believes its own fairy tales. If it wasn't an index of my sexism, I'd call the resulting politics "girlish."

   Let the fact that there's no civil war - or for that matter the fact there is a civil war - be a comfort to you as you're blown to bits. And let it be a comfort to us all that our reality is being created not with bombs and bodies or work and worth but with the merest words.