If you are American, or interested in American politics, you have probably been asking yourself a lot of questions since this Wednesday. Questions about politicians’ roles and responsibilities: What qualifies or disqualifies somebody to lead? To what extent should a public figure be held accountable for their private demeanor (or misdemeanor)? Questions about the past and future: how did polls and predictions fail so epically? What kind of president will President-Elect Trump be? Questions about the entire American political process: is the electoral college system outdated—did it do its job by guaranteeing that rural voters who otherwise would be ignored by campaigning candidates still have a voice, or did it corner a country into subjugation to a leader it doesn’t want? Why does the American government only have two mainstream parties, and what is the future of those parties? For some time before the election, I’d been trying to understand the origins of the divisions in opinion about this year’s candidates in order to inform my own perspective—and it felt impossible to reconcile the different visions of the United States’ identity and of what the nominees represented to different people. So the queries that have bothered me the most are more general; in politics and beyond, how do we draw completely different conclusions from the same words? How do we sort facts from opinion and falsehood? I’m more confused than ever, but I have concluded that one phenomenon to blame for my confusion is the devaluation of language. The steady increase in separation between language and meaning throughout this election was one of the process’ most disquieting aspects—because, especially if you are physically removed from the actual events unfolding and the people who are the political protagonists, it’s a Herculean task to grasp what the truth is. Being cut off from the truth leaves you feeling awfully vulnerable; if knowledge is power, ignorance is weakness, and the awareness of one’s ignorance is a very unpleasant and unsettling paradox to experience. The steady increase in separation between language and meaning throughout this election was one of the process’ most disquieting aspects. Three forces are responsible for the loss of language’s meaning—while the consequences of its devaluation are more difficult and upsetting to quantify. The first is the official media, in conjunction with mainstream status quo political rhetoric. The second is social media. The third is Donald Trump himself. The mandate of many journalists covering the election shifted, consciously or subconsciously, from reporting Trump’s policy ideas to categorizing him as a bigoted villain. The assumption made—which I personally would agree with, but that was damaging to the media’s credibility because it was, in fact, an assumption—was that Trump’s offensive words proved him to be a prejudiced person (misogynist, racist, what-have-you). Newspapers limited themselves en masse to preaching to the choir, to those who already shared their interpretation of Trump as bigoted, because those writing could not present the alternative interpretation of Trump’s words as joking or unfiltered. It doesn’t seem like a big jump to call somebody “misogynistic” if they routinely evaluate women based on their appearances and make demeaning, lewd comments on video, but characterizing Trump as “misogynistic” and “racist” automatically alienated a subsection of readers who didn’t take his offensive words at face value—leading to the devaluation of those words as criticisms. Which is very, very dangerous, because that allows—did allow—the dismissal and trivialization of the appertaining traits. David Foster Wallace explained language’s twofold purpose best: “…every sentence blends and balances at least two different communicative functions—one the transmission of raw info, the other the transmission of certain stuff about the speaker.” It’s the election-related content we’ve shared on social media that is most guilty of this Wallacean self-indulgence. Maybe we tell ourselves that the articles we post or the opinions we write are supposed to convince people to see things our way…but it sometimes seems that their primary goal is to allow us to publicize our own social awareness, sense of justice, or other positive quality. Our social media profiles by definition reflect us as individuals, so maybe the same way you share a photo of yourself in which you look nice, you post political statements out of a frantic sense that you have to let people know what you stand for, to reassure them that you are a moral person. I realize I’m treading on thin ice here. I’m not saying that we should all stop declaring what we believe in (which would make me a hypocrite)—I just want to prompt reflection about why we sometimes fail to communicate, because the way we present our opinions right now is a significant cause of polarization. When what should be the main determining factor in our word choice, conveying ideas accurately, is eclipsed by our concern with conveying ourselves accurately—or not even accurately, but in an ideal light—we preclude meaningful exchanges of perspectives. Some part of us intuitively picks up on other people doing this, and accordingly devalues or rejects their words and perspective by default. On both social and journalistic media, our weakness for humor and simplification have also undermined language drastically. Humor has functioned as a defense mechanism this election, as a way of distancing ourselves from the vitriol and appreciating the absurdity of the political cast of characters. But while it has sometimes reflected bipartisan unity in dismay of politics in general, humor also has also indulged polarization: many memes are shared by and for a crowd that get each other, that see the same ideas as ridiculous and therefore appreciate the same type of humor. Gluttons that we are for constant entertainment, of course we devoured stories about Trump’s socially unacceptable comments, his dramatic offensiveness. He played us like a virtuoso pianist (although his hands are probably too small for that to be a realistic simile). The comment I just put in parentheses is an example of the kind of mockery that proliferated in online discussions of the election, which undermined the seriousness of the political process and the most substantive, powerful criticisms of Trump. When we laughed at Trump for being defensive about having small hands, then made fun of him for it in a self-satisfied auto-ironic fashion, the line between jest and genuine criticism was blurred, then erased, until the entire political discourse was debased. Whenever we satirized Trump for saying “bigly,” we weakened the credibility of serious criticisms, related to his prejudices and possible temperamental instability. When we laughed at Trump for being defensive about having small hands, then made fun of him for it in a self-satisfied auto-ironic fashion, the line between jest and genuine criticism was blurred, then erased, until the entire political discourse was debased. Accompanying and complementing this humor in catering to our ever-shrinking attention spans, victims of the digital era, is the over-simplification and synthesis of political coverage. Most of the issues we are trying to understand, from economic to environmental, have cause-effect linkage that is too nebulous or complex for us to be comprehensively educated about in the length of a newspaper article or blog post. With the impossible quantity of information we have to sift through in a limited amount of time, we all end up cherry-picking reading sources we are likely to agree with. Therefore nuance and comprehensive coverage have been sacrificed to the illusion of understanding, further eroding the meaning of words by promulgating simplistic, imprecise generalizations. We are left with the language distortion by Trump himself. The media may have tainted itself slightly, but that should not have detracted from the unparalleled means it has to find and share the facts. Trump has ingeniously stabbed freedom of speech in the heart by extrapolating from the media’s bias to insinuate that whatever facts he doesn’t like are fabricated—instead of repressing dissidents, he has pulled the rug out from under them and defamed and discredited them fatally by labeling them elitist, self-interested, smooth-talking liars. He transformed his own comments from means of conveying information to projecting a quality of himself—calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” became code for “Donald tells it like it is” for most of his voters, as did his comments about women, Muslims and every other minority he’s offended. He hijacked and harnessed language as a vehicle for his own self-promotion. Trump has ingeniously stabbed freedom of speech in the heart by extrapolating from the media’s bias to insinuate that whatever facts he doesn’t like are fabricated I think my distress about the seemingly abstract relationship between language and meaning is actually closely related to the concrete hurt and bewilderment many people feel about this election result. Those who still attribute meaning to language feel profoundly wounded by the implications for American identity of the fact that a man who has said “grab her by the pussy,” who insinuated that “Second Amendment people” could take care of Clinton, who threatened not to accept the outcome of the election saying “I’ll keep you all in suspense,” who said of Jon McCain "He's a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured"—has been elected to represent the nation’s values. Because…what does that say about us? Trump was encouragingly civil in his speech post-election, saying exactly what I would have hoped he would to his opposition (aside from slightly understating it as “a few people”)—“I'm reaching out to you for your guidance and your help so that we can work together and unify our great country.” But nobody wants to hear that, because it isn’t the words that people are listening to anymore—it is their source, because Trump has outdone himself with the extent to which he has discredited language. This presidency will be the ultimate reckoning for him if he doesn’t follow through with actions on his words. But if he does keep his word, well, that would be even worse… We need our language to be meaningful and trustworthy: our world is too complicated for us to understand everything going on through firsthand observation, meaning we need input we can trust from one another, for which the medium is language. So whatever form progress takes, let’s strive to create transparent, genuine, inclusive conversation—where we listen to each other, ask the right questions and collectively heal by restoring worth to words.
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Born in Boston, USA, spent six years in Florence, Italy, and now living in Oxford, UK. Archives
July 2017
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