The Language of Decline
by Robert Bruce (November 2012)
The Medium is the Message
This intrinsically political feature of language notwithstanding, it has been contested with remarkable lethargy by the Right, and the price has not been cheap. Much of the transformation in our social and moral attitudes is attributable to this inability to identify the real priorities. In retrospect the ephemeral resurgence of political conservatism in the eighties was a pyrrhic victory outweighed by a more profound victory for the Left in the culture wars. It was during the Thatcher-Reagan era that the spurious fads of New Literacy and deconstructionism entrenched themselves in educational bureaucracies and arts faculties, and the ease with which this Long March was completed owes much to the New Rights fetishisation of market economics, and the supplanting of the conservative disposition by a militant ideological liberalism. This was a malady present on both sides of the Atlantic but in America the auto destructive tendencies of liberal individualism have been softened by a uniquely successful experiment in God building[1]. It is not through the sober calculations of utility that the values of political freedom are cherished and renewed across generations but through a sublimated religiosity which has transformed an ideology into the living faith of American exceptionalism[2].
Little of this Straussian logic surfaced in the free market ideology of Thatcherism, which was thus destined to live off the social capital it was simultaneously depleting. Her invocation of Victorian values notwithstanding, Margaret Thatcher possessed little of their sense that the invisible hand actually rested on a shared notion of the common good which could not in itself rest on market principles. Her famous suggestion that there is no such thing as society is, to be fair, frequently taken out of context, but it serves nevertheless as a useful metaphor for the creed. When her disciples tried to articulate a political vision, it quickly degenerated into the market metaphors of classical utilitarianism, and was unsparing of the little platoons and traditional institutions which had been the building blocks of the conservative social vision. The symmetry of all this with the agenda of Marxism is often overlooked. For Marx the revolution would be brought forward by a bourgeoisie which was driven remorselessly to cannibalize the moral foundations of its own society, and the most striking passage in the Communist manifesto relates to the self-destructive tendencies of unfettered capitalism.
Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
Marx’s timing, famously, was off, but it is worth bearing in mind that no true conservative would dissent from these words, which could just as easily have been written by Edmund Burke or Thomas Carlyle. The comical prudery of the Victorians was in itself simply a manifestation of this fear that without the moral self-discipline provided by nonconformist Christianity the character building effects of the market would simply dissolve into the conditions of license and incipient social breakdown which had characterized the pre-Victorian era ( the Marxist historian E.P.Thompson famously suggested that Methodism, characterized picturesquely as a form of psychic masturbation had saved England from revolution) In replacing conservatism with a de-moralized liberalism, the Right simply created the year Zero which Marxists were eager to build upon. T.S. Eliot had noted these crisis ridden tendencies of an ideological liberalism decades earlier and his prognosis has been more than vindicated by future events
By destroying traditional social habits of a people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified, by fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is a hopeless apathy, Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation: the artificial, mechanized or brutalized control which is a desperate remedy for its own chaos.
Langauge changes as social attitudes change to be sure, but the same is true in reverse. To suppose otherwise is to make the mistake Michael Oakeshott identified of assuming there is a transcendental ‘mind’ existing independently of the thought and traditions which are nurtured and transmitted through language. Debase the latter and you corrode the former. That this should prove so attractive to the modern Left is hardly surprising. Language has a profoundly sacramental function in renewing a citizen’s attachment to his country’s traditions, and an attachment to a literary heritage has historically been a powerful aesthetic dimension of patriotism[3]. What better project for the revolutionary Left than to sever this root and drag the sublime into the dust through a coarsening of the imagination.
The most astute political manipulator of language in recent times has been New Labour, a linguistic slogan in itself, whose proclivity for Orwellian language is something of an academic phenomenon. Norman Fairclough’s New Labour, New Language is required reading for anyone who doubts the importance of language in redefining the political terrain, and its most interesting observations relate to the cultivation of doublethink. In 1984 the citizens of Oceania maintained their psychic equilibrium, and the regime’s legitimacy, through the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs in their minds simultaneously, and the formulas used by New Labour to frame policy agendas followed much the same logic. Whereas conviction politicians like Thatcher used a polemical language which tended to identify an adversary, Blair adopted a rhetorical style which dissolved these conflicts in slippery neologisms. ‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’: a transparent attempt to sound populist whilst endorsing the bien pensant prejudices of left wing criminology is one of the more well known clichés to emerge from this debasement of the vernacular, and it belongs squarely in the tradition of Left-wing persuasive definitions alongside such hopeful formulations as ‘democratic centralism’ and ‘socialist legality’[4].
One should not push the parallel too far. Nineties Britain was never East Germany but this trimming of the critical potential of language is not a trivial matter either. In 1984 Winston Smith worked alongside the Newspeak philologist Syme who spent his time destroying words in the earnest anticipation that thoughtcrime would in time be impossible to express.
Many of Fairclough’s observations were already chronicled in Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man where a one dimensional language defined the limits of a one dimensional social existence. His animus was focused overwhelmingly on its anti-historical nature. Positivist language, with its ‘frozen predicates’ tended to exhaust the meaning of concepts in a precisely defined usage and thus hinder the development of the kind of historical consciousness which would equip men to ‘discover the facts which made the facts’[5]. This preoccupation with the genealogy of words, severed from any residual traces of Enlightenment humanism, was to be picked up by a later generation of postmodernists with baleful effects.
The context to this notorious descent into word play is well known. Western philosophy had traditionally been preoccupied with the epistemic problem of representation, and the cruder linguistic theories of the Enlightenment tended to see language as a neutral instrument for designating external objects. Condilac, for example, believed language reflected the structure of thought, which in turn was the simple epiphenomenon of sensory impressions, but this crude empiricism could not survive developments in modern linguistics. After Ferdinand Saussure no one could seriously maintain that language ‘mirrored’ reality and if language was, to the contrary, a structure of signs, the question inevitably arose as to what justified its conventions and implicit authority. Postmodern philosophy is largely a series of badly written footnotes to Nietzsche, and for him the obvious answer, arbitrary power, posed no ethical dilemmas. It was after all the ability of the Ubermensch to impose meaning in a world where there were no objective standards which proved his superiority to the Last Man. For a later generation of cultural Marxists this insight that power was the ultimate arbiter of any consensus opened up grand new vistas for Gramsci’s project.
Conceived gravely, as a moral and ideological effort to ‘remedy social injustice’ perpetuated against working class students, the New Literacy movement was diametrically opposed to ‘any notion of a literacy which is defined as the ability to perform at a certain level on a standardised test and which asks education for preparation and practice in that ability’ – i.e. teaching them how to read and write. This awful prose meanwhile provided a worrying portent of trouble to come[7]. If teachers could talk like this how much worse could it get lower down the food chain? The first hand effects of this shift against phonetics and towards fuzzy child-centred learning are humorously chronicled by Michael Collins in The Likes of Us, but the social effects of this attempt to make the proletariat unfit for capitalism are deadly serious. In 2012 something like 20 per cent of schoolchildren are classed as functionally illiterate, with all the consequences this entails in a sophisticated post-industrial economy[8]. At the time that this de haut en bas contempt dressed up as compassion gained the upper hand in the education system, Britain’s simultaneous de-industrialisation was also removing the employers of last resort for illiterates, and all this when the cold logic of meritocracy was robbing manual labour of its élan. This is a cruel betrayal by any standards.
The clinging to such easily refuted theories, against all the evidence, raises real questions about the hidden motivations underpinning the ideologies. With Bernstein there was plenty evidence of the narcissistic ressentiment that Joseph Conrad divined in all would be revolutionaries, and the latter have certainly gone to remarkable lengths to exempt their own works from the relentless psychologizing that they apply to their opponents (Theodore Adorno’s Authoritarian Personality a case in point). If ‘genealogical subversion’ is the favoured strategy of postmodernist philosophers, for instance, they have taken care to exempt their own philosophies from the Law of Base Motivations. None have been keen to ‘deconstruct’ postmodernism and this is just as well, for it fares far worse than the bourgeois straw men upon which this technique is usually sharpened.
And how could any deconstructionist respond except perhaps thus?
The dative or vocative dimension which opens the original dimension of language, cannot lend itself to inclusion in and modification by the accusative or attributive dimension of the object without violence. Language, therefore, cannot make its own possibility a totality and include within itself it own origin or own end.
France outgrew deconstructionism largely because of the survival of Marxism as a secular cult, and if a nation is to have an overwhelmingly leftist intelligentsia there is maybe something to be said for inculcating such an orthodoxy. It is at least capable of generating a healthy antithesis (where would neo-conservatism be without this finishing school?), and it might at the very least have its epitaph written by more elegant hands.
[1] The origin of this Marxist heresy lies in Feuerbach’s religion of humanity which attempted to appropriate the emotional intensity of religion in the service of secular ideals. I’m using the term ironically but it is noteworthy that ex-Marxist neo-conservatives should seek to leaven their secular creed with Christian fundamentalist fervor.
[2] Shatov’s words in Dostoyevsky’s novel The Possessed, could have been spoken with the USA in mind.
[3] As Edmund Burke put it ‘for us to love our country our country must be lovely’ Reflections
[5] Some things are best buried in footnotes. The following agonizing excerpt is the simplest way Marcuse could find to convey the point. This verbosity is no doubt the price of genius.
To be sure, any language contains innumerable terms which do not require development of their meaning, such as the terms designating the objects and implements of daily life, visible nature, vital needs and wants. These terms are generally understood so that their mere appearance produces a response (linguistic or operational) adequate to the pragmatic context in which they are spoken.
The situation is very different with respect to terms which denote things or occurrences beyond this noncontroversial context. Here, the functionalization of language expresses an abridgement of meaning which has a political connotation. (emphasis added)
One Dimensional Man
[6] Much the same silliness is evident in theories of supposedly authentic ‘black’ speech patterns amongst African-American schoolchildren, in reality, as Thomas Sowell has shown, derivations from a dysfunctional white ‘cracker’ culture.
[7] This is not a misquote of the words of Margaret Mathieson, a British New Literacy guru, of evident literary flair.
[8] Source is the impeccably Left-leaning Sutton Trust.
The author is a low ranking and over-credentialled functionary of the British welfare state.
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