One who glances at the typical Westerner’s intellectual – an adjective I use in the loosest possible sense — diet of CNN, the BBC, Fox News, MSNBC, the Economist, the New York Times, and so forth will notice a curious process occurring to the meanings of words. Certain words and phrases, endowed with profound and widely-understood meaning long ago for the sake of sincere communication, become degraded, debased and diluted. They get used in dubious or outright wrong ways so frequently that at some point the concept or experience originally assigned to the word becomes completely forgotten. Articulating these concepts, which used to be easily denoted by the word in question, becomes an arduous process. So arduous, in fact, that most people simply forget them. The word is the same, the spelling hasn’t changed – but it doesn’t quite mean what it used to mean. If you use the word now, people will get all the wrong associations and react the wrong way. Can you think of any words like this? Before I continue, let me reference some quotes from George Orwell’s 1984, since that is at least one work people still [purport to] take seriously:
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”
“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”
This can’t be good. Here’s my personal list of words I’ve noticed take a beating:
courage
bravery
strength
freedom
equality
god
spirit
justice
civilized
tolerance
(And these are just the ones we’ve been able to notice.)
What did freedom mean to an Appalachian settler circa 1776? What did it mean to a Roman legionnaire circa 43 BC? To a Russian peasant living under the Tatar yoke circa 1230 AD? I’m not completely sure, but I do know that to a lot of Westerners in 2014, living in supposedly the most advanced*, civilized* and enlightened* society of all time, freedom means the ability to indulge in lust, greed, sloth and gluttony without incurring any kind of cost, social or otherwise. Anything your heart desires is just a “I have a right to…” away. To some of these standard-bearers of bright new age, freedom means the ability to mutilate your genitalia then harass others into publicly affirming the wisdom of your choices. “Freedom to marry.” Funny – did you think of gay “marriage?” Did you know the phrase is the name of an advocacy group for the aforementioned farce? Do you think an Appalachian settler would’ve thought the same thing if he heard the phrase “freedom to marry?”
Here’s another one: God used to mean the transcendent dimension of ultimate perfection and Being, removed from the material world of chaos and change, the world of Becoming. Weighty stuff. Profound and difficult to articulate. Now suppose you visited an elite college campus somewhere in the United States today, the country foremost on the edge of vaunted “progress,” and asked a student if he thought God had a beard. What is the percentage chance, do you suppose, tomorrow’s diplomat, bureaucrat, politician, journalist, teacher, professor or officer would answer “Probably.”? Do you think this leader-of-tomorrow even understands the dichotomy between Being and Becoming? Do you think he contemplates serious questions like this, or more serious questions like “Is religion oppressive to minorities?” The answer, by the way, is “Yes — unless God is a person of color.”
A third one, just for fun: courage. What did courage originally mean? According to Google, this word comes from the Old French word ‘corage.’ This language was generally spoken in 13th century France. Using our imaginations, what do we imagine 13th century Frenchmen associated with the word courage? Swords? Armor? Horses? Knights? Chivalry? Death? Dry throats? Deep moats? Bloody shields? Wet fields? Pitched battle under torchlight in the thick fog of corpses’ breath?
Don’t get thee too excited, dear reader — I take you now to the boardroom of MSNBC in the year 2014, complete with the sterile epicene forms of Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow (funny that it’s difficult to tell which one is the man sometimes). Suppose one of the two uttered the word “courage.” What do you think it would mean? Do you think it would mean anything remotely similar to the word used by medieval Frenchmen? I doubt Chris Hayes would ever try to evoke something as intolerant as the Cathar Crusade. Rather I think these two progressive talking heads might try ascribing this word “courage” to something like a #Ferguson “protest.” If the liberals have their way, a Navy SEAL will be just as courageous as a “social” “justice” “warrior.” Not because courage changed, nor because Navy SEALs or medieval Frenchmen changed, but because progressive protesters will have been described as courageous so many times that we’ll all forget what the word meant in the first place, and begin to think “courage” is about promoting various kinds of leftisms.
The point is rather simple. Much like progressives, leftists, liberals, et al. destroyed the tangible institutions that held together civilization (e.g. the family, the monarchy, the military), they also destroyed the intangibles — like language and its meaning. Language is one of the most fundamental building blocks of human civilization. Without communication, there is no human civilization with a population greater than one. So naturally, we could expect language to have been one of the principal casualties in the Left’s war on civilization. Glancing at the current blatant attempts to destroy the meaning of so many important words, and thus render the invaluable and eternal concepts behind them impossible to articulate (and impossible to exist), one can only wonder how many more words were separated from their true meaning in years past. Progressives have been at it for at least hundreds of years, since the revolutions of the late 18th century. What other casualties were there, that we have not become aware of yet? How many ancient concepts, experiences and feelings are completely untranslatable, and unrelatable in our modern tongue?
It doesn’t take an organized and explicit totalitarianism like the one in 1984 to debase language and render so much of the good Lord’s truth impossible to express and understand. An informal conspiracy like the neoreactionary Cathedral** will do just fine, given enough time. You don’t need the KGB to change language and, as Orwell wrote, corrupt thought by corrupting language. You just need a big enough bully pulpit.
We ought to use more mythical metaphors and whatever other tools are available to us to create new words for concepts that are, in many ways, long lost to modern man. I encourage the reclamation of words and meanings from the progressive woodchipper. Let’s give that bully pulpit back to its original owner – God, and His Truth.
*citations gravely needed
** The self-organizing consensus of Progressives and Progressive ideology represented by the universities, the media, and the civil service.
Mark Yuray is verified on Gab. Follow him there and on Twitter.
Really good article. Voegelin has a lot to say about this in Science, Politics and Gnosticism. Specifically, the “game of masks” played by modernists, or as he calls them Gnostics:
“The phenomenon of the prohibition of questions is becoming clearer in its outlines. The gnostic thinker really does commit an intellectual swindle, and he knows it. One can distinguish three phases in the action of his spirit. On the surface lies the deception itself. It could be self-deception; and very often it is, when the speculation of a creative thinker has culturally degenerated and become the dogma of a mass movement. But, when the phenomenon is apprehended at its point of origin, as in Marx or Nietzsche, deeper than the deception itself will be found an awareness of it. The thinker does not lose control of himself: the libido dominandi turns on its own work and wishes to master the deception as well. This gnostic turning back on itself corresponds spiritually, as we have said, to the philosophic conversion, the periagage of the Platonic sense. However, the gnostic movement of the spirit does not lead to the erotic opening of the soul, but rather to the deepest reach of persistence in the deception, where revolt against God is revealed to be its motive and purpose.”
Good points. Another word you might add to your list is “love.” Used to, the phrase “I love you” meant “I am willing to make sacrifices for you.” Now it means “you make my genitals get large”.
When the Bible says “God is love.” You can’t tell me that the word means the same thing as when the gay protesters say “love is love.”
Very good observation, and precisely the phenomenon I’m noticing.
Another battered word is “discriminate.” Once it meant “accurately to distinguish one thing from another.” The Philological Branch has been hard at work on this one.
Oh yes, indeed. But do you notice what they’ve done? They’ve outlawed “discrimination.” They’ve up and gone and outlawed “accurately distinguishing!” They’re insane!
I enjoyed the article, Mark. And I’m glad to see we’re finally getting some classy writers in this joint!
Also consider the word Gay. In days gone by it ment Gladness, but today it refers to homosexuality.
An obvious example, but a less sinister one. We’ve plenty of words for gladness — but what will we do when we can’t mention courage, spirit, justice, freedom and God?
“Sluts”
You missed two big ones. “Hero”, now synonymous with “victim” and “phobia”, which briefly meant ‘does not like’ and now means ‘disagrees with’. I suspect the next step will be ‘does not actively support’.
As for words we’ve lost entirely, how about “thumos”?
My nomination for most debased word: fierce.
To those who doubt me just type it as a single word into Google News.