Naughty Words Part 2: "But"

     The study of how expressions of any sort give rise to meaning is called semantics. Meaning, of course, arises in the mind of the recipient of a communication when he has received and interpreted it. It might be identical to what the speaker / writer / cartoonist intended to convey, it might vary somewhat, or it might be so far from the originator’s intention as to bear no relation to it. This leads us to a question central to all communication studies:

How Do I Know That’s Exactly What He Meant?

The answer is massively frustrating: You don’t. It’s impossible in the nature of things. All you can do is approach confidence in your interpretation asymptotically. With a handful of important exceptions.

     This essay is about one of the exceptions.

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     First, a particularly piercing Bill Whittle video:

     Whittle has nailed one of the iconic obscenities of our time: the expressive pattern that goes as follows:

[Declarative clause], but [clause that contradicts declarative clause].

     In the matter of freedom of expression, the template goes thus:

“I believe in freedom of speech, but [insert exception here].”

     An analogous, structurally parallel version can be observed in discussions of freedom of anything. However, let’s not stop with a statement of revulsion; let’s consider what meaning the speaker really wants us to derive from his words. I can think of the following possible interpretations:

• “I believe in freedom of speech, except for this one case of it.”
• “I believe in freedom of speech, except for a range of cases that offend me.”
• “I believe in freedom of speech, except for a range of cases to be decided by ‘authority.’”
• “I don’t believe in freedom of speech; I merely want to weasel-word my way around it.”

     Got any others? The point, of course, is that the use of but negates the preceding sentiment.

     To say that one is free in some regard is to say that he has a right to do as he pleases:

1. With no possibility of being punished by any organ of government;
2. Should a private party or organization attempt to punish him, the attempt would be a criminal act.

     Very few persons actually grasp this critical concept. At least, nearly everyone I know wants to make exceptions:

• To freedom of speech;
• To freedom of assembly;
• To freedom of association;
• To the right to keep and bear arms;
• To property rights;
• To freedom of commerce;
• To the right to face one’s accusers in a trial before a jury of one’s peers;
• Even to the right to feed, medicate, and generally use one’s own body as one pleases.

     It’s a better gauge for America’s political devolution than anything else I can come up with at this hour of the morning.

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     Semantics has a hard time coping with “but” expressions. I don’t. When I hear one, I immediately lower my opinion of the speaker by about 50%. I have to strain against a powerful inclination to go on the attack. It’s one of the reasons I tend to keep to myself.

     Government in our time is 99% “buts.” It’s whittled freedom away completely, such that the typical American’s reaction to a proposed course of positive action is to find someone to ask for permission. Yet his great-grandfather would have embraced the idea without a second thought, never imagining that he needs to beg a license from any institution, governmental or otherwise.

     Here’s a pungent example: Is your money really yours? Most persons would immediately reply in the affirmative. But if so, why aren’t you permitted to move it about without being spied upon? Why, if you should arrange your affairs to avert such spying – currently, any transfer below $10,000 is nominally exempt from federal “reporting requirements” – are your funds then subject to arbitrary confiscation, on suspicion of “structuring?” If the test of ownership is whether you’re free to do as you like with your property so long as you refrain from injuring others, why aren’t you free to move your money around as you please?

     Don’t all rush to answer at once, now.

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     George Orwell wrote:

     In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible....Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

     While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

     ....But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.

     He who makes a statement about freedom / rights is making a political statement. He might not command the many Latinate circumlocutions and periphrases that Orwell condemns in his essay. He might merely say but. That one word is enough to induce the sort of cognitive dissonance in a typical hearer’s mind to make him think he’s heard a reasonable conclusion from a man who’s given the appropriate amount of thought to a weighty matter. That could not be further from the truth. Yet such a statement often becomes gospel among persons disinclined to think through basic propositions about individuals, their rights, and the social order – that is, to think about principles.

     There is no right – no sort of freedom – that admits to exceptions. Either it applies to all persons and at all times, or it is merely a conditional grant of permission from some authority, whether formally or informally constituted. The jihadis who tried to murder Pamela Geller deemed themselves an authority with jurisdiction over her speech and activities. Yet they differ not at all, in principle, from a supposedly “legitimate” government.

But Me No “Buts!”

A Crisis Of Meaning

“The destroyer is not a truth-crisis, it is a meaning-crisis.” – Piers Anthony, Macroscope

Political persuasion specialist Michael Emerling has said that the meaning of a communication inheres in the reaction of the receiver. Unless you have a considerable grounding in epistemology and semantics, that statement can be somewhat difficult to decode. Yet it’s one of the most important statements ever made about political outreach. Recent developments in the strategies and tactics of the Left have made it essential for freedom lovers to grasp it and internalize it.

For openers, consider the following episode:

The Obama Administration, following in the footsteps of another noteworthy Democrat liar (“It depends what the meaning of ‘is’ is.”), has decided to defend the indefensible by arbitrarily redefining the terms of discussion. That this has been viewed – so far, at least – as merely one more outrage to add to the Obamunist ledger suggests that in political discourse words shall no longer be permitted to have enduring meanings. If this is the case, our political degeneracy has reached a terminal stage.

But pause for a moment and reflect upon:

• What Administration spokesdroid Eric Schultz said;
• The meaning drawn from it by those who have heard his words.

No one with three functioning brain cells could imagine that the Taliban, whose operational tactics are indistinguishable from those of other Islamic terrorists in the Middle East, is anything but a terrorist organization. It differs from the others only in once having had control of a nation-state. Calling it an “armed insurgency” cannot change the objective facts of its behavior; it can only provide a tissue-thin rhetorical cover for the Obama Administration’s actions toward it.

So what Schultz said amounted to “Don’t probe us on this or we’ll take some sort of vengeance for it later.” That’s almost certainly the meaning he wanted his audience to derive from it. However, the meaning they drew from it might have included that, but surely also included: “The Obama Administration will do what it damned well pleases when it damned well pleases, without regard for the prior policies of this or any other Administration.”

Ponder the difference for a moment before continuing on.

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Man’s rational capacity requires the use of symbols. The reason is embedded in the nature of reason itself:

• To reason is to make use of abstractions – generalizations from specific cases to general patterns – to deduce effects from causes applied to adequately specified contexts.
• One cannot conceive a abstraction without inserting symbols – each one a placeholder for a generic member of some defined class – into one’s conception.
• Thus, symbols with stable meanings are essential to the conception and employment of abstractions.

(A little deep for a Thursday morning? Blame my snowblower, which weighs twice what I do and was massively disinclined to deal with the load Mother Nature dropped on my driveway Monday night and Tuesday morning.)

This is so fundamental to human mentation that even mathematicians tend to be unaware of it until it’s been proposed to them explicitly. It’s too automatic – too integral to Man’s pursuit of knowledge about the world and the creatures in it. Compelling oneself to think about it involves deliberately inserting oneself into a “strange loop” of the sort Douglas Hofstadter wrote about in Godel, Escher, Bach. Such a loop has no exit point upon which we can rely.

By corollary, if one is forbidden to attribute stable meanings to certain symbols – for example, the words used in political discourse – one cannot make sense of the statements that employ them. A barrier rises between our minds and the truths of reality with which we must grapple.

This is immensely appealing to those who seek to evade the consequences appropriate to their actions.

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I wrote some time ago:

In the ideological clashes of today, the attention of the greater mass of Americans is focused on secondary matters. Arguments over national defense, tax rates, social policy directions, regulatory structures, and so forth continue to rage, but with less prospect of being satisfactorily settled than ever before...because a critical pinion for all argument of any sort has been undermined near to collapse.

The pinion of which I speak is the concept of objective truth.

It's hard for most people to grasp that objective truth is a conception, rather than something self-evident. Yet furious philosophical battles have been fought over it. The negative side has never conceded defeat. They've advanced reason after reason to doubt the existence of objective reality. As each one is destroyed, they shift to another. In a sense, their proposition is its own strongest weapon, for they respond rather frequently to even the most obvious points by saying, "No, that's your truth" -- an implicit claim that it's the not the observation but the observer's willingness to accept it that really matters.

John Q. Public has heard little of this, of course; it's mostly fought in the ivory towers, and in the publications that cater to professional intellectuals. All the same, it matters to him more than he's able to appreciate.

Truth is an evaluation: a judgment that some proposition corresponds to objective reality sufficiently for men to rely upon it. The weakening of the concept of truth cuts an opening through which baldly counterfactual propositions can be thrust into serious discourse. Smith might say that proposition X is disprovable, or that it contradicts common observations of the world; Jones counters that X suits him fine, for he has dismissed the disprovers as "partisan" and prefers his own observations to those of Smith. Unless the two agree on standards for relevant evidence, pertinent reasoning, and common verification -- in other words, standards for what can be accepted as sufficiently true -- their argument over X will never end.

An interest group that has "put its back against the wall" as regards its central interest, and is unwilling to concede the battle regardless of the evidence and logic raised against its claims, will obfuscate, attack the motives of its opponents, and attempt to misdirect their attention with irrelevancies. When all of these have failed, its last-ditch defense is to attack the concept of truth. Once that has been undermined, the group can't be defeated. It can stay on the ideological battlefield indefinitely, preserving the possibility of victory through attrition or fatigue among its opponents.

As the years have flowed past, I’ve come to consider that particular essay the most important of all my emissions onto the Web. Indeed, the importance of its core thesis has risen to the point that no political statement can be assessed without evaluating whether the words it uses are being employed according to their public meanings: i.e., the meanings private persons routinely attribute to them. In other words, we must determine whether the speaker respects the truths those words are used by us common folk to express.

The effort involved in even listening to political gabble has risen proportionately to politicians’ self-defensive reinterpretations of key words and phrases. Such reinterpretations are inherently attempts to evade the facts.

If you’ve wondered why it is that no politician ever answers a yes-or-no question with a yes-or-no answer, wonder no longer. It’s utterly impossible to reinterpret “yes” and “no.” That makes them quicksand for the politician determined to retain the option to “adjust” his positions for subsequent needs.

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Yesterday afternoon, the esteemed Glenn Reynolds wrote thus:

IN JOHN CARTER’S WORDS, I STILL LIVE: Andrew Sullivan is going to stop blogging. No, blogging isn’t dead. And InstaPundit gets more pageviews than pretty much everyone who’s calling blogging dead. But I can understand Andrew quitting. For me, the real strain isn’t the blogging, but having to pay close attention to the news all the time. The news is usually depressing, when it’s not angering, and that’s doubly true for the Obama years. But I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.

I’m pleased that our beloved InstaPundit has resolved to soldier on, but ponder for a moment why “The news is usually depressing, when it’s not angering.” There’s always been a large percentage of bad news in the news; after all, the major maxim of journalism has always been “if it bleeds, it leads.” In earlier decades, we were far more confident that bad news with political import – i.e., negative developments the response to which would appropriately come from an American government – would be confronted squarely and coped with properly. Public confidence in such a response ain’t what she used to be. (If that comes as news to you, congratulations on a really long nap.)

The reason is the increasing – today near to absolute – unwillingness of our political class to confront reality when doing so might make it look bad.

When reality slaps you across the face with a wet mackerel, the only imaginable evasion is rhetorical: “No, no! While it did look like a mackerel, it wasn’t an authentic mackerel, as these variances along the lateral fins and the belly scales should make obvious. Besides, I turned forty-five degrees in the instant of the first impact, so it didn’t get my right cheek, so I wasn’t really slapped across the face. Anyway, we’re still good friends.” Dealing with the evasions and their implications is what I find most wearying and most angering. I’d be surprised if that weren’t so for Reynolds and many other commentators who’ve been tempted to lay down their keyboards.

Politicians’ methods for evading reality increasingly employ redefinitions of common words and phrases, distortions of their meanings, and a refusal to use those terms whose meanings are so strongly established that they cannot be so treated. The marvel of political journalism in our time is that anyone still bothers to ask a politician a question, when we all know that the answer will be self-serving rather than honestly responsive. Why, indeed, should a reporter bother to report on political statements and orations, which are inevitably more deceitful than informative? The temptation must be strong to eschew such wastes of ink and pixels, and merely report on politicians’ deeds as recorded by cameras and microphones.

Our political destroyers – and by that term, I mean our entire political class, regardless of party affiliation – have embroiled us in a meaning-crisis whose consequence is a truth-crisis. They are resolved that we shall never be able to hold them to the least of their statements. (Their promises? Forget it, Jake.) If we can be battered out of our reliance on the meanings of common words and phrases, our yearning for truth, and our belief in objective reality, their paths to absolute power over us will be completely unobstructed at long last.

Food for thought.