Tautologies

At some point during the Trump era, a certain familiar sign began to appear in innumerable front yards of countless suburban homes and on the wayside pulpits of liberal churches. You know the ones I mean: the signs that always lead with "In this house, we believe...", followed by a series of progressive activist slogans. 

Now, surely all such slogans have their place. Under the reign of our grotesque former president, the signs often operated as a convenient shorthand and social signifier: here, they informed us, was a home or church where one would be in the company of fellow members of the Resistance. Phew! As such, the signs played their useful role. And of course, as a good liberal, one did not actually disagree with anything on the signs—to the extent they were saying anything specific at all. 

Still, the signs were always faintly irritating—and not just to Trump-worshipping Republicans, but to just about everyone who didn't plant one in their own front drive. It's hard at first to determine exactly what is so annoying about the signs. Partly, of course, it's simply the self-righteous and preemptively accusatory tone. "In this house, we believe," always seemed to imply the parenthetical "(I don't know about what you and your kind believe, but) in this house, we..."

But I always thought there was also something a bit smug and obnoxious in the phrasing of the slogans themselves—the ones that follow the ellipsis. The phrases are a veritable "dictionary of received ideas" of the left, after all—a set of "thought-terminating clichés" that could not possibly convince anyone not already persuaded of their truth (since it was often not clear to outsiders what they were even saying) and that therefore functioned only to signal one's group identification with fellow liberals. 

Some of the slogans even bordered on the semantically incomprehensible, for those not already steeped in the context of contemporary American culture wars. What does it even mean to say that "no human being is illegal"? One knows—from following our country's politics—that what this is really saying is that the household in question supports progressive immigration reform, and thank god for that; more power to them—but would anyone who didn't already agree with this position even grasp what they were talking about from the sign, let alone walk away converted? 

Then there's the even larger category of slogans on the signs that were simply tautological. "Love is love"—a straightforward identity—cannot really be denied as a truth claim. "Science is real" is likewise something that no one could dispute, since a concept must have some sort of "reality," some form of existence, if we are to be able to refer to it at all. 

But for those very reasons, these slogans aren't really saying anything. Uttering the words "love is love" tells us nothing about the sense in which we are using "love." Similarly, "Science is real," may be indisputable—but there is room for endless debate nonetheless over what we consider to be legitimate science. "Women's rights are human rights"—another one commonly found on the signs—does not answer the question of what human rights are. 

One can imagine a right-winger agreeing in principle with every one of these slogans—the hallmark of every tautology being that it cannot actually be denied—yet disagreeing with the sign-maker on every actual policy position that the signs implicitly disclose. They might say, "Sure, science is real, but the real science says that climate change is a hoax;" or "sure, women's rights are human rights, but no one has a right to seek an abortion."

I therefore used to joke to a friend, in my more jaded moods during this era, that the sign I wanted for my own front yard would read: "In this house, we believe: (1) Tautologies have no propositional content; and (2) Existence is not a predicate."

I thought I was alone in this frustration, and so I tended to keep quiet in public about my annoyance, lest I alienate my fellow liberals. But reading Roland Barthes' Mythologies—that great collection of capsule reflections on the submerged ideological strata of popular culture—I have at last encountered an author with unimpeachable left-wing credentials who shares my distaste for tautological sloganeering. And, more than that, Barthes also put his finger on exactly what's annoying about it. 

Now, it must be said that I approached reading Barthes with some trepidation, having mostly encountered him hitherto in my life in the form of quotations and proof-texts from annoying hipsters. And indeed, some of Barthes' cultural criticism still reads as smug, and his Marxist pieties have aged as poorly—if not worse—than the motifs of "bourgeois" pop culture that he debunks. 

Still, what the reception of Barthes among generations of self-righteous media studies majors at America's great liberal arts institutions had not prepared me for is how genuinely witty he is. Barthes is funny, and just about every one of his micro-essays in his most famous volume has a stunningly well-observed aperçu. (Here we have, then, simply another writer who has been ill-served by his acolytes. He wasn't the first and he won't be the last.)

One of Barthes' glimpses into profound truths occurs when he discusses a recent production of one of Racine's plays. The director is purporting to strip their interpretation of Racine of any false calcification of commentary or interpretation—to present Racine, simply, qua Racine. 

Barthes points out that such an operation is inherently tautological. Racine cannot be anything other than Racine; and to assert as much is therefore to say nothing at all about the playwright. What, then, is the purpose of saying it? The real meaning behind the slogan is yet another group identification: it is to take sides—chiefly against "the intellectuals" and therefore on the side of "common sense" and unreflective feeling. 

Barthes prefaces this essay with a tag from Flaubert's Bouvard and Pécuchet—that great satirical and encyclopedic anatomy of the learned cliché (there is a reason that the novel—which Flaubert left unfinished—is often published alongside his "dictionary of received ideas"). The epigraph is a fine example of the tautology, worthy to be stuffed and mounted alongside the slogans of any suburban yard sign: "Taste is taste." Parodying the style, Barthes calls his essay "Racine is Racine." (Shades, here, of "love is love.")

The problem with such clichés, Barthes observes, is that they declare war on all reflection. "[T]autology is always aggressive; it signifies a choleric break between the intelligence and its object, the arrogant threat of an order not to think. Our tautologies are like masters tugging sharply on their dogs' leashes; thought must not range too widely[.]" (Richard Howards trans. throughout). 

This, surely, is exactly what's going on with those yard signs. Barthes' description accounts for the faintly accusatory and imperious tone that they impart. When one is confronted with a slogan that means nothing in itself—which cannot convince anyone because it has no intrinsic propositional content—one is in effect being invited to either agree or get out. There is no third option of attempting to reason or persuade. (In the next essay in the series, Barthes quotes another thought-terminating cliché of this sort that can invite only automatic agreement or damnation: Billy Graham's "God is God.")

Why, then, do people put these signs in their yard? Here again, Barthes offers the explanation. It is, in the most literal way, virtue-signaling. It is to establish an implied moral superiority through membership in the community of right-thinking people. "We understand at least," writes Barthes, "what such vacuity in definition afford to those who brandish it so proudly: a kind of minor ethical salvation, the satisfaction of having militated in favor of a truth [...] without having to assume the risks which any somewhat positive search involves: tautology dispenses us from having ideas, but at the same time prides itself on making this license into a stern morality." 

This, again, is precisely what is happening on those signs. People don't want to issue slogans that have actual propositional content, because to do so would instantly implicate them in the far thornier task of trying to sort out what is true from false, and to stand by one's assertions on the grounds of evidence and reason (that is, it would mean "assum[ing] the risks" of an at least "somewhat positive search"). To replace the slogan "science is real" with, say—what I think the sign actually is referring to—something like: "Vaccines are effective," or "anthropogenic climate change is occurring," or "the theory of natural selection is well-established," instantly invites empirical disputes, and puts one in the position of having to furnish facts to support one's position. 

Of course, the facts are there. The clinical studies are not on the side of the vaccine skeptics or the climate deniers. The evidence from natural history does not support the theory of intelligent design. How much stronger and more meaningful, then, would our progressive politics be, one thinks, if we did not try to shrug off the burden of thought, and dared instead to "assume the risks which any somewhat positive search involves." 

Why should we fear to assume these risks when the evidence actually is on the side of climate science and immunization? Why do we retreat to an empty platitude like "love is love," when, if we just said: "We support LGBTQIA+ people's freedom to love and marry whom they choose; and we support every person's right to define their own gender identity," then we would force the opponents of these policies and values on the defensive, since they would then have to cough up some evidence of their own that sexually and gender non-conforming people are somehow doing harm—and there is none. 

Let us not fear to confront the right on the domain of reason and facts, therefore. After all, if we don't think we can prevail based on truth, and therefore fear to invoke propositional content, then we are already implicitly confessing we don't even agree with our own side or think its ideas are correct. Then those tautologies on the signs will become even emptier signifiers—an effort at social climbing, indicating membership in an in-group, but devoid even of any inner conviction which would give them at least the justification of sincerity.