Magic Words

 Gustave Le Bon's classic study on crowd psychology includes an extensive discussion of the power of mere names in political life. Because the French Jacobins described their new government as a "republic," for instance, they were able to get away with creating an authoritarian despotism more bloodthirsty than the ancient regime and the Inquisition put together. 

Likewise, with the new doctrine of socialism. Because the European socialists all used the same name for the doctrine for whose cause they were fighting—Le Bon contends—they were able to convince themselves that they all had the same goal (even though a cursory glance at their political literature revealed that they actually meant quite different—and, in some cases—mutually exclusive things by the term "socialism"). 

Le Bon gives another example in the term "federal republic," which he describes as "one of these magical phrases of complex meaning on which everybody can put his own interpretation." He says that this phrase played an outsized role in launching the Spanish revolution of 1873, despite the fact that no one seemed able to define very clearly what a federal republic would mean. 

Now, the contemporary revolution in the Southeast Asian country of Burma is surely one of the most sympathetic happening anywhere in the world. The country's people have entered open rebellion against a military junta that not only brutally suppressed their freedoms for decades, but overthrew their lawfully elected civilian government just a few years ago and has launched a new wave of terror against anyone who resisted them. 

Yet, as much as I support the Burmese people's cause, I couldn't help but be struck by an odd parallel with the example Le Bon gives. A recent New York Times piece about the Burmese rebels describes how they have managed to amalgamate an internally diffuse coalition of people who oppose the junta for different reasons (some have been fighting the military for decades for the sake of regional autonomy, others have only entered the fight more recently, in order to resist the coup), under the shared slogan of "federal democracy." 

Nor is this a questionable translation of a Burmese phrase. The Times article notes that the "federal democracy" slogan is echoed in English by all the participants to the cause. It is what any of them will tell you, when you ask what they are fighting for. 

Perhaps, as in the Spanish revolution, the phrase "federal democracy" or a "federal republic" works so well as a rallying cry because it can unify two fundamentally different strands of a resistance movement—the strand that is fighting the central government primarily because it desires greater autonomy for its province or ethnic group, and the one that is fighting in order to resist dictatorship and tyranny. 

While this may make the phrase deeply useful as a unifying banner for the revolutionaries in the immediate term, however, it creates the danger—as Le Bon describes—that it is so ambiguous as a phrase that people can fight for it while meaning fundamentally different things by it. And, as Walter Lippmann points out in his Public Opinion, these differences of interpretation can suddenly become salient once the coalition becomes victorious. 

Lippmann specifically gave the example of the peace settlement following the end of World War I. Here, in describing their goals for the outcome of the war—he writes—the Allies strategically chose phrases that were ambiguous enough that everyone in the coalition could agree to them (because they could reinterpret the sonorous phrases to their own special liking). Once the Allies were actually victorious, however, it was no longer possible to paper over these differences of opinion. Once they had to concretize these slogans in practical terms of real policy, it became plain they had never meant the same things by them. 

I worry that something similar could beset the Burmese coalition. Ethnic armed groups and urban pro-democracy intellectuals alike now agree upon the shared slogan of "federal democracy." But suppose they defeat the junta and realize they actually all meant different things by it all along, as soon as they start trying to realize that political vision in real terms? 

It is concerning in this regard, for instance, that one of the ethnic separatist groups fighting the junta—the Arakan Army in Rakhine state—is now committing atrocities against the Rohingya minority reminiscent of the genocide they suffered in 2017. (The military junta—which carried out the 2017 genocide—has also been inflicting renewed violence on the Rohingya.) Surely that is not what the pro-democracy liberals mean by achieving an inclusive "federal democracy" in Burma. 

A friend of mine from divinity school was pointing out that the use of deliberately ambiguous words is endemic in politics, far beyond the areas of war and revolution. Politicians have to be vague about their goals—in just the way Lippmann described—in order to hold their internally diverse coalitions together. 

This explains, my friend pointed out, why the U.S. Constitution is so broadly worded. The ambiguities inherent in our founding document have provoked endless searches for its "true," revealed meaning—the "original public meaning" of the document's text. Yet, my friend argued, this is a fool's errand, because the whole document was meant to be ambiguous. It had to be ambiguous—because it was an exercise in coalition building. It had to be worded in such a way that multiple interest groups and sectional factions could get on board with its phrasing. 

One looks at the text of the Fourteenth Amendment, for instance—and one wonders why the framers couldn't have been bothered to define a little more specifically all the rights that it was meant to protect. It might have taken them a bit longer, and the document might be less succinct, but it would have saved us a great deal of spilled ink and litigation in the century-plus since. Yet, my friend points out, they couldn't have been more specific, because they had to get all the states in the union to sign on to ratify it (some of them, admittedly, under duress). 

So what did the framers of this amendment do? They spoke in vague terms. They talked about "privileges and immunities," without saying what those might be. They wrote about "due process," without resolving for us all the decades' worth of controversies that followed about whether this referred to substantive or merely procedural guarantees of fairness. They had to write it this way in order that numerous factions could read the same document and see their own goals reflected in its text. This is the "strategic ambiguity" one hears so much about in a foreign policy context these days. 

The desire to escape this madhouse of deliberately ambiguous political slogans—which can mean all things to all people, and which can be manipulated to excuse the worst atrocities (was the French Terror not committed in the name of democracy? Was the Bolshevik Terror not inflicted in the name of social justice?)—leads some people to dream of a language that could not be subject to this abuse: a "perfect language," in Umberto Eco's phrase, that is free of all ambiguities and could never be subject to a distortion of meaning. 

Orwell, for instance, famously thought that a plain-speaking use of language could be a check on totalitarianism. By using words to mean only what they appear to mean, one could escape the manipulations of dictatorial demagogy that twist "peace" into war and "freedom" into slavery. 

Likewise, the Beat writer William S. Burroughs argued that language in its present form had become a "virus" and a system of "mind control," because it rested on a fundamental confusion between the word and the thing it described. He was fascinated by Korzybski's concept of "general semantics," which he thought could rid us of this delusion. It could make us see that the slogans the politicians use are not the same thing as that which they purport to describe. Map is not territory, in Korzybski's phrase. And so too, we might add, the phraseology and sloganeering of "federal democracy" is not necessarily the same thing as an actual federal democracy. 

Burroughs thought the escape from this plague of ambiguous, mealy-mouthed language could be checked at the source by the widespread adoption of hieroglyphics. He saw the ancient Egyptian system of ideograms as a way of writing that had abolished the potential for abuse. If a word could correspond more directly to the thing described, through a pictorial rather than phonetic analogy, then it wouldn't be so easy to delude people with mere "magical phrases" in Le Bon's sense of the term. People couldn't rally behind the same ambiguous slogans, thinking they all meant the same things by them, if the slogans themselves had to be represented in more concrete, hieroglyphic form. 

Burroughs, of course, was a crank—albeit an entertaining one—and it's not always clear he meant all of this literally. At any rate, we are not about to start writing in hieroglyphics. 

It is interesting, however, to see how often this same dream of the idealized, concrete language—rid of all ambiguities—has reemerged in Western thought—and how often it has corresponded to a revival of interest in hieroglyphics. 

In his brief collection of essays, Serendipities: Language and Lunacy—which I was just reading this week—Umberto Eco describes several of these projects to realize the "perfect language." All of them have their origins in a discomfort with the idea that the correspondence between words and concepts might be fundamentally arbitrary. All wish to restore a supposedly "original," "pure" language—the language of Adam—in which words and the things they denote had an essential, rather than merely conventional, relation. 

Eco notes that early modern scholars like Athanasius Kircher found in pictographic writing systems like Egyptian hieroglyphics and Chinese characters the potential solution he was seeking. 

But even as the desire for a concrete, unambiguous "picture" language might seem to help us escape from the abuse of language inherent in political sloganeering and demagoguery, it is worth noting that this same drive often becomes a sort of totalitarianism of its own. Here, as so often, we find that the extremes of relativism and essentialism meet. Both can become a license for autocracy. 

After all, Eco describes, the great arch-reactionary Joseph de Maistre was also engaged on a lifelong quest for the perfect language, free of all ambiguities. He too was haunted by the dream—really, a delusion—that an original language could be found in which nothing was arbitrary or conventional—a primordial language of Adam in which every word corresponded to every unique concept because of its nature—through a necessary and inherent connection, stemming from the very nature of things. 

Of course, as Eco points out, every system of language at some point becomes arbitrary—even a pictographic one—unless it limits its range to a very small core of basic concepts. And then, such a limitation, if made, would itself be arbitrary. Why should language not embrace the full range of human concepts? But once it does, it inevitably becomes more abstract. And, as it becomes more abstract, it becomes increasingly ambiguous, and open to multiple interpretations. 

Some conservatives will never be able to tolerate this. They will insist that there is one meaning, and one meaning alone, beneath the apparent ambiguity. This is the impulse that underlies the fundamentalist idea of Biblical inerrancy—as well as the legal doctrine of Originalism. It all stems from the same fundamental "neurosis," as Eco diagnoses it. "[P]eople would like to find in words an expression of the way the world really works," he writes, "and they are regularly disappointed."

And so, we see that the same impulse that led Orwell and Burroughs to dream of an unambiguous language, as a means of escaping dictatorial "mind control," can itself become a mandate for reactionary authoritarianism. Since language is inherently ambiguous, then any attempt to make it purely concrete cannot actually succeed—all it can do is to privilege a single one of its many possible meanings in a no less arbitrary way. And since the selection is arbitrary, it can then only be imposed by force. The Constitution says this, and this alone. Why? Because we say it does. 

As terrible as it is, then, that so many totalitarian movements have been able to manipulate and exploit the ambiguities in language—have been able to rally people around "magic words" and slogans that they use to paper over their crimes—the truth is that the effort to abolish all such ambiguities may end up leading to the same result. De Maistre, like the judicial Originalists of today, believed that he had found a single "true" meaning behind every word. And since he was able to posit this with such certainty, according to his theory, then it was easy to justify the imposition of this meaning by force. 

Whereas the essence of all liberalism, by contrast, rests on the insight that meanings have not all been fixed. We need freedom of thought precisely because we do not know everything, and truth can only be arrived at—therefore—through a haphazard and open-ended process of testing what we think we know. It can only be found through admitting ambiguity and working through it. As Justice Learned Hand once put it well: "The Spirit of Liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right."