Judging Freedom - Evolution or Corruption _ Political Language

Episode Date: September 30, 2022

"Evolution or Corruption" for the Italian journal Etica & Poltica. http://www2.units.it/etica/2022_2/DEI... #Biden #language #orwellSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Friday, September 30th, 2022. It's about three o'clock in the afternoon on the east coast of the United States. My guest is well known to many of you. Jeff Deist is the president of the Mises Institute. The Mises Institute is the finest collection of scholarly work on the free market and Austrian economics anywhere in the world. It's headquartered adjacent to Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama. I'm on the board of the Mises Institute and have a long and happy relationship with it, just as I've had with Jeff. Jeff, it's a pleasure. Welcome to the show.

Thanks, Judge. You have a fascinating piece, which strictly speaking is not about Austrian economics, but obviously is about freedom, which you recently published in an Italian scholarly journal, and the English version of the speech is Evolution or Corruption, and it's about the language we speak and the meaning of words. So tell us how language evolves and how it is corrupted. Two very different processes, one of which we might liken to the marketplace, a laissez-faire marketplace where people interact voluntarily. And so the evolution of language happens organically or naturally from the bottom up. And the other process we might call imposition or corruption is top-down, engineered by elites. And that could be anybody from the Associated Press to the Modern Language Association, to the Chicago Manual, to politicians, to professors, to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, attempting to shift or shape language in ways that serve a political agenda.

So I think language is always a battlefield. It's always a front, a cultural front in any war. But sometimes I think we're not very aware of it. In other words, these linguistic changes are being imposed upon us, maybe even stealthily. But nonetheless, I do believe that to an extent they're being imposed. So I recently wrote a piece about Julian Assange defending his revelation of war crimes committed during the Bush administration under the Pentagon Papers Supreme Court opinion. And in giving the background, I talked about how he got his information from a thief who was in the military by the name of Bradley Manning. And in giving a little bit of background about Manning, I referred to his sex change operation while in federal prison. And one of my editors, since my pieces like yours end up in all kinds of venues,

changed it to gender transitioning. Is that an example of what you're talking about? To me, a sex change operation is the butchering of a body. But boy, gender transitioning sounds like it's something smooth and neat and easy and welcoming. Well, that's absolutely a perfect example. And it's really in the trans lexicon where we see, I think, some of these most outright impositions, where we hear about gender-affirming care as a euphemism for, again, mutilation, surgery, sometimes even on people who are under 18, apparently, in some cases. So we have all this coded language in our society now. And sometimes it's more obvious, sometimes it's less. But oftentimes, it's not very,

let's say, shall we say delicate, like, for instance, when we call someone a climate change denier, because people have some reservations about the entirety of the Green New Deal or how bad carbon emissions really are and what all this means and what it would actually mean to severely curtail fossil fuels. You know, anyone with any doubts can be lumped into liken them to a Holocaust denier, which is obviously a very indelicate and awful thing to say about someone. So, you know, this is just an example of, I would call it bullying almost, where the language itself, the words used contain their own exhortations, let's say. It's kind of like the old adage, when did you stop beating your wife? This is how the English language is being operated now by progressives. All right. So we've lost control of language. We've lost control of the meaning of words. Did

we ever have control of language? Did we ever have control of meaning of words? Or is the phenomenon that you have written so beautifully about and are now summarizing been with us for millennia? I think it's always been with us in the sense that language is an instrument of empire, which a famous Spanish bishop said in the 1500s and right when Spain was about to embark on kicking the Moors out of the Iberian Peninsula, for example. And of course, for the next hundred years, they did indeed use Spanish as a weapon throughout the Americas. Obviously, the Roman army spread Latin throughout much of what we today call Europe. And clearly the British Empire brought the English language to India, to Africa. So yes, there have always been impositions, but now today, especially in the West, but really

almost even in Asia today, English has become a default language of sorts, which is used almost anywhere. And for those of us who were born and raised in the English speaking world, it's a privilege because we can travel internationally and there are signs and other things in our vernacular. And so that makes life awfully nice for us, but it also tends to bring Western thought and Western ideas with it. So what the struggle is today is not whether English will predominate. I think it does. The struggle today is who's English and which English and whether this is top-down or bottom-up. And I think it's increasingly, this is a top-down phenomenon where people are trying to go beyond political correctness, which is now an outdated

term to describe a sort of set of social niceties into something much broader. Obviously, people use this term woke very broadly and insistently and inherently, but that's what's happening here. It's a broader worldview, a whole host of cultural precepts, and language is part of embedding those precepts. All right. So have we reached the point where if you're not woke, you can be punished? Well, the short answer to that is yes. In some environments, in some college campuses, if you were to say sex change as opposed to gender transitioning, if you refer to a person as he rather than they, when you're talking about one person, you can endure some sort of discipline or humiliation or even worse. I mean, how bad is this that there are language police among us? Well, I guess the question is, what's the over-under on a bet that in 10 years,

the United States has hate speech laws, criminal hate speech laws, like Canada and a lot of Western Europe have today. I think that's a pretty safe bet. Yeah. Well, you're a lawyer and you and I, and most people listening to us who are regular viewers of Judging Freedom, that hate speech is protected speech, but that could change with two or three votes on the Supreme Court. Absolutely. So this is the direction. And you can colonize people without using tanks and bombs and troops. I mean, there's lots of ways to colonize people. And the Western world has in many ways culturally colonized the whole world, especially with the internet. I mean, everybody uses Google, everybody uses Twitter, these kinds of platforms. So I think language is something that we have to defend. I think first of all, we have to recognize that we're in a battle for it.

And second of all, I think we have to defend it. Evolution is okay. We don't go around saying whomst. We don't go around saying thou anymore. We don't use Shakespeare's English. We don't use Middle English. And that's fine, provided that that's happening because of popular usage or common usage or precise usage. But when it's happening to serve an agenda, and I think that's increasingly the case, as my paper tries to lay out, that I think we need to pay attention. Is it fair to say that to lose control of words is to lose control of meaning? Well, yes, it's like Alice in Wonderland. It's very, very frustrating. And Orwell spoke about this in his, I think very well, in his 1946 essay, Politics in the English Language, which is a great read. It's online, very short, easy to find. And so even as World War II was still winding down,

he was talking about what he called meaningless words, words that are used in consciously dishonest ways to suit the speaker or the writer's political narrative. And even way back then, he used the terms fascism and democracy as examples of this. Fascism had become a catch-all term for sort of bad or authoritarian things we don't like. And democracy had become, and certainly is still today, a proxy term for a good government or a government of which we approve. That's democracy. So meaningless words are not gibberish. Meaningless words are words that mean whatever the speaker wants them to mean,

and they may mean something different to the listener. Absolutely. And we've always had those. Is the problem more acute now than it's ever been? Why did you write this great piece? I think it's more acute now simply because the digital world makes the spread and either the corruption or the evolution of language that much faster. When we think of who controlled language in the past, well, first of all, most people were illiterate up until, let's say, a few hundred years ago. And so it tended to be monarchs or clergy controlling language.

And then the printing press comes along, which makes widespread literacy more possible. But still, in an analog world, things take a lot longer to spread. But now we have a digital world and we can see that with, especially with social media platforms, a particular meme, a particular phrase, a particular saying can spread almost overnight. So I think our progressive friends are using the technology at their disposal to weaponize this. And we may soon be in an era where if someone's born biologically male, but becomes a transgender person, and we refer to this person as he, when they don't want to be, we might be up against it. So changes in language not only affect how we think and feel, but how we act. And changes in language, as you say, may be weaponized by the left or the right to force us to behave differently.

This would be very, very subtle and would require sort of a public sentiment behind it. But I can see it coming. I can feel it coming. Well, if we think about especially, well, really both the social and physical sciences, when we think about epistemology, when we think about knowledge itself, we need precise definitions. If words don't have agreed upon definitions or if they're constantly shifting, obviously that's a huge problem for any kind of truth claims. It turns us basically into all postmodernists because how do we know anything we know if the words we use? And again, everything we view, everything

we take into our senses, we translate into English if we happen to be English speakers. This is how our cognitive brains work. So even when we consider, let's say, music or mathematics, which both have a language of their own, apart from the Roman alphabet, even when you take a musical concept like a note or a scale, or a mathematical concept like a point on a graph, you use language to conceptualize those things. And so even from birth, as Noam Chomsky explained to us, how we learn anything, almost all the knowledge we have, the process is a linguistic one. And so if you want to control something important, I would say language is right up there with food, air and water. Wow. I was just going to ask you, in your research, did you find examples of efforts to control?

I mean, and this would be control without the government. This would be controlled by. Well, nobody would say that. and everybody knows that's wrong. This would be controlled by private intellectual forces interfering with the freedom of speech. I mean, in Russia, for example, hardly a paradigm of freedom, you cannot call whatever is happening in Ukraine a war. Even though we use that phrase, whatever side you're on, whether you think Putin's a butcher or Zelensky's a Nazi, whatever it is, we use that phrase openly in America, but you can be punished for calling it a war in Russia. I guess the punishment in America would come in the form of social ostracism or loss of standing or denial of tenure at a college. It's not going to come in the form of incarceration,

at least not yet. Well, as you well know, the divide between public and private entities has been vanishing in recent years. So, I mean, someone like Twitter can certainly affect your life. But I don't think we should view this only in terms of criminal imprisonment. There are lots of ways to shrink someone's life down and make it smaller. They may not be in a prison cell. You may not shrink their life that much, but certain job opportunities, certain social opportunities may be lost to them. And we have examples like Professor Amy Wax at Penn Law, who may well lose tenure and be fired for saying what I think were some untoward things, I suppose most people would

agree. But this is where we are today. I mean, what's the point of it being a tenured professor if you're not allowed to seek and speak out about truth as you see it? That's the point. Professor Professor Ira Katz at Princeton, who's a friend of mine, maybe the world's most brilliant classicist, not only lost tenure, he lost his job because he referred to Black Lives Matter amiably as a group of young terrorists. And for that phrase, a group of young terrorists tried to intimidate me, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But that's the key phrase. He's been fired by a vote of the recommendation of the president and a vote of the board of trustees. That's the most extreme example that I know of. I know you've been following the Professor Wax situation and her words arguably were harsher.

But people shouldn't be punished for their words. I mean, Thomas Jefferson once said, you know, words don't break my bones or pick my pocket. Say whatever the heck you want. If I don't like it, I won't listen. Well, we're in a new era. And when we consider what words are supposed to mean, let's say you're building a house, you better know what a cubic foot is when you're pouring concrete. Well, if we can't define a cubic foot to everyone's satisfaction, and apparently we can't define boy and girl to everyone's satisfaction, then that portends trouble, I think, for the social comity in this country. Yes. Jeff, great conversation. Thank you. Great piece. Where can this piece be found in English? I wrote it in English. I assume it was translated into Italian.

If I had written it in Italian. I don't even know how to say Jeffrey in Italian. If I wrote this in Italian, I would be about three words in as we speak. If you Google the ethics and politics, etica e politica is the Italian title, and it's on their website in both Italian and English. Got it. We will be happily together celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Mises Institute late next week, a week from today, and I look forward to it, and I'll see you then and there. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you, Judge. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.