C.S. Lewis, Aristotle, and Bill Frist: One of These Things Is Not Like the Others
In the introduction to his book, Studies in Words, C.S. Lewis comments on a phenomenon he calls "verbicide." Verbicide is the act of killing a word by reducing its meaning to the same thing as an already existing word. According to Lewis, the 2 words that most murdered words get reduced to are "good" and "bad." The word "quality," for example, has been reduced to mean the same thing as "good." A man who owns a shoe store will advertise his business like so: "Quality shoes at low prices." And we'll all understand his intended meaning -- that his is the shop for "good" shoes at low prices, even though that's not what the ad says. If we didn't kill the word "quality" by reducing its meaning to "good," his ad would be nonsense. All it really says, if we let "quality" live as a word with its own meaning, is that his shop sells shoes with some quality (some property) or other. What quality? "Durable" and "water soluble" are both qualities; which quality do his shoes possess?
So, according to Lewis, words tend over time to be reduced to meaning "good" or "bad." Why? On Lewis's view, it's because people prefer simple "evaluative" thinking to complex "descriptive" thinking. In other words, we prefer to talk in terms of a thing's value rather than its properties. Words are the objects we think with, so if we tend to reduce our words to simple "good" or "bad," it suggests we like to reduce our thinking to simple "good" or "bad," too. Absolutes are convenient and require the minimum of mental effort. If a thing is good, it's good; if it's bad, it's bad. The elimination of mixed states greatly simplifies our mental life. So we tend to drive our language toward the Absolutes: good or bad, nothing in-between.
What does all this have to do with politics?
As Aristotle noted, politics is a subcategory of ethics. This seems very counterintuitive, given that 99.999% of politicians are strangers to the notion of ethics. What Aristotle meant, though, is that ethics is concerned with how one ought to live, and politics is concerned with how one ought to live in society with others; thus, it's a subset of ethics. My point is, politics is fundamentally about values. It is about questions of how we ought to live as a society. Because politics is an arena of value judgments, we are particularly susceptible in the realm of politics to the kind of reductive "evaluative" thinking Lewis describes.
So, when politicians want the public to support their position on an issue, what do they do? They use rhetorical sleight of hand to impress their position on the public's mind as simply "good." If necessary, they'll use similar sleight of hand to impress their opponents' position on the public's mind as simply "bad." They commit verbicide. They identify the respective positions with an Absolute: their own with "good," their opponents' with "bad." Thus, they take all the thinking out of the issue for the public. People no longer have to look closely at the issue and at the various positions on it and see which of the various partly-good-partly-bad things is better and which is worse.
In American politics, the Absolute Good is our Constitution. If you want the public to support a position, call it the "constitutional" position. If you want them to oppose a position, call it "unconstitutional." It doesn't matter if the 2 positions in question have nothing to do with the Constitution, per se. The Constitution could be completely silent on the subject. That's irrelevant. The point is to identify one position with Absolute Good, and the other with Absolute Bad. It's political verbicide.
That's what's going on when something hitherto known as "the nuclear option" gets redubbed "the constitutional option." Does the Constitution have anything to say on the subject of judicial filibusters? Nope. The Constitution couldn't be less interested. But if the side that opposes them can get the public to mentally reduce that side's position to a constitutional requirement, it creates an impression on the mind: opposing judicial filibusters is Absolute Good. This rhetorical trick is pandering, of course. It simultaneously panders to the moral reflexes of "values voters," and to the mental tendency of all people to reduce all things to "good" or "bad." That's where the shift in language gets its power, and that's why politicians do it.
The judicial filibuster is a mixed bag. It's good in some ways, and bad in some ways. If we want to make an intelligent decision on whether to keep it or destroy it, we must take both its good aspects and its bad aspects into account. We can't just absolutize it by couching it in constitutional language (or accepting the efforts of others to do so), make a snap judgment about it, then dust off our hands and say with a sigh of [false] moral satisfaction, "Well, good for me. I'm on the side of the angels, again."
On most issues, political or otherwise, the responsibility of any adult person is to deal with messy reality without, for convenience or self-reassurance, pretending it isn't messy. Whatever one may believe about the Ultimate sources of good and evil, the fact is that life in the present world rarely, if ever, presents us with pure goods or pure evils. The only responsible thing to do -- the only moral thing to do -- is to accept that, do one's best, and learn to live with the uncertainty.
So, according to Lewis, words tend over time to be reduced to meaning "good" or "bad." Why? On Lewis's view, it's because people prefer simple "evaluative" thinking to complex "descriptive" thinking. In other words, we prefer to talk in terms of a thing's value rather than its properties. Words are the objects we think with, so if we tend to reduce our words to simple "good" or "bad," it suggests we like to reduce our thinking to simple "good" or "bad," too. Absolutes are convenient and require the minimum of mental effort. If a thing is good, it's good; if it's bad, it's bad. The elimination of mixed states greatly simplifies our mental life. So we tend to drive our language toward the Absolutes: good or bad, nothing in-between.
What does all this have to do with politics?
As Aristotle noted, politics is a subcategory of ethics. This seems very counterintuitive, given that 99.999% of politicians are strangers to the notion of ethics. What Aristotle meant, though, is that ethics is concerned with how one ought to live, and politics is concerned with how one ought to live in society with others; thus, it's a subset of ethics. My point is, politics is fundamentally about values. It is about questions of how we ought to live as a society. Because politics is an arena of value judgments, we are particularly susceptible in the realm of politics to the kind of reductive "evaluative" thinking Lewis describes.
So, when politicians want the public to support their position on an issue, what do they do? They use rhetorical sleight of hand to impress their position on the public's mind as simply "good." If necessary, they'll use similar sleight of hand to impress their opponents' position on the public's mind as simply "bad." They commit verbicide. They identify the respective positions with an Absolute: their own with "good," their opponents' with "bad." Thus, they take all the thinking out of the issue for the public. People no longer have to look closely at the issue and at the various positions on it and see which of the various partly-good-partly-bad things is better and which is worse.
In American politics, the Absolute Good is our Constitution. If you want the public to support a position, call it the "constitutional" position. If you want them to oppose a position, call it "unconstitutional." It doesn't matter if the 2 positions in question have nothing to do with the Constitution, per se. The Constitution could be completely silent on the subject. That's irrelevant. The point is to identify one position with Absolute Good, and the other with Absolute Bad. It's political verbicide.
That's what's going on when something hitherto known as "the nuclear option" gets redubbed "the constitutional option." Does the Constitution have anything to say on the subject of judicial filibusters? Nope. The Constitution couldn't be less interested. But if the side that opposes them can get the public to mentally reduce that side's position to a constitutional requirement, it creates an impression on the mind: opposing judicial filibusters is Absolute Good. This rhetorical trick is pandering, of course. It simultaneously panders to the moral reflexes of "values voters," and to the mental tendency of all people to reduce all things to "good" or "bad." That's where the shift in language gets its power, and that's why politicians do it.
The judicial filibuster is a mixed bag. It's good in some ways, and bad in some ways. If we want to make an intelligent decision on whether to keep it or destroy it, we must take both its good aspects and its bad aspects into account. We can't just absolutize it by couching it in constitutional language (or accepting the efforts of others to do so), make a snap judgment about it, then dust off our hands and say with a sigh of [false] moral satisfaction, "Well, good for me. I'm on the side of the angels, again."
On most issues, political or otherwise, the responsibility of any adult person is to deal with messy reality without, for convenience or self-reassurance, pretending it isn't messy. Whatever one may believe about the Ultimate sources of good and evil, the fact is that life in the present world rarely, if ever, presents us with pure goods or pure evils. The only responsible thing to do -- the only moral thing to do -- is to accept that, do one's best, and learn to live with the uncertainty.
posted by juvenal_urbino | 8:52 AM
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