This morning over a leisurely coffee I was reading a piece about Boris Pasternak and Dr. Zhivago (“He, the Living,” by Michael Weiss, in the New Criterion) when I read this:

Uncharacteristically for a poet of the twentieth century, Pasternak saw the depravity of Communism where it manifested itself earliest — in the Russian language. Yuri repeatedly registers his disillusionment with the epoch of “phrases and pathos,” the apparatchik’s cliche.

What struck me about this passage was how Pasternak saw that shifts in the usage of language often act as a barometer of where a culture is headed if things don’t change. With all the dramatic upheavals going on in the Middle East, the predominant language emerging from the tweets and Facebook posts is one of earthy practicality: food, jobs, equality, opportunity, fairness, justice. Here in the US, it feels as if our language is being hijacked as a tool of political terror, abstracted from any kind of rootedness in a common shared destiny. We are spending more and more energy outing people as ideological opponents, labeling people with some dreaded word that serves as a shorthand for otherness. “Liberal” and “conservative” don’t indicate a person’s political perspective anymore; they label the entire person, mark him or her as safe to keep or to expel from our gated village. And on TV and the radio and through the many channels of social media, this kind of branding has become a spectator sport, one that encourages the spectators to get in on the game and play too. We have in effect created a virtual national Coliseum, open 24/7 with an endless parade of undesirables being hauled up on stage to be fed to the slaughter for our blood-lust. And the people running the show for us are happy to have our attention focused there, and not on them. You want fries with your panem et circenses?

But this time it’s different, I hear. This time it’s really important, the stakes are so much higher. The unspoken and unacknowledged undertone: the reason last time wasn’t so important is because it wasn’t us.

The Great Experiment is at perpetual risk of being run off the rails by men and women whose short-sighted greed and opportunism are allowed to go unchecked. And as always, people of good will are outraged. But this time their outrage has yet to find a reality-based focus, as it has in the Middle East. Instead, we hurl blame at the convenient bogeymen who are served up to us, the perpetually unpersonified other who thinks, looks, or loves differently than we do. With the flick of a pen or the stroke of a key we can condemn whole groups of people at once, consign them verbally to a fate that we would then need feel no remorse should it actually befall them. And that is our great failing right here, right now: how can one feel compassion or empathy for, or kinship with, an abstraction? How can we see in the face of an alien a mirror of our own?

Language is the tool we use to represent a thing; it is not and can never be the thing itself. Language is also the most fundamentally powerful tool we have ever developed, the tool that has so far made all other tools possible. And since any tool can be a weapon depending on how you hold it, language is also our most dangerous weapon. In these precarious times, each of us needs to rediscover — and demonstrate — how to hold it properly again.

Categorised as: Life the Universe and Everything

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