Degrees of Truth
Sunday the Plain Dealer ran a piece by Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer in which he took off (as usual) against all things Obama. His last point described the Occupy Wall Street protesters as “Starbucks-sipping, Levi’s-clad, iPhone-clutching,” and as “indignant indolents saddled with their $50,000 student loans and English degrees...” Obama’s crime is understanding their cause.
I can let all of Krauthammer’s searing charges against Occupy’s forces pass except the one about having “English degrees.” ’Tis the unkindest cut of all. Garrison Keillor will not take it lying down. I won’t either.
Why would a columnist who uses the English language to make his living speak disparagingly of English majors? Because he is one of that company of writers and talking heads who abuse the English language to make their points. That way they can make a living off readers who have little regard for language’s primary responsibility to represent truth--literally or figuratively or however truth can be represented.
For Krauthammer and his fawning readers the difference between truth and falsehood is of no consequence if what he writes confirms their mutual prejudices. He uses the English language as a blunt weapon to pummel his targets into submission. He cheapens English by using it carelessly, randomly, and oh-so-very cutely. A person with an English degree who has learned anything at all can spot his kind in a minute and call their bluff. They are called “elites,” though I personally know few English majors who are elite in a convincing manner. But of course, he doesn’t care about them because he’s got his readership, and he’s got editors who have little concern for truth in opinion pieces if it sells papers.
There is a vast difference between an article that reasonably presents cases for and against matters such as Occupy Wall Street and an article that pitches junk words and phrases into the wind and hopes they land on some “enemy” somewhere. English majors know that, which may be why they are protesting corporate excesses that attempt to masquerade as reasonable corporate profit.
The Plain Dealer’s Kevin O’Brien is a second-rate minion of Krauthammer. Rush Limbaugh presides as glorious leader of the pack from out in talk-radio land. Sadly, the left also has those who forge English into blunt weapons: Maureen Dowd for one; Michael Moore for another.
Krauthammer claims “the real (?) Tea Party”, unlike Occupy Wall Street, has “a program--less government, less regulation, less taxation, less debt.” All together now, you indolent English majors, “Do those things, one-by-one or taken together, constitute a ‘program’?” Not in any sense of that word, no.
One last confession: my bachelor’s degree is in philosophy. No doubt there are plenty of us elite philosophers out there in the streets, too. Something about searching for an honest columnist, I suspect.
Rev. Myers’ depiction of newspaper columnists and TV personalities of the political right reminds me of the Sophists with whom Socrates had to deal in Athens of the 5th century B.C.E. Young men aspiring to a career in the democratic politics of Athens and wanting to acquire communication skills they knew they needed for political success were drawn to the Sophists who offered to teach them rhetoric, art of persuasive speech, for tuition. The Sophists had come to Athens from neighboring Greek cities with a reputation of being learned and wise. Socrates had heard a friend’s report that the priestess of the temple of Apollo at Delphi gave him an oracle saying that Socrates was the wisest man in the world. As a humble and honest person keenly aware of his ignorance and shortcomings, Socrates could not believe the oracle true and felt obliged to prove the god wrong by finding people of demonstratively superior wisdom. To that end Socrates engaged Sophists in public conversations with him in the presence of their admiring pupils. Utterly contrary to his expectations, Socrates showed that the Sophists had no knowledge but only a pretension to it, that they thought of rhetoric as a knack of making people believe or do whatever the rhetorician wanted them to believe or do, with no knowledge of what is true or right. Socrates concluded that he was the wisest because he at least knew he was ignorant. The fact about the Sophists that he revealed killed him. Humiliated and angered by Socrates, the Sophists mobilized their rich and powerful Athenian friends to accuse him of atheism and corruption of youth. He was found guilty of the two capital crimes and was executed by a forced drink of hemlock.
ReplyDeleteIf Socrates were here with us today, he would be faced with a greater challenge of defending his absolutist view of reality and morality against other absolutists whose view is contrary to his, simultaneously defending absolutism against forms of relativism. How would he advise the religious or ideological extremists, like the newspaper columnists Rev. Myers mentions, whose zeal easily turns into a demonizing hatred of foes, and what would he tell the relativistic humanists who say that in order to promote tolerance and peace among people they might as well cease talking about truth and universal moral principles and join endeavors to find partial agreements incrementally expanding their common ground? Socrates and his disciple Plato dogmatically held that the essential function of language was to express knowledge and to structure a heuristic process toward its discovery. But epistemic function is one of many functions of language. With language people can also love, hate, bless, curse, kill, save, harm, heal, celebrate, mourn, promise, betray…There indeed is no human mode of being or doing without constitutive linguistic function. Rhetoricians on the right or on the left know their purpose is not to express objective truth but to help realize a world where their interests will prevail. Admitting that much of human discourse is politics is a step toward reconciliation and peace.