Autocracy and the Destruction of Language

06-04-2020

Roger Berkowitz

Masha Gessen’s newest book argues that Donald Trump is paving the way for the end of American democracy and the rise of autocracy. Whether Gessen is right, their argument about how President Trump attacks language attacks a shared world of meaning necessary for democracy is right. Gessen founds their argument on insights from Hannah Arendt and writes:

When writers and academics question the limits of language, it is invariably an exercise that grows from a desire to bring more light into the public space, to arrive at a shared reality that is more nuanced than it was before the conversation began: to focus ever more tightly on the shape, weight, and function of any thing that can be named, or to find names for things that have not, in the past, been observed or been seen as deserving of description. A shared language is essential to this exercise, and observing the limits of  this language is an attempt to compensate for them. As Hannah Arendt argued, the awareness of one’s subjectivity is essential to political conversation:

We know from experience that no one can adequately grasp the objective world in its full reality all on his own, because the world always shows and reveals itself to him from only one perspective, which corresponds to his standpoint in the world and is determined by it. If someone wants to see and experience the world as it “really” is, he can do so only by understanding it as something that is shared by many people, lies between them, separates and links them, showing itself differently to each and comprehensible only to the extent that many people can talk about it and exchange their opinions and perspectives with one another, over against one another. Only in the freedom of our speaking with one another does the world, as that about which we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides.

The “freedom of our speaking with one another” depends on a shared language. Trump’s attack on language is an attack on freedom itself. In his philosophy of the “rectification of names,” Confucius warned: “If language is not correct, then . . . morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.” Trump’s lies and his word piles both are exercises in arbitrariness, continued assertions of the power to say what he wants, when he wants, to usurp language itself, and with it, our ability to speak and act with others—in other words, our ability to engage in politics. The assault on language may be harder to define and describe than his attacks on institutions, but it is essential to his autocratic attempt, the ultimate objective of which is to obliterate politics.