Language is a complex phenomenon. How is it possible, with ambiguous concepts and syntax and slippery figures of speech, to say anything meaningful? Or to convey the same ideas in different languages, say, English, French, and Latin? (I don’t mention Chinese because it looks like Chinese to me—or, as Casca said in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, “it was Greek for me.”) Compare with the neat logic of mathematics. I will not address these deep issues, but I just read a sentence in the Washington Post that nicely illustrates the complexity of language and its political danger.
In the first sentence of his otherwise instructive piece (“A Tale of Two Epidemics: Scientists in Sweden and Britain Fight Over Who Took the Right Public Health Path,” Washington Post, May 8, 2020), William Booth writes:
… scientists around the world have begun to skirmish over which countries have pursued the best strategies to protect their people.
This sentence is non-sensical in any of the many meanings given to the word “country.” If the word refers to the people living in a given place, the sentence means that the people protects its people. If instead “country” means “states” or “governments,” we read that governments protect their people. But, at least in a naïve democratic perspective, it is people who have a government, not the other way around. The clause is even curiouser if we take “country” to describe a set of geographical features for, obviously, mountains can’t have a strategy to protect their people. And If we mean that a country is all that—people, government, mountains—then it seems that the sentence means something like a big blob is protecting its people.
Perhaps metaphors, personifications, hyperboles, synecdoches, and circumlocutions are just a way to speak. Words are conventional and convenient ways to represent concepts. In Rome, shouldn’t we speak Latin like the Romans? We cannot avoid all linguistic shortcuts. So perhaps we should be as tolerant of the Washington Post as of the Wall Street Journal writing that “countries … reopen their societies.”
On the other hand, Orwell’s Newspeak is not just a (new) way to speak. In The Fatal Conceit (University of Chicago Press, 1988), F.A. Hayek explains how a way to speak can lead to serious political errors. Speaking of country, state, and people as being the same thing may lead to believing that this collective blob is a reality and to being unable to explain the underlying individual behaviors. It may amount to giving up the words and concepts necessary to conceive of individual liberty. Methodological individualism has much to recommend; speaking like a methodological collectivist doesn’t.
P.S.: Thanks to Andrea Mays, author of The Millionaire and the Bard (Simon & Schuster, 2015), for the Shakespeare reference.
READER COMMENTS
Andrea Mays
May 10 2020 at 4:24pm
Important piece—and thank you for the acknowledgement. Letting these mistakes of language creep in to the vernacular allows the possibility that we forget the difference between the individual and the collective. It is worthwhile to point this out!
Henry
May 11 2020 at 10:05am
This is simply a common metonym used a thousand times a day by everyone. No, we don’t say that a bunch of guys named Ivan and a bunch of Fritzes fought a battle at 49 degrees north, 43 degrees east, we say the USSR and the Nazis fought at Stalingrad. Everybody understands.
Pierre Lemieux
May 11 2020 at 7:05pm
Lots of people also say that the U.S. trades with China, that labor fights capital, that communism is the dictatorship of the proletariat, and that the Whites are racist and the Blacks lazy. This is what Hayek, as a methodological individualist, opposed. For very good reasons.
Mark Brady
May 11 2020 at 11:00pm
Since the Fritzes and the Ivans were following the orders of their respective military commanders who claimed allegiance to their respective states, I’m happy to say that Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia fought the battle of Stalingrad, and I suggest that no one would misunderstand me. And I dare say that even Pierre would agree with me.
However, to say that the U.S. trades with China may encourage readers to overlook the fact that the vast majority of trades are conducted between individuals in the U.S. and individuals in China, and that there is no U.S. interest to be juxtaposed against a Chinese interest when it comes to interpersonal trade.
To say that labor fights capital is not just an acknowledgement that at the end of the pay period the more that I am paid the less that is available for my employer to pay himself or any other factor of production (which in some very limited sense is true). It also reflects the perspective that the interests of labor and capital are irreconcilable, and that is a very different proposition.
Marxists do not claim that “communism is the dictatorship of the proletariat.” Rather they see the dictatorship of the proletariat as a stage on the way to communism.
And statements like “Whites are racist” and “Blacks are lazy” are erroneous generalizations, and something else entirely. I dare say that on occasions Pierre has generalized about Canadians, or socialists, or libertarians, and no one hearing him would have thought that he intended to describe every single Canadian, or socialist, or libertarian.
Pierre Lemieux
May 12 2020 at 10:37am
@Mark: You write:
Following this thinking, the British government, the German government, and the other countries’ government did misunderstand you each time they intentionally bombed civilian populations. Substituting “Nazi army” for “Nazi Germany” and “British army” for “British government” helps avoid such confusion.
Pierre Lemieux
May 12 2020 at 10:53am
@Mark: Not to mention that Imperial Japan and the United States fought the battles of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Right?
Peter Gerdes
May 12 2020 at 3:00am
C’mon you know exactly what the sentence meant and it’s hardly collectivist to have an idiom for actions taken as the result of collective action rather than as a mere aggregation of individual actions. We even do this in perfectly ordinary discussions about groups. Compare:
My friends and I went down to Best Buy and purchased a load of PS4 games.
A bunch of my friends purchased video games at Best Buy today just like I did.
The former indicates that the action was taken collectively the later indicates aggregate individual action. The locution you are responding to was just a way to indicate it was action taken as a collective (via the government).
I would add that this kind of search for buried political presumptions in common speech acts is why overblown political correctness is rightly derided. There is no reason to believe the reader will notice or adopt the attitude that one perceives is hidden in the phrasing on close examination in cases like this so why make communication harder?
Pierre Lemieux
May 12 2020 at 10:29am
Many believe that “action taken as a [political] collective” has an ascertainable meaning and that substituting “government” for “the collective” is innocuous. But this is an error. See my Econlib article “The Vacuity of the Political ‘We’.” You might also want to revisit Hayek’s distinction between a social order and an organization.
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