Language, Thought, and Politics

Many of the attempts to explain what motivated Jared Lee Loughner’s attempted assassination of Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords have centered on language, specifically on the pernicious effect of the intemperately hostile rhetoric that has recently characterized the political scene. Implicit in these explanations is an old debate in the field of linguistics: to what extent, if any, language influences thought.

Loughner himself has claimed that the government engages in “mind control” and brainwashing “by controlling grammar.” The belief that language determines the way we think, known as linguistic determinism, was advanced some 70 years ago by Benjamin Lee Whorf. The world’s “flux of impressions,” Whorf maintained, is “organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds.” Phenomena, in effect, are “codified in the patterns” of language.

Whorf’s strong causal ligaturing of language and thought has few adherents now, but a weaker version of it is generally accepted. According to Guy Deutscher, language influences our minds “not because of what it allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about.” These habits of speech, Deutscher says, “can settle into habits of mind” and affect our “experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.” They force us “to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience.” A language in which nouns are assigned gender, for example, can influence the kinds of adjectives used to describe them. In “Metaphors We Live By,” George Lakoff and Mark Johnson assert that metaphors structure the way we perceive and understand the world, and the way we relate to others. It makes an attitudinal difference if a politician is described as a “clueless” or a “gangster,” if an audience is exhorted to “take our country back” or be “armed and dangerous,” or if the crosshairs mapped on congressional districts are described as a “gun sites” or “surveyors’ symbols.”

We may use language mindlessly, but it is seldom received that way. As Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of “language games” suggests, language is meaningful because its use is catalyzed by a variety of rule-governed social practices, practices that are largely unspoken aspects of our social reality. Over the last two years, political language has too often operated according to rules that permit excessively heated and immoderate militancy. It is time to remember that words are deeds, not simply the intangible exhalations of breath that generate them. It is time to think, to think hard, about the words we use to describe others. It is time to remember that in the political language game, abrasive discourse, denunciatory discourse, discourse barbed with skepticism and sarcasm, is well within the rules. Discourse that advocates armed rampancy and violence, overtly or covertly, is not.