What’s In A Word?

“The Trump Dictatorship” is the title of Robert Reich’s January 14, 2019 blog post at robertreich.org.  Is dictatorship an honest characterization of the Trump Presidency?  Famed social critic George Orwell wrote “But if thought corrupts language, language corrupts thought.”  “Political language,” he wrote, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

We have not always been so careless with words.  Our culture used to put a high premium on precise language, usage and communication.  Let’s not forget that while throughout history countries were ruled by inherited or prosecuted political or religious power, America was founded on ideals; ideals, precisely expressed and clearly understood, including “self-evident truths.”

Our founders were among the most well educated and literate men in history, having almost to a man, the benefit of classical education established upon the model of the great Scottish church schools and universities.  The tradition of education in Scotland stretches back more than a fifteen centuries to the abbey schools of the Gaelic Christians first raised to renown by Columba on Iona in 563AD.  And their characteristic thirst for knowledge led them to the acquisition and then mastery of the Greek language and of all the learning accumulated by that ancient civilization.  The Gaelic Christians collected, copied and treasured the tattered parchments, scrolls and manuscripts, and the world they revealed, during their wide missionary travels.  

The Greeks are known for philosophy and the Gaels became Europe’s masters, their abbey schools and later universities becoming the fountainhead of learning linking the classical to the modern age.  Gaelic Christian scholars such as Alcuin, John Scotus Eriugena and John Duns Scotus were preeminent in their day and their influence reaches across the centuries.  Alcuin brought the Gaelic Christian model of education from York to Charlemagne’s Palace School and with it literacy to Europe; John Scotus Eriugena was the philosopher theologian who brought secular and sectarian schools of thought together, ‘synthesizing the thinking of 20 centuries’; and John Duns Scotus characterized the ‘scholastics,’ the school men and their methods, that dominated Western education for five centuries.

One of the treasures of Greek philosophy is dialectics, a method of reasoning based argumentation that advances discussion between two differing viewpoints for the purpose of discovering the one truth.

Dialectics was part of the classical education known as the trivium, which incorporates grammar, logic and rhetoric, the educational foundation for the study of the quadrivium, embracing arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy.

The trivium may be seen as the foundation for the use of language in intellectual intercourse.  According to Sister Miriam Joseph in The Trivium: the Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric, grammar is the study and science of the name of things (knowledge of what we call it); logic is the study and science of the nature of things (understanding what we know about it); and rhetoric is the study and science of the meaning of things (wisdom in how we communicate it).  One way to express the trivium is the knowledge (grammar) now understood (logic) and being transmitted outwards as wisdom (rhetoric).

The point of this review is to stipulate that the object and use of words are serious matters subject to significant intellectual inquiry and advance over thousands of years.  It was vital that two people disputing a topic adhered to disciplined process for defining, agreeing on meaning and advancing discourse. Our culture could not have progressed without the application of grammar, logic and rhetoric to advancing knowledge and understanding.  The dialectical method defined the process for how educated people reasoned together in the search for truth.  They used grammar to identify a topic, logic to agree as to its meaning, and rhetoric to advance the discussion toward discernment of the wisdom of the thing, or its ultimate truth.  It seems there is a determination as to the meaning and usage of words that can be commonly recognized, accepted and agreed to in the search for truth.  Oh to know that discipline in our public discourse today!

Unfortunately, as predicted by Orwell, in too many instances today, “political language is designed to make lies sound truthful . . .  and give solidity to pure wind.”

The Cambridge Dictionary defines dictator as a “ruler with absolute unconstrained power which was obtained by force.”

Is there a dictator in power in America?  Is it even possible, for a dictator to emerge in such a Nation of popular elections and government established as a system of checks and balances?  The simple answers are of course not.  And yet, many people considered to be serious thinkers habitually employ language in ways that will never be recognized, accepted or agreed to within a reasonable search for the truth.  The way some language is used today, there can be no common understanding, and without common understandings, there can be no constructive conversation – that’s just  common sense.

Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Thomas Reid was the man that succeeded Adam Smith as the Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow.  Reid was born in Aberdeen, educated at the University of Aberdeen and ordained as a minister of the Church of Scotland.  Among other life’s works in 1764 he authored An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principle of Common Sense, founding the widely influential school of philosophical thought known as the Scottish School of Common Sense Realism

To quote Reid chronicler Benjamin Redekop, Reidan thought was the “orthodox philosophy of colleges and universities and an intellectual bedrock for the Age of Enlightenment.”  Daniel Robinson wrote in “The Scottish Enlightenment and the American Founding” that the influence of Reid’s Common Sense Realism was pervasive in the Colonies of the American Revolution, a stabilizing philosophical influence readily found in the both the philosophy of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Edinburgh educated Scotsman John Witherspoon was President of Princeton University and a signer of the Declaration of Independence.  He installed Common Sense philosophy as the central element of the curriculum at Princeton that trained numerous founding fathers, future president James Madison, and endured for over 100 years.

Central to Common Sense philosophy is the stipulation that “there are certain principles that are to be taken for granted in the common concerns of life, principles called common sense; and what is manifestly contrary to them, is what we call absurd.”

Today more than ever we need a return to common sense and abandonment of its antithesis, absurdity.  We need the common discipline to use knowledge (grammar) now understood (logic) to be transmitted outwards as wisdom (rhetoric).  We need to find common ground based on common sense to advance our dialog about our culture to arrive at ultimate truths.  The dishonest and polarizing language of our social and political discourse is appalling.  When one party uses words wholly inappropriate, words “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind,” we all lose opportunities for agreement and progress, settling for disagreement and regress.  

Our Nation was founded upon the agreement for the progress of mankind captured in these immortal words, “All men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” It was common sense realism that empowered our Founders to understand and confidently pledge ‘these truths to be self-evident.’ 

Scotus

Daniel Robinson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the American Founding, April 2007, Monist 90,

Sister Miriam Joseph, The Trivium: the Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric, 1937

photo credit:  Portrait of Thomas Reid, Sir Henry Raeburn, 1796