There are – most people would agree, and some of them aggressively so – more important things than words. Still, words are important enough, if one reflects that those who have been deprived of them from birth never – for better or worse – become part of the human community. Orwell – via Newspeak – suggests another way in which they are important – in the manipulation of thought, and through thought, behaviour.
In a 1944 essay entitled 'The Death of Words', C.S. Lewis deals with what may be a natural – or at least unconscious – form of the erosion of meaning in language. This is the transition of a word from having a descriptive meaning, to having a purely judgemental meaning. This can happen in two ways – the word can become pejorative, or it can become the opposite, which Lewis refers to as "eulogistic".
The pejorative shift is more common:
It is certainly true that nearly all our terms of abuse were originally terms of description; to call a man 'villain' defined his legal status long before it came to denounce his morality.
However:
But I doubt if that is the whole story. There are, indeed, few words which were once insulting and are now complimentary – 'democrat' is the only one that comes readily to mind. But surely there are words that have become merely complimentary – words which once had a definable sense and which are now nothing more than noises of vague approval? The clearest example is the word 'gentleman'. This was once (like 'villain') a term which defined a social and heraldic fact. The question whether Snooks was a gentleman was almost as soluble as the question whether he was a barrister or Master of Arts. The same question, asked forty years ago (when it was asked very often), admitted of no solution. The word had become merely eulogisitic… This is one of the ways in which words die.
He goes on to say:
The vocabulary of flattery and insult is continually enlarged at the expense of the vocabulary of definition. As old horses go to the knacker's yard, or old ships to the breakers, so words in their last decay go to swell the enormous list of synonyms for good and bad.
With this in mind, I wonder what it says about our current age that the word 'anti-science' is now used so often in certain quarters as merely pejorative – a way of dismissing an argument – and that 'scientific' is used merely to mean 'reliable' (with 'unscientific' to mean 'unreliable'). Is this a trend in which all that is 'unscientific' merely becomes illegitimate and unthinkable, with 'scientific' (following the eulogistic usage of such words as 'Christian' and 'American') being simply the undescriptive, rallying flag of the realm that is (we are compelled to believe) all there is?
Lewis's essay ends as follows:
And when, however reverently, you have killed a word you have also, as far as in you lay, blotted from the human mind the thing that word originally stood for. Men do not long continue to think what they have forgotten how to say.
Karl writes:The big danger presently in regard to the dominance of scientific discourse is that anything private, subjective or individual is dismissed as ultimately ‘false’, ‘invalid’, or ‘unreal’. Only that which is affirmed by the scientists and ‘capable of being reproduced in laboratory conditions’ is deemed to possess genuine existence. This form of thinking is highly dangerous, as it can surely only lead to the rule of the technocrats and materialists. Hang on, what am I on about? This is what’s happened and seems to be accelerating at a terrifying rate.
I’m sure it won’t come as a surprise that I agree. Stephen Hawking recently moved a piece on this whole chessboard by declaring that “philosophy is dead”. Curious, I asked a friend who is actually a real philosopher what he thought of Hawking’s statement. This is a friend that I know to be very keen on science. I hope he won’t mind me paraphrasing him here. He said (from memory): “My first reaction is, ‘What would he know about it?’ I’ve read all of A Brief History of Time, and despite his obvious eminence as a scientist, he remains naive regarding the philosophical significance of scientific truths.”My own response to the statement was more like: “Scientists are becoming more and more blatant in telling us not to think for ourselves.”George Monbiot said something interesting… that I noticed… that he wished people were “more materialistic”. He was talking from an environmentalist point of view. My knee-jerk reaction was that this was an annoying thing to say, but actually, I’m increasingly in sympathy with it in the following way: I think that what I commonly refer to as materialism, which I very much dislike, has built into it an actual contempt for the matter that it insists is the only reality. The actual insistence on matter being “the only reality” is not a mark of respect – but of contempt. This is why disposability is built into the whole materialist ethos of our age. The secret keynote is that people want to feel empowered in relation to matter in a kind of master-slave relationship. But the ethos is constantly undermining itself, hence the need for an iron mask of rationality to hide the ever more distorted face of power-hungriness beneath.
Karl writes:The funny thing is how few hardcore materialists are prepared to acknowledge the real consequences of their philosophy. They’re happy going around pricking what they believe to be others’ illusions, but yet they don’t seem to realise that if materialism is true, then their own lives, plans and projects are as ephemeral, vain and possibly even more meaningless than everyone else’s. John Gray said somewhere that this is due to arrogance: evolution has produced THEM, which must mean it’s special.
Since this blog entry quotes Lewis at length, I’ll quote him again here, from his essay, ‘Is Theology Poetry?’. The following delineates almost exactly thoughts I have had on the subject to do with the philosophical implications of materialism:Long before I believed Theology to be true I had already decided that the popular scientific picture at any rate was false. One absolutely central inconsistency ruins it; it is the one we touched on a fortnight ago. The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears. Unless we can be sure that reality in the remotest nebula or the remotest part obeys the thought-laws of the human scientist here and now in his laboratory – in other words, unless Reason is an absolute – all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion is based. The difficulty is to me a fatal one; and the fact that when you put it to many scientists, far from having an answer, they seem not even to understand what the difficulty is, assures me I have not found a mare’s nest but detected a radical disease in their whole mode of thought from the beginning.
Scientism is a cult; this is clear. Utilitarianist arguments are the smoke screens hastily deployed to conceal the shame of their orgiastic widget-worship.
I don’t really have much, if anything, to add. I feel like the only possible persuasive aspect of scientific materialism is a circular one – that so many people are persuaded, and their persuasion carries conviction. But that persuasion is in itself an enigma. I was wondering about this just today – why is it that such an untenable view of things has taken root so unshakably in so many people? I may be wrong, but I feel that, partly, at least, there is the idea of normality. If normality can be, as it were, physically verified through reason, then those who verfiy can reassure themselves that they are sane and they don’t have to worry about anything. In that aspect, at least, it’s a worship of mediocrity.
Anonymous writes:Karl, not to be rude, but societies for a long time have had class inequality; a superior and inferior class. It is class inequality that leads to elitism, not this form of thinking that you call “dangerous.” Might an atheist call people who believe in a spiritual being a “dangerous” form of thinking too? After all, there have existed theocracies, have there not?But my point here is to not argue that any of this is dangerous. My point is that what might lead to a technocracy is also essentially the same thing that leads to a theocracy. The elitist class might use god, science, or some other ideology to keep their differential advantage over the subservient class, it doesn’t really matter, the elitist are just interested in power and ego. I don’t think Stephen Hawking really cares about science as much as he cares as being perceived as a scientist by others. All the attention has gone to his head, that’s probably why he makes such grandiose announcements like “Philosophy is dead! I, The God of Science, have spoken!” Okay, he didn’t say that last part, but you know he was probably thinking it. đ
Originally posted by anonymous: I don’t think Stephen Hawking really cares about science as much as he cares as being perceived as a scientist by others. All the attention has gone to his head, that’s probably why he makes such grandiose announcements like “Philosophy is dead! I, The God of Science, have spoken!” Okay, he didn’t say that last part, but you know he was probably thinking it. đ This is from The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, by Alan Watts:It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odd – uncanny and highly improbable. G.K. Chesterton once said that it is one thing to be amazed at a gorgon or a griffin, creatures which do not exist; but it is quite another and much higher thing to be amazed at a rhinocerous or a giraffe, creatures which do exist and look as if they don’t. This feeling of universal oddity includes a basic and intense wondering about the sense of things. … Ludwig Wittgenstein and other modern “logical” philosophers have tried to suppress this question by saying that it has no meaning and ought not to be asked. Most philosophical problems are to be solved by getting rid of them, by coming to the point where you see that such questions as “Why this universe?” are a kind of intellectual neurosis, a misuse of words in that the question sounds sensible but is actually meaningless as asking “Where is this universe?” when the only things that are anywhere must be somewhere inside the universe. The task of philosophy is to cure people of such nonsense. Wittgenstein, as we shall see, had a point there. Nevertheless, wonder is not a disease. Wonder, and its expression in poetry and the arts, are among the most important things which seem to distinguish men from other animals, and intelligent and sensitive people from morons.Whether or not Wittgenstein “had a point”, I would like to second the assertion that wonder is not a disease. I am more inclined to believe that whatever suppresses wonder and leads us to believe wonder is a disease, is the real disease. I’ve noticed that prominent scientists like to protest that they like wonder as much as the next man and that, in fact, science is the truest source of all wonder. And yet scientists seem very attached to the idea of ‘explanation’. My feeling is that Hawking’s pronouncement that philosophy is dead is one sign of this. In scientific-materialist arguments against religion, for instance, we find the attitude that religion was primarily a means of explaining the world to humans, and an inadequate one. There seems to be little comprehension of the idea that religion was primarily not a way of explaining anything, but a means of living, relating and so on. To make my meaning clearer, I shall illustrate with Douglas Adams’s joke about the meaning of life being 42. This is a memorable and widely known joke precisely because it sums up this situation with some insight and economy. 42 may well be a technical ‘explanation’ of life (or turn out to be) in some way. Let’s say that all life has a signature of 42. But it completely fails to answer the question of what the meaning of life might be, because it ignores and does not satisfy the sense of wonder. Any answer to the question “What is the meaning of life?” must satisfy that sense of wonder. Now, of course, there are many who think the whole question of “the meaning of life” is juvenile. On the contrary, I think, at the very worst, it is simply a juvenile phrasing of the essential concerns of that sense of wonder, but maybe it’s not even juvenile at all. Beside which, I’d prefer a juvenile human to a very mature zombie.I actually find it somewhat odd that Adams came up with this joke, considering what I know of his other views, and I suspect that he harboured a secret or not so secret belief that the real punchline is that we should be satisfied with 42.Hmmm. I’m not.
I was thinking about this again today, and remembered a bit from the end of LĂ -Bas:’And just to think that this century of positivism and atheism has overthrown everything, everything except Satanism; Satanism has not been forced to yield an inch.’