Let's All Talk Nonsense, Okay?

  by Byron McAllister

Years ago, a movement known as “General Semantics” tried to discourage the a use of words or phrases that appear to have real-world meaning, but in fact don't mean a thing. Without going into the arguments for their position, nor, I suppose, those against it, let's discuss a particular form of relatively meaningless dialogue that can act as sort of a safety net.

When an American politician ends a speech (and they all do; if there are exceptions I haven't seen any of them) with the phrase “God bless America ,” what does he or she mean? Hardly ever is any specific action of God being called for. The politician never means “God, please get our nation out of the trouble people like me have gotten us into.” Nor, “God, please send the national treasury lots of money.” Nor, “God, please bring happiness to every single American, including those who didn't vote for me.” After all, the expression isn't the religious analogue of a letter to Santa Claus. But what does he or she really mean?

I think the meaning is, “I've discovered an expression that people like to hear politicians utter, but all the other politicians have discovered it, too; so I'm afraid to leave it off when I finish speaking, just in case I get accused of atheism.” You may say that's cynical, but would it be less cynical to say the expression, used at the end of a political speech, means nothing at all?

Because I don't want to make any reader feel bad, I have to leave out a wealth of what appear to me to be good examples of “safety-net speech.” Because religion (yours, not mine, of course) and politics (your party, not mine, of course) are full of them, but people accustomed to using them as if they meant something tend to resent the suggestion that although they are following well-established rules about what ought to be said, those rules lead to a plethora of high class phrases and even long texts in ways that are strictly conventional: they don't follow the more low-brow custom of using language as a device for communicating about the real world.

Still, one gets nowhere by refusing to offend anybody at all, so I'll tread on a toe or two now. “Patriots,” for example, insist that, in this country, speech is free, i.e. not subject to restrictions. As a relative proposition, this has considerable real-world meaning, and is probably true; as an absolute it also has real-world meaning and is certainly false. Those who insist on it usually intend it in the latter sense, but fall back on the former idea if challenged with facts; however, the challenger is subject to ridicule, perhaps even persecution, since he or she is using speech in a manner that the community tends to find offensive. During my teaching career, if I had decided to insert anti-capitalist or anti-religious dogma into my mathematics lessons, ways would have been found to fire me: speech just isn't that free in a university classroom. On the other hand, the claim that we have freedom of speech is an example of safety-net locution. It's one of the things we have a right to say and people aren't supposed to find fault with the claim.

We have a number of linguistic conventions of this sort, such as, “God is on our side,” or the more apologetic, “Let's be sure we are on God's side,” that, in times of international conflict are desirable, safe phrases to recite. The two expressions form a small sub-network of a larger network of patriotic and religious formulations that in times of stress it may be comforting to go around saying. People in other nations—yes, even our enemies—do the same, though perhaps not always in terms familiar to us. Currently we are having problems with people who formulate it “God is great,” but they have the same idea in mind. And such phrases have an associated network of supporting phrases and linguistic conventions that connect with them without necessarily ever subjecting them to scrutiny as to whether they are entirely true and justifiable. How would anybody go about determining—for certain—whether God is really on our side, or even whether we are really on God's side?

In politico-economic terms, similar principles apply. Trained economists know, at least more or less, what they mean by their “law of diminishing returns,” their faith in “market forces,” their belief in the “regulation of prices dictated by supply and demand,” in “absolute free enterprise,” or even in “that government is best which governs least,” as well as in many others, but when these phrases leave the domain of experts who are aware, to some extent, of their domain of validity and are bandied about by the general public, they have an inexorable tendency to rise into the air and hover too far above the facts of life to have any connection with them, often dragging similar phrase with them. They turn into a network of “econ-speak” indicating that the speaker thinks maybe he likes Capitalism (despite not being quite certain what it is) but not indicating much else.

The Marxists have the same trouble with their pet phrases, by the way: “dictatorship of the proletariat,” to Joe Communist (if such Joes haven't all been wiped out by the disintegration of the Soviet Union) is an expression that runs around with supporting phrases (“comes the revolution,” “the end justifies the means,” “power to the people,” etc.) that may mean something to the intellectual student of that economic theory, but, to the lay user of the terms is merely a way of speaking with no very significant relationship to the real world.

There are enough people out there who are willing to commit violent acts as a symbolic form of denial that their way of talking is merely a way of talking, not connected with facts, that it would be a bad idea to list too many further examples. You may not “know who you are,” but you know who many others are, and it's up to you to observe, and only very judiciously to comment on how feeble an opinion becomes when it is unsupported by reality—especially if it differs from your own.