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Linguistic clarity may be essential to moral
clarity, as a subhead on yesterday's (9-6-14) Times' OpEd reminds us, but it's so hard, so hard, to maintain it.
As soon as you leave your neutral academic classroom and join (or admit
that you are already a member of) a tribe you feel the muck sticking to your words.
I think I felt it when I recognized my membership in
the Israeli tribe, through my attachment to the Judeo-Christian tribe of
Western history (Post 225). As
soon as the Egyptian generals overthrew the democratically elected Egyptian
government I began to fear clarity in describing their deed. Why? Because the generals would, in a pinch, help Israel and not
her enemies. (As, when the pinch
came in Gaza they did, shutting off tunnels that the elected Brotherhoood
president, I feel sure, would not have shut off..)
So, anticipating that, what do I want of the words
describing what the generals have done.
Certainly not clarity. This
is the world, where words serve purposes.
Here the purpose, Israel's security, demands obfuscation. So I, the lord of accuracy in my
Composition classroom, wince at the accurate use of the word "coup"
for the action that put the generals where they are. "Couldn't we have a little muck on this one?"
If there were a tribal membership that Chrystia
Freeland, author of the OpEd piece, might discover in herself it would be,
through her mother, the tribe of liberal Ukrainians, with clan connections to
the tribe of her father, the Liberal Party of Canada, through which Freeland
has now become a member of the Canadian Parliament.
Freeland's voice in the beginning of her piece could
be that of a colleague speaking in the next classroom. She speaks up strongly for clear
language, and exposure of obfuscation.
She reproaches Western leaders and journalists for their reluctance to
use plain terms. Russia's actions
clearly constitute "an invasion," the term Ukraine's cyberactivists
use, and are not "an incursion," the term favored by President Obama
and accepted by journalists. She
appeals, as we all do, to George Orwell's faulting of slovenly language:
"that it makes it easier to have foolish thoughts."
But what would we hear from that classroom if the
rest of her piece were before it?
Here's the central paragraph:
We may decide we lack the
will to stop this [invasion] or to more forcefully help Ukrainians to stop it,
but in making that decision we need to be clear about what is going on. The distinction between lies and truth
matter here because this conflict started with the Ukrainian people's revolt
against authoritarianism and in favor of the liberal rights and
responsibilities Ukrainians call European values. In the Ukrainian-Russian conflict, moral clarity is
essential, but to get there we need linguistic clarity, too: Ukrainians decided
to build a democracy at home and make a trade deal with Europe; Russia invaded.
Well-instructed
students will go to the central statement that "Ukrainians decided to
build a democracy" and the implication that Russians interrupted that
building. How does it fit what's being
described? A little research will
show the student that Ukraine had a
democracy. Their president was
voted into office by a majority of the Ukrainian people in an election the
international community found to be well within "democratic
standards." What else is democracy, neutrally defined? And that president was removed by
action in the streets. The word
"interruption" fits that, and Russia had nothing to do with it. What Russia is interrupting now is an interruption of democracy.
I don't know what other academics will make of
this. I suspect that, from the hum
I hear, over in political philosophy they're retheorizing faith in the common
man. How can you trust the common
man when in the Ukraine he overwhelmingly elects a mug like Yanukovich and
then so overwhelmingly rejects him that he, the common man, can't hold himself
back long enough to vote him out in the next election? Same challenge in Egypt. Give the common man a decent election,
finally, and the winners are a bunch of fanatics.
I have no doubt that Chrystia Freedland would make a
good Composition teacher. Her
heart, like mine, is in the right place.
She wants words to connect accurately with the world as it is. But she is as much a tribe member as I
am, and you can see it in her words about the Ukraine.
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