Essay: The Connection Between Language and History.

Copyright © 2011 Bob R Bogle



Over time, writers may develop a profound sensitivity to the limits of words.

It doesn't happen to everyone.  In fact, I suspect that relatively few novelists ever pause to consider the tender underbellies of words.  A sharp awareness of their physical strengths and weaknesses is more pronounced among poets, who are compelled to do so much with the fragile things in so little space.

George Orwell said a good deal about the subject.  He's explicit on the matter in the appendix to 1984, and of course the deliberate curtailing of language is important to the novel-proper.  "The purpose of Newspeak," George tells us, "was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. . . .It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought -- that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc -- should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words."

Orwell's fictional weaponization of language is fanciful, but it's not farcical.

Some people, inordinately attached to the physical world, proclaim the mantra "you are what you eat," but the more philosophical among us know that you are what you think.  It behooves us therefore to have a care for the thoughts we harbor inside our skulls.  Will you be a cog responding mechanically to external stimuli, in cold Newspeak bound, or will you consciously choose to interact with the wider world confronting you?  Will you assess?  Will you analyze?  Will you make value judgments?  Will you live a principled and moral life, or will you simply do as you're told?

Our thoughts are constrained by the words in which they are expressed, whether in voice, on paper, in electrons, or between our own ears.  Identity being inseparable from our thoughts, it follows that a nuanced vocabulary is desirable if one aspires to a life superior to that of a record-and-parrot automaton in a wind-up player piano world.  Orwell's warning remains urgent, if muffled by a million droning high-def TVs.  A government, or a mega-corporation, or any other power, that successfully controls what words mean or what words are available, tightens the limits on whom any individual or citizen or employee can ever possibly become.  Control the words and you control the world.

People assume words are like snap-beads.  String enough of them together in new ways and voilà! out pops a brand new concept unprecedented in human history.  Certainly playing with words this way can lead to strange new thoughts, but vanishingly few of them ever break the absurdity barrier.  Creativity is hard to sustain because it requires active, continuing effort to think differently than you yourself have thought before, putting different words in different orders, recombining concepts, searching for new, unanticipated, emergent synergies.  How many people do you know who significantly alter their vocabularies or word sequences or even fundamental thoughts when you speak with them over the course of months to years?  Not many.  This verbal inertia contributes substantially to the anticlimactic conclusions of old friendships and causes us to seek out the freshness of a new crowd.  Or a new spouse.

And words are not rocks.  The concept of the dictionary, the idée fixe, imposes the false impression that words signify concrete, frozen things, that words are stable, that their definitions are inalterable.  No, words are transitory symbols that error-ridden and short-sighted human beings attach to real-life things and actions and attributes or to abstract conceptualizations.  No word exists within a vacuum:  every word relies upon our ever-evolving understandings of the world around us.  The connotations, the secondary meanings of words, the feelings that some words give us while their synonyms don't, are in a continuing state of flux, but what is less appreciated is that the same is true of the denotations, the dictionary definitions.  I'll give some examples.

Take the word "hammer."  When you read the word here, your mind instantaneously invokes an iconic object.  You know what a hammer is.  It doesn't matter whether or not you know every physical detail of the hammer I pictured when I wrote the word down.  We all know what a hammer is, and what a hammer does.

But let's imagine that someone picks up the hammer and throws it very hard through the air, and to our surprise it whirls about, handle over head, sweeping out a great curving arc, until it boomerangs right back into the hand of the person who threw it.  Astonishing!  Unexpected!  Who knew hammers could do such things?

But that was a fluke, surely.  That's not a property of hammers.  So the hammer-thrower performs an experiment.  He flings the hammer through the air over and over, to see whether he can replicate the effect.  And every time the hammer returns to his hand.  And then he decides to see how general the phenomenon is, so he obtains twenty other hammers of different designs, repeats the experiment with all of them, and the hammers all return to his hand.

Are they all still hammers?  Clearly.  The object is unchanged, and the word is unchanged.  But our understanding of hammer-ness has forever changed.  When we read the word hammer now, the iconic image our minds dredge up is changed:  our expectations for what a hammer is and what a hammer does have changed.  The denoted meaning of the symbol has slipped.

That's an imaginary example, but consider this.  We used to listen to records, which we sometimes called albums.  And then CDs came along.  Now mp3 downloads are the preferred format for recorded music, and only sentimentalists talk about or purchase analog musical recordings etched in vinyl.  But what should we call those collections of twelve or fifteen songs which are released simultaneously by an artist as a collective whole when we purchase them as mp3s?  So far we still use the word "album" to indicate such a collection of songs, although the suitability of that vinyl-drenched word is clearly unconvincing.  The concept of "album" remains, the word "album" remains, but again, the symbol has slipped.

Words and ideas are slippery.  To an indefinable degree even one's native language is foreign because we're never fully certain of how meanings slip from one geographic region to another, and from day to day, and because no two people use the same words in exactly the same ways.  Every interpretation of meaning is surrounded by a fuzzy region of error.  Beginning to understand this uncertainty is important when trying to come to terms with a sequence of historical events, and also when trying to understand how history unfolds.  How history happens.

The American Civil War.  The words immediately provoke thoughts of slavery and Lincoln.  Iconic images and conceptualizations rush to fill our minds:  if we think of the American Civil War we think of slavery.   White supremacists and racists.  Initially we flash on white-robed members of the Ku Klux Klan, and then we might think of more modern racists who are everyday bigots who dress just like everyone else.  We've all met people who aren't even aware of their own bigotry.  Racism can be blatant and abhorrent, or it can be more subtle and morally elusive.  A white supremacist can be a skinhead inclined to violence or a random Caucasian whose working assumption, generally unexamined, is that those of another race are of inferior stock, although he has no desire to ever attend any hate-mongering rally or to act upon his bigoted beliefs in any way.  These emotionally-charged words can be a challenge to pin down.  Also, their connotations and denotations have evolved over the years.

What is the distinction between being racist and being a racist?  What does it mean to be racist today, and what did it mean to be racist a century ago?  When we say someone was racist in 1861, do we mean that in terms of 2011 racism or 1861 racism?

Prior to the Civil War, the overwhelming majority of white Americans, North and South, knew blacks to be an inferior race.  Even most abolitionists and their adherents wanted to emancipate black slaves and then expel them from the country.  This was Abraham Lincoln's early goal.  White superiority (another way of saying black inferiority, but how differently our minds respond to the word choice) was manifestly obvious and noncontroversial, an obvious fact that went unchallenged until Frederick Douglass began to gain some traction and raise consciousness.  I think "white supremacy" was almost universal, but "racism," by which I mean "race-hatred," was rare before Reconstruction.  Lincoln was a white supremacist but not a racist:  a strange notion to ponder in the present, particularly given the images that form in our minds when we read the word "Lincoln".  (And notice how the sentence "Lincoln is a white supremacist but not a racist" would have been unintelligible if uttered in 1861.)  By and large antebellum whites felt affection for their slaves, much as they did for their other pets.

Of course this is no defense of white slave owners or of the slavery system; I'm only trying to illustrate how the words and concepts that instantly flash into our minds nowadays don't apply to other times.  Like Orwell suggested, as words and meanings change, the way we think -- the way we are capable of thinking -- changes without our recognition that the changes are taking place.  Changing vocabularies brainwash societies.  It's happening to you and me every day.

Now I'm interested in this question.  How is it that one group of human beings could buy and sell individuals who were members of another group of human beings, and view them as property?  How is it that we can dehumanize humans when we can't depencilize pencils or dedogize dogs?  What's the psychology there?  I think in part the answer has to do with memes.

Memes.  What is a meme?  What is the dictionary definition?  A meme is said to be an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.  I'd like to consider two memes here that were prominent during the Civil War.  These were popular among the privates on either side.  From a Northerner you were apt to hear the explanation:  "I'm fighting to save the Union," and from the Southerner:  "I'm fighting to defend my country from Yankee invaders."  Before examining these widespread memes closer we should briefly revisit some of the prevailing conditions and events that unfolded just prior to the war's inception.

It's easy to compile a laundry list of developments leading up to the Civil War.  Important contributing events and prevailing cultural beliefs, in no particular order, included sectional variation in cultural mores; a greater desire among wealthy industrialists in the North for a free hand in the exploitation of Western resources for economic gain, and among the most wealthy and powerful in the South for perpetuating a kind of quasi-feudal aristocracy; the pressures for expansionism bound up in Manifest Destiny and the threat it posed to Congressional parity on the national level which, if upset, could lead to the North's eventual sociopolitical domination and subjugation of the South; the pro-/anti-federalism challenge; the economic implications of slavery vs the moral indignation of abolitionists and their expanding legions of converts; the widening crisis of conscience regarding the morality of slavery; the global cotton boom brought about by Eli Whitney's gin; tariffs imposed to pay down the national debt that inordinately impacted the South and the resulting nullification crisis; the ever-changing ratio of whites to blacks in the South and fear of slave revolts, actual slave revolts, and the substantive apotheosis of John Brown at Harpers Ferry; the Dred Scott case; fugitive slave laws, unsustainable and distasteful to Northerners, and hunts and roundups of runaways by Southerners and their hirelings in the North; incendiary rhetoric of the fire-eaters in the South and public consideration of secession; the Compromise of 1850, clarification of the issues brought about by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Bleeding Kansas, the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the Lincoln-Douglas debates that condensed and sharpened all relevant issues to a near white-hot focus in the political and public consciousness; the sectional fractioning of the Democratic party and the election of Abraham Lincoln; and so on.

And yet:  "I'm fighting to save the Union," Billy Yank said.  Notice that he wasn't fighting against slavery.  Slavery wasn't significant to him after secession, and indeed most Northerners declared they would never have fought to end slavery; Lincoln was always extremely sensitive to this truth.  And note too that Johnny Reb wasn't fighting to preserve slavery:  "I'm fighting to defend my country from Yankee invaders."  Something funny's going on here; something related to how we use words and the concepts they represent.  Remember what I said previously?  If we think of the American Civil War we think of slavery.  Funny how slavery wasn't foremost on the minds of the war's combatants.

These two memes were rampant in either army.  They were useful taglines to sum up in a very few short words one's personal beliefs and to immediately identify one's self  with a larger group:  one's comrades in arms.  We all do this all the time, use a few short words as proxies to substitute for deeper and more voluminous accumulations of beliefs and assumptions, and this is why I assert that every syllable stands in for a dozen words; every word stands in for a dozen sentences; every sentence stands in for a dozen paragraphs; every paragraph stands in for a dozen chapters; every chapter stands in for a dozen books; every book stands in for a dozen Alexandrian libraries.  When you say "I'm fighting to defend my country from Yankee invaders," you're saying a great deal more than you can possibly know.

A meme is a digest of deeper, unexamined thoughts, feelings and beliefs.  The soldiers who said these things were sincere, but in perpetuating and spreading these memes they were behaving exactly the way that we all usually behave when we string words together:  they were not deliberately weighing their own thoughts, experiences, and principles against the events unfolding around them.  They were aligning themselves with prevailing sentiments, parroting the memes that reinforced cohesion within their fighting units, behaving like cogs, turning mechanically in response to external stimuli.

I listed some of the precedents of the Civil War, but there are no "causes" of a phenomenon of such enormity as this war was. Probably none of the individual events enumerated above was either necessary or sufficient for the conflict. My core historiographical assumption is this: the tides of history reflect the sum-totality of the beliefs and actions of all individuals ‑‑ all individuals, not just those whose names are recorded in the archives. "The reason" for the Civil War is to be found in diverging sectional beliefs, justified or not, rational or not, and the personal experiences of all Americans during preceding generations. How all these factors are encoded as behavior-affecting memes, and how the memes are then passed on, how they spread and proliferate, which ones peter out, which ones come to dominate, which ones capture the imagination: this, I believe, provides the driving force of history.

I think it's inescapable that one factor overwhelmingly influenced which memes predominated and "led to" the Civil War.  That factor was the fact of slavery, mostly as it affected economic concerns, even if these vexations were relatively infrequently expressed in the public debate or ever crystallized in consciousness.  The fact of slavery shaped and constrained the words and the language and the ways people could talk and think until the war broke out.

Southern soldiers were never consciously fighting to protect the slave economy.  I doubt Robert E Lee ever once conceived of the defense of Virginia that way -- although no doubt some of the wealthier plantation owners did.  But I do believe that more popular expressions of the rising concerns of the day, mostly voiced in social and cultural and sentimental terms, stood in as proxies for these deeper, subconscious currents that carried the nation into war.  Furthermore, I should point out that wealthy plantation owners who were cognizant of the economic implications of rising sectional divisions over slavery in the late 1850s comprised a small minority.  The force of the thesis I'm advancing here doesn't really require anyone to be consciously aware of deeper currents of history, whether in the majority or a small minority.  But in this case one consideration should be borne in mind:  in which minority do we find these plutocrats?  They were synonymous with the most politically-connected Southerners:  those with the most pronounced vested interest in leaving the Union before it put an end to slavery.  Those best positioned to influence the course of history, if you will.  The hyperwealthy in our own time comprise an analogous minority with political influence disproportionate by far to their actual numbers.  This can be seen as being factually true without going down the road of conspiracy theories, which I reject.

The Emancipation Proclamation came as a shock and frequently as a disappointment to Northern soldiers, and it also flew in the face of the stance Lincoln had taken during his presidential campaign.  The Northern soldiers had told each other they were fighting only to preserve the Union, not to free the slaves.  But who can deny that most events within the sphere of human activity are driven by subconscious impulses at least as much as by our conscious choices and decisions?  I don't mean to suggest that white supremacist Northerners had a secret, almost Freudian desire to emancipate the slaves and that's what really compelled them to fight.  I mean that everyone was fighting because of the fact of slavery, even if no one could guess what the war's outcome would mean for blacks and whites in America.  "I'm fighting to save the Union" is a proxy meme, a kind of oversimplified and generally unexamined verbal shortcut that, while superficially true, stands in for: "I'm fighting against the slave economy that broke the Union." It's true that the Northerners didn't think that way, and would have objected vociferously to my psycho-linguistic argument; their objections are noted, but I deem those objections irrelevant to the model I'm always laboring to refine concerning how history "works." It's equally irrelevant to me that a Southerner saying:  "I'm fighting to defend my country from Yankee invaders" was unaware that this was an unconscious proxy position unwittingly substituting for:  "I'm fighting because my country's existence requires preservation of the slave economy, even if so few of us own slaves."

The implication of this crude historiographical model with which I continue to tinker must be that all of us behave in this manner all the time:  our most sincere individual, personal beliefs are better perceived to be limited and truncated insights representative or symbolic of deeper, truer psychological currents that are at work at the scale of the broader population.  Just because human beings can't plumb all those deep currents says nothing about whether those occult currents truly exist. . . .as I suspect they do.