The German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”. Whilst other philosophers may argue about this (after all, it’s what philosophers do), there’s no doubt that in order to communicate with each other, we need a shared – and also varied – vocabulary.
The same notion was later explored by George Orwell, both in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and his lesser-known, but equally important essay Politics and the English Language. I’ve commented elsewhere on how expressions from Orwell’s novel have become commonplace in our language and culture, but in addition to coining new expressions, Orwell was also concerned about how the reduction of our language to a controlled set of words could have a detrimental effect on the expression of thoughts and ideas.
The war on woke
Those who have been closely following the news from across the Atlantic, will be aware of Donald Trump’s ban on certain ‘woke’ words from appearing on federal government websites. Among the words and phrases he objects to, are ‘clean energy’, ‘racial identity’ and even ‘women’. Naturally, this has caused some consternation and confusion – not least, because many of the terms have more than just the ‘woke’ meaning that is being targeted. There was a bit of schadenfreude in some quarters at the realisation that references to the Enola Gay aircraft had been flagged for removal under his new edict.
Ironically, on his first day in office, Trump had signed an executive order titled ‘Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship’. The order declared, “Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society”. The main source of his ire appears to be a social media crackdown on the spreading of misinformation rather than a genuine desire to allow people to express their views – political or otherwise – freely.
Even on our own side of the Atlantic, certain politicians and the mainstream media have been vocal in their support for ‘free speech’, bemoaning the so-called ‘cancellation’ of some words by the ‘woke’. Nigel Farage recently gave a speech to CPAC in Washington DC, in which he claimed that “We should be able to say whatever the hell we want”, going on to complain that “in my country you can’t say anything or you might get put in prison”. Fortunately for Nige, help was at hand: enter that well-known hero of free speech – Elon Musk!
Censorship as a political act
It would be easy to write this off as another off-the-wall or irrational decree from a president who appears to specialise in bizarre ideas. However, censorship of language has long been a political act. In the 19th century, the (essentially English) British government tried to prevent children in Wales from speaking Welsh. Similar acts were prevalent in many countries across the British Empire – witness the restoring of original place-names post-colonisation – Mumbai, back from Bombay, or Dun Laoghaire from Kingston, for example.
The extreme – albeit fictional – example of linguistic censorship is Newspeak – the official language in Nineteen Eighty-Four. One of Orwell’s characters, Syme, explains:
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten…”
Much of Orwell’s views on language change could be seen as hyperbolic – he was criticised both in his own time and more recently by what some saw as his over-pessimistic view of the future. His analysis of language as a form of control, however, is not without precedent – as Wittgenstein had previously observed, and the colonisers who tried to ban native languages had practised.
When we read about Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America and the insistence of the White House press secretary that this is the “correct” name, it’s not hard to see something Orwellian in this chilling reject-the-evidence-of-your-eyes-and-ears moment – particularly as expulsion from press conferences was threatened for the news agencies that didn’t use it.
Doublethink
By restricting the use of language, Trump is following a well-trodden path, one that is about control. By re-shaping the ‘official’ language of the federal agencies, he is censoring what can and can’t be said by government employees. Taken to the extreme conclusion, this could result in the erasure of identities and the limitation of certain human rights – after all, how can you discuss people, ideas and principles if you don’t have the language to do so? It’s also worth noting that by removing the use of certain words from official documents, he is also fundamentally altering what source information is available to AI, which will gradually also change the results produced. Trump is inhabiting a contradictory position. He is claiming to end federal censorship, yet he is enacting his own form of censorship.
To return to Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four, there is a word that perfectly exemplifies Donald Trump’s championing of free speech, while simultaneously attempting to restrict it: that word is ‘Doublethink’.
