Democratic Abstractions
A recent essay over at Quillette observed that "The near assassination of Donald Trump was a brazen attack on democracy." Silly me, I thought it was a brazen attack on Donald Trump. Unless, of course, one takes Trump to be the living incarnation of democracy, in which case shooting at one would be shooting at both, but I suspect that the writer would not incline that way.
Writing about good writing is about as easy as dancing about good dancing. One runs the risks of expressing badly the need to express oneself well. But I think good political or philosophical writing, like good comedy or a good novel, understands that the particular and the concrete should always take precedent over the general and the abstract. Evoking images gets the reader’s attention and keeps ideas connected to reality. In politics, we have to navigate the tension between too much particularity, which makes it impossible to put together policies, and too much generalization, which obscures reality.
George Orwell understood this well in his famous essay on “Politics and the English Language.” Orwell reminds us that bad politics results from bad thinking and bad thinking results from bad use of language. When we write too much we often succumb to the temptation to result to verbal shortcuts – clichés, jargon, or other modes of lazy usage. The next thing we know we write absurdities, such as confusing shooting at a person with shooting at an idea.
The writer would no doubt protest that he was working metaphorically, but the metaphor breaks down when we consider that “democracy” is not a thing, and therefore not subject to being attacked. One of the most challenging problems we have in America today results from our misuse of the word “democracy.” Mainly, when someone uses the word they mean it to refer to their own complex of political beliefs, which are understood to be threatened by a contrary set of political beliefs. The incidents of violence lose their force and even their meaning when they lose their specificity. Orwell wrote:
A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration.All too often as I read the papers I find myself wondering what the author actually means, which is often different from what the author intends. Many a writer, Orwell opined, “either has a meaning and cannot express it” or is “indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not.” Writers often suffer from a lack of attention, both to the world around and that as mediated through the written word. Too often, he thought, we let our words choose our meaning rather than let our meanings choose our words.
Why do we do this? One reason may be that we are writing in haste or indolently. “A scrupulous writer,” he continued, “in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?” Especially in this age where we add our dropper of thought to the flood of words in a world that emphasizes the now , the temptation is to write quickly, and thus not attend to every sentence in the way Orwell suggests. Who has time for that? The result is a surfeit of bad writing that makes a politics already noted for its distance and lack of transparency even more so.
As pervasive as laziness is, too often, Orwell feared, we write badly because we are trying to defend what is otherwise indefensible. This can mean we cover for acts that have no moral legitimacy, or we engage in a sleight-of-hand designed to distract the reader from what we really mean. What function, for example, does the word “our” play when people say that “our” democracy is under attack? Are we supposed to assume we know who the “our” are? Or is the speaker playing on our assumptions while slyly letting us know that it is the democracy that his or her party possesses? “When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia" -- all of which will wrap themselves sanctimoniously in some sort of moral crusade.
Good writing appeals to the mind’s eye. Its use of concrete images stokes the imagination and engages the reader. The writer, having closely attended to the real world, can now direct the reader to the elements composing the world that they share with one another. The minute we resort to abstractions we draw ourselves out of this shared world into one of shadows and airy apparitions.
In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising, you probably hunt about till you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Orwell comes close to arguing that all abstract words are meaningless, and not without cause. Trump is a fascist? How about you define fascism for me and then describe for me in what specific ways he matches any historic description of a fascist. Our “democracy” is under attack? Define democracy, how it is under attack, and why this is a problem. Your rights are being violated? What, exactly, is a right, and where does it come from? Our constant use of stock phrases and ideas makes political discussion more difficult, not less so. My wife and I have successfully navigated 40 years of marriage without once making a rights claim against one another. Do we really need that argot in our politics? Can we honestly say, at this time, that these concepts help us navigate our differences?
Only after we attend to real things can we attend to verbal meanings. Our usage too often both reflects and intensifies our partisan allegiances, and we use words as cudgels to bludgeon our opponents. Orwell believed that “one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy.”
Abstractions, from the Latin for “to draw away,” allow us to take an element of a thing or event and to remove that element and turn it into something not real in the sense that it admits of direct perception or experience. It becomes “lofty.” It loses its connectedness to other things and relations. Edmund Burke, the Irish statesman and philosopher, warned that “the hocus-pocus of abstraction” distracts us away from concrete goods and prepares us for the performance of otherwise indefensible deeds. This is especially true when our goals become so removed from the actually achievable that they can be used to justify all means to accomplish impossible ends. “But I cannot stand forward,” Burke wrote, “and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions, or human concerns, on a simple view of the object as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction.”
He invited us to think about “democracy” in the most concrete way. The relationship between liberty and its restraints will vary with time and circumstances, and thus “cannot be settled upon any abstract rules” that admit of universal application and understanding. Furthermore, once we create these abstractions, we often attribute agency to them, or personify them. Thus we can say something like “liberalism destroys families,” or “conservatism foments hate.” These labels refer to no real things, and thus cannot be capable of purposeful action. The Jacobins, Burke thought, leaders of the radical wing of the French Revolution, used “abstractions and personifications” to justify the murder of their political opponents. Orwell’s ruminations remind us that we should distrust abstractions because they divorce us from practical experience and particular circumstances. They oversimplify the complexity of life. Human beings, being complex, cannot have a government that is simple, but it does have one that has to be properly suited to the details of life.
Tocqueville feared that abstraction at the conceptual level would lead to greater centralization at the administrative level. As the centralized government gets increasingly granular it also begins to take over the tasks of otherwise responsible persons, particularly in their associations with one another. We become less dependent on each other and more dependent on the government. “In this way,” Tocqueville claimed, “it accustoms men to making a complete and continuous abstraction of their will, to obeying, not once and on one point, but in everything and every day. Then, not only does it subdue them by force, but it also captures them by their habits; it isolates them and then, within the common mass, catches hold of them, one by one.” And calls itself democracy.
Plato thought political dialogue had to employ both logos (word, reason) and mythos (stories). Sometimes our politics devolve to too much mythos. We like to tell a story about this or that particular person and invite the reader to extrapolate from that often benign and sympathetic example a general problem and concomitant policies. Our feelings engaged, we forget to think clearly about the nature of the assumed problem and whether it admits of solution at all. Other times we employ too much logos: a tendency to generalization with its instincts to uniformity while ignoring the idiosyncrasies and particularities that make the world interesting. In political discussion, mythos ought to be brought into the service of logos and mythos ought to stir logos to move out of its sterile precision.
Anyone attentive to the our politics knows, however, that a person with a compelling story can defeat a hundred social scientists and policy wonks armed with charts and graphs. This is why our political writing has become largely formulaic: begin with a story and engage the reader's sympathies, assume the case indicates a wide-spread phenomenon, and prepare the reader for a host of accompanying policies, without even having to say what they are. But worse is our tendency to myth-make, to use abstractions to alarm and shame and to justify an unlimited exercise of power. Mythos must have its say, but logos must remain in the saddle.
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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