Making America Think and Speak Again

 From The Aspen Beat:

Seventy-five years ago, George Orwell observed in “Politics and the English Language” that our language “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier to have foolish thoughts.”

Our culture now appears to have interpreted this as a desideratum. A “mandate,” as it were.

Apart from murdering the thousand-year-old words “women” and “mother” (no doubt because of their unsavory associations with such things as service, sacrifice, endurance and — worst of all — family), personhood is being reduced to bare-bones biological functionality.

Whereas 20^th century feminists thundered that “Biology is not destiny,” today’s Warriors of Woke have thrown in the towel. They agree that biology is indeed destiny, to the point that they’re willing to mutilate genitals to construct the false biologies they believe are necessary for their chosen destinies. They alter male and female hormones to match. They even do this to children.

The notion that their problem is not between their legs but between their ears is heretical to their wokeness.

Language, of course, cannot be fully controlled. Being just as organic as we are, it’s always mutating, despite the best efforts of lexicographers, editors, grammarians and the current priestly caste of social media censors to corral it. Generally speaking, a civilization functions and even flourishes when the gatekeepers of its thoughts and words find the right balance between laissez-faire and orthodoxy. When they don’t, we have “foolish thoughts” and slovenly language — words allowed to evolve so far from their meanings that the entire culture they express becomes unmoored.

Every contributing cause of our diminished social cohesion can be linked to words run amok. Look at what has become of the word “justice” in the leftists’ crusade for the “social” kind. Justice for the last 4,000 years, at least, has been the impartial assessment of responsibility and remedy between individuals where one has wronged the other. Once “justice” takes on a plural aspect – when it becomes an assessment between groups of people, it invariably becomes unjust because not all members of one group committed the wrong at issue, and not all members of the other group are victims of that wrong. It becomes not justice, but an exercise in group guilt and group reparations.

That’s fine with the left, because they aren’t out for justice anyway. That’s just their branding. What they’re really out for is class struggle. They don’t want justice; they want to bring down The Man who denied them the success they think they deserved in life.

It is instructive to note that in The Gospels none of the socially disfavored individuals — Mary Magdalene, the Samaritan woman at the well, the Canaanite woman who likens herself to a dog come to eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table, the chronically bleeding woman who reaches out to touch the hem of Jesus’s garment, even the Roman centurion who deems himself unworthy to have Jesus enter his home — none of these approach Jesus thinking that they are owed anything. That’s why he lifts them up. Indeed, the only characters who might be said to be pursuing “social justice” are Judas and Barabbas, and that says it all.

But even though Jesus never preached social justice, that hasn’t kept what remains of his church on earth from adopting social justice agendas — on behalf of immigrants (the less legal, the better) and that LBGTQ “rainbow coalition” that has infiltrated The Church from stem to stern. “Love thy neighbor” has now mutated into “Love those constituencies that need to feel good about themselves.” Or maybe it’s “Love those constituencies that make me feel good about myself for loving them.” (Read more.)

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