Alexander Rojavin ’20, Law & Public Policy Scholar
President Biden assumes leadership of a nation facing a murderer’s row of crises, most of which he identified in a clear-eyed manner at his inauguration: an only-worsening pandemic, “growing inequity,” systems grappling with a legacy of discrimination, a suffering economy, a faltering education system, and a global arena that has spent four years without a particularly involved America. But President Biden also acknowledged that foremost among these, the most insidious crisis underlying, enabling, and intensifying all of the others is that of disinformation. “We face an attack on our democracy and on truth,” began his laundry list of existential problems, correctly identifying truth and linguistic commonality as integral to the workings of a democracy.
Voltaire famously wrote, “If you wish to converse with me, first define your terms.” It is no secret that our ability to hold a dialogue as a country is presently strained. With humanities education being deemphasized, our national discourse has been degenerating for decades, and 2016 served as the apotheosis of our communication breakdown. We have spent the last four years in a quasi-apocalyptic communicative wasteland, desperately looking for oases in a desert stalked by mutant “alternative facts” and rabid whataboutism. A contributing factor is certainly ideological polarization and tribalism. Another is the increasing siloing of news consumption. But one key factor that has gone largely overlooked is not merely that different political tribes are inhabiting parallel realities—they are using language devoid of any points of tangency.
Different tribemembers can find no conceptual valence between each other, because the language that they use is so amorphous (to them) that they can use the same word and have it denote diametrically opposed things. What is a progressive? How is a moderate different from a centrist? Why does “socialism” mean dozens of different things when Merriam-Webster provides three distinct definitions? The ideological tribalism in our society has therefore been fueled in large part by a disintegration of communal meaning, which exacerbates the U.S. information space’s vulnerabilities to external disinformation campaigns and inhibits the government’s ability to, well, govern.
For this reason, it is crucial that our leaders, with President Biden, his Cabinet, and Congressional leadership at the helm, diligently defragment the language we use a nation on a whole slew of subjects in order to reconstitute and immunize a common vocabulary. Rhetoric is everything, and it is vital that things are called by their names, that different concepts are not conflated in every national conversation—on topics ranging from the environment to Covid, from systemic racism to national security.
A few years back, I watched a news segment on different people’s ability to explain some basic concepts. The most illustrative moment was when a girl in her late teens was asked, “What is capitalism?” “Capitalism is evil,” she replied, slightly rolling her eyes. How could someone not know what capitalism is? Her confidence faded only slightly when pressed to provide an actual definition; in a testament to our education system, she was unable to do so.
This is symptomatic of a crippling problem—a dearth of critical thought brought about by the degeneration of meaning. “Capitalism is evil” is the language of slogans. It is the language of populism and demagoguery that is as endemic on the left as it is on the right and as endemic on the right as it is on the left. People calling for an end to capitalism are as rhetorically irresponsible as those drawing salt rings around their homes to ward off socialism, because their self-expression is often devoid of nuanced understanding of the concepts against which they are railing. This, in turn, conditions others to communicate in the same manner. And that, in turn, cheapens an already-weakened public discourse, foments polarization through “othering,” and thereby limits people’s ability to understand each other and the government, because where one person sees a mask mandate as a public health issue and another sees it as a breach of the First Amendment, we have a problem.
President Biden faces an intangible challenge. How to get the country, if not speaking as one, then at least using a common vocabulary? This cannot be achieved through legislation or policymaking alone. While there are indisputably federal laws circuitously governing the use of language that must be reformed—think Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and social media liability laws generally, and the Foreign Agents Registration Act—perhaps the two most powerful things the President and his team can do are (1) lead through example, as they began to do on January 20th, when President Biden delivered a series of grammatical and cogent speeches and White House Press Secretary Psaki resumed the regular, civil conduct of press briefings; and (2) provide more support for humanities education and the arts. As Music Director of the Philadelphia Orchestra Yannick Nézet-Séguin wrote in his open letter to the new administration, “the arts…assist with healing [and] with self-expression,” reminding the President of his own words: “The future, who we are, lies in the arts.” Empowering the NEA and the NEH, reconstituting the PCAH, and making clear the administration’s recognition of humanities’ importance to cultural and linguistic reintegration by appointing a Cabinet-level official to foster the arts nationwide would be significant steps in empowering us to overcome the aforementioned challenge, no matter how intangible it may be.
Per Voltaire, we must “define [our] terms” if we are to have any hope of conversing with one another fruitfully. The President’s team must employ and engender the responsible and precise use of language in its pursuit of national realignment, discouraging and highlighting any transgressions regardless of where on the political spectrum they occur. Through policymaking, example, and the elevation of the humanities, Joe Biden can take a decisive series of steps on his path to becoming a President of Healing, mending our broken national discourse, and immunizing us not only from the Covid pandemic, but the pandemic of disinformation.