Sunday, September 26, 2004

The 'Liberal' Epithet

Orwell wrote an illuminating essay in 1946 “Politics and the English Language” about how the meaning of words can be changed and in so doing can corrupt thought. The assault on the term ‘liberal’ occurs to me to be a glaring instance in our own times.

Conservatives speak with outrage and indignation at anything that appears ‘liberal’ to them and the context and tone with which they use the term liberal itself speak volumes. The word ‘liberty’ which to me evokes thoughts of rights from the state and freedom to seek opportunity appears to conservatives to be the very bane of humankind. So why are conservative commentators so venomously attacking the word liberal? It appears Machiavellian to me that conservatives attack the very strength of their adversary: the universal legitimacy of freedoms that liberty enshrines, since liberty assaults their own narrowly defined ‘values,’ which should be identified for what they are, an assault on free will. The same liberty that stands for understanding, tolerance and compassion is an assault to the conservative orthodoxy that is judgmental and meddlesome.

Conservatives used to vulgarize the term using epithets to modify it, for instance ‘knee-jerk liberal,’ or ‘bleeding-heart liberal’ and more recently ‘Massachusetts liberal.’ Quite outrageously, ‘liberal’ itself has become the epithet in recent times with usages like ‘the most liberal senator,’ or ‘the liberal hospital in Berkeley.’ Pray how can a hospital be characterized as liberal?

The words liberal and liberty are so routinely abused that I frequently have to look it up in a dictionary to remind myself of its true meaning and I hope you will spend a few minutes reviewing it for yourself:
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=liberty

When I attempt to infer the meaning that conservatives attribute to liberal, I find that they either mean ‘gravy train’ or a catchall term for anything that violates their particular flavor of orthodoxy. (In the hospital instance, the speaker intended he usage in the sense that the hospital in question violated his sense of orthodoxy with its birthing techniques).

When you control the language, you control thought. By hijacking the meaning of words, conservatives are manipulating the terms in which we can have discourse and this must be aggressively resisted and rejected. There are perfectly good words in the English language which people may use to characterize what offends their values or orthodoxy (blasphemy and abomination come to mind), but the meaning of words such as ‘liberal’ cannot be permitted to change when the motive is to control thought.