Compromise is a Ten-Letter Word
Four-letter words are so much cheaper and easier... but at what cost?
Let’s talk about obscene language — though not of the sort that you might be thinking. My concern today is not F-bombs and scatology. I am more concerned with how our civilization is weaponizing language, as cynics, politicians and social movements calcify free thought through sophisticated ideological weapon systems, securely encased in terminology. I’ll warn you now: If you are a an extremist — progressive or right-wing — you will probably like me less after reading this. If you prefer to avoid that outcome, stop reading now. But if you prefer honest discussion and analysis, I hope to bring some of that to the table.
As I’ve matured, I have done my best to purge catastrophism from my modes of thinking. That is becoming more difficult these days, as American civilization accelerates toward a cliff, politically and socially. Most free-thinking people see this, at least the ones I know. The rest continue in a delusion that their oponents will either disappear or have a sudden epiphany or desire to capitulate. Because they are evil, and good triumphs over evil, right? We are now even seeing hints of people who would prefer to tear our civilization down to its roots rather than capitulate at all to people and ideas that they view as enemies. That’s when the ship goes on red alert.
The difference nowadays (vs. every other time in human history) is that our communications systems are frictionless, by which I mean that we no longer have any delays, filters or simmer time in the distribution of ideas. As the internet age developed, we naively thought that this would be a good thing. But, to use an analogy, imagine what driving would be like without friction. If you have ever driven on black ice, you know. This is what is happening to our civilization. The brakes are useless, and many people and organizations have removed them entirely.
We saw the beginning of this with Bill Clinton’s first Presidential campaign, going back more than thirty years, which was as successful as it was innovative. The campaign hired a lot of young people who realized that systems were developing to support “rapid response”. They realized that they could fight more of a guerilla war against a traditional army. You no longer needed to wait for the Sunday news shows to make an impression; you could respond immediately to the news of the day or an accusation from an opponent. They thought that such response capability was a serious advantage. And they were right. You could affect the news cycle rather than simply ride its wave and recover after it passed. Back then, a kind of messaging arbitrage was possible; you could “profit” by exploiting, among other things, disparities in comfort levels with newer communications technologies.
Fast forward three decades, and everyone is armed with such capabilities, so neither side can claim or exploit any advantage. Both sides long ago mastered the art of guerilla warfare. All that is left is solidifying one’s army of believers. In the bigger picture, we are left with mutually assured destruction. Twitter is both the admission and the mechanism of frictionless response. It is part of the black ice that now induces a stable civilization to slide off a cliff into an unknown abyss.
All educated people know (or at least should know) that our system is built on compromise. The U.S. Constitution defines a set of checks and balances that assumes a constant stream of conflict and disagreement. It only resorts to dictatorship in certain places, such as the Bill of Rights, which is a forceful anti-democratic, anti-majoritarian statement. The BoR defines things that the people, through their representatives, may never touch. Those things are not subject to compromise (interpretation perhaps, but not compromise — we don’t get to vote on freedom of speech, for example). Otherwise, the Constitution defines a system that will come to a grinding halt if people refuse to compromise. Which describes where we are today. The current government only works at all because Congress has empowered an enormous backup generator of sorts — the executive branch bureaucracy — to run things while members of Congress and senators preen for the cameras, obsess over social media accounts, and worry about their next primary. Say what you will about that bureaucracy (and I have much to say, for another time), but, without it, we would currently not have a functional Federal Government.
Compromise requires communication, and communication (of the sort I am discussing) requires language. My premise today is that we sabotage any chance for compromise with our rhetoric, which is no longer directed at truth, but, rather, forms a kind of barbed wired fence that defines and encloses tribes — because tribes win primaries (another topic for another time). If we can release the rhetoric to the winds of reality, perhaps we can open minds and tear down those fences.
Let’s look at an example: climate change. Some people read those words and tremble, fearing that the earth teeters on the precipice of uninhabitability. Others read them and their eyes roll; here we go again, more progressive claptrap. And both reactions are exaggerated, in the service of tribal unity. The term “climate change” is now fraught. It divides. It discourages compromise. And it must go.
Why is this? What’s so bad about the term “climate change”? After all, the climate is changing, as it always does. And, whatever you might think of that, humans have been doing some serious environmental damage for the past couple centuries. You don’t need to see a direct connection to see the data. My answer: None of that matters. The term is the term, and it has become what it has become. It must go, for now anyway. We need a coherent energy and environmental policy that can survive the four-year Presidential election cycle. If semantics are getting in the way, we need to dump the semantics.
Whatever we might say or believe about energy or the environment, those things are irrelevant. The environment and our energy systems are in a certain state today, and their state tomorrow or the next day have nothing to do with human rhetoric. They depend, within limits, on what we do.
My partisan progressive friends are cringing. Partisans know the storage capacity of words. When you finally succeed in “charging” a word or phrase to your liking, the last thing you want to do is throw it in the trash... “framing the narrative”, etc. But that’s the point — we need less framing of non-intersecting narratives, and more agreement on things that we can actually do, to make tomorrow incrementally better than today. That is the only way our system can work and remain stable across generations.
Partisan language is designed to convey particular certainties, and imply others.
Example: I am a Christian. But when I discuss Christianity with non-Christians, I intentionally and consciously avoid what has become “Christian-speak” to many ears. The phrases, the verses, the idioms — to non Christians, those things range from meaningless to cringe. Within the tribe, those same manners of speech often signal membership — almost literally preaching to the choir. But they have little or no value outside it. They convey certainties that the outsider does not recognize as such, and they often imply ideas that the listener might misinterpret. If I say “In the beginning was the Word” to the average person, I am conveying a metaphysical certainty about how we got here, and I am implying a lot of other things that will set off alarm bells in the mind of a secular materialist. I would lose any hope for a conversation before it starts. I gain nothing. If I care about that person, why would I do that? Am I in this to persuade? Or to bathe myself in the sweet-sounding notes of my tribal music?
My solution is to dump the terminology altogether in such situations. I don’t think the Christian God is interested in terminology. My God is interested in people and relationships. Talk to people on their own terms, and you at least have the opportunity for a conversation.
So what does this have to do with climate change? A lot. The term “climate change” now conveys certainties, and implies others. For practical purposes, progressive partisans almost always mean “human induced climate change”. The first two words are now assumed; human impact on climate change is taken as a certainty. And the related literature and discussion create the impression that humans can in some way manage the climate; thus, that concept is now buried in the term as well.
But if we return to the facts, what we actually know is that the global climate is currently warming, and humans have the capacity to damage local environments and ecosystems pretty severely. Anyone who saw Lake Erie sixty or so years ago would be hard-pressed to deny this. We also know that we have dumped a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over the past couple hundred years. Computer models suggest that this is a serious problem. Of course computer models are often both biased and wrong (as one who has written a few, I can testify to that). Models aside, and whatever the specific cause and effect might be, there is reason to expect that a buildup of CO2 will cause some problems. If nothing else, the glidepath certainly isn’t sustainable. We need to find alternatives to meet the power requirements of modern civilization. And, whatever our capacity might be to damage the environment (evidence suggests it is high), there is no evidence that we can manage it to our liking on any large scale. The evidence suggests that our job is to be good stewards, allowing a very complex system to balance itself. I.e., get out of the way. And we have not done a very good job of that since the Industrial Revolution.
For psychological and political reasons, partisan climate change activists will claim that we know a lot more than that, and that we have more control over the situation than we have. Conversely, partisan right wing activists will try to dismiss the issue entirely and change the subject. And they’re both wrong. Both attitudes derive from calcified thought processes, glued together through the abuse of language, extorting words to do work that reality cannot do on its own. Some people reading this are already preparing rebuttals, using whatever one-sided, partisan argument that has been instilled by their respective tribe.
Partisans believe that relinquishing hard-earned terminology is like flushing money down the toilet. And if your main goals are tribal unity, that is probably true. So, for example, right wing activists now have a primal need to refer to the Democratic Party as the “Democrat” Party. The instant that a person uses those words, battle lines are drawn. Hair stands on end. Blood pressure rises. And that’s the point. The guy who popularized it was a media figure whose livelihood depended on maintaining a state of virtual war. His job was based on division. The term is designed to divide. When Democrats introduce a “climate change” bill in Congress, they do two things: First, they ensure that members of the coalition will have something to use in a primary election. And, second, they ensure that nothing will get done with respect to the underlying (and very important) issues.
Using the term “Democrat Party” accomplishes nothing beyond an enhanced sense of self-serving tribalism. Proposing a “climate change” bill accomplishes nothing except an enhanced sense of security about the next primary. These things accomplish nothing of value to a broader civilization whose governing threads are woven together on the loom of compromise. That loom now sits in a corner collecting dust, while we tug at the strings of fabric, watching it unravel before our eyes, blaming the person pulling on the other side for all the damage.
The compromise that our civilization requires cannot happen if the substructure of our language has been carefully and cynically engineered to sabotage any chance of bipartisanship. The system is now bickering turtles all the way down. And somewhere out there is a civilization that likes turtle soup. If you don’t want to be on the menu, I suggest that you begin to choose your words carefully.