This article was published in the Winter 2025 edition of our print Journal. To read for free online, please Subscribe. If you would like to receive future editions of the print Journal, become a Basic or Solidarity Member today.
Josef Pieper. Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992. 54pp. $11.95
In December of 2023, a group of Ivy League university presidents testified before a Congressional committee regarding antisemitism on American campuses. The most fateful question asked that day would end up being a straightforward one from New York representative Elise Stefanik. Ms. Stefanik asked the group whether calls for the genocide of Jewish people would constitute unlawful harassment according to each president’s respective university code. All three gave the same answer, nearly verbatim: “It would depend on the context.”
Donors were unhappy with this answer (or at least, with how unpopular the answer was). Claudine Gay and Liz Magill eventually resigned their positions at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively, and few would argue that such a result was or is unjust. To go back and re-listen to their testimony, however, is quite useful. Rep. Stefanik believed she was hearing a limp wristed justification for antisemitism. But I’m not so sure.
Each president explained “context” by referring the committee to the same cache of words: “targeted,” “pervasive,” “severe,” “conduct.” Things were brought to a head by Magill, who blurted out that chants for the deaths of Jews might be against Penn’s code of conduct “If the speech becomes conduct.” A stupefied Rep. Stefanik asked if by “conduct,” Magill meant actually committing genocide against Jews.
Of course, this is not what Magill meant. There’s no reason to believe that Magill is personally antisemitic. There’s no reason to believe Magill meant anything at all. The phrase “If the speech becomes conduct” means nothing. It is a formula, not a proposition; a creation of Human Resources, not an expression of human reason. Everyone in the room knew that the university presidents were trying not to say something. In that exchange, language became a hiding place.
George Orwell would have appreciated the moment. “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” he wrote in “Politics and the English Language.” “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.” The spectacle that ended Claudine Gay and Liz McGill’s presidencies is perhaps a fitting symbol of, to borrow from Christopher Hitchens, how far the termites have spread in American higher education, and how long and well they’ve dined. What has happened to the conscience of the university? Partly, it’s been jargon-ed into oblivion. Words like “harassment,” “equity,” “safe,” and “just” no longer mean anything an honest person can understand. They are deployed like artillery or parachutes, depending on the situation.
Of course, such dilution of meaning happens in many other places, too. Films, advertisements, self-help bestsellers, and even some preachers use words like “authentic,” “repressed,” “deserve,” “boundary,” and “trauma” to refer to anything from being lynched to having the barista mispronounce your name. But the devolution of language at the college campus is worse. These are the places that society entrusts with resources and authority to, among other things, explain what things mean. If nonsense like what Claudine Gay and Liz McGill spouted is normal at the very places that are supposed to teach us how to think, what are the consequences?
Josef Pieper’s Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power is well titled. Its main argument is right there: The abuse of language, especially for the purposes of propaganda, happens because people want power. Beginning with Plato’s arch enemies, the Sophists, Pieper briskly summarizes the inner lives of those who expertly say non-things.
Sophists, both ancient and modern, display “exceptional awareness of linguistic nuances and utmost formal intelligence, from their way of pushing and perfecting the employment of verbal constructions to crafty limits, thereby—and precisely in this—corrupting the meaning and the dignity of the very words.” In other words, Sophists are very smart, and they know it. Their words are calculated to inspire in their audience both admiration and a fear of being the only poor dolt who doesn’t understand. These emotions in an audience give the Sophist enormous power to do what he wants to with language. He can flatter, he can cajole, he can manipulate: and all the while the disconnect between what he says and reality is camouflaged almost perfectly.
Even in flattery, however, there is a kind of elitism in sophistry. Pieper observes that abandoning the pursuit of truth in speech reveals the speaker “no longer considers the other as a partner, as equal. In fact, he no longer respects the other as a human person.” But why? Because language has only one of two roles to play. Either it seeks reality, however imperfectly, or else it seeks power.
The illustration that many will reach for at this point is so easy it feels unfair. The COVID pandemic featured many neologisms that violated common sense, and in many cases this abuse of language was quite literally a power play. But there are other examples, too. One thinks about the dissident Right’s love of “effeminate” as a catch-all slur for any male who doesn’t fall in lockstep conformity with its orthodoxy. The actual meaning of the word is irrelevant, as is the particular target. Again, the fear is the point. Nobody wants to be considered effeminate. The word works like a concealed handgun in tense negotiations. You know it’s there, they know it’s there, and every desire you might have to take a stand is weighed down by the desire to not see that handgun.
Contemporary political discourse regularly abandons even the pretense of seeking truth. But too often, politicians and journalists merely chalk it up “disinformation” and leave it at that. This is not what Pieper means. The problem is not so much that there’s a lot of untrue things being said. It’s that there are a lot of people who don’t care about the truthfulness of what they’re saying or hearing. The former situation creates ignorant citizens; the latter creates indifferent ones.”
It is entirely possible that the true and authentic reality is being drowned out by the countless superficial information bits noisily and breathlessly presented in propaganda fashion. Consequently, one may be entirely knowledgeable about a thousand details and nevertheless, because of ignorance regarding the core of the matter, remain without basic insight…something far more discouraging is readily conceivable as well: the place of authentic reality is taken over by a fictious reality; my perception is indeed still directed toward an object, but now it is a pseudoreality, deceptively appearing as being real, so much so that it becomes almost impossible any more to discern the truth.
The technological problem is real. Mass media in general, and the Internet especially, create what might be called an implausibility structure for truthful thinking. There’s just too much information, coming too quickly and too easily accessible, in order to think honestly and wisely about it all. If one is going to keep up, one has to decide in advance what kind of lies, what kind of fallacies, what kind of untruths one is willing to live with.
But the technological problem is not the biggest one. More urgent is the openly transactional relationship many modern people have with the idea of truth itself. I’m entitled to my myths because the people I dislike—my political enemies, my religious rivals, my personal out-group—have theirs, too.
I can vividly recall numerous times when someone told me what they’d just read online, and I knew this information was untrue, and told them so. Rarely in my experience does someone proceed to argue the point, offering up evidence and arguments. Far more common is the shrug and something along the lines of “Well it might as well be true.” You can see in that moment a sliver of humanity dying. Mankind’s natural instinct to care about whether what he thinks is true or false cannot be suppressed without harm to oneself, and to others.
Pieper’s treatise, first published in 1974, ends with the conviction that the university ought to be a bulwark of truthful speaking. This part of his essay feels almost hopelessly quaint and ironically prescient. Pieper insists on the university as an “expressly reserved” place for truth-telling, “explicitly protected against all potential special interests and invading influences, where hidden agendas have no place.” Reverse engineering this hope reveals just how right Pieper was. Special interests look like the bureaucratic leviathan of academic administration. Invading influences look like the bowing of academy to activism. And hidden agendas sound like the progressive social doctrine that confidently asserts a woman can have a penis yet cannot tell whether chants for genocide should get a person removed from school.
As I write, Christmas is a few weeks away. Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power is like the ghost of Christmas Past. Readers can see in its pages the specific choices that professors, media moguls, and tech startups have made to land us where we are. When the clock strikes midnight and the book closes, we are left with no strategies or habits, just regret. But perhaps language is the kind of thing one cannot recover with sheer willpower. Once abused, perhaps all that remains is to sit under its wrath, and let it render us according to our deeds.
