Dictatorship and language

One of the main characteristics of Orwell’s type of dictatorship is that people are oppressed by manipulating the language they use. It was thesis 2 in Onfray’s summary of Orwell’s theory in my blog last week: Impoverish the language and manipulate the thoughts with the help of words. This is done by introducing new words and banning undesired words, if not by making a completely new language. Sometimes words get a double, possibly contradictory, meaning. The word “peace” is a case in point, not only in Orwell’s Big Brother Society but also in the present world. A “peace keeping” operation is a kind of military operation performed by United Nations troops. Really peace keeping should be sending mediators. But in this case we can say yet that it is an independent international organisation that tries to end a violent conflict, which is a step towards peace, indeed. But how often hasn’t it happened that one country has invaded a neighbouring country on the pretext of bringing there peace, while in fact it was nothing but forcing the neighbouring country to the will of the invader. Or, another case, just say that your neighbouring country is governed by Nazis and you have constructed a pretext to invade it.
There is a basic idea behind the view above: By manipulating the language people speak we can influence their thoughts. Even more – and we see this also in Orwell’s approach of the relation between dictatorship and language – the idea is that by manipulating their language we can determine how others think. It’s a common idea. Not only political writers like Orwell once thought so, but also linguists assumed a relationship between language and thought: the Sapir-Whorf thesis. The strong version of the thesis says that the relationship is deterministic. However, it has become clear that this strong version is not true. The relationship between language and thinking is more complicated. As a consequence, in this sense a strong version of an Orwellian kind of dictatorship cannot exist: A dictatorial language instrument that oppresses people by determining how they think does not exist. And how could it? It would suppose that the Sapir-Whorf thesis was not valid for the leader(s) of the Big Brother Society but only for the common people.
The idea that we can determine people’s thoughts by manipulating the way they speak supposes that thinking and language are two sides of the same coin, but this idea is quite problematic. For instance, don’t animals think because they don’t speak? Cannot we discriminate colours if we haven’t a word for it? In Russian, there are words for light blue and dark blue, while in Dutch there is only one word for both. Does it mean that the Dutch cannot discriminate these shades of blue? Of course not. Such examples illustrate that thought and language are different things. However, although your language doesn’t determine your thinking, it does have an influence on it. So, although the strong Sapir-Whorf thesis is not tenable, there is a weak version that says that their language does have an impact on what people think, and there is clear evidence that supports this weak version. For instance, in many languages some substantives have a female gender and other substantives have a male gender, but in each language it is different whether a substantive is female or male. So in Spanish “bridge” (puente) is male, while in German (Brücke) it is female. Lera Boroditsky discovered that, when asked to describe “bridge”, the Spanish speakers said “big”, “dangerous”, “long”, “strong”, “sturdy” and “towering”, while the German speakers said “beautiful”, “elegant”, “fragile”, “peaceful”, “pretty” and “slender”. Other tests gave equal findings. As Boroditsky concludes: “Apparently, even small flukes of grammar, like the seemingly arbitrary assignment of gender to a noun, can have an effect on people’s ideas of concrete objects in the world.” (see my blog dated 18 November 2013).
For this reason, but also based on what I see happening around me, I think that the effect of language manipulation for political reasons is somewhat different from what Orwell’s theory of dictatorship supposes. Orwell’s theory implicitly endorses the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf thesis, and this view is not tenable, as we just have seen. However, there is clear evidence that a weak version of the Sapir-Whorf thesis is true and that language does have an influence on how we think. This means that language still can be used to oppress people and to affect what they do, but the effect is not deterministic. There is no strong version of Orwell’s dictatorial language theory. Instead, there is a weak version, based on the weak version of the Sapir-Whorf thesis. By manipulating language dictators can try to influence social, and so political behaviour. If it is not allowed to talk about certain themes or if people are forced to use certain words, dictators can try to prevent that people are going to communicate about certain political issues and next that they organise themselves around a certain idea in a way the dictator doesn’t like. “No communication, no organisation”, is the slogan of a dictator. To make communication more difficult is to make it more difficult that people oppose themselves and organise themselves with like-minded people. If you call an invasion a “special military action” instead of a “war”, maybe people feel less the need to oppose it (or so the dictator hopes). Word manipulation can influence people in the same way as an ideology does. However, the effect of language manipulation is not deterministic. It does not exclude alternative ways of thinking. This is what we see in dictatorships happen and this is how dictators use language in order to oppress people: Manipulation with words. Nevertheless, opposition remains possible and also often exists.