Losing Our Culture, One Word at a Time

I recently read, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies by Marilyn McEntyre. It was a gift from a beloved friend who knows of, and enjoys, my writing. Unfortunately, the author of the book was prone to be tangential, and thus went on liberal rants about climate change on far too many occasions. However, she shares my concern that the way we use language in the modern day is sure to reap its consequences in our culture, and it has. We have a deficit of meaningful communication.

Our collective vocabulary is smaller than it used to be. That’s clear to anyone who reads old books and who can thus see how words that past authors considered appropriate for average audiences are considered exotic to ours. And with this reduction, with this dumbing down, if you will, we lose our ability to carefully articulate clear thoughts. We’re not specific in our speech, and our meanings are lost in the vague choices that we make. We therefore land somewhere between Orwell’s prophetic notion of our inability to communicate ideas due to banned words and Idiocracy’s prediction of the intellectual retardation of future generations having deleterious effects over time.

I don’t believe that people are, in general, less able to communicate due to a biological inferiority versus past generations. We are simply not trying to keep a culture alive. We are creating people who are utterly dependent on celebrities to know how to think, argue, and debate, which is to say that they don’t know at all. They only know how to repeat things that they have heard, and especially those things that were short enough to be memorable. This is not to say that being pithy is always erroneous or even a poor choice. I can’t think of a classier way to call someone a traitor than, “Et tu, Brute?” But for most people, it’s political slogans masquerading as well thought-out ideas, or whatever sentence their favorite TV host said (which in turn was actually written by a staff writer).

When we surrender dialog to idioms and coy phrases, we suspend our ability to do better, to aim higher. We’re not even trying to reach beyond what has been said, because we’re only repeating it verbatim. Of course the occasional turn of phrase can make for a more playful conversation, but the phrases of the evening news shouldn’t be the totality thereof, and for so many people, they are. We cannot build a culture, even a parallel one, in the absence of thought, history, art, and… words.

John Senior reminds us that, “Culture, as in ‘agriculture’, is the cultivation of the soil from which men grow.” What is the condition of the soil that we are supposed to be fertilizing? Can it make a man? Can it build a civilization worthy of the description? To build a society that does make men, we must learn and read and care. It’s not quixotic to suggest what I am advocating, for it was once the normal.

Through the works and words of the past, we learn what was once self-evident to prior generations, but which our own eyes can be blind to. Since no time has ever been a utopia, we learn their mistakes and errors too. In so doing, we become balanced. We gain some wisdom. We learn to articulate the errors that we see around us, and we become of better service to our loved ones, including our children, our families, and our friends.

While McEntyre saw the effects of colonization as outright negative and shameworthy, there is plenty to applaud from English expansion, including and especially the spread of a common language across so much of the world. If you are able to speak and read English well, you have an amazing privilege to be able to learn from so many countries and cultures. It’s a beautiful and rich opportunity. The percentage of children who leave high school illiterate is increasing—it’s a status that places a person at such a disadvantage in life that it ought to be criminal. Yet it goes in hand with a society that doesn’t value reading, nor see the need to raise each man to his potential, that he manifest what God had planned for him.

Those who value these things must read, think, and spend time in silence. In an era as loud as ours, with so many beeps haggling for our attention, we have forgotten how to be alone, to process, to pray, and to think. Without silence, we hide from our own thoughts, and are likely to only regurgitate what others have spoken. We can and must do better, that we might reclaim a piece of Christendom and live accordingly.