Jonah Goldberg Discusses The Tyranny of Cliches, Part I
Perhaps the opening quote in Jonah Goldberg’s new book, The Tyranny of Clichés, from George Orwell — “We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men” — unduly influenced me. But as I joked with Jonah at the start of our two-part interview, when I first read the galleys of The Tyranny of Clichés back in February, my first thought, despite how pretentious it sounds, was that whereas Liberal Fascism was the equivalent of Emanuel Goldstein’s “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism,” the alternative history book within the book of George Orwell’s 1984, The Tyranny of Clichés was sort of like the Cliff Notes to the Newspeak Dictionary.
As to the tyrannical nature of cliches, and how they’re used to steal bases in political arguments, Jonah writes in his new book:
I started to notice that the same thing happens in writing, on TV, in books; people invoke these clichés as placeholders for arguments not won, ideas not fully understood. At the same time, the same sorts of people cavalierly denounce far more thought-out positions because they’re too “ideological.” Indeed, in America, we train people to be skeptical of ideology. College students in particular are quick to object with a certain gotcha tone: “That sounds like an ideological statement.”
Such skepticism doesn’t bother me. Indeed, I encourage it. The problem is that while our radar is great at spotting in-bound ideological statements, clichés sail right through. People will say “It is better that ten men go free than one innocent man go to jail” and then stop talking, as if they’ve made an argument simply by saying that. They will take the slippery slope at face value. They’ll say “Diversity is strength,” as if it means something, and “Violence never solved anything,” as if that were not only plausible but so true that no further explication is required. “We are only as free as the least free among us” they’ll proclaim, misquoting Martin Luther King, Jr., or Elie Wiesel, or was it Captain Jean-Luc Picard? But of course, this isn’t even remotely true. It is a very nice thing to say. It’s a noble thing to try to live by. But it’s in no meaningful sense true. Rather, it is the sort of thing people assert in the hopes that it will win them uncontested ground in an argument.
Sometimes the problem is simply lazy thinking. But in other cases the lazy thinking merely creates the vulnerability for radical thinking. Some incredibly ideological ideas simply ride into your head like the dream spelunkers in the movie Inception— setting up, working their way through your programming— all because they’re wrapped in the protective coating of clichés.
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Watch for Part II of our interview tomorrow, in which Jonah will discuss the entomology of liberal clichés such as “diversity” and “social justice,” and how Bill Clinton used the phrase “The Middle Class” as a cliché he rode to victory in 1992. Plus a look back at how Liberal Fascism was received by the right, the left, and by historians.
A transcript of Part I of our interview begins on the next page. (Part II’s transcript will appear tomorrow.)
Update (5/8/12): Part II is now online here.
In the same manner in which PC mandates are meant to muzzle the opposition, so too are empty-meaning cliches meant to win the argument.
It is as if a toddler, screaming NO, NO, NO, has the definitive word with the adult (supposedly)in charge. Lazy (acting) is as lazy does (thinking).
Just because someone screams the loudest, often having the biggest megaphone (politically, via the MSM)doesn’t mean a damn thing-unless one is lazy/clueless enough to allow said results!!
This is why Goldberg’s exposure of said techniques are so valuable.
You may lose the battle to a screaminmg infant unless you bring the adult’s tool to bear — violence. “Sticks and stones may break my bones; but words will never hurt me.” Yes, and this has always summed up the wisdom of getting past words and right to sticks and stones in any important dispute. Basically, what we hear today from “conservatives” is that we have to win the ’12 elections or see our way of life destroyed. Well, I don’t think that’s an overstatement of the situation, but what did the Founders (the somewhat fantastical icons of the conservatives) think in a similar situation. And you have to admit, right off, that George III in his wildest dreams had no such tyranny in mind as Barak O’bwana does. Yet, to agree to allow the fate of your entire nation, society, culture be decided by 50% plus one of those casting ballots doesn’t remind me of Patrick Henry very much. In fact, conservatives today remind me of no one so much as the “Gentlemen who cr[ied] ‘Peace, ‘Peace’ when there was no peace.” When our Founders came to the conclusion that they were facing endless tyranny unless they acted, they acted. They didn’t redouble their petition-drives. ‘Action’, ‘time for one people to sever the ties which have bound them to another’, ‘serious’, ‘let’s roll’, are all expressions meaning one thing: kill or be killed; no more bullsh*t. Modern conservatism seems to be unusually pusillanimous institutionalized BS.
And therefore what?
First, and most important, you have to distinguish between true cliches and propaganda. It’s not usually too hard. “Birds of a feather flock together.” That’s a real cliche, and its true. “No guilt by association” is propaganda — and it’s false. Cliches are true; they condense long real-life experience into a simple formula. As we say: “Experience keeps a hard school; but the fool will learn in no other.” Cliches are Cliff’s Notes of life/history, so you can bypass as much experiential learning as possible. The reason Leftists claim that Reason contradicts cliche is that cliches expose Leftism’s agenda so easily. Leftists can claim anything as the result of Reason. They can’t create cliches, because a cliche that proves untrue (or contradicts other, accepted cliches/experience) disappears immediately. Healthy human societies have no problem with Leftism, because those arguing against commonly-accepted knowledge are quickly transported from the realm of ‘being’ to the realm of ‘not-being’ and pose no further problems.
Kipling used the phrase “The gods of the copybook headings.” He WANTED a phrase that sounded staid and tiresome.
“No guilt by association” is fine as a moral standard.
I wonder if Goldberg explains just how mistruths [sic] become the official record. Along the same line, my theory is that of Fictive Reality, where an untrue thing becomes so widely accepted that it may as well be the truth. Fictive Realities exist all around us, I’m sure there was always some of this phenomenon, but now, with the 24/7 news cycle, schoolteachers openly inculcating instead of educating for decades now, and, above all, gubmint legislating and administrating to solve fake problems, Fictive Reality has become the central feature of society. There are so many fake facts and unreal realities surrounding us now: global warming, the real cause of the 40 year bull market ended a few years ago, illegal immigration and terrorism being just a few examples (it couldn’t be the Islamic scriptures, could it?).
Confusion and self-delusion breed mistakes.
One of the most recently established Fictive Realities is that the 2008 financial crash was caused by Wall Street greed, whitewashing the explanation that it was of course caused by the federal gubmint (unconstitutionally) forcing banks to make millions of bad mortgage loans.
From Ogden Nash “I’ll take a bromide please:”
Do not seek the wisdom of the ages
From the philosophers and sages;
You will not find it any old ism or any new ism;
Truth doesn’t lie in the well, it lies in the truism;
So if truth is the one thing you are determined to keep in sight,
Well, to put the whole thing in a nutshell, where it probably belongs anyway, if it’s trite, it’s right.
The following are three paragraphs from Rudyard Kipling’s, The Gods of the Copybook Headings. The Gods are eternal universal truths that always come back and reassert themselves when humanity strays, such as “2+2 = 4″ and “Fire will burn” that the liberals always seem to deny.
“Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!”
Ed: Your download links above seem to be reversed or messed up.
Whoops, we didn’t have a link to the lo-fi version. Fixed!
I don’t know about pretentious, but I have noticed the exact same phenomenon wrt cliches. People my own age and younger say these trite soundbite statements all the time in arguing and act as if they’ve said something profound and insightful, and it has disturbed me.
I can’t say they’ve opposed more insightful arguments as purely ideological necessarily… that hadn’t crossed my mind. I would like to play the optimist and suggest its merely a common trait among the young, but I know better. Hell, I used to make deeper arguments than that about why I should get a bicycle for christmas when I was 9.
Interesting stuff. I guess cliches start out as pithy, memorable statements of principle that really mean something to someone. There is truth behind them. But then they become slogans – things we chant, advertising to everyone else (and to ourselves) how enlightened and noble we are. Then maybe they become truisms – simple ideas that we use to hide ugly complexity. They depict reality as we would like it to be. They represent magical thinking. They’re like little charms which, if we say them enough times with enough conviction, will one day change reality into what we want it to be. As such, they have no actual truth value and are not subject to criticism.
“There will be a latent Communist danger under the most favorable external circumstances as long as the public debatein Western societies is dominated by the gnostic cliches.” [Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics]
The left at this point is unexcelled in its exploitation of such cliches: Hope and Change, 1% vs. 99%, Yes we can, Save the World, Forward, etc. As Voegelin understood, the right finds itself in the less mobilizing position of defending the values of our culture, which carries no hint of a “Brave New orld” ahead of us; just the existing, beautiful one we have inherited.
The essence of modern Liberalism’s “non-ideology” can be expressed in three words and put on a bumper sticker: “You’ll Take Orders”.
My favorite is when they argue against the death penalty. “We’re killing someone to show that killing someone is wrong!” Yeah. And when we find a kidnapper, we handcuff him, put him in a car he can’t get out of and take him somewhere to lock him up in a cage. Oh, my God! I guess we kidnap people to show that kidnapping people is wrong!
In fiction, a cliche is a dead metaphor: a metaphor so brutally overused that its referent no longer appears in or affects the reader’s mind. A good example: “Avoid cliches like the plague!” Who actually imagines the horror and devastation of a plague when he hears that cliche?
In political discourse, a cliche is comparable, though subtly different: As Goldberg points out, it’s “a placeholder for an argument not won.” In other words, the very commonness of the cliche is supposed to imply that the argument it refers to has taken place, and has clearly been decided in a particular direction.
Here’s the difference: Whereas the cliche in fiction did once evoke a strong image in the reader’s mind — in many cases, an image of a real event in the real past — the cliche in politics attempts to deflect the reader from any substantive discussion, even though substantive discussion is possible, appropriate, and hasn’t been settled in the cliche-wielder’s preferred direction!
In that sense, the political cliche is a tactic — in practice, a tactic of considerable power. This is especially the case when a cliche-barrage can prevent substantive discussion of issues from ever taking place.
This is vital stuff!
Could someone please inform Hollywood that it is indeed possible to make an action-chase movie without the line “We’ve got company!”?
Remember when Harvey Korman shot a guy in the foot for saying “Head ‘em off at the pass”? We need someone to do something similar for the line “We’ve got company.”
Honorable mention: “OK, I’m in” every time someone cracks a computer code.
When Mr. Goldberg started defending the term “dogma” as though it were synonymous with “belief”, he lost me, and I stopped reading.
A dogma is a belief, moral or otherwise, that is not permitted to be subject to question. It’s the equivalent of a Looney Toon who refuses to glance beneath the platform on which he stands, on the presumption that if he does, and he discovers that nothing supports that platform, his DISCOVERY of the fact will be what makes it fall.
It is the presumption that ethical philosophies and moral beliefs cannot be subject to rational inquiry, and I find it to be repugnant. That slavery is an unacceptable evil is a claim that can and is subject to a rational examination, an examination that it passes with flying colors.
That God exists is a dogma to most religious believers, and I believe that this fact is the source of his desire for dogma to be something benign.
Much of the rest of his text is good, if dated (Ayn Rand began writing on this very subject 60 years ago), but that lost him my attention.
Ayn Rand was an ugly woman. That is one of the most horrible conditions that any human can endure, and it warps you. Rand was a very intelligent social misfit and a monumental kook. All Libertarians are. And that’s why they’ll never break 10% of the vote. FDR was another. A Little Lord Fauntleroy who reached his hero-time and found himself a pitiful cripple married to his own horse-faced cousin, he hated life and he hated America. That’s why he tried so hard to destroy it. Did a darned thorough job too. But all serious Leftists are people whoh don’t ‘fit in’ one way or another. You can put it in the bank. Leftism’s dogmas are all untrue and unrelated to real human existence (Libertarians’ too). Rightism always taps into normal, natural human life — common ancestry, religion, language, customs, mythology. Often reduced to ‘blood and soil’ or similar phrases. Notice when the Wehrmacht invaded the USSR, nobody in Russia jumped up, and Stalin was hiding under his desk. Only when the head of the Russian Orthodox Church got on the radio and declared “The Great Patriotic War” did Russia rise up to defend herself — because the Soviets and collective farms weren’t anything that real people gave a crap about, but their nation, religion, and lands were.
Well, first enough, religious people are the biggest questioners of all. It would seem to me “objectivists” are quite dogmatic, and then have the absolute gall to refer to their “dogma” as objective!
Very similar to the author’s statement that the Left claims not to be ideological, is the claim by Randians that they are “objective”, or by atheists that they have a monpoly on “reason”.
Does it warp the fabric softener of space/time to consider the anti-social Darwinist? Or does it just make us uncomfortable? Is there a middle finger class, or are we just in denial?
Was JB’s 14 year old alter ego being interviewed? “you know” appeared with middle-school regularity, and “I mean” wasn’t far behind. Next time you interview this guy, just slap him when he does that. It detracts from the seriousness his arguments and makes the transcript tedious to read.
“Safety Net”, “Infrastructure”, “…finish the job…” (let’s try to make a complete list before part 2 of the interview is published…) “Investment” [another gubmint program], “sustainable”, “unsustainable”, “renewable”, unrenewable”, and so on.
“Shovel-ready.”
“A place at the table.”
“Level playing field.”
“Safety net” was Ronald Reagan’s term for what would be left when he got rid of the overdone social spending.
By the way, Ezekiel also complains about this sort of thing, as my Dad pointed out when he taught it.
I do think slippery slope is correct, because of the “liberal ratchet” – eventually it happens. Also, it is a warning for what COULD happen. Anyone who said not very long ago that eventually men would marry men was considered an alarmist nut.
Oh, come now! These are the mooks who repeat with gusto any old stupidity shouted at them through a megaphone! What are you expecting? Chesterton? Or perhaps Dr. Johnson? Maybe a new Epistle of St Paul?
We are surrounded by lies and liars. Almost everything the Left holds dear is a lie. If they took to real self-examination now, there’d be suicides by the Bargeful! There wouldn’t be enough sackcloth and ashes to go ’round.
And about time!
Using fillers words such as “you know,” “Uh,” “you know what I mean,” make the me as a listener cringe. A little bit of silence is better.
“You see what I’m sayin’?”
CFM: You know, I like, totally agree.
I got through perhaps two paragraphs and then copied/pasted the text into an editor in order to delete all occurrences of “you know,”. Without doing that I would not have been able to read it all.
Contra Jonah, it is not true that “Jesus told his followers to carry swords.” Matthew 26:51-52, describing the scene in Gethsemane when Jesus was arrested, says:
“At that moment one of those with Jesus reached for his sword and drew it, and struck the high priest’s servant, cutting off his ear. But Jesus said to him, ‘Put up your sword. All who take the sword die by the sword.’” And John 18:11a has a similar passage.
Nevertheless, as demonstrated in the incident of the cleansing of the temple (when he orchestrated the expulsion from the temple court of the dealers in sacrificial animals and the moneychangers), Jesus did approve of using force to protect the majority of a human group against the unfair and enslaving practices of unjust minorities entrenched behind financial, political, or ecclesiastical power.
My favorite Liberal pearl is “perception is reality”, because either it describes the mental state of someone who is most likely clinically delusional or else it is an expression of someone’s intention to try to delude someone else. For once its fit is downright uncanny!
I believe Ghandi himself said this; “we knew the trains would stop”.
“Harry Turtledove” has a cute short-short story wherein Ghandi and Nehru go up agaisnt the Nazis. It basically comes out like the famous extremely short-short film, “Bambi verus Godzilla”.
The problem is not ideas — conservative or progressive (sic) — it is power. For the most part the Left has it because the arms of communication, the media, the educational system is under the spell of the Left. Propaganda Power leans left.
Then there’s the 88 major union bosses and myriad trial lawyers put into power and riches through legislation who in turn shower the proceeds of legislation (monopoly dues extraction and class-action settlements) into the Democratic Party which writes.
The Right has been busy creating companies, jobs and prosperity allowing the Left to use that wealth to gain and retain power. The Right tends toward modesty and restraint, the Left anything but. So the Left will do anything for that power, and does. We have a president that will stop at nothing to be reelected, using the entire asset base of the United States of America, lawful or not, he cares not, since power and “truth” is in the hands of the winner.
The Right has to change to win this Second Civil War, the second internal war for the survival of the United States and that for which it stands.
Counter phrase with phrase. The Left says the 99% vs 1%. We say the 55% who pay income taxes want the 45% who don’t to join us.
The Left says the government needs to get bigger and more expensive to help those in need. We should say, without prosperity everyone is in need.
The Left says spend more, we should demand SUSTAINABLE SPENDING.
And so on.
And Mitt needs to strongly defend the goodness of “Business” in creating jobs, prosperity and freedom; the freedom of free enterprise; that “the people” can decide thing for themselves and the few in Washington, D.C. can’t tell the future any more than I can: that is democracy, decision of the people; and free enterprise is the democracy of commerce.
“College students in particular are quick to object with a certain gotcha tone: “That sounds like an ideological statement.””
I don’t recall anyone saying that in the 60′s/70′s … but it became more fashionable to say after the fall of Soviet Communism — after the “ideology” of the Left — failed. So, suddenly, it was no longer “cool” to discuss “ideology.”