Weaponized Words
As we begin a new year, crises are intensifying. At the same time, our capacity to think clearly, to act boldly, and to envision alternative paths toward a just future are under unprecedented assault. Concepts and conventions of the past are worn out, no longer providing insight or inspiration.
In a recent interview, cultural critic and scholar Henry Giroux talks about the “Language of Neoliberal Education” and the crisis of ideas.
He observes:
Neoliberalism has upended how language is used in both education and the wider society. It works to appropriate discourses associated with liberal democracy that have become normalized in order to both limit their meanings and use them to mean the opposite of what they have meant traditionally, especially with respect to human rights, justice, informed judgment, critical agency, and democracy itself. It is waging a war over not just the relationship between economic structures but over memory, words, meaning, and politics.
Giroux goes on to explain how concepts that once propelled and inspired generations to work toward more meaningful lives are distorted and stripped of meaning. He says: “Neoliberalism takes words like freedom and limits it to the freedom to consume, spew out hate, and celebrate notions of self-interest and a rabid individualism as the new common sense. Equality of opportunity means engaging in ruthless forms of competition, a war of all against all ethos, and a survival of the fittest mode of behavior. The vocabulary of neoliberalism operates in the service of violence in that it reduces the capacity for human fulfillment in the collective sense, diminishes a broad understanding of freedom as fundamental to expanding the capacity for human agency, and diminishes the ethical imagination by reducing it to the interest of the market and the accumulation of capital. Words, memory, language and meaning are weaponized under neoliberalism.”
As we approach this new year, a critical challenge for us is to create language and ideas that make reality clear, that project visions worthy of sacrifice, and that compel actions for justice.
Giroux helps us understand that the current crises of racialized capital are about more than economic gain and consolidation of power. These are crises created to gain control of thinking and culture. He explains this “crisis of ideas” saying:
At a time when civic culture is being eradicated, public spheres are vanishing, and notions of shared citizenship appear obsolete, words that speak to the truth, reveal injustices and provide informed critical analysis also begin to disappear. This makes it all the more difficult to engage critically the use of neoliberalism’s colonization of language. In the United States, Trump prodigious tweets signify not only a time in which governments engage in the pathology of endless fabrications, but also how they function to reinforce a pedagogy of infantilism designed to animate his base in a glut of shock while reinforcing a culture of war, fear, divisiveness, and greed in ways that disempower his critics.
As the touchstones of the past erode, we are faced with the challenge of finding new ways to make collective judgments that move us toward a more human, responsible, and sustainable future. To begin reimaging how to think and act more clearly, we would do well to take seriously the Masai greeting, “How are all the children?” We are a long way from being able to offer the expected response, “All the children are well.” But this is a place to begin. Protecting and enriching the lives of our children can guide our understanding of “what needs to be done” by each one of us.