Schall on Chesterton: Timely Essays on Timeless Paradoxes

The Horror

The Horror We cannot help today but be conscious of the degree to which both law and ideological pressure impose on language, requiring us to say certain things in certain ways or forbidding us from saying them in other customary or normal ways.We have to utter the boring “happy holidays” because “Merry Christmas” hints that Christ is important.We have to affirm that active homosexuals live noble lifestyles.We have to pretend that we are all morally equal, no matter what we do, a position that puts vice and virtue on the same level and allows no moral discourse about whether there be virtue and vice in the first place.We are more and more dominated by a coerced public language totally out of harmony with what goes on in reality and with what we actually think. We all begin to lie about the important distinctions of right and wrong because we are allowed no other way of speaking about them. No public discourse will mean what it says. Things that are perfectly intelligible and clear are, for political reasons, said to mean something else when they really don’t. If I say, for instance, that “man is a rational animal; he laughs, he cries, he floats on his back in the river,” I am said arbitrarily to exclude from this sentence the feminine half of the human race.Therefore , I must not say that “man is a rational animal; he laughs, he cries, he floats on his back in the river.” Rather, I must say awkwardly , that “the human being is a rational animal; he/she laughs; she/he cries, he/she floats on her/his back in the river.” Preposterous , really. Of course, in my original sentence, as any fair-minded person knows, I have not either in logic, grammar, or intention excluded half of the human race. Nothing exists in that original sentence 149 that would not include each member, male or female, adult or child, of the human race. In order to think that it does, one must have been educated out of the normal understanding of words and their relation to concepts. Words can have different meanings . We can understand them when they do.The word “man” can and does refer to a concept that prescinds from, without denying, the distinction of male and female. Every language for thousands of years has recognized this multiple meaning for words. The standard English pronoun that refers to this concept, “man,” is “he.”The pronoun makes the same adjustment that the word “man” does, meaning either the generic human being— prescinding from the distinction of male and female—or the male. Neither word, man or he, when used for the abstract concept , in any meaningful sense to anyone who understands the language, excludes females, since it does not talk about males or females as such. Both words,“man” and “he,” in context are designed to talk of human nature, without adverting to the sexual distinction, but without denying it either.We can do this easily and clearly and habitually. Not to have this mechanism at our disposal makes our speech stilted, silly even. University lectures and academic journals have become boring, unending repetitions of unnecessary and confusing hes/shes in all their splendid ideology . Another variety of this same problem occurs when we use words to cover up what we are really doing or talking about.The most obvious candidate in this category is what is known, with incredible paradox, as the “choice” movement.Today, if I say that I am for “choice,” it does not mean that I have some elaborate theory about free will. It means rather, to put it clearly, that I think it all right to kill babies in wombs.The word “choice,” by itself, does not tell us what is going on, except when we come to know how it is used.“To choose” never stands by itself. I always 150 The Horror have to choose something, this or that. Simply having the power to choose, which all rational creatures have by their nature, tells us nothing at all about what individuals will do with their wills. The “pro-choice” movement, thus, is not some debating club organized to combat radical determinism. It is rather a theoretical justification for killing certain human beings (euthanasia is also a part of this same movement) on the sole basis that we want...