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©iStockphoto.com/Alessandro Contadini
By Loran Howard Blood
What we think about ourselves, our relations with others, and about the great and greatest questions of life — questions that the restored gospel answers and clarifies — depends to a great extent upon the way we use language. As our language is altered and corrupted to reflect the philosophies and agendas of the world, we begin, here a little and there a little, to confront the world more upon its own terms than upon the gospel's.
It is a cardinal rule of military strategy that it is far better to engage an enemy upon one's own terms — and force that enemy to fight under the conditions you choose — than to allow him to engage you on his terms. The great battles the children of our Heavenly Father face in mortality, as the War in Heaven that began in the pre-mortal realm continues on this earth up to the present moment, are subject to very similar rules governing the order of battle, or, what we might term our spiritual rules of engagement.
Imagine for a moment a war in which one's soul — one's moral, intellectual, and spiritual destiny — were at stake, and that, battle by battle, the war progressed either to one's own benefit, or to the benefit of one's adversary. There are skirmishes, ambushes, harassment and intimidation, and sometimes, pitched battles.
The weapons in this war are the signs and symbols through which we understand, describe, and negotiate our experience. The major weapon here is language, and the battle is for the hearts and minds of our Father's children. In some cases, the weapons are also imagery, as with pornography, but in every case, even the images must be justified or defended with words.
Our adversary, in this case, has created a situation over a very long period of time (indeed, generations), in which, even when we engage the adversary or his supporters in a vigorous defense of righteousness and truth, we may find ourselves using the very same terms, and unwittingly making some of the very same assumptions as our adversary.
We find ourselves, even if quite unconscious of it, fighting against the enemy even while allowing him to control the terms of the debate and limit the degree to which our own defense can deviate from boundaries he has set.
The enemies of decency carefully insert the terms they wish for us to use into a society's common language through endless repetition in the popular news and entertainment media, books, novels, magazine articles, song lyrics, product advertisements, and public education textbooks. Without our ever recognizing it, these enemies influence us to use their terms to describe our own positions.
Your parents may have gotten wise to it, (as may you, if you lived at a time when the transitions were taking place), because they saw the changes as they occurred and could contrast the alterations in language use with what had been standard before. The next generation knows only the altered meaning of terms, and tends to assume that those terms describe real things — when in fact they may not be descriptive at all, but prescriptive.
The new terms may carry unspoken but assumed ideological or philosophical assumptions that place us in covert agreement with the world even when we know we are not in agreement at all.
We may have come to use, without prior thought or reflection, the term Gay to refer to a male homosexual. We may hyphenate the class names of various groups of our fellow citizens into African American, Mexican American, Latin American, Asian American, and even European American , to describe people who have been here continuously for generations, and even centuries.
We may use the term Ms., rather than Miss or Mrs., when referring to a married or unmarried woman. We may describe pornography as adult entertainment , and various sexual practices and indulgences as alternative lifestyles .
Killing one's own children within the womb for whatever reason one feels it appropriate becomes termination of an unwanted pregnancy. A wife or husband becomes a life partner , pets become animal companions , food grown in one's own garden becomes organic (as opposed to the inorganic variety one can purchase in the supermarket). Defects of character become personality disorders , addictions become diseases , and sin becomes dysfunction.
The Purpose of Political Correctness
As we can see, allowing the world to set and define the appropriate terms and limits of discourse creates a situation in which, even as we object vehemently to what the world is teaching, we yet find ourselves objecting within the linguistic boundaries the world has set. We describe our objections even as we use the world's accepted terminology to do it.
What we have come to call political correctness is a standard term for what is really the politicization of language such that what appears to be only descriptive carries implied prescriptive weight. It is the subtle and pervasive forging of language into a weapon of cultural warfare.
As Latter Day Saints, our battles are against “principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places .” (Eph 6: 12). Timothy reminds the Saints that they are to “strive not about words to no profit, but to the subverting of the hearers. (2 Tim 2: 9).
Elder Jeffrey R. Holland said this in an April 2006 conference address:
Our words, like our deeds, should be filled with faith and hope and charity, the three great Christian imperatives so desperately needed in the world today. With such words, spoken under the influence of the Spirit, tears can be dried, hearts can be healed, lives can be elevated, hope can return, confidence can prevail.1
Although Elder Holland's talk was aimed particularly at the kind of words we use to speak of one another, the importance of words in how we describe the spiritual, moral, and social phenomena around us are of equal importance. As Roger Kimball noted:
Political correctness can also be enlisted in what Alexis de Tocqueville, in his Democracy in America , called "democratic despotism." In pre-democratic societies, Tocqueville noted, despotism tyrannized. In modern democracies, it infantilizes. Democratic despotism is both "more extensive and more mild" than its precursors: it "degrades men without tormenting them." In this sense, Tocqueville continued, "the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world." 2
The Challenge We Face
As some of the Brethren have noted in the past, the major challenges to the present generation will not, for the most part, be physical persecution, but the all-encompassing envelope of Babylon and its values. Personal apostasy, both intellectual and behavioral, is the fundamental challenge we face, at least in the West.
We face precisely, and in a pervasive and relentless way, the very tyranny Tocqueville identified — a tyranny of politicized words and phrases that Orwell identified as Newspeak , or a language used to enforce conformity in such a way that those using it enforce that very conformity upon themselves.
Indeed, Satan was the first such manipulator of language, when he termed the denial of our agency a form of “redemption” when he brought his plan before the Father. As he said then, “Behold, here am I, send me, I will be thy son, and I will redeem all mankind, that one soul shall not be lost, and surely I will do it; wherefore give me thine honor” (Moses 4:1).
What Satan was describing was not, of course, a form of redemption, as no plan founded in the denial of agency could imply anything but outright slavery and nullify the entire plan of salvation. It remained the case that coating serfdom to Satan's power with the terminology of the plan of salvation by calling it redemption could not alter the truth.
In the same manner, calling adultery open marriage or one who practices homosexuality gay is very much like embalming and perfuming a dead body to prevent it from becoming unpleasant, such that we can look at it and touch it at the viewing without undue discomfort.
In this sense, the purpose of political correctness is twofold. The first is to domesticate various concepts, beliefs, or behaviors such that they lose their moral or philosophical distaste. Indeed, it is to season them linguistically until they become palatable. The second is to take control of the language such that as many discussions of various issues as possible take place within the ideological framework of those exercising that control.
Wearing the Clothes of Babylon
Hence, many in Zion may not only wear Babylon's clothes, listen to its music, watch its popular visual media, and accept some of its cultural assumptions; they are also, more often than not, speaking its language. This may appear as trivial linguistic fashions like “You go girl!” that come and go like the wind, or, more importantly, as the careless and unreflective use of words that make unspoken assumptions about the world that we otherwise might well find unacceptable were the implicit to be made explicit .
When we domesticate unrighteousness, we morally neutralize it. The old fornication , which carried at one time a moral and social stigma, becomes cohabitation , a term that does nothing more than describe the physical proximity of two people within a dwelling but carries no moral implications and assumes no background of values against which such behavior might be scrutinized. A young thug who victimizes others and disrupts the school environment may be termed part of a group known as at risk children . A terrorist may be renamed a militant.
In some cases political correctness isn't used to create moral neutrality, but to erase obvious distinctions in the world by which we negotiate our relationships with others and make discriminations (the one unforgivable sin in the secular world) as to the nature of those relationships and how we will conduct ourselves relative to them.
For example, politically correct convention might call a short person vertically challenged , or a handicapped person differentially abled. One more interesting example is the use of the phrase deferred success to mean failure at something, such as a test at school. Or, there is always the engaging sanitation engineer to mean janitor . The purpose here is to linguistically erase the actual differences between human beings in various attributes and characteristics in the service of a philosophical template that says all personal behaviors, personal and lifestyle choices, as well as all cultures, are essentially equal.
In each case, language is changed from a description (short, handicapped, delinquent, or a person who cleans things for a living) of a condition or state of affairs to a prescription regarding how that person or situation is to be understood. An ideology is surreptitiously inserted through language that seeks to prescribe our values and value judgments in a covert way.
Sin as Defined by the Politically Correct
There are at least three main “sins” within the politically correct secular society that one may commit that are so serious that proponents of this view of the world believe them to place the sinner virtually outside decent, civilized humanity. We will look at each and compare it with the same circumstance from a Gospel standpoint.
- Discrimination. The worst thing one can do in Babylon is make discriminations between one state of affairs and another based upon a system of values that is understood to guide personal conduct, and then make a judgment based upon that value system. The reason is that this assumes that any one system of values is actually better than another.
Systems such as this are then exclusionary, since they imply hierarchical relationships in moral, ethical, and cultural matters. The idea that some ideas are better than others, as well as some ways of life, some attitudes, and some types of relationships, is rejected because it denies the moral and social egalitarianism necessary to this system of belief.
- Intolerance. As with the above, the concept of tolerance in Babylon becomes a general, cardinal principle, rather than a principle that is understood to be valid in some circumstances but inappropriate in others. A case in point is that equal weight is assigned to tolerance for those who do not look like us (such as with racial differences) and tolerance for various behavioral or cultural variations (such a homosexuality and its associated subcultures).
Being black, or Asian, Irish, or Italian is, of course, nothing over which anyone has any power, and none of these inherent characteristics come laden with values and moral implications. However, there is no evidence that homosexual behavior is inherent in anyone, and regardless of the elements that create conditions under which homosexuality may develop, the concept of tolerance here has a different application.
We should, of course, always refrain from kneejerk or arbitrary discrimination against anyone in the sense of denying others the same unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that we enjoy. However, should homosexuals be allowed to marry, and substantively alter the core meaning and purpose of the concept of marriage? Should they be Boy Scout leaders?
Although it doesn't matter at all whether a Boy Scout leader is black, Mexican, or Chinese, it matters a great deal whether that person is “gay”, with all the implications and value assumptions that come with that self label. “Tolerance” in Babylon means nothing more or less than simply the acceptance of Babylon's values, regardless of the depth and severity of its conflict with other values, just as “intolerance” means dissent from those same values. There is one thing Babylon will not tolerate, and that is toleration for values other than its own.
- Value Judgment. To make value judgments — to make judgments at all, in moral, philosophical, or religions areas — is considered to be another form of arbitrary bigotry. Political correctness imposes a mind set in which the ultimate value is either to have no set of fixed values at all, or to see one's own values as no better, and no worse, than any other set of values.
In this sense, Hugh Hefner's Playboy Philosophy is no better — but at the same time, no less valid — than the teachings of Jesus Christ himself on sexual matters. There is assumed to be no real substantive basis for comparison. As with the other principles mentioned, in practices, this relativism becomes very absolutist and dogmatic, and always ends as a stick used to beat those with whom the relativist disagrees. Relativism always becomes an absolute principle with which there can be no relative dissent.
Sin as Described in the Gospel
In the Gospel, we understand that there are absolute truths that govern our conduct in mortal life in most circumstances and that cannot be set aside simply by playing with words. Hence, as Latter Day Saints, we call sexual immorality just that, and dispense with terms such as alternative lifestyle that whitewash the term and drain it of its moral implications. We understand that concepts like tolerance, discrimination, and avoidance of being judgmental are not absolute principles but, indeed, relative to the circumstances or values involved.
They are not, in other words, values in and of themselves that stand above all other values, but guides as to how we approach the values of others. They are principles that help determine the nature and limits of our tolerance and the reasons for and manner in which we make discriminations between alternatives in this life.
In the Church, we recognize that letting our teenage or preteen daughter dress like Christina Aguilera is not appropriate — not only in an overt sense, but for what it implies in a psychological, moral, and cultural sense. In Babylon, it doesn't matter, because in Babylon it is claimed there is no basis for comparison between one kind of dress or another, or between hairstyles, attitudes, or even fundamental concepts of what is moral, true, or “of good report.”
In Babylon, as in Camelot, you can have it any way you wish, because everything is relative to everything else, and politically correct language is the language that assumes this to be true. It's not the language of rational argument or debate, but of settled context. It does not describe, but prescribes values and ideas before they have even been examined and we've had a chance to decide whether we'd prefer to accept them at all.
Satan's Word Games
Political correctness has been known before — in the old Soviet Union, China and other communist societies, and Nazi Germany. It has only come into its own in the West over the past forty years or so, as massive changes in values and traditional standards have shaken our own society to its very foundations.
Those with a vested interest in seeing those massive changes overturn those older, traditional values have developed a language of their own that reflects their own agenda.
Satan uses words to destroy us in two ways (other than the coarse, violent, and provocative language that has become the coin of the realm for much of our culture): The first is to get us to label ourselves in such a way that our sins and weaknesses become inherent aspects of our being . This is the function the term gay performs for those who experience same-sex attraction.
By the same token, someone who has a problem with compulsive and addictive behavior becomes an addict , and is expected to confess that he has a progressive, incurable, and inherent disease that will always be with him no matter what he does. He may be sober, but he will always be diseased.
Satan wants to label us all as sick, diseased, disordered, or, in some other fashion, inherently less than or alien to the eternal son or daughter of God that we really are. The Lord will, indeed, point out to us that we are sinners, but Satan wants us to believe that we are the sin .
Let us, as King Mosiah counseled, watch — not only our deeds, but also our thoughts and our words, so that we do not use the terms of Babylon to describe either ourselves , or Babylon ! Let us teach and warn, preach the Gospel and cry repentance, in the terms of the Gospel and the language bequeathed to us by generations past, and not in the Babylonian Newspeak of so many of our society's institutions and media.3
© 2007 Meridian
Magazine. All Rights Reserved
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| About
the Author: |
| Loran
Howard Blood is 48 years old, and living in Kershaw, South Carolina.
He was born and raised in the Seattle Washington area. He has
spent much of his life making pocket change as a landscaper, and
is just now preparing to return to college to get, it is hoped,
a couple advanced degrees — one in political science, and
a minor in western philosophy. His wife’s name is Deborah,
and they have two dogs and a cat named Shelby, Avery, and Coggins
respectively. |
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