The Tyranny of Words
by
[Harcourt, Brace, $2.50]
‘LANGUAGE itself,’ Mr. Chase remarks in a key sentence of his opening chapter, ‘needed to be taken into the laboratory for competent investigation.’ Not alone among contemporary publicists, he finds himself dismayed by the paradox that as the verbal resources of communication multiply and supposedly improve, the efficiency of communication seems to decline. Specifically, he becomes more and more perturbed by the apparent failure of his own trenchant writings to mean the same thing to any two equally intelligent, equally analytical readers. At a certain point he begins to perceive that the core of the difficulty is our general failure to agree on the identity of the concrete matters to which our words refer. M e treat the words as if they were themselves things, as if they were self-defining; and particularly we do this with the large verbal abstractions by means of which so many of our more dubious intellectual operations are transacted — liberty, democracy, the law, right and wrong, Fascism, truth, art, neutrality, socialism, production, value, science, progress.
This is the point at which Mr. Chase decides to take language into the laboratory for some long-overdue psychochemical overhauling. He finds himself preceded there by few pioneering moderns — mathematicians, physicists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, critics — who among them are working out the prolegomena to a new technique of communication, science of the relation between word and meaning. This new method of linguistic analysis — ‘semantics is the term now coming into use to denote it —has been adumbrated in Korzybski’s Science and Sanity, The Meaning of Meaning, by Ogden and Richards. Richards’s Philosophy of Rhetoric, Bridgman’s Logic of Modern Physics, Pareto’s Mind and Society, F. C. S. Schiller’s Formal Logic, Thurman Arnold’s Symbols of Government, and various other more and less technical analyses of the modus operandi of thought. The Tyranny of Words is essentially a digest, interpretation, and amplification of their results, and it is the first deliberate, systematic, popularly usable discussion of semantic method.
There are probably few writers on serious subjects who can read Mr. Chase’s pages without renewed self-searching, not to say self-castigation. More important, his book is going to help enormously in the propagation of a healthy skepticism among all sorts of readers. The man who fully accepts what Mr. Chase has to give him will never again be browbeaten by appeals to nonexistent authority (‘History teaches us,’ ‘This proposal is contrary to economic law’), or by meaningless statistics compounded of incommensurables (‘ The business index shows’), or by scientific concepts misapplied to provinces in which they are devoid of sense (‘The New Deal flouts the biological principle of the survival of the fittest.’), or by unwarrantably narrowed alternatives (‘Either Jesus was truly the Son of God or else he was the most colossal liar in history’), or by the idiomatic; personifications and metaphors of cartoon (‘Japan has run amok.’ ‘Capitalism has its back to the wall). or by brash absolute statements about undefined and perhaps indefinable categories (‘Democracy never was and never will be the most efficient form of government’). The Tyranny of Words, simply because it tends powerfully toward criticism in the reader and self-criticism in the writer, should do a great deal to lucidify the future discussion of our social, political, and economic affairs, ‘A good semantic discipline . . . prevents us from peopling the universe with nonexistent things. . . . It checks us from acting as if fantasies were real events worth fighting and dying for.’
Sooner or later, of course, this subject of semantics will itself have to undergo a semantic examination. Particularly, it will have to be surveyed in the light of a searching semantic question that Mr. Chase has chosen not to ask: namely, What is to make us victims of human nature want to replace our various illusions, preconceptions, and prejudices, our sustaining fantasies and abstractions, with the scientifically provable concrete facts about ‘the structure of the world we live in’?
Mr. Chase himself points out that Christian preachers are extravagantly ferocious in time of war, that well-to-do church members are among the bitterest opponents of laws to end child labor, that our most notorious den of political brigands is kind to the poor, and so on. Semantic analysis, he says, will help us understand these baffling contradictions and confusions. It will; it does.
But how is it to get any initial leverage on the ferocious preacher himself, on the pious enemy of ‘state paternalism,’ on the Tammany exploiter, on the gullible voter whom he exploits? Describe these to themselves, and — be you Mr. Chase or another, be your account as semantic as Einstein — what they will hear is what they prefer to hear; that is, a proof that you are a traitor to your country, an enemy of individual liberty, a half-baked visionary, a highbrow malcontent.
In short, the semantic-pragmatie-realistic method shares with other reforms the drawback that the few who have the least need of it are the only ones who will see a great deal in it. But in the present context Mr. Chase undoubtedly does well to ignore the drawback. His subject is what semantics could do for human communication if humanity were to see the light, and it is tactically sound for him to leave it to future criticism to take the measure of this rather formidable ‘it.’ What he has written is first of all a fighting book. Few will doubt that it is on the side of the angels.
WILSON FOLLETT