What is language? What can we do with it, and what does it do to us?

In Orwell’s 1984, INGSOC’s totalitarian control of Oceania ultimately depends on Newspeak, the language the Party is working hard to develop and implement. Once in common use, Newspeak will eliminate the possibility of thoughtcrime, i.e. any idea that contradicts or questions absolute love for and devotion to Big Brother. Newspeak systematically scrubs away all those messy, gray areas from the English language, replacing them with a formal, logically-rigid system. For example, instead of having to decide whether to use ‘awesome,’ ‘fabulous,’ or ‘mind-blowingly stupendous’ to describe a situation, you would algorithmically deploy the Newspeak formula, which reduces the plethora of synonyms you could use to ‘good,’ ‘plusgood,’ or ‘doubleplusgood.’ Furthermore, all antonyms are reduced to ‘ungood,’ ‘plusungood,’ or ‘doubleplusungood.’

Syme, a Party linguist, tells Winston, the novel’s rebellious protagonist, that the ultimate goal is to eliminate conscious thought from the speaking process altogether. The Newspeak term for it is ‘duckspeak‘—a more mechanical form of communication that doesn’t require higher-level cognitive functions, like having to pick the word that best expresses your feelings or creating a new one. That sense of freedom and creativity will simply cease to exist once Newspeak has finally displaced ‘Oldspeak.’ “The Revolution will be complete,” Syme tells Winston, “when the language is perfect.” The Proles and the Outer Party (95% of Oceania’s population) will become a mass of mindless duckspeakers, the linguistic equivalent of ‘philosophical zombies’.

Newspeak implies that cognition depends on language—that symbolic communication isn’t merely a neutral means for sending and receiving thoughts. Instead, the words and sentences we use actually influence the way we think about and perceive the world. While Orwell was obviously inspired by the propaganda techniques used by the dictators of his day, perhaps he was also familiar with Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” or the work of anthropologists like Boas and Sapir, all of whom embraced some form of what is now called linguistic relativism, a theory which argues for the reality of what Orwell proposed in fiction: we experience the world according to how our language lets us experience it.

Linguist Lera Boroditsky

Linguistic relativism is on the rise in the contemporary study of language. The work of, for example, Lera Boroditsky and Daniel Everett provide strong empirical data that supports (at least the weak version of) linguistic relativism, challenging the Chomskian paradigm, which posits a universalist account of how language is acquired, functions, and, by extension, relates to cognition and perception.

In my previous essay on the Uroboric model of mind, I asked about the connection between neuronal processes and symbolic systems: how can an abstract representation impact or determine the outcome of tangible physical processes? How can ionic thresholds in axons and the transmission of hormones across synaptic gaps depend upon the meaning of a symbol? Furthermore, how can we account for this in a naturalistic way that neither ignores the phenomena by defining them out of existence nor distorts the situation by positing physics-defying stuff? In short, how do we give an emergent account of the process?

First, we ask: what is language? Most linguists will say it means symbolic communication: in other words, information exchanges that utilize symbols. But what is a symbol? As you may recall from your grade school days, symbols are things that stand for, refer to, or evoke other things—for example, the red hexagonal shapes on street corners provokes your foot to press against the brake, or the letters s, t, o, and p each refer to particular sounds, which, when pronounced together, mean ‘put your foot on the brake.’ Simple enough, right? But the facility with which we use language, and with which we reflexively perceive that usage, belies both the complexity of the process and the powerful effects it has on our thinking.

Cognitive linguists and brain scientists have shown that much of our verbal processing happens unconsciously. Generally speaking, when we use language, words just seem to ‘come to mind’ or ‘show up’ in consciousness. We neither need to consciously think about the meaning of each and every word we use, nor do we have to analyze every variation of tone and inflection to understand things like sarcasm and irony. These complex appraisals and determinations are made subconsciously because certain sub-cortical and cortical systems have already processed the nonverbal signals, the formal symbols, and decoded their meaning. That’s what learning a language equips a brain to do, and we can even identify parts that make major contributions. Broca’s area, for example, is a region in the left frontal lobe that is integral to both language production and comprehension. If a stroke damages Broca’s area, the sufferer may lose the ability not only to produce speech, but to comprehend it as well.

Left-brain language regions

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor

One of the most publicized cases of sudden ‘language-less-ness’ is that of Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, the Harvard brain scientist who, in 1996, happened to have a stroke in her left hemisphere, which impacted both the Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas of her brain. She couldn’t remember who she was. She couldn’t use language. Taylor compares it to dying and being reborn, to being an infant in a grown woman’s body. Her insights into a language-less reality shed light on how words and sentences impact cognition. She says she lost her inner voice, that chatter that goes on ‘in’ the head. She no longer organized her experiences in a categorical, analytic way. Reality no longer showed up to her with the same fine-grained detail: it wasn’t divided and subdivided, classified and prejudged in terms of past associations or future expectations, in terms of self and other, us vs. them, and so on. She no longer had an ‘I’ at the center of her experience. Once the left-brain’s anxious, anal-retentive chatter went offline, right-brain processes took over, and, Taylor claims, the world showed up as waves of energy in an interconnected web of reality. She says that, for her at least, it was actually quite pleasant. The world was present in a way that language had simply dialed down and filtered out. [Any of you who are familiar with monotheistic mysticism and/or mindfulness meditation are probably seeing connections to various religious rituals and the oceanic experiences she describes.]

This has profound implications for the study of consciousness. It illustrates how brain anatomy and neural function—purely physical mechanisms—are necessary to consciousness. Necessary, but not sufficient. While we need brain scientists to continue digging deep, locating and mapping the neuronal correlates of consciousness, we also need to factor in the other necessary part of the ‘mystery of consciousness.’ What linguistic relativism and the Bolte Taylor case suggest is that languages themselves, specific symbolic systems, also determine what consciousness is and how it works. It means not only do we need to identify the neuronal correlates of consciousness but the socio-cultural correlates as well. This means embracing an emergent model that can countenance complex systems and self-referential feedback dynamics.

Orwell understood this. He understood that rhetorical manipulation is a highly effective form of mind control and, therefore, reality construction. Orwell also knew that, if authoritarian regimes could use language to oppress people [20th century dictators actually used these tactics], then freedom and creativity also depend on language. If, that is, we use it self-consciously and critically, and the language itself has freedom and creativity built into it, and its users are vigilant in preserving that quality and refuse to become duckspeakers.

Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate: Terror Management and the Politics of Fear

The opening chapter of Orwell’s dystopian nightmare Nineteen Eighty-four centers around the “Two Minutes Hate.” Winston Smith, the novel’s protagonist, describes pulling up a chair in front of the big telescreen, taking a seat among his Ministry of Truth co-workers, and participating in a ritual designed to reinforce party orthodoxy, Oceania’s version of Must-See-TV.

What follows is a wild display of enmity, precisely channeled and orchestrated by Ingsoc, the totalitarian rulers of Oceania. The chorus of hissing, squeaking, and screaming is focused on Goldstein, the ultimate enemy of the state, “the self-satisfied sheeplike face” that automatically “produced anger and fear” in everybody. Why? Goldstein stands for everything Ingsoc reviles. He demands peace and advocates “freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought.”

The Hate celebrates Ingsoc’s slogans—WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH—and helps stamp out thoughtcrime, i.e. the right to hold personal, unorthodox beliefs and value privacy, the very thing Winston secretly lives for. He’s actually a big fan of Goldstein. But even this devout intellectual heretic feels powerless to the overwhelming wave of emotion that ripples though the crowd and makes otherwise reserved and terse people start “leaping up and down…and shouting at the tops of their voices.”  Take a look at a cinematic interpretation of this.

The most horrific thing, Winston says, isn’t simply that he feels obliged to go along with it. It’s that even a true thoughtcriminal like himself finds it “impossible to avoid joining” the “hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer.” Winston helplessly watches as his secret loathing for Big Brother, the face of the Party, becomes, for a brief, but terrifying moment, true adoration. This foreshadows the fate of his desperate revolt. In the end, Winston’s rebellion fails. He is destined to love Big Brother. The Two Minutes Hate gives us a disturbing glimpse into the psychological, and indeed physiological, means by which totalitarian control is possible. Orwell takes the reader right to the intersection of nature and nurture, where political propaganda sets its scalpel and goes to work, ‘healing’ us through the power of ‘proper’ beliefs—the pseudo-salvation of mind and body that comes from loving and hating the ‘right’ faces. Being an accepted member of your tribe, Orwell argues, is invariably linked to being fervently hostile towards the other tribe.

In this way, Orwell’s diagnosis of totalitarian tactics prefigures a recent breakthrough in social psychology called Terror Management Theory (TMT). The idea is rooted in anthropologist Ernest Becker’s seminal work The Denial Death, which proposed that all human behavior is instinctively shaped and influenced by the fear of death. Whether we realize it or not, our ‘mortality anxiety’—a quality that appears to be unique to our species—is such a potent and potentially debilitating force, we have to repress and distract ourselves from it. But as Freud says, the repressed always returns, slipping into our conscious minds and affecting our behavior in lots of weird ways. This anxiety, according to Becker, feeds back into our psyche and influences everything we think and do. Our social practices and institutions—from politics to religion to art—are systematic attempts to explain away and allay this fear, which is why we can lash out so viciously at those who seem to threaten or undermine our beliefs. We can’t let their existence weaken our psychological armor against the ultimate enemy, Death itself.

Researchers Sheldon Solomon and Jeff Greenberg decided to put Becker’s hypothesis to the test by devising clever psychological experiments to isolate and measure the anxiety factor. Time and time again, they found that when people were made to think about their own death, they reacted in a more hostile way to those who were perceived as an ideological other than they did when they were not asked to contemplate it. You can check out these weird but illuminating experiments here.

Terror Management Theory (TMT) can explain everything from the bloody sacrificial rites carried out by the Aztecs to the sudden and unquestioning support Pres. Bush received from many liberals after 9/11, people who on September 10^th didn’t even think he’d legitimately won the office. The theory helps us grasp not only the irrational, cult-like power of charismatic leaders and the effectiveness of negative political ads, it presupposes a neurological basis for our susceptibility to the Love/Hate style of propaganda—how it taps into the way we’re wired and re-routes the circuitry so we become unwitting puppets to elitist agendas that don’t actually serve our interests. We become mouthpieces and pumping fists for the very forces that oppress us. In other words, you are not in control of your own beliefs and behavior, Big Brother has already gotten to your amygdala—the brain’s subcortical fear factory—and told you what to love and what to hate, the faces worth admiring and the faces that need to be smashed with a sledgehammer…or with a prejudicial slur or with a cruise missile.

Orwell may not have grasped the neurology (he predates the f-MRI technology that allows us to see the amygdala in action), but he certainly understood the psycho-dynamics of TMT, fifty years before it was empirically verified by Solomon and Greenberg. The hate, Winston explains, flows through the group “like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.” And yet, since its a primitive instinct which has been manipulated by social conditioning, this hate is “an abstract undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another,” like a flashlight. In other words, we love and/or hate by nature, but the particular objects of our adoration and enmity are learned. The question is, have you learned how to consciously control this dynamic? Or has Big Brother already beat you to the punch?

Tragically, Winston can’t choose who to love and who to hate, and this, Orwell implies, is the ultimate agenda of an effective totalitarian state, one of its defining properties and ultimately its most fundamental power. Nineteen Eighty-four‘s dystopian vision—unrelentingly bleak and terrifying—still resonates because the kind of manipulation it describes hasn’t gone away with fall of the Soviet Union. Its machinations have just grown more subtle and are all the more powerful and hideous for it.

Hate on the Left and Right

Orwell’s novel reminds us to step back from the histrionic media frenzies that pass for political discourse these days, take a rational breath, and ask ourselves: am I really in control of what I believe? Or am I motivated by fears I’m not even aware of? When I step into the booth and cast my ballot, am I making a conscious choice or has Big Brother already pushed the button for me?

Remember, Hitler initially gained power through the democratic process, which he then systematically dismantled. Do we really want to be free and rules ourselves or is there, as Freud argued in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1922)  something deep within in that longs to be subjugated and dominated? Do you secretly like it when Big Brother mashes his political finger against your limbic button?

 Take a minute or two and think about it.