Defining Terms
Clarity in Writing Again
In my essay, “On Clarity in Writing,” I spent considerable time on the definitions of various terms such as “fascism,” “technocracy,” “corporatism,” and “jingoism,” which technically have specific meanings but which are typically thrown around willy-nilly by commentators who either don’t know what they mean or are willfully dissembling in an effort to confuse readers. Whether we chalk this up to laziness, ignorance, or malice isn’t important. What is important is the effect it has – that of making public debates nonsensical. If we use the same words to signify different concepts, we are talking past one another, and we will never manage to have constructive arguments.
I mentioned in that essay that many of our debates are semantic – we expend great effort to argue that our vision of “real freedom” or “true equality” or “authentic patriotism” is the only one that matters and that the other side’s version of freedom is slavery. While these debates are more than merely semantic (and actually strike at the heart of interesting philosophical questions), most of the time they end up confusing matters and it would be simpler for us to set out a list of terms upon which we can agree or to state our preferences clearly and simply, rather than saying that the other side doesn’t know what true equality is.
For instance, instead of saying as Marx did that true freedom can only be found in community with others and jumping from there to a statement like “libertarians say they are for liberty, but they don’t know what freedom is,” it would make more sense to ditch the talk of freedom and make a straightforward case for a form of social organization in which property is owned in common and that this method of social organization is better for human flourishing for specific reasons. Or, conversely, instead of arguing that their ideology is “the real progressivism, because progress only comes about through decentralized interactions between autonomous individuals,” libertarians should forget the fight over labels and instead make a straightforward case that the best method of social organization is a night-watchman state.
These are merely examples, and I could have picked a dozen others. Rather than focus on semantic debates about true freedom (or real equality or the authentic definition of progress), here I will turn to the main thesis of today’s essay, which is that modern discourse suffers from a lack of clarity, partially traceable to poorly understood debates about definitions. Among other factors, widespread ignorance about the nature of these debates results in tautological discussions in which some, most, or all parties are unaware of the subtexts of their own arguments.
One way to remedy this would be to have an acceptable set of definitions agreed-upon by almost everyone, but this is never going to happen. As soon as we have a common understanding of a word, (i.e., that “Nazi” has something to do with Adolf Hitler,) people are going to intentionally abuse it in order to further an agenda (ex. “Ronald Reagan is a Nazi”) or make a point (ex. “stop being a grammar Nazi about the Oxford comma”).
The alternative is for writers to define their terms. For instance, I would estimate that nine out of ten Americans don’t know what the term fascism means, other than that it has something to do with Mussolini and Hitler. Anyone who uses the term should be clear what they mean by it. Do they mean “a futuristic, revolutionary ideology of social control centered around a single individual’s will,” “a militaristic, socialist movement in the 1910s spearheaded by Benito Mussolini,” “an authoritarian ideology which worships the state instead of God,” or something else? Since I spent time on fascism in my last essay, I won’t do so here. Even if someone is using it in a way that I would describe as being so far from historical truth as to be impossible to take seriously (ex. “fascism is about religion and capitalism”),1 it’s better for a writer to define what he or she means by fascism and proceed from there than to assume that we understand the word the same way he or she does. We can then read the article and substitute in the author’s definition each time we see the word, even if we don’t agree with the definition.
Further Examples:
Recently, I read an article (whose author will remain anonymous) which used a notoriously difficult-to-pin-down word: reactionary. The author quoted Henry Cabot Lodge using the word, and while I think Lodge’s use was in the same ballpark as the author’s, I came away unsure whether they really meant the same thing by the word, and even whether the author was aware that Lodge might be using the word differently than he was.
I’m not going to attempt to set out a clear, widely-accepted definition for the word “reactionary,” which originally referred to the throne-and-altar opponents of the French Revolution who sought to preserve the ancien regime. For a while, it meant the proponents of premodern, medieval forms of social arrangement. Reactionaries preferred feudalism, or at least monarchism (and sometimes mercantilism to capitalism), and disliked political and even technological change. The word grew complicated by Marx’s “scientific” theory of history, which posited that feudalism gave way to capitalism, which would in turn give way to communism. By this theory, anyone opposing the “inevitable” forward movement of history was a reactionary, which meant that both Enlightenment liberals who believed in capitalism or natural rights and monarchists who opposed those things counted as reactionaries. It is quite a logical leap to suggest that J.S. Mill and Adam Smith were in the same ideological camp as Joseph de Maistre, but if history really only moves in one direction, than anyone opposing that direction is “reactionary.”
I admit I am guilty of using the term without defining it, as I have used it in the past to mean “opposed to technological change” or “Luddite.” In some ways, “reactionary” is like the words “radical” and “conservative,” two descriptors which lack a single ideological definition and which depend on the word they are modifying for their full meaning (i.e., a “radical libertarian” vs. a “radical syndicalist;” “conservative opponents to Deng Xiaoping opposed reform towards a more capitalist economy and sought to preserve Mao’s Cultural Revolution”).2
When we use the term “reactionary” today, do we mean (as some do) “populist,” or as Stalin did “anyone who opposes the Soviet Union, including American socialists or progressives,” or as the Nazis did “anyone who opposes the revolution, including the ‘conservative’ elements of German society such as business and the church,” or “a desire for a rebirth of monarchism in the modern day” a la Curtis Yarvin and the “Dark Enlightenment” or “neo-reactionary” crowd? Or something else?
We could do an even longer treatment of the word “progressive” which means something different for Alexandria Ocasio Cortez than it did for Woodrow Wilson or FDR (even as there is more continuity in ideological progressivism than there is in the word “reactionary,” which unlike “progressive” is typically not used by people to describe themselves, but rather is used to describe other people in an often-derogatory manner).
I suppose I am retreading old ground at this point, given that I wrote earlier about the misuse of “neoliberalism,” “libertarian,” “neoconservative,” and other terms which seem to mean entirely different things depending on who is speaking.
Finally, I won’t dwell on the misuse of the term “assault rifle,” other than to mention that many journalists and pundits know less about firearms than I do. The abuse of technical terms such as “automatic” and “semi-automatic” is such that most journalism on the subject of firearms is misleading to the point of being misinformation. It’s probably best to name the specific gun in question and say what it does, rather than use a term which half your readers are going to misunderstand anyway. For the record, an automatic firearm continues firing when the trigger is held down, and a semi-automatic requires a new pull of the trigger for every shot.
I’ll turn briefly from the world of politics to the world of health and wellness, where similar problems abound. For instance, the word “calisthenics” has the definition “gymnastic exercises to achieve fitness and grace of movement”, which quite frankly could include almost anything. Typically, it refers to bodyweight resistance exercise (i.e., the push-up, pull-up, squat, lunge, etc.), however I have noticed that many people appear to use the word to mean whatever they want it to mean. In my work, I try to avoid the word for the reason that it becomes so confusing, however if I had to use it, I would mean push-ups and squats.
Another good example is “tempo” or “threshold,” which some people will use to refer to aerobic exercise performed at lactate threshold, but even then many of those people appear not to know what lactate threshold is (even though it is a physiological parameter with an inarguable single definition, in the same way that hemoglobin A1C has a single definition which isn’t subject to debate). If I use the term, I will always define it and explain what I mean by it (i.e., I mean the same thing that Jack Daniels – the man who did most of the early research on long-distance training, not the whiskey purveyor – means). Even then, I sometimes wonder if people understand. I’ve mostly given up on using the term “tempo” entirely, and will instead give three definitions in succession, any one of which should suffice for most people (“a pace that is comfortably hard, or the fastest you can go without any physical pain,” “the pace you would race at for a race lasting exactly one hour,” “the pace at which your body still clears lactate from your blood”).
Where Are We Going with These Examples?
The larger point is very simple. Intellectual honesty requires writing in a way which does not intentionally confuse the reader, and therefore writers should avoid using terms about which there is great confusion (or especially terms about which they are confused themselves). And if they do use those terms, they should define them.
This is difficult to carry out in practice. Some editors see such definitions as a waste of time. “Everybody knows” what fascism is (even though everybody doesn’t), so why waste space in a column defining it? The problem is that the abuse of terms such as “reactionary” and “fascist” is such that every reader will come to an article with a slightly different idea of what they mean,3 which makes it difficult to make an argument while relying on those terms unless a definition is offered. As I have said, the definition could be technically incorrect, but readers can proceed through the argument by substituting the writer’s definition in each instance for the term in question and emerge at the end with a clear understanding of the argument even if they do not accept the definition as accurate.
For instance, if a columnist defined the word “progressive” as “a person who is optimistic about the future,” you and I might rightly find this definition as silly and false as saying that “pigeon” is a word for a yellow fruit,4 but we could still grasp the columnist’s argument by substituting the word “optimist” whenever we encountered the word “progressive.”
Definitional debates can be inane or obscure, but they can also be deeply interesting and instructive. However, because these debates can easily turn a preface into an encyclopedia without resolving fundamental disagreements, it is better to sidestep them when possible. Either state in as clear terms as possible what you are for, or briefly acknowledge that your definition of certain terms is contested and then move on quickly,5 but don’t use a term without defining it while assuming that readers will just figure it out from context.
If at all possible, use terms which aren’t contested. Admittedly, this is difficult, because even a clear invocation of “laissez faire capitalism” or “socialized medicine,” is confused by the fact that some people conflate “fewer rules than I would like” with no rules at all, while others will contend that even a system in which the government owns all of the hospitals and employs all of the doctors and offers medical care for “free” isn’t true socialism, just common sense in an advanced democracy. My solution to this is that we should at times be willing to use at least some terms as our opponents define them in order to convey to them exactly what we mean. For instance, proponents of universal healthcare could concede that they are in favor of socialized medicine and make an argument for why that is the best arrangement, rather than contesting that it isn’t a form of socialism. Pro-lifers could accept the label “anti-abortion” (the pro-choice crowd contests that the pro-life argument is about life) as it accurately describes the pro-life position.
This only works when the label is an accurate description. For instance, most proponents of restraint in foreign policy should not accept the label “isolationist,” because that is not in fact what they are.6 Few of them support autarky or a withdrawal from all foreign affairs. Similarly, most hawks are not “members of the Raytheon Party” (or whatever), so they should reject the label and continuing calling themselves hawks.
In Conclusion:
I will endeavor to strive for clarity in my own writing. I could have given a dozen more examples (“nationalist,” “hack squat,” “low-carb,” and “punk rock” come to mind), but I will end here. I’m sure at times I will slip up and use a term like “low-carb” without defining it first. I will probably continue to call out flagrant examples of confusing language abuse throughout my career, because it annoys me and because it is so common. It is a Sisyphean task,7 I suppose, because most of our debates are so confused already with poor thinking and unclear writing that you could found a magazine dedicated to correcting the problem and even employing a hundred writers you would not stem it. But Sisyphus is happy.
Hitler and Mussolini both saw the goal of their political movement as displacing Christianity as a source of meaning in the lives of their citizens. Neither believed in God. Mussolini used to famously give speeches in which he would call upon God to strike him down with a lightning bolt to prove He existed. Similarly, both hated capitalism and capitalists, and Mussolini spent his dying moments with a committed communist friend who declared him a martyr for socialism to the bitter end.
I believe this point was originally made by Russell Kirk or possibly Lionel Trilling or Arthur Schlessinger (or someone else from that error), but my memory and internet research has failed to turn up the answer. At some point in the future, I may amend this essay with the proper attribution. Or, if any reader knows the answer (and can point to a citation), please let me know.
Terms such as “Marxist,” “communist,” and “socialist” are also abused in the discourse. However, because they have clear and simple definitions which almost anyone with basic literacy in political matters can give you (i.e., “the philosophical movement created by Karl Marx and his followers,” “a person dedicated to the creation of a social order in which private property is abolished and all land is held in common by all people equally,” “a person dedicated to the creation of a social order in which the means of production are owned by the state.”), there is still a broad understanding of what they mean.
By which I don’t mean to suggest anything about whether or not progressives are optimistic about the future, but rather to make that point that even with a definition like this one, so vague and tangential as to mean close to nothing, we can still arrive at an understanding of what the author intended by his or her argument.
Examples: “While raging debates over the ‘true’ definition of ‘liberty,’ have failed to resolve the question after hundreds of years, when I use the term I am referring to an absence of governmental restrictions, which some call ‘negative liberty’ (to be contrasted with ‘positive liberty’), and from here out you can assume that when I reference liberty this is what I mean.” Or “I recognize that the man who coined the term ‘technocracy’ meant it as an alternative to the messiness of laissez faire capitalism, but I intend to use the term to mean technologically-advanced laissez faire capitalism.” Perhaps these statements aren’t particularly short, but they do lay out things out rather nicely for the reader (although they invite the question, “Why are you using that definition?”).
“Restraint” is the best term for this camp. “Realist” isn’t. The most prominent foreign policy realist in the twentieth century was Henry Kissinger, whom many in the restraint camp consider to be a war criminal. (I don’t agree with every decision he made, but I think they’re wrong about that.)
Since you asked, the word “Sisyphean” does not now mean, nor has it ever meant, “a difficult task.” It refers to a task which literally never ends. Sisyphus was condemned for eternity to roll a stone up a mountain only to have it slip and roll back to the bottom every time he came close to the top.