Language and Murder

Building photo created by ungvar – www.freepik.com

Language and Murder

By Joel Levin

The recent events in the Capitol Building are so surprising, so unexpected, so unprecedented and, at this point, so foggy, that one hesitates to offer any early comments. I will attempt caution but simply suggest that, the heat of the outrage, the apologetics of the defenders, and the complications of the politics all aside, we might consider two simple pieces of wisdom, one borrowed from philosophy and one from history, as to why what happened might actually be as concerning as the overwrought media and partisan politicians suggest.

Philosophy first (the typical path of this blog). In the often bleak area of philosophy of language, renown for its obscurity and yet greater obscurity, two principles, one set out by Gottlob Frege, the German mathematician turned Nazi sympathizer, and one by J. L. Austin, the ordinary language Oxford philosopher so far from ordinary that no one could keep up with him, seem to have a certain resonance when judging the protesters turned rioters turned looters in the Capitol. Frege first. Frege said that truth is the essential quality of sentences; that is, sentences gain their sense in meaning and importance because they are true or false. The reasoning here quickly gets into the weeds but, basically, we communicate with each other and run our lives, our social existence, and our civilization by making statements that we want others to judge as true or false. “The Zoom call is at 3:00”. “I ordered double pepperoni and triple anchovies on my pizza.” “Their office is in Rockefeller Center.”  “Joe Biden won the Georgia election.” When we lose our way in this idea that language is essentially a convention or device or tool or habit that we employ to figure out truth, we have lost our way to making sense of ourselves, our family, our society, and our civilization.

Next, J. L. Austin. Austin wrote that certain important, even critical, statements – what he at that time originally called ‘performatives’ – were neither true nor false and we commit a major mistake in thinking that they are. They are conduct. A few examples: “I do”, in response to whether the groom will have and hold for better or worse. “Fire” by the officer commanding a firing squad. “I name this ship the QE2”, being the queen and smashing champagne against a new ocean liner.” These are speech acts. Saying “I do” causes one to be married; commanding “Fire”  begins the execution, and striking the ship and saying “I name” etc. actually gives it that name. It doesn’t matter, at least in terms of becoming married, whether the groom is being entirely honest in his intentions or prudent in his predictions about being faithful and honorable in a marriage, or whether the name of the QE2 is actually the QE2. Saying the first makes you married and saying that the name of the ship is the QE2 makes it the QE2. Saying “Fire” makes the soldiers under command fire. The statement is a speech act, as Austin dubbed it, and is as much of an action as any piece of conduct that one might observe. That is, there is no interesting difference between firing the weapon yourself and saying fire to a group of soldiers under your command.

Now, back to the Capitol. The theme of the rallies before the storming of the Capitol and the rhetoric leading up to tens of thousands of individuals pouring into Washington to participate basically centered around the belief that the election was stolen. The origins of that belief are complex and the individuals who have repeated it are diversely situated, from politicians, to those active in right-wing organizations, to media types, to social network bloggers to those on the dark web seeing conspiracy behind every word and action. What is important in terms of the storming at the Capitol Building is that those who were in the best position to advance that statement – that is, the statement that the election was stolen or fraudulent or in someway lead to a result contrary to the actual vote – were in a good position to know the statement was false. It was simply, without question, without controversy, without any real ambiguity, simply and utterly false. The defenses of the falsehood – that there was the odd vote or voter in some out-of-the-ordinary situation or in some particular out-of-the-way place or in the usual place – is utterly irrelevant to the actual outcome of 155 million voters and a few hundred questionable votes. 1% of 1% of 155,000,000 is 15,500. That is the kind of calculation that caused dozens of courts to ask the Trump and GOP lawyers why they were there and what they wanted the court to do.

Uttering something that is known to be false, particularly when it becomes central to the discourse between the speaker and the listener (here the millions of listeners) destroys what Frege thought to be essential to our society: that the statements that we make are taken to be true and should be meant to be true. This does not mean they cannot be mistaken, that we might discover that the person we thought was at a certain address has moved, the zoom meeting was at 2:00, or that we ordered the pizza from a different pizzeria. It only means that the paradigm and the general cases must call for the truth.

What is essential for Frege, and should be of concern to us, is that we still judge every statement by (at the least) its truth on the one hand, and on the other that we can only engage in this communication andlinguistic endeavor if we assume that what is being advanced is offered for its truth by those advancing it. Here, in the Trumpian camp,  there was no such integrity. That might seem obvious, but it leads to the J. L. Austin insight. Much of what was said in the speeches at the Save America rally prior to storming the Capitol, found earlier on the active and overwrought internet, and repeated on the grounds of or inside the U.S. Capitol is now considered by apologists to be free speech. That is, it is said to be protected in some way – although it is hardly legally protected according to past Supreme Court decisions, but my purpose is not to discuss why it is bad First Amendment law, only why it is destructive to rational language and social use – because it is language and not an act. This distinction is supposedly ironclad. 

However, as Austin suggests, it is nothing of the sort. That is why those who believe in elevating free speech as an exalted right ought nevertheless be relatively comfortable with prosecuting those who use language as an action, and not simply as something that could be true or false. The suggestion by Trump and his allies and followers – that we need to march, we need to be powerful, we need to show people what’s right, we need to force people’s hands, the Democrats are trying to steal the election and we must stop them, we need to engage in trial by combat, we need to take back the vote, we need despite the Electoral College to declare Trump not Biden, the winner, we need to teach Vice President Pence and Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Chief Justice John Roberts a lesson – all that, in the context of a crowd, as Austin pointed out, is entirely unprotected conduct. 

What, then, is the basic lesson here suggested by philosophy of language? It is hardly complicated, although the philosophical underpinnings are complex, even byzantine. It is simply this: we operate as human beings in society only through statements that have truth value, that is, the ability to convey truth or falsity, the need to form an intent to be truthful in our utterances and the need to be judged as to that truth.. Further, when we make statements that are in fact performative or speech acts, whether they are a few or number of steps in a short or long series of utterances leading to action, from “Fire” before the soldiers conducting a firing squad to the much longer set of steps, as when President Trump, in Georgia several days before the Capitol riots, said that “The Democrats are trying to steal the election and we must stop them.” We would hardly excuse the head (consider here a Klan leader or other racist incendiary) of a group of rioters turned lynch mob, seeing that the mob had caught and bound their victim, for saying the words: “String him up”. That is what being a speech act entails.

Let us remember that language is essentially a means of communication, not just meant to be a private vocal offering useful to enjoying the sound of one’s own voice. Communication requires listeners, audiences, settings, and particular situations. What one says on stage or in a film, what might masquerade there as a threat, is not meant to be taken seriously as a threat because the audience knows that it is simply part of a drama. Similarly with jokes, not to be taken literally. Similarly with hyperbole meant in context or sermons in church and closing arguments in a trial. They have ambitions unconnected to truth. They have ambitions unconnected to truth. President Trump stood before a mob, that is a group of individuals that he well knew were gathered in Washington with deep grievances, well armed, in search of retribution against those who they considered responsible for those grievances, and with a belief in violence. What exactly did he say to them? “We won this election, and we won by a landslide“, “We will stop the steal”, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore”, and “We are going to the Capitol.” Whether speech acts, per Austin, or also “fighting words” in Constitutional law, these words are actions, not merely to be judged or considered for their truth content, but for being a link in the chain of conduct.

The lesson from history then. In the age of equality, or at least purported equality, we like to say that all individuals are created equal, should be considered as equal, should be treated no differently from others before the law, should be given the identical civil rights, vote, and privileges. Killing one person is to invite consideration of the victim and the perpetrator in all cases in the same manner: each is the same as the killing of any other person, no more and no less. No one who reads history can think that to be true. The assassination of Julius Caesar effectively ended the Roman Republic and gave birth to the Roman Empire, and prevented any programs of redistribution of Roman wealth from the patrician class to the lower classes. It would be hard to say that there was another populous leader of Rome interested in the common man andwoman until 1900 years later. Let me raise two more familiar assassinations: President Abraham Lincoln andSenator Robert F. Kennedy. These involved not just the killing of two extraordinary men, they involve the killing of ideas, the murder of hope, and a change for the worse in America that lasted for decades, cost people their lives and livelihoods, and created a reshaping of the American landscape for the worse. 

First, Abraham Lincoln. President Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865, not long after delivering his remarkable Second Inaugural Address. There, he famously set out an approach that he voiced as “with malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves and with all nations.” 41 days later Lincoln was dead and Andrew Johnson was President.

The changes brought by Johnson were immediately evident. He was opposed to the 14th Amendment which guaranteed basic liberties, due process and equal protection to all; he opposed rights or compensation for the freed slaves, he resisted Reconstruction that protected the rights and lives of those individuals; and, at every moment, he exhibited a crude racism, a meanness towards the former slaves and their allies, and a profound sympathy for those in the Confederacy whose treason cost the lives of hundreds of thousands in service of a pernicious cause. Civil rights would not begin to see the light of day for African-Americans for another century.

Next, Bobby Kennedy. Consider his impromptu words when, at a political rally a hundred years later on April 4, 1968, he learned of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God. What we need in the United States is not division; we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black. . . . Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.” He was the leading candidate for President, running firmly on a platform to end the Vietnam war. 63 days later he was dead and Richard Nixon became President, extending that war another 4 years, with the death of an additional 22,000 Americans andhundreds of thousands more Vietnamese soldiers and civilians, a population and countryside destroyed by Agent Orange, land mines and napalm, a devastated American war economy, the destruction of Cambodia, and America’s place in the world justly tarnished.

Unlike Caesar, or a large number of assassinations which changed the world, including one we will return to in a moment, not only were the assassinations of Lincoln and Kennedy violent acts which altered the course of history, they had a narrower, but perhaps more profound, consequence of changing elections. Changing a democratic election, at least prima facie, is a distinct wrong. Not all killing of leaders, think autocrats, necessarily have the same moral flavor. (Iannucci’s film “The Death Of Stalin” is one look at that). Consider the disenfranchised voters whose interests and preferences were taken from them when their candidate or elected official was killed and whose successor, for whatever complex or idiosyncratic reasons, represented a different point of view are wronged. They are victims. At certain turning points in history, this alteration is profound. Attempting it, though, is always a dramatic, drastic, and momentous act. Lincoln’s death stopped the possibility of real equality and integration into the politics, society and economy of the South for freed slaves and their descendants; while the death of RFK extended the Vietnam War, permanently severed the ready Roosevelt alliances between working class blacks and working class whites, and stopped cold the first initiative by a political leader in the United States promoting environmentalism.

The point here is perhaps obvious: there are certainly crimes against society, against democracy, against government, and against the social order that stand apart from crimes against individuals. There is a related, perhaps more subtle point that needs to be raised here, one easily lost in the rush to proclaim equality among individuals: while all individuals may be created equal, politically, at least in a democracy, they do not remain equal, and the death of political leaders, particularly distinctive or irreplaceable political leaders or those in power at certain crucial periods, elevates the act to a different and potentially far more catastrophic crime than simply murder. 

This week, in the Capitol Building, the new Senate is balanced 50-50. The killing of a Democratic senator or two, particularly from a state that either would have delayed elections, or called for appointment by a governor who is Republican rather than Democratic (or an election that might go the other way, as perhaps might be the case in Georgia or Arizona or Ohio) would change the politics in America profoundly for at least two years and perhaps more, alter judicial appointments, change cabinet selections, reverberate through economic decisions, and make foreign policy, environmental policy, healthcare policy, and racial policy quite different. It would have been possible for the rioters, carrying guns, to effectuate this, or to assassinate Senator and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, leaving the Senate with a 50-50 tie and politically impotent and inert. All of this was at stake with gunmen roaming the Capitol Building, haunted by grievance, consumed with “stop the steal”, and seeing as responsible, ultimately holding liable, various elected officials who they thought aided and abetted, participated in and encouraged, and ratified and endorsed this “steal”. 

A slight apocalyptic diversion. On June 28, 1914, the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated along with his wife by Serbian revolutionaries in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo. This set in motion a series of events where nations grimly chose sides, the Russians with Serbia, the Prussians with Austria. Eventually the English and French and Italians would take one side, the Bulgarians and Turks another, leading to a world war leaving more than 20 million dead, 20 million injured, another 20 million killed in the flu pandemic spread by the war, the Armenian Genocide, Leninists ruling Russia, and a broken and impoverished Germany choosing the Nazis a decade later. Christopher Clark, in his brilliant analysis of World War I, “The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went To War In 1914”, described the Archduke’s assassination as evidence of “the way in which a single, symbolic event – however deeply it may be enmeshed in larger historical processes – can change politics irrevocably, rendering old options obsolete andendowing new ones with an unforeseen urgency”. 

A couple of bullets and the world changed. This was the risk of the Capitol riots. It was only made possible because the fabric of language that ties us together, which separates our gatherings from those of the gazelles and lions of the savannas shared by our ancestors, a fabric sewn and held together by truth, was deliberately ripped apart.