The War of the Words
Jul 16th, 2008 by admin
by Teri Ong
Researchers have determined that women need to generate 4 times as many words as men, on average. It is a good thing that I do not feel compelled to keep track and generate 4 times as many words as my husband. He– a preacher– has been given the spiritual “gift of the gab.” There would not be enough time or legitimate opportunity in 24 hours to quadruple his output. I do, however, get in my fair share. Freedom of conversation was one of the things that drew us to each other 30 years ago.
In conversation, there are three identified levels of concern: people, events, and ideas, with talk about people being the lowest form and talk about ideas being the highest. Some have mistaken me for being rather a cold fish because I am generally more interested in talking about ideas than I am in chatting about people and the circumstances of their lives. (As a mother of seven children and grandmother of two, I have plenty of involvement in the circumstances of life of certain people.) But on the whole, society is obsessed with gossip about people. Witness the popularity of People magazine, the tabloids, and gossip shows on TV. Why would so many magazines, even news magazines, have celebrities on their covers? (Because they sell!) Look at Oprah– identified as the number one culture maker in our country– her picture is on her magazine every single month.
As Americans have drifted away from reason toward emotion as the basis of evaluating truth, words have become less important and pictures and images have become more important. The implications and reasons for this shift can be debated, but few would deny that it has happened. [see notes in References below] Two examples in the culture war come to mind: MTV (based on sensual/sensate images designed to arouse feelings) and conservative talk radio (no images, only words about large scale political and social ideas designed to provoke thought).
Technology has increased the output of both words and pictures in society. Until the printing press, writers and artists were restricted to single copies produced by hand. With the invention of the printing press, multiple copies could be produced quickly and with less investment of time and money, but the cost was often prohibitive and printing was in the hands of skilled tradesmen who made large investments in equipment.
During the early 70’s, when I was in high school , our journalism department moved from contracting out the school newspaper to a specialized print shop every other week, to printing on “insty-print” offset presses in the school print shop twice a week. What we wouldn’t have done for all of the computerized E-quipment available for in-house newsletters today! We could have produced the school paper every day of the week! But today, news is not even daily– it’s minute-by-minute. And anybody can sit around in their jammies and post written pieces, photographs, films, music videos– anything they want– on the internet, and almost for free, have an expectation of world-wide distribution.
This is not the first time in history that an explosion in technology has had ramifications in a culture war. In the 1600’s, English society saw unparalleled upheavals as royalists and republicans slugged it out physically and metaphorically over whether their government was going to be top down (royalist) or bottom up (republican). Historian Nigel Smith wrote, “The sinews of communication made the [English] Civil War possible, and, beyond the level of brute force, communication and authority were fought over and disputed until the end of the century. Moreover, as the most fixed and daunting structures of the external world– monarchy, Lords, church– crumbled, so the internal pillars of thought crumbled.” (P.1)
In his book Literature and Revolution in England: 1640-1660, Smith argues, “It is my contention that literature was part of the crisis and the revolution, and was at its epicenter. Never before in English history had written and printed literature played such a predominant role in public affairs, and never before had it been felt by contemporaries to be of such importance: there had never before been anything to compare with this war of words. It was an information revolution.” (P. 1)
What Smith identifies as a “war of words” was so intense that the monarchy at various times sought to control certain types of communications. In the 1620’s and 1630’s James I and Charles I (“Big Government”!) tried to stifle means that were used to criticize their regimes. When the Commonwealth failed and the monarchy was reestablished in 1660, the “Act of Indemnity and Oblivion” was enacted as a method of forcing political unity. It stated, “Anyone who shall presume maliciously to call or allege of, or object against any other person or persons any name or names, or other words of reproach tending to revive the memory of the late differences or occasions thereof, shall be punished with fines.” (P. 1) Evidently too many people were engaging in what the king saw as “the politics of personal destruction.”

Don’t give up in the war of words.
This is eerily similar to modern day American attempts to hush up one side or the other: witness, hate crimes legislation, the “Fairness” doctrine, campaign finance reform, and a host of attempts to regulate the internet.
Just today I read a column by Gene Policinski (executive director of the First Amendment Center) entitled, “More fences springing up to restrain the wild wild web”. He details a variety of diverse groups such as the US Supreme Court, the Missouri Legislature, Verizon Wireless, AT&T, and their attempts to block certain kinds of e-mail and language on live broadcasts, to bring libel suits against bloggers and to restrict what bloggers can reproduce from news organizations. “Nostalgia and romantic notions didn’t stop the fencing in of the vision of a wild, open country. For good or bad, a combination of legislation, court decisions, self-imposed restrictions and private vendor rules are creating limits in and around the Web’s wide-open speech country in much the same fashion.”
Smith wrote, “When something as cataclysmic as the English Civil War and Revolution occurs, a massive destabilisation in the order of meaning is engendered. That there were so many words enhanced the sense of this, and it was a time which many acknowledged as a collective loss of reason.” (P. 362) In the current election cycle, we are seeing more clearly the cumulative effects of a similar collective loss of reason. Rush Limbaugh expresses it as “symbolism” (visual, emotional) over “substance” (ideological, rational). It goes back to that whole idea of people and events vs. ideas.
Star Parker, columnist for Scripps Howard News Service, points out that Republicans and Democrats alike are dissatisfied with “the state of their country”; 70% are unhappy with president and 90% unhappy with congress. That is pretty cataclysmic! “What also is happening is we are witnessing a phenomenon that, at least for the time being, is personal– not ideological.” She continues, “So the election is about change. It’s not ideology. It’s personal. And those who care about limited government and traditional values should be worried.” Our important presidential race is between Obama with 71% public visibility and McCain with 11% visibility.
Someone years ago uttered the truism, “One picture is worth a thousand words.” Pictures are, however, limited. One can photograph people and events, but one cannot photograph ideas. And pictures do need captions. When there is no caption, a picture may not be understood at all or may be misunderstood. It may evoke inappropriate emotions because it was not understood in context. So the need for words to go with our pictures is as great today as ever. During the English Civil War, Smith acknowledges, “As usual with governmental attempts to regulate language, the legislation did not work.” We should pray that attempts to regulate free speech, particularly political speech will be as ineffective today as they were 400 years ago. And we need to keep fighting hard and smart in the war of the words.
P.S. Our heart goes out to the family of Tony Snow, a fallen soldier in the War of the Words. May someone worthy step up to carry on the fight!
References_____________
See: Hunt, Arthur W. III. The Vanishing Word: The Veneration of Visual Imagery in the Postmodern World. Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Books, 2003.
I personally attribute the shift from verbal to visual to two things:
1. Uncertainty of epistemology: post-modern relativism causes many to believe that there is no objective truth to be known rationally. Hence, we can only truly know how we feel. Visual images evoke feelings preeminently and are trusted as true.
2. Declining national character– i.e. laziness, selfish desire for ease. Studies have shown that alpha waves are produced in the brain during tv watching, making the brain more inactive watching tv than during sleep. We watch in a deep sleep with little ability to think critically about what we see.
Smith, Nigel. Literature and Revolution in England: 1640-1660. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.
Parker, Star. “Change in party should have Republicans worried”. The Truth (Elkhart, Indiana), Monday, July 14, 2008, page A4, columns 4,5,6.
Policinski, Gene. “More fences springing up to restrain wild wild web.” The Truth (Elkhart, Indiana), Tuesday, July 15, 2008, page A4, columns 1,2,3.

