IN TIMES of crisis, government public rhetoric needs to be absolute and unambiguous. But equally important are voices that remind us of the complexity of the situation we are in. To suggest that only one form of public rhetoric can exist, or that only one kind is legitimate, is to shortchange the people who have to make important decisions in this democracy: ourselves.
A thriving democracy requires citizens who can handle complexity. We can do so only if we permit ambivalent voices to reach our ears and our minds.
In a recent essay, "Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It," Jerry L. Martin and Anne D. Neal take the position that you're either with us or against us. Writing under the auspices of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, they juxtapose the absolute statements of our political leaders with more ambivalent comments by academics to argue that the academics are "failing America."
For instance, they cite President George W. Bush saying: "In this conflict, there is no neutral ground. If members of any government sponsor outlaws and killers of innocents, they have become outlaws and murderers themselves."
And, on the other side, they cite an unnamed Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor as making the following argument: "Imagine the real suffering and grief of people in other countries. The best way to begin a war on terrorism might be to look in the mirror."
Martin and Neal might defend the MIT professor's anonymity on the ground that it protects the speaker from the consequences of his or her utterance. Perhaps. But, at the same time, the fact that all the equivocal academic quotes in their essay are anonymous, and all the absolute political quotes are attributed, cannot fail to imply that there is something shameful about the first, something secretive, subversive.
The differences between these two voices are numerous. But both need to be heard respectfully if we are to preserve a free and vigorous democracy. Shutting off equivocal views only makes it harder for us to understand what democracy - what we are repeatedly told we are fighting for - really means.
Moreover, this struggle is being fought not only by the weapons of war but in the court of public opinion often called the Arab street, through a principal organ of Muslim public opinion, the Dubai-based Arab television station al-Jazeera. If America cannot convince its Muslim allies that our cause is just, the coalition will fall apart, to our detriment. To this end, we have dispatched experts in public relations to sell our side. But they cannot - we cannot - persuade Arabs of the justice of our cause unless we are able to understand their position and make reference to it.
The absolutes of our public rhetoric, however thrillingly persuasive they may sound to us (who hardly require persuasion), are likely to fall flat when directed at a society that interprets current events very differently than we do. I am not saying that we need to believe these alternative positions. To understand is not necessarily to agree or to forgive. But we must give them respectful consideration. Consider, from this perspective, three favorite current public absolutisms:
We are morally pure and utterly innocent.
In our eyes, perhaps. But, to many in the Arab world, the United States has killed Iraqi noncombatants and has been implicit in the killings of innocent Palestinians.
We live in freedom; our opponents represent oppression.
"Democracy" and "freedom" to us are unequivocally good words and good concepts. But in many societies "democracy" may suggest "chaos"; "freedom" may suggest license - things to oppose and stamp out, not to venerate.
We aim to save civilization from their savagery.
Imagine the effect of such rhetoric on members of a culture whose memory goes back a thousand years to a time when their civilization kept learning alive during the West's Dark Ages. How dare we, they must think, claim "civilization" unilaterally for our own? We sometimes minimize the power of rhetoric - we call it "only rhetoric," "mere words."
But the battle being waged over what kind of language is right for American public speech, in the present crisis, shows that we all are well aware of what language can do.
In a moment of danger that emphasizes the preciousness and uniqueness of our tradition of robust public discourse, it would be bitterly ironic to abandon that tradition.
In dangerous times, passionately absolutist rhetoric is paradoxically soothing. It's what we want to hear - and what a wise government provides us. But we would be foolhardy to stamp out the voices that warn us that things are not so simple.
Robin Tolmach Lakoff is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley.
Copyright © 2001, Newsday, Inc.
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