Who describes Orlando as a ‘terror attack,’ and who describes it as ‘mass murder’?
The reaction to Sunday morning’s shooting in Orlando was deeply distressing if unsurprising. Mere hours after the news broke, several debates raged nationwide. Participants came forearmed with prepared positions that they applied to the shooting. This is the hallmark of discourse these days. The subject was rarely the shooting of scores of patrons at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub by a disgruntled Afghani American. Instead, arguers went meta: Everything from homophobia to the nature of Islam to the place of guns in society was fodder for argument on cable news and radio, in social media, and in speeches and tweets by presidential candidates. Americans experienced not even a nanosecond of solidarity. The notion of coming together against a common enemy foundered on hermeneutic nit-picking about who the enemy truly is or whether the very concept of enemy is offensive. How did we get here?
The short answer is that, in 2016, everyone is talking past one another. Even in the aftermath of a mass murder, perpetrated by a gunman who emphatically swore allegiance to a national enemy while hunting his victims, the verbiage machine is incapable of switching to a different mode. Instead, the primary target of indignation was the opposing political camp — just as it would have been on a slow news night for any talk show trying to drive up ratings. Meanwhile, politicians and media organizations are exploiting the polarization to further their own self-interest. Donald Trump: “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism.” New York Daily News: “Thanks, NRA.” Both received plenty of coverage for their hot takes on the latest atrocity.
Wise people have argued that culture precedes politics. But politics also happens downstream from philosophy. So the sorry state of contemporary political discourse was in a way anticipated by the Scottish philosopher Alasdair Macintyre. In his seminal 1981 work After Virtue, he argued that our modern language for morality is a glib facsimile of what it is supposed to be. In sum, we use language in ways that are inadequate for the task at hand. A symptom is our addiction to superficial argumentation, which, rather than moving toward truth, simply persists in tossing the issue back and forth. He wrote:
The most striking feature of contemporary moral utterance is that so much of it is used to express disagreements; and the most striking feature of the debates in which these disagreements are expressed is their interminable character. I do not mean by this just that such debates go on and on and on — although they do — but also that they apparently can find no terminus. There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture.
But why is it so hard to reconcile competing moral positions? Doesn’t the rhetorical contest between two positions subject both to stress? Shouldn’t the better position emerge? Not necessarily. And in a culture unsure of its basic knowledge and articles of faith, perhaps not at all. Macintyre continues:
If we possess no unassailable criteria, no set of compelling reasons by means of which we may convince our opponents, it follows that in the process of making up our own minds we can have made no appeal to such criteria or such reasons.
The central contention here is that two contesting parties that lack an agreed-upon set of rational principles within which to bound their argument will not be able to resolve moral disagreements. This describes our contemporary political condition. We are barely able to talk coherently about the issues we purportedly hold dear. Euphemism has degraded not only language but also thought itself. “Choice,” “diversity,” “activism,” “terrorism”: Each should be a weighty term capable of eliciting contemplation about complex ideas and their role in political society. Instead, each is a buzzword that repels thought and propels rhetoric into predictable formulas. The terms are only signals designed to convey political allegiance. Consider: Who is calling Orlando a terrorist attack, and who is calling it a mass shooting? Why?
Our political language is degenerating along with our moral language. The utility of political terms now lies in their expediency rather than in the ideas they once denoted. Of course, politics was never the primary venue for honest and open discourse. But the situation seems increasingly hopeless.