Words Had to Change Their Meanings

On an Echo of Thucydides in Three People Writing Today

(This post is part of a series which seeks to relate the Athens of the late 5th-century BC to our own time. If you want an overview of the larger picture, of which this post is a piece, you might want to start with my introductory post.)

Some years ago I was in Berlin, and found myself visiting the church on one side of Alexanderplatz. A statue of Martin Luther stands outside, and inside one finds material commemorating the visit of his (almost-) namesake, Martin Luther King Jr., in the 60’s. When I was there, a side room contained recently updated explanatory placards, and I remember one item in particular from all that I read there, because it told me that something had changed.

The placard contained a novel definition of racism. I had grown up with the idea that racism consisted of discrimination against people on the basis of their race. It was this definition that lay behind King’s famous dream of a world in which his children might be judged on the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin. The placard in the Berlin church, however, looked in a very different direction, declaring racism to be “power plus prejudice.” We need not worry here about the significance of this change. The point is rather that when I was growing up, a rejection of King’s phrase would have indicated backwardness and bigotry; now it is increasingly the case that one must accept the new definition if one wishes to count oneself among the enlightened. In the space of relatively few years, the word has changed its meaning.

There is a passage in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War that can seem almost as though it was written as a description of our own times. It is a portion of a larger passage that is often referred to as the “Pathology of the Polis,” which provides a high-level overview of the kind of changes that cities typically underwent as the war progressed. The crucial section runs as follows:

Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal supporter; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question incapacity to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting a justifiable means of self-defense. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected. To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot a still shrewder; but to try to provide against having to do either was to break up your party and to be afraid of your adversaries… (trans. Crawley)

In one obvious respect, Thucydides is talking about something quite different from our own time: he is describing a war between states, one that often becomes a civil war within states, with all the violence that entails. In the face of such violence, people are often driven into a cycle of immediate reaction, in which their inhibitions against extreme action are naturally lower. Political actors today have no such excuse: our own situation is the product of profound peace rather than war. Nevertheless, the similarities are telling. In recent years I have come across passages that seem to echo Thucydides both in rhetoric and in certain aspects of its content. Here, for example, is Bruce Pardy, writing from Canada:

Double standards on speech and conduct are baked into our current political order. Burning churches and blocking railways are blows in support of social justice, but peacefully protesting vaccine mandates constitutes a public order emergency. Defying pandemic lockdown rules is a threat to public safety when parishioners gather for church services in parking lots, but not when thousands gather for Black Lives Matter marches. The federal government vilifies law abiding gun owners while it eliminates minimum sentences for gun crimes. The hypocrisy of our authorities is no accident. Their choices are deliberate and calculated.

For another example, consider Kathleen Stock in the UK:

Attempts to express kindness or curiosity about another person can get rebranded as “microaggressions”. Apparently sincere efforts to communicate a particular message in good faith are framed as “covert dog whistles”. Reasonable concerns are dismissed as “moral panics”. The phrase “cancel culture” — as good a tool as any other to discuss the silencing of many, via the visible punishing of a few — is batted back with lofty condescension, dismissed as conceptually deficient and not really capturing the right phenomenon in quite the right way. What does “cancellation” mean anyway? Are you really cancelled if you’re still upright after some horrendous ordeal or other? Was it even cancellation at all, or were you just facing “consequences”?

For a final (and more recent) example, let us turn to Abigail Shrier in the US:

“My body, my choice,” was a sacred and undeniable maxim, unless you refused the Covid vaccine. Calling the 2016 election “stolen” was fine; claiming the 2020 election was stolen made you an enemy of democracy. Uttering a word in Mandarin Chinese that sounded like the N word was enough to get you suspended from your university teaching job. But calling for the death of your Jewish or Israeli classmates, blocking their access to the library or large sections of campus, defacing university property—this was free speech, or rightful protest, or kids being kids.

These passages originally struck me because they seem to echo the “x was y” motif that Thucydides employs as he gives examples of how words changed their meanings. Of course, neither Pardy nor Stock nor Shrier is focused on merely verbal matters, but I don’t think Thucydides is either. There is a larger point concerning something that has happened to normative life, which is now characterised by hypocrisy, by a want of fair dealing. I am inclined to explain the echoes of Thucydides in terms of a basic similarity between our own situation and the one he was focused on: words are changing their meanings because the older ethical order that originally gave such words their content is disintegrating.

So long as an ethical order is accepted as a matter of course by most people, the meanings of words will tend to remain fixed, on account of being tethered to that order. Under such an order, citizens can rely on established institutions, on widely accepted norms, on “the ancient simplicity into which honour so largely entered,” as Thucydides puts it. As an ethical order disintegrates, things become muddier, and it becomes easier to understand normative principles through the lens of the immediate situation where once might once have done the opposite. The pressure of particular situations can thus exert a sort of gravitational pull, giving political life a tendency towards factionalism and making words instrumental as much as descriptive.

People at odds with one another will naturally feel the pull of these new possibilities – in fact, they can end up twisting words for political convenience without realising it. Take any example from our three contemporary writers above – for example, the notion that “my body, my choice,” was a sacred and undeniable maxim, unless you refused the Covid vaccine. It is not the case that a group of people sat down in some shadowy room somewhere and decided that “my body, my choice,” would apply only in one situation and not in another. Rather, they reached for a principle in one situation, and didn’t notice or care that they were violating it in another because they were more concerned with the immediate situation (and perhaps especially the battle against their opponents) than with the principle.

In a healthier, more unified normative order, words and the norms they represent will be stabler; they will tend to determine how one views a situation rather than the other way around. We have known a different situation: notice how every example given by Pardy, Stock and Shrier is a new phenomenon, confined to the last decade or so.

In each of these examples, the dominant regime has, perhaps unconsciously, twisted the meanings of words in a manner that deprives its enemies of the protection they would have if words were used in a consistently fair spirit. The change in the meaning of ‘racism’ mentioned above is no different – see, for example, this article from Bari Weiss’s Free Press about the state of equality before the law (a major achievement of recent centuries) in Canada. As an ethical order collapses, words change their meanings because those who are able to change them do so, for the sake of their own power.

Thucydides would not be surprised by the claim that power is what drives things once a traditional ethical order has lost its influence. In the story he tells, people go to much more extreme and violent lengths to destroy each other than anything we can (yet) point to in the Western world today. The fear of violence from our political opponents is something that is felt occasionally, but is, for now, a relatively rare thing (incidents such as January 6^th, 2021 or the summer of 2020, both in the US, are exceptions to a generally more pacific situation; in the UK, one thinks of Islamism). There is, however, a general truth behind both the ancient and the modern situations in question: as an older ethical order collapses, there is a danger – indeed a likelihood – that it will be replaced by nothing more than the unrestrained exercise of power, which will take increasingly brutal forms. (This is a truth that is also central to Plato’s Gorgias and the first book of his Republic – but now is not the time for that.) With this in mind, we should recognize the logical endpoint of the sort of changes at issue here: if you want destroy people utterly, the redefinition of words is about the best place to start.

The incremental nature of the changes at work here – something I stressed in my discussion of Polemarchus (and of the Titanic) – is worth emphasizing once again, because it conceals the nature of the logical endpoint. The exercise of power is likely to be muted and hidden at first because the older order does not disappear instantly, as though in a puff of smoke, but rather disintegrates over time. Initially, it does still retain much of its influence and prestige. Accordingly, those who slowly begin to seek the full personal destruction of their opponents rather than merely their political defeat, will not initially be honest, even with themselves, about what they are doing, and will begin by exhibiting significant restraint. They will initially claim that nothing has changed, and then that any changes have been slight – the phrase one often hears today is “I support free speech, but...” Changes in the meanings of words are a means by which substantive changes can be introduced while obscuring the fact of the change. By redefining words, one may enjoy, for a time, the prestige of the fading older order together with the advantages of abandoning it. The recent mania around ‘disinformation,’ which apparently requires a rethink of fundamental speech rights, is a good example of this tendency, for in practice it does involve the silencing of very widely held opinions, and even facts, that the dominant elite class does not like, even as it allows them to tell themselves that they are doing something quite different (e.g., preserving “our democracy”).

In ancient Athens, traditional ethical restrictions proved unable to restrain people’s behaviour; revolutionary ideas spread like a disease across multiple states; words changed their meanings; ideological ties trumped blood relations; party and private interests usurped the good of the state; and political extremes obliterated the moderate middle. Many readers will be able to think of parallels to all this in our situation today. We will look in more detail at some of this, both in antiquity and in our own time, as these posts progress, and will certainly take a look at the natural outcome of these trends: tyranny.