Un-American

Last updated on: October 2, 2006 at 8:46 am by Fred Clark

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Un-American 2006-10-02T08:46:04-04:00 Fred Clark

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Arthur Silber thinks that many of us have been using meaningless language as part of an elaborate charade. Specifically, he's upset with the use of the adjectives "American" and "un-American":

… politicians of all stripes appeal to "American values" when they are defending their particular beliefs or programs. Similarly, when people wish to condemn some practice in the strongest possible terms, they call it "un-American." An essential part of this elaborate charade is that none of these terms is ever defined. Since everyone employs them, we can be absolutely certain of one thing: such terms can mean anything, which means they signify nothing. They are completely empty gestures, designed to evoke an emotional response. They relieve the speaker and the listener of the unwelcome and difficult task of responsible thought. We have just witnessed this mechanism promiscuously employed in connection with the abominable military tribunals bill passed by the Senate yesterday: liberals and others opposed to the bill repeatedly said that torture is "un-American." Once again, reality will make an unwelcome appearance here: for at least the last 50 years, unimaginable brutality and torture have been as "American" as Mom and apple pie.

How can something be called "un-American," Silber asks, when it is, in reality, descriptively true of America?

His confusion here arises from the fact that not every adjective is, as he supposes, exclusively descriptive. They can also be normative or, as in this case, aspirational.

Consider, for example, the word "inhuman." The word certainly has a descriptive meaning, but if that were all the word meant, then it would be useless. Only humans, after all, can behave inhumanly. And they often do. Does that make the word meaningless — an "empty gesture designed to evoke an emotional response"? No.

"Inhuman" has definite meaning. It refers, descriptively, to specific actions and attitudes, but it also carries a normative meaning — that humans ought not to be this way even though that is often exactly what we are like.

We Americans use the word "un-American" in very much the same way we humans use the word "inhuman." Its descriptive meaning is secondary to its normative meaning. Such words are never merely descriptive. These words are essentially aspirational — calling on Americans and humans to be better than they already are.

From an exclusively descriptive standpoint, it would make no sense to say that slavery, for example, was un-American. It was ingrained in our culture, our economy, even our religion from the very beginning. It was enshrined and encoded in our Constitution. From an exclusively descriptive standpoint, slavery was and is almost archetypically American.

Yet despite this, slavery was incompatible with the aspiration of America. It was — despite it's cultivation in American soil and extraordinary protection in American law — deeply un-American.

If "aspiration" here is too Capraesque a term for you, try "trajectory" or "logical extension." Aspiration involves reason as well as the (perfectly appropriate and necessary) "emotional response."

This also explains why a word like "un-American" is used by different people to mean different things (including people like Joe McCarthy). This is not because of a disagreement over who and what we are. It is because of disagreement and debate about who and what we will be. But that doesn't mean that every claim in this debate, every assertion, is equally defensible. Martin Luther King Jr. won his life's argument over the meaning of the word "un-American," not because of his rhetorical skills, but because the substance of his aspiration was congruent with the aspirations of those who first chose what it would mean to be American or un-American. Segregation and Jim Crow inequality was "un-American," King said. Descriptively inaccurate. Aspirationally true.

The word un-American, like the word inhuman, is often descriptively inaccurate — bitterly so. It is meant to be so. That is its function. Which is why, now more than ever in my lifetime, it is a critically necessary and important word.

Allowing the executive to suspend habeas corpus at his discretion is un-American. Torture is un-American.

George W. Bush may have the power to make such statements descriptively inaccurate. He does not have the power to make them false.

(cx: Wrong word now the right one. Thanks S.F.)

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