THE HARVARD academic Stephen Pinker is one of my heroes (a pantheon that includes Bobby Orr, Joni Mitchell, Robert Stone, Ann Patchett, and Van Morrison). I have nothing like Pinker’s erudition and academic bona fides, but I share his keen interest in language and have benefited from his wisdom. Many of my notions about good writing, and some of the lessons I try to impart in my presentations, have grown out of my encounters with his work.
A Montreal-born McGill alumnus, Pinker has mastered the public intellectual’s art of adapting scientific inquiry for popular audiences. His research has been honoured, his books have been bestsellers, and for a decade he chaired the American Heritage Dictionary’s usage panel. He’s fascinated by language: how we acquire it; how it reveals and alters the workings of the mind; and how we use it. Some years ago, I reviewed his book The Sense of Style. The great pleasure of that work, for me, was Pinker’s dissection of the many ways in which language serves us.
I wish he would now turn his attention to an exploration of how language also disserves us—how, for instance, pure nonsense becomes perceived wisdom.
What is the psycholinguistic explanation of how the carefully chosen words of advertisers and propagandists persuade people of things that are patently false?
Why, if you repeatedly deny an allegation, do people become persuaded that the allegation is true?
And how, if you repeat a blatant falsehood often enough, does it cease to seem false?
Tell me, Stephen Pinker: What exactly is going on in people’s brains?
WE USE WORDS so often, and so casually, that it’s easy to forget their power. You can devastate someone with a few words. You can also thrill them. People fall in love in chat rooms. Using nothing but words, skilled people talk perfectly competent adults into doing outrageous things.
Words persuade people to serve up money and sex to men who wear white robes and fly around in private jets, claiming to be acting out of love for humanity. Part of the Scientology doctrine is that, 75 million years ago, a galactic tyrant brought billions of people to Earth in spacecraft resembling DC-8s. If you’re Tom Cruise or John Travolta, do you actually believe those words? If so, what role did language play in embedding the belief? Or do you simply fear the consequences of stating otherwise? In which case, how did language instill that fear?
Charlotte Cowles, who contributes to New York magazine, recently wrote about falling victim to an elaborate hoax, conducted by telephone, that led her to put $50,000 in a shoebox and give it to a stranger. The caller didn’t threaten to blow up her house, and Cowles is not a demented widow. She is (or maybe now was) a financial columnist, advising people how to, among other things, safeguard their investments. There we have the power of words.
Charlotte Cowles is no dummy, but the right words cost her $50,000.
IN 1998, GEORGE W. Bush accepted the Republican nomination with these words: “Read my lips: No new taxes.” In 2008, Obama rode three hopeful words all the way into the Oval Office: “Yes we can.” In 2016, Donald Trump got elected by launching an incoherent stream of lies, insult, and invective: “Lock her up.” It would be fascinating to go back and study the role that language—selectively amplified and distorted by the media—played in the absurd, almost unbelievable ascension of a narcissistic, made-up clown to the highest office in the United States.
In Alice in Wonderland, Humpty Dumpty tells Alice: “Words mean what I choose them to mean—neither more not less.” Is a convicted, tax-cheating rapist now facing criminal charges for leading an insurrection (an act for which, in another country or era, he may well have been executed) really being persecuted, as he claims; or simply prosecuted, as he should be? Is a criminal trial, delayed ad nauseum by the accused himself, really election interference? Is a Republican judge, appointed by the defendant, really bent on vengeance?
This U.S. election later this year, and the Canadian election next year, like all so-called “free and fair” elections, will be a battle waged largely with words—words tested in online focus groups, words arranged by artificial intelligence, words churned out by bot farms in Moldava, words algorithmically delivered via chat rooms and social-media accounts into the brains of the credulous.
LANGUAGE IS the open-source process by which we arrive at a consensus about what a word means. The clear, accurate exchange of words is fundamental to honest human endeavour (just as dishonest doings generally rely on deceitful language).
Help us, Stephen Pinker. Do words shape our thoughts? Do we inevitably heed the words that support our own beliefs and reject the rest? Can we no longer counter untruths with words that are undeniably true? Can lies really win the day if they’re disguised as “alternative facts?”
We can now create plausible videos of people uttering words they never said. The images are faithful, the words persuasive, the actual voices convincing to anyone who is not an expert at voice analysis. The video scorches the internet like a wind-whipped fire before it can be debunked. Perhaps honesty and accuracy simply no longer have place on the charred battlefield of meaning.
Can we do anything about the words that disserve us? Or can we only cross our fingers and hope that, come November in the U.S., a vulgar psychopath who uses words to mean what he chooses them to mean—neither more nor less—suffers the same fate as Humpty Dumpty before he has a chance to bring a dismal future crashing down on the Western world.
You beat me to the saying, read my lips. “It’s frightening.”