Language and War

M. J Hardman

Language is inseparable from humanity and follows us in all our works. Language is the instrument with which we form thought and feeling, mood, aspiration, will and act, the instrument by whose means we influence and are influenced, the ultimate and deepest foundation of human society. So inextricably has language grown inside personality, home, nation, humanity, and life itself that we may sometimes be tempted to ask whether language is a mere reflection of these things, or whether language simply is all of those things the very origin of their growth.

Adapted from Louis Hjelmslev Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, 1953

As Humanists we seek peace and we seek to construct peace in our daily lives. Many of us choose non-violent toys for our children, we try to minimize the amount of violence that our children see on television, we criticize the glorification of violence in the news media. We often also decry the lack of civility in our daily discourse. We clearly recognize the power of language. Nevertheless, we use a great deal of violent language in ordinary everyday speech quite oblivious of the way in which we are constructing our language to glorify war and violence and in that way make such violence appear appropriate even acceptable when it appears in reality.

Let me give you an example:

Johnny don’t fight at school. Your mother is waging the war on cancer. Your father has his battles everyday at work. Your sister has to attack her studies. We just can’t have you fighting at school.

One might consider just what message little Johnny is receiving. In this paragraph there is no incivility or any language that would be forbidden as abusive or violent. It is, nevertheless, loaded with violence. The all-day every-day level is where the seeds of violence are planted and the appropriateness of war is taught.

Generative metaphors are a basic structure of ordinary language use. These metaphors are those that we use to construct the world around us, those that we need only allude to, to be fully understood. War itself is such a metaphor, where allusions to battles and victories and challenges and firepower and attacks can evoke the whole panoply of two sides in contention where only one will in the end remain. There are three examples of the use of war as a generative metaphor in the example paragraph above. As Humanists we recognize in a fully rational way that between humans an absolute victory or an absolute defeat is rarely a desirable or even an attainable outcome. We also recognize that violence begets violence and that war is much more a cause of problems than a solution to them. In our daily speech we behave quite otherwise.

The first way in which we make war an ‘appropriate’ response to problems, then, is that we metaphorize the non-violent as war, as in the following examples.

We wage war on cancer / war on drugs / war on crime.

In medicine we attack, treat aggressively, use ammunition from a pharmacological arsenal stocked with big gun antibiotics. In the end we conquer disease.

We try to conquer someone we love by dressing to kill, by fighting for love, by winning someone’s love.

We perceive business as war: Angry consumers are forcing a revolution in the car lot.

Sony: A new round of sword play.

The Taste of Victory: In the battle of ideas between liberals and conservatives, a little magazine that has played a large role celebrates 30 years on the firing line.

Two other generative metaphors meet with war and the three sets interact to metaphorize each other to the detriment, I would argue, of all three. The three that interact with each other are war, sex, and sports. We seek to win a lover and once the lover is conquered what are we to do? We make a sport of love and war out of sports, sometimes defined as a substitute for war, rather than as an exertion and exhilaration of the possibilities of the human body, or even as the pleasure of structured movement.

We further make war an ‘appropriate’ response to problems by inverting the metaphors when we metaphorize the violent as peace, as in the following examples from the nuclear industry.

clean bombs = mass murder, mangled bodies & unspeakable human suffering (with less radioactivity killing people is not ‘dirty’!); surgically clean strikes (sounds like medicine); countervalue attacks (incinerating cities); collateral damage (human death); silos = where missiles are kept, as though they were nutritious grain; ‘Congratulations to the new parents. “Can hardly wait to see the new arrival” (telegram announcing the successful atomic bomb explosion); little boy = Hiroshima bomb; in the early tests: if the baby was a boy = good (the bomb exploded) / if the baby was a girl = dud.

These two language behaviors together have the effect of

A) making violence OK and even desirable when quite inappropriate and

B) making the reality of genuine violence invisible.

Both serve to increase the amount of violence with which we live and to increase the possibility and reality of war itself.

Constructing Peaceful Metaphors

If we as Humanists wish to construct a peaceful world, part of our task is to construct peaceful generative metaphors, to discuss peaceful events within a peaceful language construct. The second part is to discuss violence with violent linguistic constructs to make such violence clearly visible, that such violence may be perceived as such and, hopefully, reduced.

To this end, I would like to suggest the following:

A) Observe your own language quite consciously for a specific period looking for the violent metaphors you use. You may be very surprised. You will also find that you start hearing the violence in the language around you.

B) Construct for your own use a set of alternate metaphors that can replace the violent ones.

C) Observe the difference it makes in your own perception and in the reactions of those around you as you use these alternate metaphors.

Constructing new metaphors is a difficult task. One way to do so is to list a set of the violent metaphors that you have heard and then write out for yourself an alternate set using such non-violent generative metaphors as gardening, or music, or carpentry, or weaving/needle arts, or cooking. You may find that one or another of these cognitive sets is compatible with your own perception patterns.

To help in the initial stages of constructing such metaphors, I include here some examples that others have constructed.

Violent metaphor: It’s a blast. (said of a party)

Alternate: It’s a roller coaster ride.

Violent metaphor: You’re the bomb.

Alternate: You’re the frosting on my cake.

Violent metaphor: the anthropology metaphor of the survival of the fittest causes focus on competition and violence and has been overlaid onto academics, economics, and all other cultural constructs, giving defense and whipping things into shape and a dog eat dog world.

Alternate: a metaphor based on grooming in nature, with a focus on cooperation, would give us smooth and / a ‘dog lick dog world’, and we might be closer to what ecologists today see as essential to survival, far more than competition.

Violent metaphor: Peace as the absence of war (giving primacy to violence as a definer).

Alternate: Peace is like making a patchwork quilt.

Peace is a Patchwork Quilt

Peace is like having a potluck. Peace is like having a house built with many kinds of bricks. With the metaphor of peace as a patchwork quilt development agents could look at so-called third world countries as pieces of the quilt. They can, and should, be considered as valued contributors to the global well-being of the people of the world, just like in the quilt the pieces are together, but remain distinguishable. Instead of modernizing third world countries in the sense of westernizing, development agents could try to learn from them, not just their values and ways of life, but also specific knowledge about medicine (called ethnomedicine), plant and animal species (ethnobotany, ethnobiology) among other things. Participatory development.

Violent metaphor: She shot down every one of his arguments.

Alternate: She took apart every one of his arguments (carpentry).

She unraveled every one of his arguments (weaving).

Violent metaphor: This is a battle over principles, not just opinions.

Alternate: This discussion is built on principles, not just opinions (carpentry). This discussion is woven of principles, not just opinions (weaving).

Violent metaphor: That first argument was a real bombshell it just tore our case apart.

Alternate: That first argument was a thunderstorm it stopped us from building our case (carpentry). That first argument was a knot in the yarn it stopped us from weaving our textile (weaving).

The construction of peace in our everyday language and thus in our everyday perceptual patterns is an ongoing process. I was shocked to discover how much violence I used in my language when I began the process of change within myself. This must be a cooperative community endeavour. A major problem in this reconstruction is that we have come to regard the violent metaphors as the most vivid and the most powerful. That perception in and of itself must change by our own creative use of language such that peaceful metaphors come to be perceived also as vivid and powerful.

One rewrite that I use for myself comes from the false perception that pacifist and passive be somehow related. They are not; they sound similar by chance correspondence through historical convergence. Rather than define myself in the negative

(being a pacifist is not passive) I have come to use the following:

Being a pacifist requires a high level of commitment to activism. The same active level of commitment will be necessary if we are to construct peace in our language.

Prof. M.J. Hardman is Board Member of the American Humanist Association. She works at the University of Florida and examples in this article are from students and participants in her workshops.