Linguistic Inflation

One of the occupational hazards of writing is that you can be reasonably certain that someone, somewhere, at some time has either had the thought you have had, or has come eerily close.

Being a bit of a finance and history nut, I was particularly interested in reading Edward Feser’s recent blog post about what he called “linguistic or semantic inflation”, a post which I believe should draw more attention than it has. It touches on something which I have been feeling and thinking for sometime now, and I think is also something many thoughtful and sincere people have as well.

What is linguistic or semantic inflation? Just like monetary inflation is the phenomenon of too much currency chasing too few goods, so linguistic inflation is too many words chasing too few concepts. Monetary inflation is as old as the use of currency, with various states and rulers electing to debase their currency in order to service their debts, a practice which may be helpful in the short term, but which can cause ruin if it is allowed to go on for too long. In the times before fiat currency, so most of human history, to debase a currency meant adding relatively worthless metals to precious ones. To debase the currency of the word, whether written or spoken, one may likewise also inflate language, whether by adding unworthy vocabulary, or by increasing the sheer volume of words to such an extent that meaning becomes lost.

Of course, this phenomenon can be relatively benign, just like the shift in the use of the English words awesome and terrible. But there is a practice of linguistic inflation which can be absolutely malign and ruinous. In my previous post Facts without Truth, Truth without Facts, I mentioned how words may be compared to color in art. To convey a particular image in the mind of an artist, the artist takes pains to choose the medium and palette by which his vision can be expressed. It is always a delight to visit famous pieces in person, and observe just how marvelous such meticulous attention can be. An artist’s decision to get a color or hue just so may be part of the difference that sets a great work above just a good one. The same is true of great literature or writing in general. As Joseph Conrad once said, good writing often is a process like “mining for diamonds”; choosing the right word or turn of phrase is of crucial importance. This is especially true in an era of mass-produced garbage, where writing for volume is more important than writing for meaning. I think for instance of Saint John’s remarks in one of his Epistles that he would write more, but he lacked parchment and ink to do so. That makes me wonder sometimes: how different would the Scriptures have been, if the printing press, let alone word processing, had been invented? Ancient Romans, especially the literati, used to fault the New Testament for being parsimonious and clumsy in its language, but I’d like to note that such a thing is helpful to perceiving the authenticity of the Canonical Scriptures. As Saint John said in his Gospel, there are not enough books that could ever be written about Christ and his deeds while on earth. Yet all the Gospels, let alone the Epistles, are such beautiful syntheses of divine power and the human incapacity to articulate the Divine Mysteries perceived.

Returning to the theme of inflation, I would love to see a long term study on the effect of social media on the average attention span and reading level of people. Anecdotally many people have reported that the former is markedly reduced. Even older people I know have noticed how their capacity to remember once essential things like telephone numbers or names are not quite what they used to be.

At the risk of veering off topic, a few years ago I had the mixed pleasure of watching the TV show The Young Pope, in which Jude Law plays a young Priest who is elected to the Papacy as Pius XIII. As a new Pope, he decides to completely forego public addresses and public appearances, instead trying to augment the ‘mystique’ of the Papacy and to distance his style of governance from that of so many in representative democracies. Although the character of Pius XIII is clearly troubled in many respects, that drama gave me pause to wonder if one of the drawbacks of a globetrotting, hyper-accessible papacy is that we have lost the sense of the power of the office.

In tandem with this thought, I have often returned to Cardinal Sarah’s wonderful book The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise as introducing the means by which we may “deflate” our “linguistic inflation”. As necessary as speech and action are, silence and stillness may be more necessary. I especially think that the current Church needs to deflate the currency of her own speech: how many Papal interviews do we need? Documents from Episcopal Conferences? Synod paperwork and endless meetings? At the same time as this huge increase in the volume of words has come, so too has the banality of our speech increased. Who can forget the rightful scorn and contempt many Catholics felt toward the USCCB, when Catholics were asked how inspired they were about “inclusion” and “diversity” as themes of the upcoming Synod, while at no time were people asked to be excited by “Jesus” or “The Gospel”?

In history, the adoption of an entirely new currency for a nation or state only happens when faith in the old one has absolutely collapsed. This should give us pause to ask: has the institutional Church begun to lose faith in the currency of her own ideas, and that of her Founder? The Scriptures say that the Word of the Lord is like gold or silver refined in the furnace; in other words, it is the very opposite of an inflationary word: what you see is what you get. It will never lose its value. There seems at present to be two or more tracks in the discourse regarding Church affairs: those who still hold to the meaning of the Church and her words as understood perennially, and those who are increasingly adopting a new vocabulary, or mental currency, to supplant the old. I would expand the analogy further by comparing current discourse to the supplanting of the gold standard by purely fiat currency. The stability of the gold standard is one of its greatest strengths, in that it for the most part forces monetary and fiscal discipline on the government which issues currency. Fiat Currency’s strength lies only in the faith and credit of the government which issues it; nothing more, nothing less. If the credibility of the government were to collapse, so too would its currency, and indeed, much of the world financial system. It seems a similar phenomenon is now at hand for the contemporary Church. We may choose the ‘gold standard’ of the Word of God and Sacred Tradition, or we can choose the ‘fiat currency’ of the Twitterverse and fluid, undefined vocabularies like accompaniment, inclusion, diversity, etc. Using the Church’s traditional vocabulary means that we must have mental, spiritual and moral discipline. Using Church ‘fiat vocabulary’ imposes no such thing upon us; instead, ‘fiat vocabulary’ is in fact a tool for power, not for the conveyance of truth.

To combat this, I highly recommend a return to the gold standard of the Scriptures and the Sacred Tradition, as well as a healthy dose of sacred silence, a willingness on the part of the Church not to be reactive to the times, but proactive. That is, to shape the temporal by the eternal, and the temporary by the permanent. As it stands, the Church, like the State, is facing an unprecedented inflationary crisis. And just like regular families are finding it difficult to feed their families and run their cars, so too regular men and women are finding it difficult to navigate the spiritual realm, as it becomes obfuscated by a web of confusion. In short, may God give us the grace to value his words more than our own.