“Language is the armory of the human mind; and at once contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future conquests.”

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge

This remarkable French mathematician has written extensively on what he considers the fundamental spiritual problem of our day, the perversion of language, which he believes is related to the perversion of mathematics, a topic that he explored in an earlier book. In the present work, Upinsky’s thesis is simple: Since the days of the Greek philosophers. Western intellectual history has been marked by a clash of two different languages, “true language” and “strong language.” True language is the language of the real or—in Upinsky’s terminology—of realism, the goal of which is to impart a truthful view of reality. Strong language is the language of nominalism, a language in which words are merely nomina—names or symbols designed to influence belief and behavior.

While the conflict between true and strong language is age-old, in our era strong language is being effectively honed so that its dominance becomes ever more complete. The result is that we who listen have “our heads cut off: That is, we are unable to use them for the purpose to which they were designed—namely, to think. Upinsky’s insight is kin to that expressed by George Orwell in the imagined totalitarian society of 1984, in which the official language, Newspeak, is made mandatory in order to prevent people from resorting to Oldthink.

Something similar has already been accomplished in Sweden and Norway, where old language forms have been changed, as it were, by government decree in order to simplify the language, or (in the latter case) to distinguish it for nationalistic purposes from the heavily Danish-tinged Norwegian of the old literary classes. In the Scandinavian countries, it is not apparent that any goal other than “modernization” is in view.

The largest Germanic country has given us a prime example of the use of strong language to manipulate public opinion and make people willing to endure the otherwise unendurable. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt described the imposition of Newspeak, or Neudeutsch, as we might call it, under the Nazis. She called it “language rules.” Shipment to an extermination camp, for example, was called “resettlement in the East,” while the buses that transported the sick and handicapped to the institution where they would be euthanized bore the identifying inscriptions, “Charitable Association for the Transport of the Sick.”

A wonderful example of the imposition of strong language in our own time is the mental climate that legalized abortion has created, in which the reality of the act has faded from view behind the word “choice.” It is not impossible to use true language to speak of abortion: The Germans, following their experience with Neudeutsch under Hitler, have dared to do it. In a 1975 decision, the German Federal Constitutional Court wrote, “The usual language, termination of pregnancy, cannot conceal the fact that abortion is a homicidal act.” That is the undeniable truth, but such real language is hardly acceptable today in the United States, where “homicide” has been replaced by “choice,” a neutral term with great popular appeal. (Even anti-abortionists have submitted to behavior modification to the extent that they regularly refer to their pro-abortion opponents as “pro-choice.”) “Strong” language—replacing a true word, abortion, with a manipulative word, choice—conceals the reality of prenatal homicide and induces masses of people who actually detest abortion to accept it, for the reason that opposing it would be to oppose “choice.” The language of choice, however, is used in our society only where it serves the purposes of power: In today’s America, smoking is not a matter for “choice,” nor is gun ownership.

Upinsky offers a number of examples from French history and contemporary France in proof of his thesis. “The great systems of our day function in fact on the reverse of language: the majority is only a minority; equality implies disparity; the ‘will of the people’ is only that of one party; the presumption of the innocence of an accused person is only a myth; representative government is only a fiction, etc.” If, moving beyond France, we look at the U.S. presidential election of 1996, we see what Upinsky means: Fewer than half of the eligible voters voted, and slightly fewer than half of those voted for Bill Clinton, who won the presidency thanks to the support of a minority of a minority, of less than 25 percent. He became president, and he rules. Articles of impeachment were passed by a majority of the House of Representatives and one article was approved, albeit with fear and trembling, by over half of the Senate, where a two-thirds majority is required: There, too, majority ruled. President Clinton has named two justices to the Supreme Court, five out of nine members of which suffice to void the laws of 50 states; in Roe v. Wade, decided seven to two, the will of seven old men prevailed over a nation of 200 million.

Upinsky wants us to see things as they are. Then it may be possible to wake from our slumber and deal realistically with reality. He contends that:

it is indispensable to develop our powers of observation, our visual acuity and our hearing. We have to train ourselves to disconnect our eye—which has to follow the facts—and our ear—which has to follow the discussion. Thus we shall succeed in distinguishing the movement of facts from the movement of words, and in seeing that today there are two systems that operate in opposite ways. This was the central contradiction of the [French] Revolution: the coexistence of the speculative discourse on the Rights of Man with the operational discourse of the Terror.

Upinsky considers Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose thinking influenced the French Revolution, a major architect of the perversion of language. It was Rousseau who frankly stated that the proclaimed goal of liberty actually destroys the bonds that the individuals to one another and to small groups and puts them entirely at the disposal of the state. The goal of every system of government, Rousseau wrote, must be the greatest common good, reducible to two principal objects, liberty and equality: “Liberty, because every particular dependency is that much power taken by force from the body of the State, and equality, because liberty cannot exist without it.” Were we paying attention when he told us what these noble-sounding words really meant?

What Upinsky calls the “Jacobin Bible” makes it plain that the promises of liberty and equality can be used as tools to establish the absolute totalitarian state, i.e., the state that recognizes no legitimate bonds outside of itself In the United States today, “security” and “safety” serve as strong language to give our state ever greater power.

The state that claims to enforce only the volonté générale, the “general will,” can place demands on every citizen which the absolutist monarchs were unable to achieve on the basis of their royal will. What Louis XIV (the “Sun King” who said, “L’état, c’est moi“) could not do—namely, establish universal military conscription in France—the Republic, expressing the volonté générale, quickly did. What the French people would not permit the king to do to them because it would violate their traditional rights, they promptly did to themselves—a strange result of the quest for “liberty” and “equality.”

(Speaking of the French Revolution, Upinsky notes the power of the impersonal word on, or “one.” “One saw the monarchy impotent . . . one grew indignant . . . and one overthrew it.” Six months later, “one grew uneasy,” “one feared that the Girondins lacked the necessary energy” “one outlawed them.” In American English, we do not use the word “one” like this, but in place of the impersonal “one,” we have the anonymous opinion poll, in which the opinion of some chosen small sample of several hundred people sways the votes of the 100 senators who chart the destiny of 260 million Americans.)

La Tête coupée is an extremely thorough and complex book, reaching back to the experience of Greece and Rome and examining French history from the beginning of the monarchy down to the present day. It may well be described as “thrilling,” as Le Figaro called it, yet the extremely detailed symbolic analysis of French history and institutions would be hard to translate into English. An abridged translation, if widely read, could be tremendously valuable in helping Americans understand the extent to which we, too, have la tête coupée. Strong language defeats true language, in which majority does not mean minority. If this awful fact could penetrate American consciousness at every level—the political, the educational, the journalistic, and the judicial—there might be a chance for us yet to defeat the forces behind linguistic manipulation and to recover a measure of our former freedom and dignity.

 

[La Tête coupée: Le Secret du pouvoir, by Amaud-Aaron Upinsky (Paris: Le Bee) 522 pp., 149 francs]