politics | On Campaigns And Parrhesia

For Aristotle, parrhesia is a virtue. Parrhesia, or frank speech, is used in Aristotle's description of what the paradigmatic virtuous person would look like.

One must also be open in his hate and in his love (for to conceal one's feelings, i.e. to care less for truth than for what people will think, is a coward's part), and must speak and act openly; for one is free of speech because...one is given to telling the truth, except when one speaks in irony to the vulgar.
(Nichomachean Ethics, Book IV)

Newspeak, the fictional language in George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, might be considered the simulacra of parrhesia. Like parrhesia, there seems to be a frankness to Newspeak as the language sought to remove shades of meaning leaving only dichotomous simplicity (which is easier for the state to manipulate). Our own political speech has its approximations of Newspeak, terms like pro-life, patriotism, freedom. The telos of Newspeak was to reduce even these dichotomies to the "yes" of obedience with which everyone answered to whatever was asked of them. Yet, Newspeak cannot be frank, or open and sincere in expression, since it is never honest about its goal to squelch dissent and disallow a plurality of thought. Unfortunately, much of our political language has more in common with Newspeak than parrhesia. When the Bush administration sold the country on the war in Iraq based upon intelligence known to be (at best) weak, when they told us that a control-freak dictator supported terrorism, when they played on our fears by invoking biological and nuclear weapons, they did so under the cover of a single word, patriotism, to which one could only say "yes."

The ongoing campaigns are not much better. When Barack Obama is questioned for not wearing a lapel pin, when McCain chooses "pro-life" over a wealth of political experience, when it is implied that the Clinton's are racist, when the McCain campaign runs a silly context-bending story about lipstick under the guise of the scare-word: sexism, we are witnessing and being involved in a lack of virtue. Insofar as our talk about, our interest in these stories involves us in this linguistic corruption and duplicity, it must over time have an impact on our character. Let's see if McCain can utilize parrhesia and call Obama a sexist during a debate if he in fact believes that to be true, or will he merely hide behind the Newspeak of his proxies?


Are there bright spots in our situation? Absolutely but not always where you'd expect:


"[The virtuous person] is given to telling the truth,
except when one speaks in irony to the vulgar."
Here's is to better reportage, better campaigns, better conversations and more frank speech. In the meantime, we can be grateful for those who help us to see our vice.


For further reading on parrhesia, see Michel Foucault's Parrhesia and the Crisis of Democratic Institutions.

[AYT][Theology][Politics][McCain]