Nihilism, Barbarism and the 14 Year-old Adult.
Semantic pollution is dangerous. People need some coherency in the words they use. What folks around here do not seem to realize is that they are, to a greater extent than anything else, composed of words. Words have to mean certain things, but not others. It becomes dangerous when we lose our grip on words and they spiral out of control. Semantic chaos leads to a kind of anti-cultural environment called nihilism. Nihilism is the absence of belief, the loss of meaning. Nihilism and barbarism go hand in hand. When language begins to lose shape and melt in grotesque ways, we lose direction and can no longer rely on the maps that marked the territory of yesterday’s normative standards. It is terrifying. We lose our up, our down, our left or right. We don?t know if yesterday?s friend is tomorrow’s foe. Our certainty of matters within the moral realm gives way to skepticism. The narratives that formed the lumber of which we have built our very lives evaporate and in their stead we fill the void with barbarism. Barbarism is the regression to the primitive, id-like pseudo-consciousness of animality. The jungle appears before our very eyes. The human returned to the level of beast, but capable of much more damage because of today’s instrumentalities of destruction.
Take for example a society that rigidly separates adult and child at the age of 18. A thirty-something-year-old teacher has a sexual relationship with a 15 year-old girl. He is found guilty of a predatory crime and sentenced to over a decade in prison. A while later a 14 year-old boy gives a handful of pills he took from the medicine cabinet to his friend who swallows them and overdoses. The same society that called the 15 year-old a child now wants to pretend the 14-year old to be an adult. If this was a healthy semantic environment we would know what a child is and wouldn?t need to argue the point. The effect of nihilism is mental illness; the outcome of barbarism is violence. Perhaps we need be more careful regarding the ways we wield our words.
Tom Neal said:
Barry … true words. I guess it’s relativism … how we look at (classify) someone and treat them is relative to how we feel about them (or vice versa?). How we feel about them might be situational or stereotypical. That kid would not have been considered for adult processing if there hadn’t been the fatality. He wasn’t placed in the adult category because of what he did, it was because of the result of what he did. No fatal result … no “adult” question comes into play. It’s relative. Now, the kid allegedly tries to whack a jailer and escape … the adult question becomes heavier, and to many, it becomes moot. Maybe with his alleged attempted whacking, he’s deemed too heavy-duty for the juvie system. I don’t know how that works. But, come on, where do we send a 14-year-old adult for incarceration? Prison? After what would happen to him there, he’d almost certainly come out a killer if he came out alive. This adult designation has little to do with the kid and a lot to do with our own sense of outrage and helplessness. Stupid kid. Stupid system.
As I often say, we make choices and judgments that make us feel good about ourselves (look for a post from me on abortion I hope to see on CW soon, but ideally only after this thread of yours is aired and explored).
December 5th, 2007 at 11:43 am #
deepintheheart said:
Nihilism. Barbarism. Wonderful.
If I am not missing something in Barry’s original post (call me simple), the idea of language deterioration is also linked to mediums such as CW.
Reference my choice of “wonderful” above. How do I really mean wonderful? Imprecise communication–language choices–breaks down meaning and creates confusion when our own human instrument can not hit the sarcastic crescendo that we may or may not intend.
Ever send an email and have your message misconstrued?
Ever spend time clarifying, “No, I am not angry with you.”
Words can be powerful tools. The craft of delivery can make them deadly.
December 6th, 2007 at 7:29 am #
Barry Liss said:
deepintheheart is right - CW could tread on the nihilistic. However, it’s an interesting medium in that people have the opportunity to be vigilant defenders of the word and hold people to account. To be sure, the medium itself privileges the literate and technologically savvy. It’s important to keep an open dialogic back and forth. The question to ask is qui bono - who benefits by profaning the word?
Barry
December 7th, 2007 at 8:43 am #