The other day while reading Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language,” I came across the following passage:

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier–even quicker, once you have the habit–to say “In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that” than to say “I think.” If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for the words; you also don’t have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry–when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech–it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style.

In other words, Orwell says, writers prefer complexity and euphony to clarity and directness. This in turn waters down our language, and since language is the clay with which we mold our thoughts, we dumb down our thinking as well.

That brought to mind a book I read in college, John McWhorter’s Doing Our Own Thing: The Degredation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care. Part of McWhorter’s thesis is that we no longer value the formality and structure of writing. Our culture values the spoken word, which is by nature more focused on the flow of the sounds, more spontaneous, and therefore less developed and thought out than prose.

We can see this in the difference between the song lyrics, journalism, and political speeches of the 1940s and those of today. As we outgrew oratory and cogent sentences, we forgot that they were conducive to concrete thought. The rise of post-modernism didn’t help either. If there is no truth or definite meaning, language becomes reduced to its form. If sentences can’t say much, they might as well sound nice and intelligent.

Orwell’s solution to this problem–at least the linguistic part–was to write with care and to write well: “What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them.” Fight with your words as you fight for them, for precision in meaning and argument is needed in our time.

If you’re at all sick of non-stop political reporting on the election, here’s the perfect antidote: Dave Barry is reporting daily from the Democratic National Convention in Denver. His pieces for August 24, 25, and 26 are currently on the Miami Herald’s website, with more to come. Here’s a sample of the 24th’s column:

It’s hard to blame Sen. Clinton for being bitter. Here she is, the smartest human ever, PLUS she spent all those years standing loyally behind Bill Clinton wearing uncomfortable pantyhose (I mean Hillary was, not Bill) (although there are rumors), PLUS she went to the trouble and expense of acquiring a legal residence in New York State so she could be a senator from there, PLUS she assembled a team of nuclear-physicist-grade genius political advisors, PLUS she spent years going around to every dirtbag community in America explaining in detail her 23-point policy solutions for every single problem facing the nation including soybean blight. And after all that, she loses the nomination to a guy who has roughly the same amount of executive governmental experience as Hannah Montana. Hillary is like: “Are you KIDDING me?” . . .

But in the end, the focus of this convention will be on Barack Obama, who on Thursday night will receive the nomination in long-overdue recognition of a distinguished career of seeking the nomination. His goal, in his acceptance speech, will be to win over the undecided voters–the people who are unsure of what he really stands for, or who have received emailed rumors that he is a Muslim, or a socialist, or a vampire, or a lesbian. His goal will be to show, with no disrespect to the Muslim socialist vampire lesbian community, that he is a regular person just like you, except he has Vision and Leadership. After that, he will lay out his specific policies for building a brighter future. Then he will turn into a bat.

An excerpt from a letter of St. Thomas More to Erasmus, written on the 14th of June, 1532:

Congratulations, then, my dear Erasmus, on your outstanding virtuous qualities; however, if on occasion some good person is unsettled and disturbed by some point, even without making a sufficiently serious reason, still do not be chagrined at making accommodations for the pious dispositions of such men. But as for those snapping, growling, malicious fellows, ignore them, and, without faltering, quietly continue to devote yourself to the promotion of intellectual things and the advancement of virtue.

This past Sunday on Meet the Press, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi claimed that, having studied the matter carefully as a “fervent, practicing” Catholic, she had learned that doctors of the Church have historically had no fixed position on when human life begins; therefore, one should not interfere with a woman’s right to choose an abortion.

No-one was surprised when, not twenty-four hours after the program aired, Denver’s indefatigable Bishop Charles Chaput sent out an open letter correcting Pelosi’s gross misrepresentation of Catholic tradition. But it did not stop there. Rather unexpectedly, more bishops chimed in, including New York’s Edward Cardinal Egan, whose firm rebuke included these thunderous lines:

We are blessed in the 21st century with crystal-clear photographs and action films of the living realities within their pregnant mothers. No one with the slightest measure of integrity or honor could fail to know what these marvelous beings manifestly, clearly, and obviously are, as they smile and wave into the world outside the womb. In simplest terms, they are human beings with an inalienable right to live, a right that the Speaker of the House of Representatives is bound to defend at all costs for the most basic of ethical reasons. They are not parts of their mothers, and what they are depends not at all upon the opinions of theologians of any faith. Anyone who dares to defend that they may be legitimately killed because another human being “chooses” to do so or for any other equally ridiculous reason should not be providing leadership in a civilized democracy worthy of the name.

The Speaker responded yesterday morning. She acknowledged that “Catholic teaching is clear that life begins at conception” but she, like “many Catholics,” dissents from this view. She instead follows St. Augustine, whom she quotes as saying that “the law does not provide that the act [abortion] pertains to homicide, for there cannot yet be said to be a live soul in a body that lacks sensation” (Saint Augustine, On Exodus 21.22).

Don’t hold your breath waiting for Pelosi to explain how a “fervent, practicing Catholic” can justify dissent from an immemorial teaching in the name of outdated science. Anyway, let’s hope that, especially with the election coming up, the bishops get a taste for this kind of forthrightness.

Recently Robert George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton and a frequent contributor to First Things, was on CNN’s Glenn Beck Show with some of his students to discuss life on college campuses, specifically the acceptability of conservatism and the hook-up culture. One of the students was our new junior fellow Stefan McDaniel. A recording of the program is available online, but takes a long time to load, so you might be interested in the transcript of the show instead.

From ZENIT this week, an interview with Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver on his new book, Render Unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living Our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life. “Nobody wants a theocracy,” says the archbishop, but if we do want democracy, we need a culture of political decision-making imbued with religious and moral convictions:

Q: Catholicism in the public square in the United States has had a long and complicated journey, and you say that Catholics have a lot to offer the political process, but that more often than not they keep their beliefs and convictions separate from their political actions. Why is that?

Archbishop Chaput: Catholics have always been a minority in the United States, and prejudice against Catholics in this country has always been real, even before the founding. Sometimes the bias has been indirect and genteel. Just as often it has taken more vulgar forms of economic and political discrimination, and media bigotry. Either way, prejudice always fuels the appetite of a minority to fit in, to achieve and to assimilate, and American Catholics have done that extraordinarily well–in fact, too well.

In the name of being good citizens, a lot of Catholics have bought into a very mistaken idea of the “separation of Church and state.” American Catholics have always supported the principle of keeping religious and civil authority distinct.

Nobody wants a theocracy, and much of the media hand-wringing about the specter of “Christian fundamentalism” is really just a particularly offensive scare tactic. The Church doesn’t presume to run the state. We also don’t want the state interfering with our religious beliefs and practices–which, candidly, is a much bigger problem today.

Separating Church and state does not mean separating faith and political issues. Real pluralism requires a healthy conflict of ideas. In fact, the best way to kill a democracy is for people to remove their religious and moral convictions from their political decision-making. If people really believe something, they’ll always act on it as a matter of conscience. Otherwise they’re just lying to themselves. So the idea of forcing religion out of public policy debates is not only unwise, it’s anti-democratic.

That sounds like an argument I heard somewhere once before. . . .

Dennis Byrne, a columnist in the Chicago Tribune, reminds us yet again that the question about abortion has changed for this election. It’s not just a question of whether abortion is permitted in the womb, but whether infanticide is legal when the mother doesn’t want to keep a newborn baby. There is no way a thinking person can get around it. Are newborns people, or not?