by Scott Samuelson
When Confucius was asked what the first thing he’d do if a king were to let him administer the state, he said, “Without question it would be to make sure names are used properly.” His shocked student replied, “Really? Isn’t that a little farfetched?”
It’s easy to share the student’s incredulity. How can proper terms be more beneficial than good laws? Surely, it’s far more important to feed and defend the citizenry than to use language well?! Don’t forget that Confucius was living in a time of violent civilizational collapse. It’s not like we can supply him with the excuse of living in the good old days.
So, is Confucius right? Is naming that important, especially in times of crisis?
Consider a post to ICE officers from the Department of Homeland Security quoting Stephen Miller. Pay attention to how it uses words to name and construct reality, especially the words I’ve put in bold.
REMINDER. “To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. Anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony. You have immunity to perform your duties, and no one—no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist—can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties. The Department of Justice has made clear that if officials cross that line into obstruction, into criminal conspiracy against the United States or against ICE officers, then they will face justice.”
Now think about what Stephen Miller tweeted after the shooting of Alex Pretti (again, note the terms in bold): “A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists.” Similarly, many others in the Trump administration repeated that Pretti was trying to do “maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”
Now look at something downstream of such language. In a Wall Street Journal editorial that strongly objected to calling Pretti a “domestic terrorist,” the editorial board nonetheless held that he was partly to blame for what happened to him: “Pretti attempted, foolishly, to assist a woman who had been pepper-sprayed by agents . . . Pretti made a tragic mistake by interfering with ICE agents, but that warranted arrest, not a death sentence.”
Now let’s imagine a conversation further downstream, around a family dinner table. After having seen the video footage of Alex Pretti’s murder, a wife says to her husband, “I just worry that ICE has gone a little too far.” He objects, “What do you expect when you bring a gun to interfere with agents doing their job?” Then their teenage son loses it, “You’re insane! Alex Pretti is a saint! Our country is under occupation!” He stuffs in his earbuds, turns up the music in dramatic fashion, and storms off.
Here’s how Confucius goes on to defend his priority of making sure names are used properly:
When names are not used properly, language will not be used effectively; when language is not used effectively, matters will not be taken care of; when matters are not taken care of, the observance of ritual propriety and the playing of music will not flourish; when the observance of ritual propriety and the playing of music do not flourish, the application of laws and punishments will not be on the mark; when the application of laws and punishments is not on the mark, the people will not know what to do with themselves.
Drawing on a well-known essay by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, many critics of Trump and his administration have accused them of “bullshit,” defined as an utter indifference to the truth. Similarly, over the past month, I’ve heard many people quote the famous lines from George Orwell’s 1984: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
While the problem of weaponized bullshit in politics is an important part of what I’m talking about, I’m trying here to get at a related problem, which has more to do with language’s relationship to the good than with its relationship to the true. To vary Frankfurt’s analysis, we could call it the problem of “horseshit”—moralized shit from one’s high horse.
Language isn’t simply a tool for describing the evidence of your eyes and ears. It’s also an instrument of “the tones given off by the heart”—to use the phrase that Ezra Pound lights on in his translation of Confucius. It’s how we connect to each other—how we greet, thank, organize, curse, love, chat, say goodbye, and so on.
According to Mencius, the second great Confucian after Confucius himself, the tones given off by the heart are fundamentally good, even though the possessors of those hearts do lots of bad things. Given all the glee that people take in gratuitous violence, it’s hard for me to agree completely with Mencius.
But there’s at least something to his point. Nobody I’ve quoted so far, even Stephen Miller, says that it’s bad to help people in distress, or that murder is good. Instead, what people say is that “officers” must do their “duty,” the “law” should not be “obstructed,” “terrorists” must be “dealt with.” Such a way of renaming things detaches us from whatever moral instincts we possess, even as it underlines our urge to pay homage to morality. It twists our moral sentiments against themselves. As cynical as Trump and Miller are, they realize that the human heart requires a moral language—for instance, a language of protecting our loved ones against rapists and terrorists—to bend it to their plunder and self-aggrandizement.
The famous example Mencius gives as intuitive proof of our goodness is that when we see someone about to fall down, our strong initial impulse is to reach out and catch that person. It’s only when we drape certain concepts over the situation, like “enemy” or “domestic terrorist,” that we can ignore our compassionate instincts and rename the act of a nurse helping a woman in distress as a “tragic mistake” or the “obstruction of justice.”
Obviously, there are innumerable psychological ways that we become detached from reality and our natural sociability. But the abuse or outright weaponization of our moral, legal, and cultural concepts almost always plays a significant role in that detachment.
Notably, our moral systems and our political ideologies can be part of the problem. Horseshit isn’t just the prerogative of the powerful who wish to cloak their greed and violence in high-sounding terms. Moralism, which helps us to scorn or punish our rivals with a clear conscience, can be used by anyone who wishes to feel superior to others.
I don’t quite know what to do with myself in our current situation. Protest—but how can I do so effectively? Contact my representatives—but what can I say that will persuade them? Raise my voice in public—but how do I do so in a way that doesn’t just add to the noise? Work for a better future—but what does that even look like?
All these activities, which I heartily recommend for the health of our country, require that we name and communicate what matters most. Unfortunately, we find ourselves working with a vocabulary of diminished luminosity. Appeals to justice, decency, rights, law, duty, humanity, and so on can end up sounding partisan and hollow, even when we desperately want them to light the way to the traditions in which we’ve expressed and preserved our moral sentiments.
Though I’ve been focusing on the current administration’s vile abuse of language, it’s not like they alone have trafficked in horseshit and bullshit. It would be a huge mistake to think that it’s enough to adopt the standard language of outrage. The opposition to MAGA not only contains plenty of its own horseshit and bullshit but feeds the very thing it hates.
One of our tasks—a great task, a task that never lets up—is to restore meaning to words like justice, decency, and humanity. In one sense, this is a remarkably difficult undertaking. It requires us to hear, through all the noise, the fundamental tones given off by the heart. It requires us to use all our rational, imaginative, and emotional powers to combine words in such a way that others feel and understand what it means to be human. Even the greatest writers and orators achieve only partial success.
In another sense, using names properly is easy. Just talk to people. Especially over food. Listen to what they have to say. Don’t be an asshole. Try not to mouth off when you don’t know what you’re talking about. Don’t have ChatGPT write your love letters. Cultivate relationships that make you feel human. Have a drink with a friend or a stranger. Remember that we all make mistakes and need forgiveness. And then speak freely.
As important as the Confucian rectification of names is, I think that it’s important to have a little Daoism in you too. Sometimes you have to play around with language—joke, pun, fantasize, even bullshit—so that you don’t take language or yourself too seriously. When we don’t allow ourselves the carnivalesque in our personal lives, we’re prone to looking to politics for our topsy-turvy amusement.
In any case, it’s worth recalling that how we use language is fundamental to who we are individually and collectively. If I could have a few wishes for our country, one of them would certainly be that terms like murder and justice were used properly.
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Scott Samuelson is the author of several books, including the forthcoming To Taste: On Cooking and the Good Life.
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