The Foundation for American Christian Education (F.A.C.E.) has a series of lectures called Lessons on Liberty. I gave #8 on May 12th; “Learning from History: The Importance of Language. The prose below misses most of the color commentary, examples, and details. A much abridged version of the notes pages – yet quite long for an op ed – follows:
Our learning from history is this: Language has always mattered in history.
History as a social science is relatively new – less than 200 years old as a unique academic discipline. Concurrently for most of its 200 years one school of thought stands out in its pedantic use of language to promote itself. That branch of history is Marxism. Marxism created Revisionism and continues today. There are other forms of revisionism. But, usually, the use of language to twist history into a revisionist pretzel stems from some form of Marxism.
We should learn from history. I say that from more than my personal love of reading history. I was in a small community of Army “Futurists” for decades as a soldier and a contractor. Futures is entirely based on our understanding of the past. The better futurists are the more knowledgeable historians. Not that you can predict the future, but you can certainly see options for how it may unfold as well as the parameters for those options happening.
It’s absolutely essential to have a common understanding of history within certain limits of academic license. Obviously, that means using the same language to describe that history. Definitions in history are determinative, not subjective. History is a science, not an art.
If you want to revise history, you have to re-write history. If you want to re-write, you use different words. When you create new words or re-define old words you change language. Changing language is how to revise history to fit your narrative.
It’s been argued that all of history is revisionism. That all of history is opinion or perspective. Let’s leave that idea to people who dismiss rational empiricism. Or, semanticists and logicians who live for those arguments.
There is a history of history in Western Civilization.
History became history as we know it in the 19th Century. Germany lead the way. History focused on accuracy, verifiable facts, and observation.
Ideas, and the words which express them, have genealogies. We can see and date the changes from historical orthodoxy and common language.
Language changes aren’t revisionism. The definitions as well as the pronunciation of words change.
Yet, there is objective truth in this world. Throughout the universe and all of time. The Word of the one, true, only, living God is truth. That Word is written in the Holy Bible.
Consequently, all history and all language isn’t subjective if there is objective truth.
However, God’s Word is subject to human disputes. It always has been. From the sects in Judaism, to the New Testament controversies, to the Great Christian Schism, to the Reformation. None of those disagreements are revisionism.
Linguistics and the differences in translating languages isn’t revisionism.
Evolving ideas, like St Augustine’s “know the Mother Church to know knowledge” to St. Thomas Aquinas’s “know knowledge then accept the Church teaching or not” to the Protestant Reformation’s “all knowledge is created by a Sovereign God and is discoverable” are not revisionism. The one, unknowable exception is the Resurrection and it’s not revisionism either.
Cultural perspectives aren’t revisionism. Consider the many names for the war in America between 1861-65. Arguments aren’t revisionism.
Schools of history, historiography, aren’t revisionism, except for “Marxist” History. And, that’s where most revisionism exists since the French Revolution.
The French Revolution is the inflection in time. Its ideas are called Human Secularism. I prefer to call their unity as an ideology with the term Human Secularist Totalitarianism.
The French Revolution changed the days of the week and the months of the year ,and personal forms of address to try to create a new social order and a new human.
Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals captures every attempt to create a Human Secularist (Marxist) paradise, “What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be.”
Marx took Hege’s dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis and made dialectical materialism. The problem is every premise of his about history, economics, and sociology is wrong.
Furthermore, History isn’t the story of class struggle.
The ideas of the French Revolution crossed the Atlantic to the US. In 1790, there was a scandal at Yale when some undergraduates denied the divinity of Jesus Christ. (In 1697 the last death sentence for blasphemy was executed in Scotland. Tolerance meant different things in different places.)
Slowly, the ideas from France took root and grew.
The worldview of the French Revolution did so institution by institution across the 7 institutions (Government, Business, Education, Media, Arts & Entertainment, Religion, Family) which shape American Culture and Civilization.
American Culture had 4 Regional Sub-Cultures at the time of the American Revolution. They were Tidewater South, New England, Middle Atlantic, and Appalachian Frontier.
The ideas evolved from the French Revolution became the dominant worldview of 2 of the original 4 Regional sub-cultures in the US – New England and the Middle Atlantic. Tidewater and the Appalachian Frontier regions have not completely gone over to this worldview.
Human Secularist Totalitarianism presents itself in the US today as the many tentacles of cancerous Cultural Marxism. Cultural Marxism has its own language.
Truth and history are flexible. Make things up as you go along.
It’s like studying a real, new academic discipline in learning the key words and concepts. Yet, it is profoundly un-academic or anti-academic in its poor scholarship.
If there isn’t objective truth, then you can make things up as you go along. That is both convenient and necessary if your arguments fail under any scrutiny.
Orwell said it best:
1. “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” (1984)
2. “The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.” (1984)
3. “Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable…” (“Politics and the English Language”)
4. “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs… and accepting both of them.” (1984)
- “Every record has been destroyed or falsified… History has stopped.” (1984)
- “If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say… it never happened—that…was more terrifying…” (1984)
- “The past was erased,the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.” (1984)
- “The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc…” (1984)
The Left is making the “Long March Through the Institutions” and changing language in every institution to fit their narrative.
Consequently, your freedom is defined by what you aren’t allowed to say or write. Ask yourself, “What is it that you believe is true, but dare not say in public?”
Push back by questioning revisionist speech. Ask for definitions, like for diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Read, laugh, and pray.
PS 119:43 “Never take your word of truth from my mouth”
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