When I worked at a regional food bank, there was one word we did not use in relationship to hunger: fight. Fighting hunger, like fighting grease or fighting off sleep, makes for a good image. As the person who was responsible for shaping how the food bank communicated its mission to the public and asked for their support, I would have liked to be able to talk about fighting hunger. But the recently retired Executive Director was a Quaker, and Quakers are famously non-violent. He was insistent that we communicate non-violence in our words as well as our work.
To be honest, this awareness of language was a pain in the ass at first. We had a lot of work to do and doing it well meant more food for more people, so we wanted to get it done not talk about how we talk about things. Still, the more time I spent wrestling with the challenge, the more I came to appreciate why being picky about words is important. When we get imprecise about language, we can open up the possibility that meanings slip through the gates of figurative usage like gifts from departing Trojans.
Take, for instance, the War on Poverty. Lyndon Johnson introduced a series of legislative proposals that he wanted to be seen as parts of a whole. The aim of those proposals was to reduce or eliminate both the effects and the causes of poverty in the United States. Johnson had idolized Franklin Roosevelt and wanted to imitate or exceed Roosevelt’s New Deal. To do this, Johnson envisioned a sweeping program called the “Great Society,” but that was too abstract to be useful for selling massive social programs to conservative senators. The War on Poverty was sounded focused and energetic, and besides, everyone knew it was not a real war.
Figurative war is so compelling that it can be applied to a lot of things: debt, bureaucracy, crime, drugs. And everyone knows these are not real wars, right? We are not carpet bombing the national debt (although it might be argued that an excessive capability for carpet bombing is a significant cause of our indebtedness). There are not bureaucratic brigades manning barricades at the intersection of Connecticut and K Street. And even though the nation’s police departments have been equipped by the Federal government with military weapons, vehicles, and tactical gear, that doesn’t make the War on Crime an actual war, does it? Not any more than the War on Drugs could be considered a real war even though US personnel are deployed in foreign countries to advise and collaborate on what are essentially combat operations and the US Navy is sinking vessels in the Caribbean under the premise of drug interdiction.
And what is the War on Terror? It seems much more like an actual war than the War on Poverty, but it is not a war that has been declared. There’s no articulated goal (“end terror” doesn’t count) and the shifting sands of strategy are probably not even clear to the people tasked with formulating strategy. “War,” it seems, has come to mean little and justify a lot. Declaring a city like Portland, Oregon a “war zone” is easy to do because the essence of the word has become so diffuse but its impact is very apparent. Wars call for warriors. Warriors fight. They fight to win and do not count the cost, no matter how devastating.
There is another word for something without an essence of its own, a thing which is evident only by its debilitating impact on other things: evil. With apologies to people who know the work of Karl Barth much better than I do, this “nothingness” is how Barth describes evil in Volume 3 of his Church Dogmatics. There are echoes in Barth’s work of St. Augustine’s description of evil as a kind of “rust” that eats at what is created by God (with is everything that is). William Tecumseh Sherman invoked this sense of evil — either knowingly or intuitively — when he rightly said, “War is all Hell.”
The ruddy Ohioan was talking about the act of war, but it is increasingly clear that even the language of war opens up a gate through which the chaos and degradation of violence can be unleashed on populations that have been experiencing less and less of it in recent years. What does the President mean when he says “Inner cities are a big part of war”? It seems that by invoking such language he is — either knowingly or intuitively — cooperating with a thing which has no essence of its own, a thing which is only evident in its impact.