Culture Wars and the Degradation of Language

Like truth, the integrity of words is another casualty of war.

From Thucydides to George Orwell, the degradation of language during war and political conflict has been recognized. As Thucydides wrote of the brutal and violent civil war in Corcyra, “Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them.” Like truth, the integrity of language is also a first casualties in culture wars.

The culture war that has been waged for over half a century––and is now reaching a destructive absurdity in “wokism,” “cancel culture,” and blatant censorship and suppression of free speech––has made debased language one of its most important weapons. So insidious has been this process that even conservatives opposed to the progressive left’s illiberal and unconstitutional excesses legitimize these transformations of language by using that ideologically corrupted vocabulary.

Take, for example, using the word “gender” instead of “sex.” First introduced in the Fifties by sexologist and suspected pedophile John Money, this change in usage was popularized in the Sixties to reinforce the dubious idea that sex-identity is not binary by nature, but comprises multiple variations, just as linguistic gender is not restricted to masculine or feminine, but can classify nouns by other qualities such as “animate” or “inanimate.” Male and female, masculine and feminine thus are not facts of nature, but social, cultural, and political “constructs” that serve the interests of the prevailing regime of power.

In other words, using the word “gender” to mean “sex” insidiously reinforces the constructivist ideology underlying as well Marxist theory and its antihumanist economic and political determinism. It also gratifies modernity’s fatal hubristic conceit: that human reality can be manipulated, changed, and reinvented at will by “technicians of the soul,” as Stalin called the self-proclaimed improvers of human nature.

One malign fruit of this bad idea is the transgender movement, the destructive consequences of which include...

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