Cleaning Up Our Cultural Chernobyl

We live amid quite histrionic times, when taking a $9M bonus is seriously defined as an act of self-sacrifice; a culture in which news is a hyperventilating perpetual motion machine; rap singers are political pundits, and leading ladies are medical experts. As I mentioned last month, the principles of mature expression are usually buried under such an avalanche of infantilism. But that doesn’t mean we have to stop noticing it — especially when the neurobiology of the phenomenon (see below) makes it all the more urgent of redress.

One of the formative lessons every writer (and editor) learns is that the adjective is the uranium-235 of language. Adjectives are to be treated as highly radioactive material: when used correctly, they can light up a city; used with laze, stupidity, and excess, they can turn you and your work into the artistic equivalent of Chernobyl. The glowing green fallout of adjectival excess poisons the rest of the writer’s earth, and soon verbs, metaphors, similes, and all the other citizens of language have developed gross and obvious deformities. But the real danger is upon us now, because the deformities are now so common as to be nearly universally accepted as health.

Granted, virtually every writer, at some point in his development, forgets the core principles of his work and walks into the swamp of hyperbole. Having done it myself quite frequently, and having been a frightened witness to it as an editor of other writers, I can confirm that it is a common error. But most of us manage to pull ourselves out of the swamp, or are helped by another. Even the clearest and simplest lessons must be reinforced by experience; that is how we grow.

The problem gets really nasty, however, when hyperbole becomes the norm; when the swamp becomes the water supply to an entire industry. This is the problem we face today in our culture’s media in particular, and much of its writing besides. Watch Jon Stewart keelhaul this trend in a segment about the blogosphere’s reaction to his recent encounter with Bill-O.

But again, the blogosphere is only the visible and easily lampooned tip of the iceberg here. The problem permeates our media: books, blogs, newspapers, and especially, of course, television. Blaming the Internet is a facile, cheap way out: the problem has gone global. If it has been enabled by any single force, I would point toward corporate marketing. Consider another visual example, an ingeniously edited video of the Apple iPad launch event. It was a marketing event staged for an audience of, ahem, journalists, who sent copy back to their offices containing many of the same adjectives they were fed from the stage.

The neuro-psychology at work here is only beginning to be well understood. Read this story of a British science reporter who went to have the language area of his brain artificially shut down.

TMS studies are gradually overthrowing the textbook view and revealing that language involves a more complex network of activity. “Something like two thirds of the brain is involved in language processing. It’s a whole brain experience,” says Devlin….it demonstrates scientifically what great writers have instinctively known all along: that we don’t just understand words, we feel them.

The author of this piece goes on to point out how marketers already, as if instinctively, take advantage of this reality of language processing, in his discussion of “agent metaphors,” which essentially comprise hyperbole used to inspire identification or positive emotion toward products, corporations, or government. Greenwald touched on this toxic use of language just the other day — note his comparison between the metaphors used in the Salem witch hunt with those used in the Bush-ama terrorist hunts. It is indeed no coincidence that authoritarian language coincides with corporate marketing. Karl Rove was the quintessential corporate MBA; Rahm Emanuel plied similar skills in his careers as a mega-millionaire investment banker and in government.

But that is not the smoking barrel of disinformation’s gun: corrupt, authoritarian, and cynical politicians have long been a part of American life. The present danger is the result of writers, reporters, and editors who are all too ready to bury the core principles of their trades in exchange for money, fame, or insider status. Once again, this is not just about the Internet or the blogs: a shrill amateurism has become de rigeur throughout our media. It is also more than an ethical problem; my entire point here is that it goes much deeper than that. You can’t merely demand that these media corporations and their employees start being honest and telling the truth — most of them have forgotten how; even if they wanted to, they wouldn’t know where to start.

Once again: these writers and reporters are spreading disinformation not out of greed, but from fear. They know, or feel, deep within themselves, that they have lost touch with the tools and core principles of their craft, and so they’re utterly disoriented. To merely demand honesty or accuracy of them now would be like giving a child a hammer and telling him to build you a house. A reporter or writer who has never learned to use language accurately and critically (especially self-critically) cannot possibly understand how to use it honestly or truthfully. In short, I am saying that these people need to go back to school.

I will now risk sounding like a stereotypical old man: in other times, “school” was not merely a college, university, or J-school. It went further and involved an apprenticeship, during which the cub reporter or budding writer was not merely thrown in front of a camera or behind a pundit’s keyboard to parrot a corporate script, but was taken through an active process of professional development, or mentoring. That process has broken down and the mentors vanished amid a corporate (and now broken) economy that values maximum, short-term profit over long-term quality of product.

A professional ethic and professional practice are not separate. They are chicken and egg; nut and bolt; yin and yang. A sound method supports and nourishes one’s ethics; a commitment to ethical principles delivers oxygen to the muscles of technique. For everyone involved in the transmission of information — writers, editors, reporters, publishers, producers — it all comes back to the continuing study of language. That radioactive water in the swamp of excess can be detoxified, clarified; but for it to happen, there must be a renewal of the mentoring model. Something tells me that most of those kids in front of the cameras at CNN, FOX, and the Big 3, and many of the fumbling hackers of newspaper punditry, do not want to spend their lives shouting marketing slogans and calling it news — I can sense their desperate need for guidance and growth amid their shrill complacency. In the end (and we are well along the way toward it), the only real evil is ignorance.