Sol Steinmetz
New Rochelle, New York
Moral Clarity. “No great nation can abandon the obligations of moralclarity,” said Senator John McCain last month, “for the convenience of situational ethics.” In his speech to the American Israeli Political Action Committee, he repeated the phrase moral clarity three times. (McCain’s speech led with “There’ll always be an Israel,” a paraphrase of the 1939 song by Ross Parker and Hugh Charles, “There’ll Always Be an England.”)
This followed some 1,100 hits on moral clarity in the Dow Jones database over the past twenty-two years, almost 550 since September 11. On the morning after the Qaeda attacks, the phrase appeared in the monthly column written by Robert Kagan, the hard-liner at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in the Washington Post. Kagan said he hoped that Americans would respond to the attacks “with the same moral clarity and courage as our grandfathers did.”
Later that day, William Bennett, conservative author of The Death of Outrage, used the phrase five times in an interview with Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s Hardball, beginning with “This is a moment for moral clarity .” (Six months later, it appeared as the subtitle of Bennett’s new book, Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism.) Charles Kraut-hammer’s column in the Washington Post the week after the attacks was headlined “We Need Moral Clarity” because, he wrote, “we are already beginning to hear the voices of moral obtuseness.” The voice he had in mind was Susan Sontag’s in the New Yorker, where Sontag denounced those writers outraged by the terrorist attack for what she called their “self-righteous drivel.”
As these usages show, the ringing phrase moral clarity has a clearly conservative political coloration. The Chicago Tribune noted that White House officials saw President George W. Bush’s plain talk about “evildoers” as a virtue: “He is bringing ‘moral clarity’ to a convoluted world, aides said, just as President Ronald Reagan did when he declared the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire.’”
Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman agreed last month that Bush “has brought a moral clarity to the conflict we are in.” However, by pressuring Israel “not to do exactly what we ourselves have done to fight terror in Afghanistan, … I’m sorry to say the Bush administration has recently muddied our moral clarity .”
(A tangent: Lieberman’s prepared text reads muddied; many newspaper accounts of the speech reported his verb as muddled. He may have used both, at different times. To muddy, from the metaphor of beclouding clear water with earth, thereby to make turbid and obscure vision, now has the extended sense of “to confuse.” To muddle, with the same origin, has a more Mr. Magoo-like quality, defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “to busy oneself in a confused, unmethodical and ineffective manner.” End tangent.)
The earliest use of the phrase moral clarity I can find is by the University of Chicago philosophy professor James Hayden Tufts, who said in a 1934 speech to the American Philosophical Association that “the law is often thought to be the most conservative of institutions. It is necessarily conservative, for it uses compulsion and therefore may well hesitate to move in advance of general moral clarity.” The phrase was picked up in the ’80s and increased in usage in the next decade. The Times columnist Maureen Dowd, describing the pope’s meeting in 1999 with President Clinton, observed that the pontiff may have received a public-opinion boost from the president: “Moral clarity is all well and good, but you’ve got to keep those poll numbers up.”
Bennett defined the phrase to a pro-Israel crowd in Washington as “seeing things for what they truly are. It requires the understanding of distinctions … between a democracy fighting for its survival and its opponents fighting to push that democracy into the sea…. It means the time for moral equivocation and moral equivalence should be over.”
Just as Krauthammer used moral obtuseness as the direct opposite of today’s phrase under study, Bennett used moral equivalence scornfully, dismissing the term as an obfuscator of clarity. This phrase originated in William James’s 1906 speech about the need to find what he titled “The Moral Equivalent of War.” His point was that mankind needed a new outlet for combat, and he suggested an “equivalent discipline”—conscription of men into universal nonmilitary service to “coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing”—to “get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier and soberer ideas.” James’s purpose, as he wrote to H. G. Wells that year, was to cure “the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess success. That—with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success—is our national disease.”
Since then, James’s idealistic phrase has pejorated to mean “with no distinction between right and wrong, between the unpleasant and the horrific or between aggressor and victim,” and as such has become a favorite whipping-phrase of the political right.
I checked with William F. Buckley, who helped popularize the current sense of the phrase, and the inventor of modern conservatism reports: “Moral equivalence is a handy imposture by which behavior and misbehavior are equated. Some years ago I made the point after an ‘antiwar’ demonstration by the American left. The demonstrators were arguing that Ronald Reagan’s defense budget was the equivalent of Mikhail Gorbachev’s. I said that that was like saying that the man who pushed old ladies out of the way of an oncoming bus is like the man who pushes old ladies into the way of an oncoming bus. Both push old ladies around.”
Then there is moral relativism. Its advocates describe it as a view that moral standards are grounded in social custom, varying from culture to culture, while its critics call it loosey-goosey moralism incapable of deciding that such institutions as slavery are wrong.
A moral certainty has nothing to do with morality; it means “high probability.” To use it in a sentence: The continued clash between moral clarity and its antonyms—moral relativity and moral equivalency—is a moral certainty.
We certainly enjoyed your piece on equivalence and relativeness. The subject can certainly stand more clarity and you did it proud with all the references to the clarity and mud of Lieberman, Kagan, Bush, Krauthammer,Clinton and William James.
But we do wonder whether you clarified or muddied the waters with youruse of an unknown form of “pejorative”—pejorated. Since Merriam Webster does not provide any verbal form of pejorative—or are you now manufacturing for us a new verbal form to demoralize the right/wrong distinction we conservatives demand? Maybe you have to get Bill Buckley’s acquiescence before we start pejorating?*
Ben and Doris Haskel
Chevy Chase, Maryland
McCain the Antonymist. Who wins the language maven’s award for the most effective use of semi-antonymy in the primary campaign to date? Push the envelope, please.
The winner is Senator John McCain, for an apparently offhand statement made aboard his campaign bus, the Straight Talk Express, rolling through South Carolina. According to Edward Walsh of the Washington Post, McCain said that among Republicans, he is “not trying to appeal to the disaffected. I’m trying to appeal to the disenchanted .”
What’s the difference? Plenty.
Disaffected means “ill disposed, unfriendly, inimical.” The core of the word is affect, same as in affection; the usual sense is “to lose affection for.”
A more extreme sense, used more in law and politics, is “estranged; alienated; resentful; disloyal.” Judge Learned Hand, speaking to educators in 1952, deplored an atmosphere “where nonconformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, is a mark of disaffection.” At a time when charges of Communism were being made, that word was carefully chosen to denote a state just one step short of “disloyalty.”
Disenchanted, though not the opposite, is markedly different. It evokes the ancient breaking of a magical spell, and is a calibration stronger than “disillusioned.” In its verb form, to disenchant means “to free from an often false belief.”
Thus,
McCain rejected any characterization of those Republicans to whom he was appealing as “unfriendly” or “disloyal” to the GOP; on the contrary, he saw these potential supporters as people disillusioned with the current leadership—let down by political dealing—but whom he could bring back into the fold, their faith restored. A key meaning of disenchant is “to restore to reality.”
This careful contradistinction of disaffected and disenchanted could not have been conceived by McCain off the cuff. I suspect a skillful speech-writer at work and hereby put my dibs on the first interview if he or she makes it to the White House.
There’s a related word for that mystery ghost to think about: disenthrall . That poetic verb has a more active and positive connotation than disenchant and has historic resonance; it was last used in politics with great effect by Abraham Lincoln: “As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”
What you say about the meaning of enchanted is etymologically true, but the element of magic spell and illusion that you stress has pretty well sunk out of sight in common use of the term. When one is enchanted one is not deceived. An enchanting person, landscape, work of art radiates true delight. On being introduced to someone in France, one says “Enchanté,” which implies no witchcraft on the other’s part; it means “delighted.”
The question is whether disenchanted does imply having been fooled. In some cases it probably does, but it also suggests mere weariness or boredomwith the once pleasurable object—or more mature tastes. Besides, the object itself may have changed: a friend behaves badly and one is disenchanted. But that does not mean that the previous enchantment was not based on genuine qualities of mind and heart.
Jacques Barzun
San Antonio, Texas
The words enthrall and disenthrall have metamorphosed since Lincoln’s time. When one now says, “I am enthralled,” upon first look at the Acropolis or during a new performance by Alvin Ailey, the meaning is what? Awestruck? Overcome with admiration? The first entry in my dictionary is “captivated; charmed.” To be enthralled these days is a good thing.
In antebellum, enthralled meant “enslaved.” Indeed, a thrall was a person in bondage to another. Lincoln’s use of disenthrall was dual. Here is a more complete look at the quote:
The dogmas of the past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
Not only did the president refer to abolition of slavery, but also to the liberation of American social and political thought. Disenthrall was a perfect choice of words.
A word with similar changes is captivate. If you are willing to have a new department for anachronisms, why not one for metamorphisms? Fabulous and fantastic and terrific are all expressions now of satisfaction. Nothing like their original meanings. And my favorite, hysterical, used so loosely today as the harmless equivalent of hilarious.
T. J. Harvey
Huntington Station, New York
Movable Modifier. Word mavens get a linguistic thrill when a skillful politician manipulates the language with great deftness and an alert reporter catches him at it.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, maneuvering his way through the sticky wicket of the Middle East, wanted to stress the need to maintain an international coalition, including Arab states, when talking to Israel’s Ariel Sharon—while getting an antiterrorism message across to the Palestinians’ Yasir Arafat.
Accordingly, he spoke in Jerusalem to Sharon of an “international coalition against terrorism in all its forms” and later the same day, with Arafat in Gaza, spoke of “a coalition against international terrorism.” He switched the placement of the adjective international from modifying coalition (acceptable to the Israelis) to modifying terrorism (acceptable to the Palestinians).
“It is a distinction with a difference here,” wrote the New York Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief, James Bennet. “Mr. Sharon and other Israeli officials like to identify their efforts against Palestinians with the American attack on the Taliban,” he noted, “and they reject as hair-splitting any distinctions between ‘international’ terrorism and Palestinian attacks on Israelis. Palestinian officials, of course, prefer not to be lumped in with the Taliban.”
Thus, merely by moving his modifier, Blair pleased both camps. To Israelis, his international modifying coalition included them in, while to Palestinians, his international modifying terrorism was taken as differentiating their local warfare from the global terrorism of Al Qaeda. Subtle move by the politician, intended not to be noticed; good catch by the reporter.
Mujahedeen. An Arabic noun that has been bandied about on the front pages in recent years has a meaning and a spelling that often wanders. Who are the mujahedeen?
First use I can find in English: “When the question of disbanding the mujahidin or ‘warriors of the Holy War’ arose,” noted the Encyclopædia Britannica in 1922 in an article about Persia (now Iran), “these soldiers of fortune, for the most part, assumed a menacing attitude and threatened to mutiny unless their exorbitant demands for pay were granted.” Fifty years later, greeting President Nixon on a visit to Tehran, the shah of Iran dismissed the noise of demonstrators as “just the shouting of the mujahadin”; guided by Muslim clerics, they deposed the shah in 1979.
A mujahid is a fundamentalist Muslim fighting what he considers to be a jihad, or “holy war,” literally “struggle.” Why is a jahid fighting a jihad? The reason the vowels are transposed is based upon what is called, in Semitic languages, the tri-consonantal root. According to Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, “You take three consonants”—like the j, h and d—“and play with them. It’s like a Latin declension, but with a vengeance.”
By the 1950s, the word was used mainly as a collective plural, mujahedeen, applied to guerrilla fighters and later to terrorists throughout the Middle East. “To the east of Kabul,” wrote the Observer in 1979, “the rebel mujahideen, or ‘holy warriors,’ effectively control all but the provincial capital and the major towns.”
Nationality is not part of the definition. There were Iraqi mujahids fighting in Syria against the Damascus regime, and Iranians who call themselves by that name who shouldered aside the secular Marxist fedayeen; later ejected by Tehran’s ayatollahs, some of these Iranian mujahadin are now under the protection of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. In 1980, Sad-dam, not then assuming a religious pose, said: “Those are the ones whom Khomeini calls mujahadin. Those so-called mujahadin are traitors.”
Because it is a transliteration of the Arabic, the various local assemblages of what some of us call terrorists are spelled mujahadeen/mujahadin/mujahideen/mujahadein/mujahedeen/mujahidin. All are correct. The Library of Congress likes mujahidin; the Times prefers mujahedeen.
Mushy. With Valentine’s Day bearing down on us, you need to know the difference between the pronunciation of mushy as mooshy (with the first syllable rhyming with whoosh) and mushy (with the first syllable rhyming with hush).
The mooshy locution does not concern lovers. In current usage, the adjective means “pulpy, mealy,” an onomatopoeic alteration of the noun mash, a thick, boiled cereal. Mark Twain, in his 1880 A Tramp Abroad, used that mooshy sense in writing of “mushy, slushy early spring roads.”
That meaning, metaphorically extended, landed—plop!—in the middle of political terminology as a derogation of moderation. Theodore Roosevelt in 1900 derided “the mushy class” with its “wild and crude plans of social reformations.” Nearly a century later, Governor George W. Bush said, “I’m skeptical about a national test which the federal government could use to promote a feel-good curriculum or mushy curriculum.”
Senator Chuck (what kind of name is that for a serious senator?) Hagel said approvingly of Senator Joe Lieberman’s partisan oratory in the 2000 campaign that his was “not a fa
int-of-heart, kind of mushy middle role.” Afterward, Senator John Kyl predicted that the Bush cabinet would include “a lot of nominees from the mushy middle.”
That’s how mushy as mooshy developed from “a soft mass” to “soft on the masses”—undefined, imprecise, fuzzy-edged.
On the other hand, mushy, pronounced with an uh, is back in vogue among lovers. It means “romantic, sentimental, tender.” After an explosion that introduces potential lovers in the 1994 movie Speed, the female character says: “You’re not going to get mushy on me, are you? … Relationships that start under intense circumstances, they never last.” In 1998 grand jury testimony, Monica Lewinsky said that she gave an antique book to the president along with “an embarrassing, mushy note.” Last year, David Brooks of the Weekly Standard described the conclave that nominated George W. Bush as “a lovey-dovey, mushy convention.” Time magazine writes that in the current movie What Women Want, Mel Gibson, a star who often plays tough-guy roles, “learns to get mushy.”
The romantic sense of the word can cross the border into sloppy sentimentality. The novelist Henry Miller wrote in 1927 of “mushing it up in a corner,” and a character in Saul Bellow’s 1952 The Adventures of Augie March spoke of “the kind who’d never … let you stick around till 1 a.m. mushing with them on the steps.” Rob Long, a screenwriter, reviewed a Fox Television “reality” series last month and asked, “How gooey-mushy could they really be, deep down, if they’re willing to head off to Temptation Island to test-drive their monogamy?”
One who overdoes tenderness is called a mushball, which has replaced the earlier mushhead. In the Arctic, husky sled dogs that hear their drivers urge them on with a shout of “Mush!” know that the command is not an endearment but a corruption of the French “Marche!”—meaning “Move on!”
The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time Page 23