We live in a world dominated by the sound bite, the clip and all things scrollable. To facilitate this shortened content, different groups have had to find creative ways to convey great meaning in small packages. Though this may sound ingenious, these words — known today as political buzzwords — have had a divisive effect. They have become tribal, drawing lines in the sand between ideologies. The shift in vernacular along party lines separates those who disagree from those with the same political vocabulary. Put another way: no buzz words, no entry.
This is not an entirely new phenomenon. In fact, it goes all the way back to the Old Testament in the 12th century B.C.E. Judges 12:6 describes a conflict between two Israelite tribes, the Gileadites and the Ephraimites, in which the Gileadites use the pronunciation of the word “shibboleth” to test for Ephraimite spies — with deadly consequences for those who failed. The passage reads, “Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan.”
The shibboleths of today function similarly, albeit less lethally. From protest chants and Instagram comments to backpack pins and vinyl stickers, no one can escape the influence of shibboleths on the national conversation.
It’s an unfortunate side effect of the information age that the most rhetorically riveting coverage of a story garners the most attention. Within a single political issue or party, the shrinking of complex ideas into easily consumable shibboleths has led to the proliferation of certain words which cement one’s membership in a particular political tribe (“neoliberals,” “eat the rich,” “defund the police,” “Let’s Go Brandon,” “from the river to the sea,” “Zionist,” “colonist,” “terrorist” and so on). These are the ideologically-loaded, simplifying soundbites that have become the main barrier to effective political discourse.
Novelist Zadie Smith, in an essay published in The New Yorker, explains how this issue plays out in a modern context. She writes, “It is no doubt a great relief to say the word ‘Hamas’ as if it purely and solely described a terrorist entity. A great relief to say ‘There is no such thing as the Palestinian people’ as they stand in front of you. A great relief to say ‘Zionist colonialist state’ and accept those three words as a full and unimpeachable definition of the state of Israel … at every stage of its long and complex history…”
The sort of language Smith critiques is used to “other” and dehumanize differing communities, and it simplifies complicated political arguments by appealing to our mental associations. The fact is, the political reality is much more nuanced. And yet, reality is often denied because it doesn’t fit snugly into our shibboleths.
Such abuses of language don’t improve discourse. Still, they persist.
These labels attempt to summarily dismiss any offending ideas via a mental shortcut, and the free market-esque generator of ideas enables the most radical phrases to rise above their ordinary, but more sensible, counterparts. In other words, subtlety rarely survives on social media and 24-hour news. With time, these words and phrases become embedded in the DNA of a political tribe as a shared vernacular. Or perhaps it’s the other way around: Groups form around a common language. Both sides believe in their moral-ethical-intellectual superiority over the other, in a way best described as contempt.
The culture of contempt in America persists largely because we’ve built it into the language used by groups to discuss politics. Language becomes fragmented between parties. The meaning of “Zionist” in a pro-Israel group is not the same as its meaning in a pro-Palestinian one. Modern shibboleths form when we flood language with non-neutral context. The process of creating shibboleths is the process of associating the words for your cause with moral good, and turning names for the enemy into a kind of slur.
In some ways, the PR war over Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has become as important as the physical war. Discrepancies in language often reflect disagreements over objective truths. Besides the overt simplifications made in the coining of shibboleths, many disagreements between parties are over the semantic vs. pragmatic uses of a word. Ask either side what “from the river to the sea” really means and you’ll get wildly different approaches to answering the question. For many people, it depends on which side of the debate they fall on. But the truth is rarely so black and white.
Perhaps the most damaging part of political shibboleths is that they put supporters of the non-literal meanings in a bind. Yes, there are people who want to legitimately abolish the police, and there are people who use “from the river to the sea” that mean it as a call to destroy Israel, but these groups are in the minority. Still, those who disagree with the extreme meaning of these phrases are trapped because they don’t want to be seen undermining the side that they support, even when it misrepresents them.
This issue is especially prevalent on the left, which has a tendency to use slogans with both reasonable and absurd interpretations. To the people within the ingroup, the slogan holds the reasonable interpretation, but the opposing side tends to see the absurd. Language has become such a strong marker of group membership that people are reluctant to criticize their own side for fear of seeming defeatist.
On a national level, blind tribal conformity results in nationalistic rivalries; on the level of political parties, you get whatever America is doing right now, and on the level of individual issues, you get social media posts and angry essays written back and forth in influential magazines. And language is at the center of all of it: what you see, what you hear and what you risk saying as a member of your tribe.
Although the influences of language permeate every inch of existence, there is a bit of a silver lining in that they are easy to detect — just think of a word, and note the mental association your brain assigns to it. Is it warranted by the amount of specific evidence that you can produce? In other words, how confident are you that the feelings that immediately come to mind accurately reflect the facts? My observation of college students, including myself, is that the strength of the belief far outweighs the extent of the evidence.
A key point that arises from that understanding is Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” When you disagree with someone’s perspective or think that it neglects your own, take a moment to recognize that this person has no deep-seated rancor against you, your opinions or the groups you defend. Instead of becoming vindictive, choose to become overwhelmed with curiosity, ask open-ended questions to genuinely understand their viewpoint and practice active listening without planning your response while they are talking. By seeking to understand rather than to condemn, we can dismantle the modern shibboleths that divide us and foster a more inclusive and empathetic discourse. The biblical shibboleth was a dangerous test of belonging — let us create a new standard where our shared humanity becomes the common ground for dialogue and understanding.
Seth Gabrielson is an Opinion columnist and can be reached at semiel@umich.edu. Opinion contributor Kenneth Sun can be reached at sunken@umich.edu.
The post The language of tribalism: How political shibboleths are destroying discourse appeared first on The Michigan Daily.
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