The "meaning of meaning" has become downright mean-spirited these days

Just ask Martha Alito and her mean-girl menace Maureen Dowd

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There is a story, possibly apocryphal, regarding a student of the late Harvard philosopher Stanley Cavell, who inquired about a remark his professor had just made during a class lecture.

Excitedly raising his hand, the student, who sat in the front row, is reported to have blurted out, “Professor Cavell, what exactly do you mean by that?”

According to the tale, Cavell then proceeded to lean forward, bend downward, remove his glasses, and with an intimidating glance toward the student ask, “young man, what do you mean ‘what do you mean’”?

Cavell’s career was all about the meaning of “meaning”.  He himself was a devotee of the great twentieth century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who is perhaps most famous for his dictum that “the meaning of a word is its use in language”. 

In a collected book of essays entitled Must We Mean What We Say? Cavell made the “shocking” philosophical claim for his time that statements of artists, poets, dramatists, and perhaps even certain theologians (he was highly conflicted about religion) were not “meaningless,” as the dominant philosophical school of the first half of the twentieth century known as logical positivism was wont to claim.

On the contrary, they were meaningful in the sense Wittgenstein had posited. 

That is to say, their meaning had to be assessed in terms of the context in which they were deployed in ordinary language, as well as professional discourse. 

In his later, and most revolutionary writings, Wittgenstein himself had argued that “meaning” is not something out there in the ether toward which words fluctuate and point like the magnetic north on a hiker’s compass. 

Meaning is appropriate usage in keeping with certain linguistic conventions as stipulated in what we know as “dictionary definitions”. 

Look up any everyday word in Merriam Webster and you will find that it often has multiple meanings, which may or may not have anything to do with each other.  The different meanings are dependent on the grammatical setting, or system of rules, in which they are deployed.

If someone decides to use a word in an entirely new and provocative way, that is their right.  But they can’t then claim that that alone, or even for the most part, is what the word specifically means.

If others over time come around to a similar usage, fine.  It will get into the dictionary.  But meanwhile we all have to get used to the fact the word has no fixed signification.

Okay, but why then belabor this point?  Or, even worse, why squander the first 420 words of this essay in order to harp so obsessively on something that seems intuitively undeniable, let alone trivial in relation to the colossally compelling matters of our present era?

That, as it happens, is exactly the point, meaning….

Meaning that our fetishism with meaning nowadays is what is driving us to demonize each other and stir the hyperpartisan witch’s kettle to such a froth that the republic is seriously on the ropes.

Take the most obvious instance, the never-say-die faux controversy over the meaning of two flags Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s wife Martha flew at their two private residences in 2021 and 2023.

I, along with others, have written how thoroughly ridiculous and deranged the controversy has become in the first place, especially when it involves the Pine Tree a.k.a. the “Appeal to Heaven flag”, which Alito’s trolls and gaslighters are claiming that George Washington’s two-and-a-half-century-old flag from the Revolutionary is an obvious “right wing” dog whistle exclusively to the very same insurrectionists who stormed the capitol on January 6, 2021.

The creepy, covert, crypto-fascist, putschy meaning of the “Appeal to Heaven” banner should have been so supremely self-evident to Alito a year ago when his better half ran it up the flag pole that he, or anyone with an elementary understanding of Supreme Court ethics, would have demanded he scrupulously reprimand his spouse for her blatant impropriety and insolence, immediately get on the horn to city leaders in San Francisco as well the governor of Massachusetts (two notorious nests of ultra-right-wing vipers) who happened also to be flying the same flag at the same time, and beg them to join him in a nationally broadcast and tearful mea culpa.

The insanity keeps metastasizing.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, normally a sane human being, today shovelled even more pterodactyl puckey into what was already hitting and flying from the supercharged fans of the mainstream media.

The Pine Tree “flag”, she declared with absolute and apodictic authority, “symbolizes support for Donald Trump and a desire to infuse the federal government with a lot more Christianity”.

Of course, Kathleen Parker in The Washington Post had a rather different take, as can be descried in the headline for her opinion piece: “Democrats weaponizing flags to intimidate Alito is an embarrassment”.

Parker, who excels in wit rather than whining, notes that a certain flag owned by Martha Alito,

…one that featured a pine tree and the words, “Appeal to Heaven,” flew over the New Jersey beach house she owns during the summer of 2023 — long after the 2021 Capitol riot. But because this flag also made an appearance at the Capitol on Jan. 6, The media horde and others made a giant leap: Martha-Ann must be expressing common cause with white nationalists who want a more-Christian government. (Cue heavy breathing.)

Soon, thereafter, Charles Pierce in Esquire huffed that Parker’s flippancy about the flag flap makes it utterly and morally incumbent on the Post’s new editorial regime to get “a little tougher on this particular swill”.

In other words, they are overwhelmingly obliged to call in the news censors, accompanied by the D.C. thought police, to do their part in preventing the unconscionable crime of sarcasm committed by an uppity woman defending in her Pulitzer-winning column another uppity woman for refusing to admit both clearly knew the true and incontrovertible meaning of the Pine Tree flag, which no one else seemed to have known until about two weeks ago when the Times itself told us once and for all exactly what it means. 

You know what I mean.

In linguistic theory there is something known as the “referent”.  A referent is the specific object, concept, emotion, or person to whom a word presumably, given conventions of speech, are supposed to “refer”.

If most people don’t realize a certain x refers to y, then it is up to the speaker or interlocutor to give a plausible account of why the meaning of the locution has shifted, not berate them for deception and dishonesty because they somehow must have known what you as the odd one out actually had in mind.

But, no, we as the buffoonish privileged class of infallible cognoscenti like Dowd, Peirce, and their ilk – whom we may one day reluctantly have to rename the American un-intelligentsia – know down to the nethermost nefarious nuance what a given word means, even if the entirety of the population has no clue.

Not only that.  We have the right to set up a la Orwell our own ministry of truth to haul even high court justices’ wives before our tribunals and decree that they are threats to democracy.

That goes as well for all those miscreants out there who refuse to admit that any defensive war fought by the Israeli military against the Palestinians ipso facto and pari passu means “genocide”,  or that the exclusive referent for the term “Jew” is “Zionist”, or that whatever anyone does to Donald Trump is indistinguishable from “persecution”.

In this age when higher education itself has come to “mean” a lurid lust for thought lobotomies, and political discourse nothing more than spasms of vituperation and cloudbursts of obscene expletives, the meaning of meaning has become…well…mean and nasty!

In her most recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal Peggy Noonan, highlighting the contempt elites nowadays seem feel for the unwashed populist masses, put it this way:

The left leans toward condemnation. It is going from “Trump is a criminal” to “Trump supporters are criminal.” They understand things the other dopes don’t.

They truly know what meaning means.

But, she observes, the unwashed populist masses have about an almost identical view of the “elites”.  “They charge the other side are bad human beings.”

A long time ago I read that one of the most telling and unmistakable clinical indicators of the form of psychosis known as “schizophrenia” is the tendency to use words in wild and unrestrained ways by treating vague associations as facts with a self-certainty that normal individuals would not even consider.

Thus a female patient refers to herself as the Virgin Mary – and believed indeed that she is that in fact – simply because she had never had sex with a man.   Or a male subject who obsesses over having “killed Jesus” because he reminisces about his prior career as an airline Pilate.

I’m not sure if that’s really much different than accusing Ms. Alito of supporting the January 6 uprising because one or two people brandished the same flag, even though the overwhelming majority of those, past and present, who have flaunted the pine tree had something different in mind.

We may truly be on the cusp of a national psychosis where the inmates are running the asylum.

Or as the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously quipped, human beings “would rather have the void for meaning than be void of meaning.”