How misology stole our humanity

Man, Nietzsche wrote, is “the unfinished animal”. He meant that nature goes only so far in shaping human beings. We become who we are through the distinctively human capacity to produce and understand speech. That’s why Aristotle called us the animal that possesses logos, whose meanings include everything from word to speech, thought to reason, order to logic, proportion to account. This extraordinary semantic richness tries to capture the manifold articulate intelligence that makes us human — an intelligence that, in the first instance, answers to the nature and shape of things as they present themselves to our minds.

But today, logos — and therefore our humanity — is under intellectual, political, technological attack. It’s not that people have stopped talking. Rather, the difference between speech and what Aristotle called “voice” ( phōnē ) — the verbal expression not of reason, thought, and judgment, but emotion — is rapidly being effaced. Indeed, the most troubling social phenomena of our time are all reflections of misology: the effective, if largely unconscious, hostility to logos that is perhaps the definitive characteristic of 21st-century life.

Academic culture has, for decades, perversely promoted misology. In the early Nineties, I told a new assistant professor at my university that I taught and wrote about the Ancient Greeks. When I asked her what she worked on, she said: “Sure as hell not dead white males!” The incident was a harbinger of contemporary intellectual trends. The assistant professor’s aggressive dismissal of DWMs, as they were then known, was an expression of academic radical chic: the view that the poets, statesmen, philosophers who founded and developed the Western tradition have nothing worthwhile to teach us, because their (unchosen) membership in certain groups stained them with some sort of indelible sin. What had long been regarded as essential was now understood to be accidental, and vice-versa; being white and male counted for more than being human. This was little more than voice — the communication of feelings of pain or pleasure, as in a dog’s bark — masquerading as speech.

Misology has now taken root far beyond the academy, degrading political discourse and curtailing essential human freedoms. The notion that speech is violence and violence is speech, a confusion of the fundamental categories of liberal democracy that are enshrined in the US Constitution, justifies shutting down speakers and badgering those who wish to remain silent into endorsing positions they do not support. Nor is it permissible for actors to “play the other” — sympathetically to inhabit roles that do not match their identities as members of particular groups — even though doing so has been the lifeblood of dramatic performance since antiquity, when free Athenian males enacted the suffering of female slaves. All these developments constrain and weaken the capabilities of thoughtful speech and moral imagination that make it possible for human beings to live decent and elevated lives together.

At the same time, ideological imperatives have warped and corrupted language. Words like “racist”, “Nazi”, “fascist”, and “genocide” are applied so broadly and inconsistently that they have ceased to signify anything other than the speaker’s disapproval. “Equity” — which originally meant reasonableness and moderation in the exercise of one’s rights — now has virtually the opposite sense: imposing extraordinary measures to ensure equality of outcomes. Neologisms like “undocumented immigrant” or “birthing people” have become necessary in order to avoid acknowledging plain matters of legal and biological fact. Some, notoriously including the Smithsonian Museum , have even condemned objectivity, scientific reasoning, and good grammar as expressions of “whiteness” and “patriarchy”. And, of course, politicians’ constant resort to hyperbole (President Trump being the primary example of this trend) has exacerbated the decay of logos . The looseness of our language and imprecision of our thought have left a void that is increasingly filled by intemperate emotion, making citizens leery of publicly sharing their perceptions of what is just and unjust, or what is best for the body politic — an activity that is vital to the health of any free society.

But it is digital technology that poses perhaps the greatest threat to the development and exercise of logos . Social media connected individuals, but also allowed them to melt into “flash mobs”. The possibility of remaining anonymous encouraged angry outbursts, personal attacks, and other threatening behaviours, so much so that these phenomena required new words: “flaming”, “doxxing”, “swatting”. The online world also promoted simplistic binary thinking: swipe left, swipe right; thumbs up, thumbs down. By limiting users to 140 (later 280) characters, Twitter — now X — got people into the habit of communicating in crude, telegraphic ways: acronyms, truncated phrases, and…