An unfortunate side effect of not living in a world full of monotonous, robotic, literalists is that making any particular statement often has implications that extend beyond the literal meaning of the statement. When a person says “America is the greatest country in the world,” they intend to convey both that they hold the factual belief that America is greater than all of those other countries and that they are a godnguns, America-loving conservative who probably tends to vote republican. They want to signal that, not only do they think that America is the world’s greatest country, but they’re the type of person who says things like “America is the greatest country in the world,” unlike those pussyfooting, traitorous Obama and Clinton loving Democrats.
The linguistic undercurrents of a statement can often be just as important to the statement, if not more so, than the original statement. Many statements are almost bereft of literal meaning, replaced purely by a potent linguistic undercurrent. Examples include “all cops are bastards,” which, as touters of the slogan are quick to inform us, does not mean that individual cops are in fact bastards (how could one be such a fool as to think that the phrase “all cops are bastards” actually means that all cops are bastards), instead it means that systemic reform to policing is good. Or “abolish police” which often does not actually mean that the police should be abolished but really means “I’m a young leftist who doesn’t like policing very much as an institution and think a lot of it should change.”
One amusing experiment I’ve done that causes (some) left-wingers to misfire is by asking them if they think something that sounds vaguely like something a social justice warrior would say, but one that is totally incoherent. So, for example, do you think that transphobia is largely rooted in racism, or that abortion bans are homophobic, or that sexism is rooted in a legacy of colonialism? They will say yes, but then totally collapse into an incoherent, stuttering mess, when asked to actually defend the statements, because they did not conclude the statements were true for reasons, but merely because they had pleasant linguistic undercurrents.
In one of my classes, one person is quite sure to mention Marx at least once per class. This often involves making relatively shallow points. However, the linguistic undercurrent is “hey, I’m a Marxist — note that everyone!”
But because of linguistic undercurrents, there are some statements that can’t be uttered in public — or even to most people — even though they’re obviously true. While they’re true, they sound like the type of things a bad, evil, vicious person would say.
Here’s one example: the Holocaust is less bad than some people think it is. This is clearly true — there are no doubt some people who think the holocaust killed billions of people, so it must be less bad than some people think that it is. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t be caught dead uttering that utterly trivial, obviously true statement in public.
Or here’s another one — it’s hard to know exactly how bad slavery was. This is obviously true — we don’t know how many people were enslaved. But this sounds awful!
Here’s a third example — Trump’s presidency was very good in many ways. This is no doubt true — any significant impact had by anyone will produce lots of good things. Nevertheless, a liberal would never utter such a statement, because it’s the type of thing that’s primarily uttered by Trump supporters.
Or here’s another that will upset conservatives “American foreign policy routinely kills more people than 9/11.” That’s indisputable, but it’s a fact that makes conservatives uncomfortable. Ted Cruz would never utter that, for example.
A lot of this has to do with the social desirability bias. As Caplan notes
If you ask people, “Should people help their mothers more?,” they’ll probably respond “yes.” Why? Because “helping mothers” sounds good. It sounds so good, in fact, that no matter how much help mothers receive, almost no one will ever openly advocate helping them less. That’s SDB for you.
Exactly the same applies if you ask people “Should government do more to help the sick?” People will probably say “yes” – no matter how much government already helps the sick. Why? Because “helping the sick” sounds good. If people were as logical as Steve Landsburg, they’d instantly protest, “X being good is a reason to do a lot of X – not a reason to do more X.” But these words sound terrible – so only courageous thinkers like Steve utter them. Psychologically normal humans say the words other people want to hear.
Often, when people make statements they want to signal that they are a generally good person. This is the social desirability bias — the claim that there is a monetary value of a human life sounds dreadful, yet is obviously true.
But people also love to use their words to signal that they’re part of some group that they think is good, even if conventional morality has a more mixed view. The Marxist example from before fits this formula — this person likes Marxists, so he wants people to know he is a Marxist, even if most people don’t like Marxists (it’s not clear that most people at university don’t like Marxists, however).
But this can become insanely pernicious because there are lots of issues where avoiding a ghoulish position requires striking a balance — but striking a balance sounds like something the other side would do. Take the example of designing adequate sexual harassment standards. The optimal sexual harassment standard would avoid overly persecuting people for innocuous things, but it would punish real harassment. But stating that any sexual harassment standards are too strict sounds terrible to many left-wingers — it makes a person sound like one of those terrible conservatives.
This is a truly terrible situation. It means that soberly considering the relevant issues is procedurally barred by one’s general political sentiments.
It turns out that the effective altruism community is largely white and male. This is, I think, prima facie a bad thing — diversity is a good thing. However, it does not automatically make the movement bad. Yet many left-wing people just hear the words white and male and their brains turn off; they assume the movement must be bad overall, despite its overwhelmingly good track record.
Or take issues involving transgender people in sports. The correct solution seems to vary by the sport and the level of competitiveness — but both the left and the right seem to not like that solution. This is because it’s a compromise with the enemy — legitimately hearing out people who are getting totally wrecked by transgender people who are still biologically the other sex is abhorrent to many people.
This also is the cause of lots of political polarization. If conservatives take sounding like a liberal to be such a grave sin that they avoid it at all costs — even when it involves them making overwhelmingly stupid points, then they obviously will not listen to liberals making points. If you treat the other side as Voldemort and their peculiar way of speaking as evidence of malevolent ideas, you’ll totally ignore things said by the other side. This results in conservatives, for example, totally ignoring arguments for veganism, because they associate it with “leftist soy-boy cucks.”
It also results in people being deathly afraid of correctly representing their opponents’ arguments. If their political opponents say things that sound even remotely plausible, well, that would be a disaster. If one runs from saying true things that sound like what the other guys would say, then the other side will monopolize truth on many issues.
This could be the cause of most political polarization. Linguistic undercurrents exert such a perverse, noxious stain that they make people unwilling to debunk bad arguments for their position — left-wingers are often unwilling to debunk incorrect rape statistics, and right-wingers are unwilling to debunk election misinformation and other nonsense.
Even the implications of words are required to fight in the war of soldiers not scouts.
I guess the TLDR here is that politics is the mindkiller and makes us very, very stupid. But politics doesn’t just exist at the level of political argument — it exists at the level of utterances, even totally trivially obvious ones. It is so pervasive that, I remember in my statistics class, a person was scrambling, visibly uncomfortable at being asked to give possible cofounders for increased policing in communities with disproportionate numbers of black people. In general, giving cofounders is easy, but when you’re a left winger, having to give cofounders when analyzing the correlation between higher policing and the race of a community in ways that make a person sound like a conservative — the type who says “black people commit more crimes because of culture” — is like having to swallow a live frog; it just can’t be done.
This is one thing we should do less of as a society. We should not jump down people’s throats because of objectionable linguistic undercurrents. This is not to say that we should in all circumstances ignore them, merely that we should be much more reluctant to discard a line of reasoning because it sounds like something the other side would say.
So say it loud and say it proud: the holocaust was less bad than some people think, America has done things worse than 9/11, Trump was good in lots of ways, Biden is good in lots of ways, and there are an infinite number of possible worlds in which you should torture infants!
Unspeakable Truths
Most people also assume that you aren’t making trivial statements. For example if I say that we can never know for sure that the Holocaust was bad, that would be true. It would also be reasonable to assume that I am a nazi, because few people bother making statements that are only trivially true on a narrow technicality. That would be a waste of time that could instead be used to read Substack blogs.
I don’t think that any of this whacky undercurrents stuff is necessary to understand that’s relatively simple fact.
You might find pragmatics interesting as it studies the way that words, sentences, speech acts, etc. can have meaning apart from just their ability to communicate descriptive content. These also function to express and mold various non-cognitive attitudes in subtle and often subconscious ways.
The "undercurrents" that you speak of are part of why I'm drawn towards non-cognitivism to interpret many (if not most) utterances with moral terms. Terms like "right", "wrong", "good", "bad", etc. have such powerful "undercurrents" (or connotations, dynamic meaning, etc.) associated with them that these undercurrents completely determine when people judge it appropriate to ascribe these terms to things. But, of course, this is not happening at a conscious level. Somehow, our subconscious is able to determine the undercurrents of various sentences and this guides our feelings towards the sentence, just like what is plausibly happening with the examples you have in your post. Thus, in the same way that some of the political slogans you mentioned seem to be devoid of any propositional content when used in various contexts, it seems equally plausible to me that utterances with moral or evaluative terms are also devoid of any propositional content when used in most contexts.