There was a time when we thought it was nice to have something sanctioned. Your boss sanctioned leave, banks sanctioned loans, corporations sanctioned building plans. But now we have another line of usage that inverts the meaning. Some sanctions stop operations instead of allowing them. When Donald Trump talks of sanctioning Iran, he does not mean approving Iran’s right to exist (though he might fantasize about having that power). He means halting trade with Iran and penalizing nations that do not follow suit. The Latin root of ‘sanction’ means holy, sacred (compare ‘sanctum’ and ‘sanctity’). The word literally means making holy or sanctified, approved by god, as it were. The question is, which side is god on?
Or human beings, for that matter. The superpower imposing most such sanctions is increasingly described as having a populist government. That might seem a strange appellation for a regime that slashes social services and favours tax cuts for the rich. ‘Populism’, we might think, would foreground the demands of the people, populus in Latin. It would profess an ideology of equity, social support and State control over wealth production. At the end of the nineteenth century, America briefly had a People’s Party with precisely those aims. Today, on the contrary, many common American citizens feel threatened by immigration, positive discrimination, the decline of industries and environmental restrictions. Today’s populism can thus be pro-rich and authoritarian.
These changes of meaning are not instances of post-truth. When that term means anything at all, it is basically plain untruth with a suspect agenda. When facts and logic will not serve your turn, you strategize to fill people’s minds with lies. As the Nazi propaganda guru Joseph Goebbels is reputed to have said, with constant repetition you can convince people that a square object is actually round. (Goebbels never said precisely this, but the underlying philosophy is abundantly his own.) In the examples above, the words ‘sanction’ and ‘populism’ are not belying their meaning in this way. They have actually changed meaning as words habitually do. The players are not playing foul: they have simply shifted the goalposts.
Not only do words change meanings; those meanings themselves effectively change meaning in practical terms. This is obvious enough even in material contexts. A Nigerian and a Norwegian might define a bird in the same terms for a dictionary, but their mental images of a bird (hence effective conceptions) would be very different. The effective meaning of ‘dinner’, ‘home’ or ‘school’ might differ radically among people living half a kilometre apart. So what stability can we expect from abstract terms?
The internet offers a definition of populism as “a political approach or style that pits the ordinary, ‘common people’ against a perceived corrupt or self-serving elite.” This covers both the nineteenth-century and the twenty-first-century avatars of the term, yet the two are diametrically opposed: as the same AI-based entry puts it, democratic versus authoritarian populism. The latter, apparently a contradiction in terms, is gaining ground in country after country, not excluding our own.
Nor does the contrast of ‘democratic’ and ‘authoritarian’ resolve the issue. When Germany was split in two, the eastern half called itself a Democratic Republic. History does not grant it a greater claim to the title than its western sibling. It is a depressing exercise to search The Economist’s Democracy Index for countries with ‘democratic’ or ‘people’s’ in their name. Just two of the ten such countries score 5+ out of 10. North Korea, the only one to sport both words, scores 1.08.
Even that is hardly conclusive. The Democracy Index is compiled by The Economist: why should we take its criteria as gospel? It has its own biases. The final word must rest with a poet, Alexander Pope: it is that there is no final word. “Tis with our judgments as our watches, none/ Go just alike, yet each believes his own.”
Take the much exalted, much contested term ‘nationalism’. In India today, it has become a synonym — in fact, a substitute — for ‘patriotism’. But while patriotism simply means love of one’s country, nationalism carries a lot of baggage: of a world divided between nation-states with set territorial limits, their relations governed by implicit though often unclear codes, a coexistence always charged with competition and sporadically with conflict of various types, armed encounter being only the most extreme. Political scientists will no doubt find many flaws in this makeshift definition, and no less with one another’s expert views. The bottom line is that one can be profoundly patriotic yet critical of the idea of nationhood and nationalism, the all-time exemplar being Rabindranath Tagore.
Our public life leaves us blinded in a sandstorm of words. Most of them have been emptied of meaning through abuse and overuse, like ‘democracy’ and ‘nationalism’: they usually mean little more than the ideas the speaker favours. Yet ghost meanings of earlier origin rise like apparitions to charm and frighten us. If a well-drilled chorus keeps chanting ‘democracy’ in our ears, few will muster the resilience for a reality check. All modern states claim to work for the welfare of the people. Which people? Welfare of what kind and for whom?
After a lifetime spent in chasing elusive words, I would not entrust the well-being of our people to high-sounding rhetoric. Instead, let us focus on hard facts. How does our world-inspiring model of electoral democracy bear up against the state of our voter rolls? How does our impressive gross domestic product translate into income per person? Is our self-bestowed status as vishwaguru borne out by the state of our government schools? How does the world’s largest (and now, it seems, oldest) democracy treat the underprivileged citizen on her timorous forays to a sarkari office?
‘Words alone are certain good,’ wrote William Butler Yeats. Yet the genius of humankind ensures that all too often, the function of words is neither certain nor good. Yeats’s poem is called “The Song of the Happy Shepherd”. One wonders how many of our rural citizens share that shepherd’s happiness.
Sukanta Chaudhuri is Professor Emeritus, Jadavpur University