Looking back over my erratic entries in this blog, I see that the commonest subject matter has been politics. Is this of relevance in a website dedicated to English B? I feel that it is… because we teach a language to be of use, and surely one of the most significant uses of language is in the world of politics. Or perhaps it is more accurate to talk about the abuse of language… and the best way to defeat the abuse of language is to think sceptically and critically. After all, if the IB Diploma is based fundamentally on anything, it must be about critical thinking: about the cultivated mind being more in command than the gut reaction.

I have here a small collection of observations about politics, drawn from varied sources, which throw light on the abuse of language in the confused world of contemporary politics.

The Italian writer Antonio Scurati has recently had a major success with ‘M’, the first novel in a trilogy about Mussolini (soon to be translated into English by HarperCollins). I recently read an interview with Scurati in the Sunday magazine of El Pais, in which he made some very interesting remarks about how Mussolini rose to power. For one thing, Scurati comments that he sees Mussolini as…

“… an opportunist, of course. But, above all, a leader who, in the era of the masses, knows how to guide them by deciphering their state of mind, which is almost always dark, troubled, uneasy, resentful and trapped in fear. He blows on the fire picking up ideas from the last conversation he heard in a bar. This is how a populist leader works: from Trump to Salvini by way of Boris Johnson. They propose to their voters a reduction of the complexity of democracy by means of a discourse about the inefficiency of parliamentary debate. They say that there are too many opinions, contradictions, petty power centres. Mussolini solves the problem like this: ‘Reality is not that complicated, it’s enough to be decisive and cut things cleanly. Give me power and I will reduce all this complexity for you’.”

The contemporary relevance is explicit!

But where does this “dark, troubled…” state of mind of ‘the masses’ come from? I came across another quote by the German philosopher Odo Marquard (cited in Javier Cercas’ book ‘Anatomy of an Instant’), which provides an explanation of social dis-satisfaction which is both credible and less melodramatic:

“When cultural progress is really successful, and eliminates evils, this rarely arouses enthusiasm. Rather such progress is taken for granted, and attention is centred on the evils that still exist. This is how the law of increasing importance of leftovers works: the more that negativity disappears from reality, the more the remaining negativity irritates, precisely because it is diminished.”

We can all recognize that tendency in our essentially safe and comfortable lives in the developed world – we don’t have to be poor and oppressed to be “resentful and trapped by fear”, even if this is caused by relatively trivial problems.

Scurati also points out that a key means of Mussolini’s rise to power was through journalism, and especially his role as editor of the influential political magazine of the time ‘Avanti’, where he used language to project exactly the message he wanted…

“He began to use a completely different journalistic language, simply constructed of subject, verb and predicate. Each sentence was a slogan, beginning with an ‘I’. He didn’t care whether these slogans were supported by reality, or contradicted themselves a day later. A language which was direct and striking, as if they were tweets…”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

And finally there is the whole area of underlying political bias: the semiconscious assumptions on which we base our values. In Iain Banks’ novel Stonemouth (highly recommended), the protagonist Stewart attends the funeral of an old man of whom he was fond. The funeral is disturbed by deep underlying conflicts, and at one point Stewart is challenged to repeat something memorable that the old man said…

“So I clear my throat and say ‘Yeah, he said something once about… about how one of the main mistakes people make is thinking that everybody else is basically like they are themselves … He said that conservatives – right-wing people in general – tend that think that everybody’s as nasty – well, selfish – deep down, as they are. Only they’re wrong. And liberals, socialists and so on think everybody else is as nice, basically, as they themselves are. They’re wrong too. The truth is messier.’”

All of these quotes deal with how gut reactions function and are created. They are thoughtful ideas about thoughtless attitudes - perceptive insights which involve the mind analyzing, and then expressing itself through language. Given that there are a significant number of contemporary politicians across the world who seem to be primarily concerned with controlling the gut reactions of masses of people (and that the internet provides a fantastic tool to achieve such control), we English B teachers should indeed dedicate much time to practicing critical thinking skills with our students… so that their minds really can command their gut reactions.