Control

“Language is holy.”

Controlling language means controlling freedom.

Totalitarian governments control what their people hear.

Do you believe in freedom or control?

Watch our Truth in Two to hear your choices (full text, hyperlink below).

If you want to be free, start with keeping language holy.

Subscribe to “Truth in Two” videos from Comenius (here). Mark is President of The Comenius Institute (website). Dr. Eckel spends time with Christian young people in public university (1 minute video), hosts a weekly radio program with diverse groups of guests (1 minute video), and interprets culture from a Christian vantage point (1 minute video). Consider becoming a Comenius patron (here).

Picture Credit: Luke Renoe, Snappy Goat

FULL TEXT

Chills ran through me as I read the words. In the April 2020 issue of The Atlantic Jack Goldsmith and Andrew Keane Woods publish an article about internet speech (hyperlink below). I quote the article at length here to show the full context of what the authors propose.

As surprising as it may sound, digital surveillance and speech control in the United States already show many similarities to what one finds in authoritarian states such as China. Constitutional and cultural differences mean that the private sector, rather than the federal and state governments, currently takes the lead in these practices, which further values and address threats different from those in China. But the trend toward greater surveillance and speech control here, and toward the growing involvement of government, is undeniable and likely inexorable.

In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong. Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.

It would be better if we followed the wisdom of Toni Morrison. In her speech “For a Heroic Writer’s Movement,” she writes,

“Language is holy. To destroy a culture, you first denigrate it’s language. You prohibit it’s spoken use and limit it’s printed form. You screen it and filter it until it accommodates itself to the presiding language. To control future generations, you must control the words and the books that contain it.”

At the Comenius Institute we agree with Morrison and Proverbs: trusting human thinking is foolish when that thinking is linked to “controlling words” based on the changing nature of “society’s norms and values.”

For Truth in Two, this is Dr. Mark Eckel, President of the Comenius Institute, personally seeking truth wherever it’s found.

Free Speech An Atlantic article (here) suggests that authoritarian groups should police speech

Toni Morrison, “For a Heroic Writer’s Movement” What Moves at the Margin