Political Problems May Need a Language We Have Not Built Yet

Here is a question I have not seen asked seriously: why do we assume political problems must be discussed in the language ordinary people already use?

We assume it so completely that the assumption is invisible. Political argument happens in the vocabulary of everyday speech, augmented by a handful of inherited abstractions — left and right, capitalism and socialism, liberty and equality — and any proposal to change the vocabulary is treated as evasion or elitism.

Nowhere else do we work this way.

The Comparison That Makes the Point

We did not get aircraft into the sky using everyday language.

Before flight was possible, a vocabulary had to be built: lift, drag, thrust, angle of attack, centre of pressure, yaw, stall, wing loading. Not one of these words was available to ordinary speech beforehand, and none of them is a mere renaming of something people already understood. Each names a distinct physical quantity that turned out to matter — and the discovery that it mattered, and the naming of it, were the same act.

Nobody argues that aviation should be discussed in plain language on democratic grounds. Flight is a human problem, it affects everybody, and we solved it in a language humans had to construct first. That is not elitism; it is what the problem required.

Medicine is the same. Disease belongs to everyday life as intimately as anything can, and yet nobody proposes we diagnose in ordinary vocabulary. We built the terms — pathogen, immune response, prevalence, contraindication — because the ordinary ones could not carve the problem where it needed carving.

Politics as the Exception

Politics is treated as the one domain where the inherited vocabulary is adequate.

And look at what that vocabulary consists of. Left and right is a seating arrangement from a French assembly in 1789. Capitalism and socialism are nineteenth-century terms describing nineteenth-century industrial arrangements. These are not analytical categories that someone designed to carve the problem accurately. They are historical accidents that hardened into the only available axes.

We would find it absurd to diagnose an illness using the humours, on the grounds that people find the humours intuitive. We do the political equivalent daily.

What a Better Language Might Contain

I do not have the vocabulary to propose; if I did, this would be a different and much longer post. But I can indicate the shape.

It would need terms for things we currently cannot say precisely. Concentration of decision-making power, as a measurable quantity rather than a rhetorical accusation. The gradient between where a decision is made and where its consequences land. The ratio of a group's stake in an issue to its size — Olson's asymmetry, which currently requires a paragraph every time. Whether a position is derived from evidence or inherited from a package.

Each of these is something we can currently only gesture at, and gesturing is not enough to reason with. The aviation pioneers could not have computed anything before they had "lift" as a distinct quantity. Political argument is where aeronautics was before that word existed: everyone can see that something holds the thing up, and nobody can calculate with it.

The General Claim

That a problem lies in the domain of ordinary human life does not mean ordinary human language is adequate to solve it.

Flight is ordinary. Illness is ordinary. Both required constructed vocabularies, and in both cases the construction of the vocabulary was most of the intellectual work. Only in politics do we insist that the terms we inherited are the terms we must reason with — and then express surprise that the reasoning goes nowhere.