Writing is a New Word
As I write in The Interactive Voice, words themselves are thesis statements.
The lawyer Raphael Lemkin first developed and coined the term “genocide” in response to the Armenian Massacre at the hands of the Ottoman Empire in the early Twentieth Century. He wanted to legally define “the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group” as an international crime.
He needed nothing more than the one word. Once the definition existed, the crime existed, and the world was changed. International law first used Lemkin’s word in the written indictment of the Nazis at Nuremberg.
In the same way, any common word like “word” is a substitute for its own full definition and history.
New words, or “neologisms,” are a great way to understand your own inquiry and ideas, even if the words you invent never leave your head or desk. Specialists create specialized neologisms or jargon to improve understanding of their disciplines all the time—and not always to complicate them as jargon is often accused.
For years, I’ve thought about a big question and wondered if it required a new word: What guides humanity?
Despite the gloom of current headlines, a number of editorials and articles this year illustrated how well the human race is actually doing if you go solely by the numbers. Global violence, poverty, and illiteracy levels are at all time lows. There are more people in the world and more of those people have a better quality of life right this minute.
How did this happen? How does the world improve when, individually, we are so doubtful? The Web does a marvelous job illustrating our isolated disbelief. People dealing with day-to-day struggles post and tweet about the coming apocalypse without irony. Divided, each of us is Harper’s Index, Jacob Marley, and Debbie Downer combined.
Is there a word that explains our resilience despite our doubt?
One word I found that approaches what I mean is the German word zeitgeist—literally “a time’s spirit.” I wrote previously about how we associate essence or genius with particular places as well as people. Zeitgeist suggests we also do it with periods in history—that an idea or phenomenon is “in the air” at a certain moment on the calendar.
Zeitgeist speaks to the communal aspect, but not the direction of our invisible compass.
I rejected many of the words others would offer. Religion, morality, the golden rule, scientific rationality, good government, philosophy—each one of our institutions is flawed. Different characters and groups have used all of them to defend and pursue terrible goals. They are noble only as drafts and helpful only as part of a greater whole.
I wouldn’t post this essay though, if I hadn’t finally thought of an answer. I realized, in this particular exercise, I wasn’t looking for a new word, but redefining an old one.
The word I wanted was, “writing.” That was always my answer.
Writing allows us to record the results of our flawed efforts and institutions and navigate a path between them. In the news, in books and threads and conversations, between the small talk, we create neologisms every day.
Collectively, humanity finds a way. The world appears awful, and heading in a worse direction, and that perspective is dependably, measurably wrong. The cold war bomb shelters, the Doomsday Clock, the Y2K survivalists—unused, unchanged, and unnecessary.
More than a library sitting in some building or even a wiki sitting in the cloud, writing is our hive mind, argumentative and elusive and only as assured as possible in this unpredictable universe. It is our walk with imagination and caution—hope and responsibility—in the face of so much justified disbelief.
It’s the only word that grasps all we’ve been, all that we know, and all that we want to become, and it will be new again tomorrow.
Read and write on.