Linguistic Disfunction

I had an informative read this week followed by a coherent and related podcast.

First Things has an essay by Carl Truman entitled "Our Marcusan Moment".  In this eloquent piece was a link to a 1968 academic work "Repressive Tolerance".  The lead paragraph states:

THIS essay examines the idea of tolerance in our advanced industrial society. The conclusion reached is that the realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed. In other words, today tolerance appears again as what it was in its origins, at the beginning of the modern period--a partisan goal, a subversive liberating notion and practice. Conversely, what is proclaimed and practiced as tolerance today, is in many of its most effective manifestations serving the cause of oppression.

I urge you read both.

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Done yet?

Ideologically loaded Humpty-Dumpty language lives.  My question is: to what end are these inversions of language directed?  

Is it just breeding resentment and dysfunction?  Destroying what currently is to allow to new utopia to be born?  A childish tantrum?

Honestly, to what end and is the end worth the destruction?

One discussion from an evangelical perspective is a podcast from HillFaith.blog which discusses Critical Theory with regard to our current cultural moment. 

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Postscript:  I suspect that Marlon Brando's character in The Wild One was more honest than Marcuse.

Lepanto

Of all poems I have read recently (granted most were by Byron) the most beautiful has been a poem about the battle of Lepanto written by G. K. Chesterton.  It begins so:

White founts falling in the courts of the sun,

And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;

There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,

It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard,

It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips,

For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.

You can read the whole thing online, but in whatever medium, read it out loud.  It sings. It vividly paints the importance of the battle and the weakness of Europe at the time.  It also has a glorious portrayal of the importance of prayers and the place of the knight.  ("Don John of Austria is going to the war!" will continue to ring with excitement.)  I think I want to memorize the poem.

The anniversary of the battle was just this past Sunday.