What’s in a name?
You’ll notice that the name of this here blog is no longer Homo Publicus. I have changed it to “The Heretic” and I thought I should explain why. I read an essay by George Orwell, last night, called “Politics and the English Language.” In it, he describes everything he thinks is wrong with Modern (as of 1945) English. The gist of it all is that he thinks people get so caught up in pretense that they cram their writing with passive and contrived language. As part of this, he says that people feel compelled to use Latin and Greek phrases, solely because they imagine them to be more impressive—a sort of inferiority complex around the English language.
Needless to say, the essay had an effect on me. Homo Publicus was always a rather contrived name. I guessed that it was proper Latin and went with it, because I thought it sounded impressive. While I am most focused on using Orwell’s views to improve the content of my writing itself, it made me want to put the blog through a rebranding. (I had already been considering it, in the hopes that a simpler name would be easier to publicize). In plain English, I wanted a direct name that embodied what I hope to do.
So, why “The Heretic?” The exhaustive, 10-second search I did on dictionary.com informs me that, among others involving the Catholic Church (go figure), one of the official definitions of ”heretic” is:
Anyone who does not conform to any established attitude, doctrine or principle
While it could very well be that I am simply an average leftist who is deluding himself with visions of eccentricity, my aspiration is to have this blog be a means of exploring the Truth (note the capital T) that lies beyond the confines of modern political ideologies. My hope is that I remain suspended, fighting against the current of uncertainty and doubt, but never landing on the “left” or “right” river bank.
Furthermore, this blog is built upon the contention that the World is not simply changing, but has in fact changed already, and that all of our self-images and schema are antiquated and useless. I think the prevalent internal conception of America is too White, too traditional, and too nostalgaic. I don’t think we are debating whether or not to become a pluralistic society; I think we are a pluralistic society trying to figure out how to feel about it. I want to write gadfly-ish posts that poke popular assumptions as they swiftly turn to dust.
The World defies the boxes we build to contain it. I don’t think we can ever truly “understand” geo-politics (as evidenced by the fact that it usually takes political scientists about 30 years of retrospection to fully grasp any development). We can only listen. I want to be a heretic because, when I see a new truth revealed by developments in American or International politics, I want to taste it in its distilled form, before it is doused and drowned in the sauce of stubborn, narrow-minded, partisan delusion.
So, I changed the name of the blog. Lo, the Earth trembles.
