This statement was first made by Rev. Richard S. Kirby, PhD., International Chairperson of the World Network of Religious Futurists on September 24, 1998, in view of the impeachment efforts of President Bill Clinton.

I write these words on behalf of my colleagues, scholars in the future of religion and society.

We are living in an era where many people are concerned about the corrosive effect on public life of the use of language to conceal and mislead.

There is good news here: this is a time of opportunity! Language has a future, a great one. No surprises there. The language of goodness, truth and beauty has a great future, too: in politics! (Gasp!)

The opportunity is the shared development of a new theory of political and social language -- the way we communicate with each other about how to live together. And more important than a new theory -- a new community of pioneers in excellence in social language.

It's breakthrough time in social language theory. It's innovation time, and then some, in inventiveness - reinventing not just government, but the language of government.

What is the ground of our hope? It is the divine Ground, the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Creativity, the Spirit of Communication.

This work has already begun. There have been many attempts to develop language consciously. Esperanto, the international language is one. Others include semantic theories such as 'General Systems Theories', some of which make their way into literature such as the science fiction of A.E.Van Vogt (The World of Null-A).

But behind such attempts lies the ancient legacy of theory of language. There have since ancient times been two theories of language as a social power. One is rhetoric - the science of persuasion. Aristotle, the 'Master Mind of Antiquity' extolled it in his book on Rhetoric. Persuasion was considered an honorable part of public life.

The other theory is that of scientific discourse. The theory is that language must become an instrument to convey truth as exactly as possible. Persuasion, even exaggeration, does not fit here.

Artists with words perennially try to bridge this gap. Many philosophers, too, have tried to describe the relationship between language and truth. A notable attempt in the 20th century was that of Ludwig Wittgenstein in such books as the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and The Philosophical Investigations (1953).

Social Philosophers such as George Steiner in such books as Language and Silence ponder the value and place of speech and its absence. Similarly, educationalists, centers of civic reform, institutes for civic society and such centers of language-excellence studies share in recent and contemporary attempts to reform language in the direction of that truth which is also compassion and insight.

Ancient philosophers can also help today. In the ancient writings of Plato, the ideal and the real are inextricably linked. This legacy of ancient times helps us see a possible reconciliation of the two competing ideals of language use in society:

• the ideal of 'political' and 'legal' language' (rhetoric); and
• the ambitions of scientific and philosophical discourse to describe truth simply.