The Power and Danger of Words…
For me, it took the discovery of the likes of Virginia Woolf, Conrad, Fitzgerald, not to mention Plato, Mill, Thoreau and the like to come to see that the written word can be the source of true insight and inspiration. And it was them I have to thank for awakening me to so much that I’d been missing. Clearly, it had been there all along, but I had not yet had eyes to see it. This is the power of true words, good reasoning, and great literature – it not only can open our eyes to the power of words, but to all those referents of all those words in the world around us, which is far more glorious than we might notice without words to put it into.
Until I discovered actual literature, much less philosophy, I hadn’t much enjoyed reading. As one hero I hadn’t yet discovered put it, “books can become a chore to those who read them under compulsion.”(Alexander Meiklejohn) And too often those one reads ‘for fun’ are mere distraction from anything meaningful, and leave us worse rather than better for it.
It was Joseph Conrad who brought home to me that the written word can as easily lead to evil as to good. There is a right and a wrong way to do anything, after all, and much depends on one’s purposes, which might be divine diabolical. So there is all the difference in a writer who is true to higher purposes, and those whose actual, but hidden, purposes may well be to “kill all the brutes.” And it’s not as easy as you might think to tell the difference between them, because evil has every incentive to appear good. So words can be like sheep’s clothing for wolves. And this is what makes our critical capacities so…well, critical! Because words can be used in different senses, they can be slippery. And while we are born with reasoning capacities, the ability to tell the difference in truth and empty rhetoric is like a muscle that needs exercise, lest it atrophy altogether.
In light of this, I’d like to share a few other lessons that teaching brought home to me, including why they say that ‘you never really learn something until you have to teach it.’
First among these came from teaching Logic and Critical Thinking (topics that some right wingers are inexplicably trying to purge from the school curriculum altogether), including the simple power of words, the difference in good and bad reasoning, and the difference between the mere appearance of something and the real thing.
I had long since understood that words can as easily lead to evil as to good, but I admit I had wondered why philosophers obsessed about them so, sometimes at the expense of what seemed to me to be more important aspects of learning. It had long been true that the purposes of ancient thinkers had been neglected in the search (philo) for truth and wisdom (sophia), but Capital-P Philosophers especially seemed to me to have turned the entire purpose of the search for truth into an exercise in logic. While I agreed logic was useful and important, in its own right, I knew it was not everything, certainly not the heart and soul of philosophy.
But then the politics of the 1990s illustrated how easily spin can thwart truth and justice, and I came to understand why we needed more logic and critical thinking in our education, albeit a better kind than the mere analytic logic I was taught, which might be useful for matching wits at cocktail parties and conferences, but little else. The power to make meaningless words seem meaningful and to make rationalizations, and even venomous lies, seem true is poison to healthy deliberation, and a corrupting influence everywhere in our culture, an essential element of how we keep people too blind to see how thoroughly they are being controlled by forces that are capitalizing on their ignorance.
And so it’s easy enough to guess why it is that students make it all the way to college having learned nothing about any of this – even what a fallacy is, much less that there is a clear difference in good and bad reasoning, and a way to tell the difference between truth and deceit! This is why philosophy was born with democracy itself, because it’s the freedom of speech that gives rise to the proliferation of BS, and thus, this is when we need the search for truth most. And philosophy ought to improve our BS meter, since miscommunication is like “spokes falling off a wheel,” as Confucius says.
But it’s perfectly obvious (at least to anyone with a healthy sense of cynicism about the power of unspoken conspiracy), that this omission of dialogue and critical thinking from our curriculum is actually deliberate (there are even bills being put forth to critical thinking in Texas schools). For certainly, if we could recognize empty rhetoric when we hear it, few of us would fall for the tricks of advertising, and who among us would continue to buy into all those PR campaigns that keep us falling for the spin and rhetorical tricks of politicians, religious leaders, medical paradigms, and yes, educational institutions themselves, all selling us these products like so many more consumer goods. At the very least, we should worry about ever needing justice at the hands of a a jury system made up of people who’ve been told to sit down and be quite all their lives, and now are trusted with the responsibility to make a reasoned case up against eleven others who disagree with them. Good luck with that!
All of which underscores the importance of dialogue, especially in the classroom, where a dearth of it too often exists. As Alfie Kohn observes, when students are asked “what it means to ‘behave well,’ the most common single answer had to do with keeping quiet.”(164) “As McCaslin and Good see it… ‘Students are asked to think and understand, but in too many classrooms they are asked to think noiselessly, without peer communication or social exchange.’”(348) (And how many can verify this by their own memories of being scolded for ‘talking with our neighbor.’)
So it would do us great good to come to see that we use words in different senses, that some have more truth than others, and that there is a real and discernible difference in justified truth and rationalized untruth – the difference being that the former is just, while the latter is probably not. Illuminating the need and encouraging the power to understand the difference in the mere appearance of something and the real thing has become a fundamental purpose of this book. We are raised in a culture that teaches us that appearance are all that matter, but the ancients understood that these are not enough to make us happy. True happiness requires real self-respect (not mere self-esteem) and this kind of self-knowledge cannot be faked, but must be earned. It is reserved for the worthy.
By way of a few brief examples, consider the word friend. Some appear to have thousands on facebook, but how many of them would qualify as true friends? The difference between a real friend and the mere appearance of one is a worthy discussion…that we never seem to have. Likewise, the word love – how many who profess to love as a means to winning, say, a young girls virtue actually mean by this word what the beloved hopes? And how often does what we call happiness or intelligence or democracy even remotely resemble the deep and true senses of these meaningful words that could be our highest potentials?
Another good example is the word science. When most of us think of it, we typically think of those peer reviewed studies that are published in journals to prove or disprove this or that hypothesis. This hypothetico-deductive method is part of the discovery process, to be sure, but science in the broader and deeper sense goes beyond this and extends to include the advances made in theory at the cutting edge of every discipline. Take for example mathematics and ecology, complementary fields in which extraordinary thinkers have stretched our understanding of the natural world in ways that explain and diverse observable phenomena (including fractal geometry, chaos theory, and global systems theory, to name a few interconnect systems of ideas). For hundreds of years we have used the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm that examines three dimensional matters from outside looking in, Whereas ecological systems theory, as its often called, would give us a better understanding of those perspectival insights discussed earlier (see Power of Ten) regarding scale and expanded vision. The ancients would remind us that the real advance of scientific thinking can be found in the patterned system of ideas that envelope all phenomena, including both math (fractal geometry) and ecology (chaos and systems theory). (See more here…)
Likewise, Capitalism might be better understood by a study of capitalism in the broader sense, and Communism by way of communism as the ancients would recommend, just as Philosophy might learn from it’s origins in philosophy. Comparing how we typically understand these words to their broadest senses can likewise stretch our minds to greater understanding of all that is.
The thing is, we cannot hit a target we don’t aim at, as Aristotle made clear. So it’s in our best interest to think and teach better about the truer senses of words themselves and the reasoning we follow to accomplish our purposes. We more often miss than hit the mark of what is possible because we don’t aim to realize the higher ideals we are capable of achieving.
A lesson that changed me for good in this regard came from the work of Robert Axelrod and others on the prisoner’s dilemma, and of Daniel Bateson and others on altruism and egoism. In both their work we can see a still largely ignored lesson about the echo effect of selfishness and the self-fulfilling prophesy that ruins lives when we make assumptions about ‘human nature’ and go about trying to get what is not actually good for them on the logic that everyone does it. Everyone does not do it – but we do create the need to self-defense in others when we treat ‘selfishly’ treat others as if they are ‘naturally’ selfish. This assumption is build into our very ‘economic man’ conception of ‘human nature’ – itself a fallacy – more self-fulfilling prophesy than innate, since this belief induces us to treat others in a way that actually brings out the worst in them. Likewise, the idea of the ‘survival of the fittest’ (which Darwin never actually said, btw) is just a spin on the sense of ‘fitness’ he actually tried to convey, not the athletic conception that implies winning and loosing, but rather, the ecological sense of “fitting into the natural order.”(Allen, 1998) For this reason, enlightened self-interest is the life strategy illuminated by ancient wisdom because our interests are inextricably intertwined with those of all others, and we actually have the power to bring out the good in others by way of our own good.
So given all this and more, I came to understand why the ancients were so insistent that we learn and teach better about the true meaning and higher senses of words. There’s no telling what the world might have become without the persistent slight of tongue that has served no one well, even and perhaps especially those who prefer hierarchical domination to the egalitarian social justice that would be better for us all, even – arguably – those who resist it most.
For me, it took the discovery of the likes of Virginia Woolf, Conrad, Fitzgerald, not to mention Plato, Mill, Thoreau and the like to come to see that the written word can be the source of true insight and inspiration. And it was them I have to thank for awakening me to so much that I’d been missing. Clearly, it had been there all along, but I had not yet had eyes to see it. This is the power of true words, good reasoning, and great literature – it not only can open our eyes to the power of words, but to all those referents of all those words in the world around us, which is far more glorious than we might notice without words to put it into.
Until I discovered actual literature, much less philosophy, I hadn’t much enjoyed reading. As one hero I hadn’t yet discovered put it, “books can become a chore to those who read them under compulsion.”(Alexander Meiklejohn) And too often those one reads ‘for fun’ are mere distraction from anything meaningful, and leave us worse rather than better for it.
It was Joseph Conrad who brought home to me that the written word can as easily lead to evil as to good. There is a right and a wrong way to do anything, after all, and much depends on one’s purposes, which might be divine diabolical. So there is all the difference in a writer who is true to higher purposes, and those whose actual, but hidden, purposes may well be to “kill all the brutes.” And it’s not as easy as you might think to tell the difference between them, because evil has every incentive to appear good. So words can be like sheep’s clothing for wolves. And this is what makes our critical capacities so…well, critical! Because words can be used in different senses, they can be slippery. And while we are born with reasoning capacities, the ability to tell the difference in truth and empty rhetoric is like a muscle that needs exercise, lest it atrophy altogether.
In light of this, I’d like to share a few other lessons that teaching brought home to me, including why they say that ‘you never really learn something until you have to teach it.’
First among these came from teaching Logic and Critical Thinking (topics that some right wingers are inexplicably trying to purge from the school curriculum altogether), including the simple power of words, the difference in good and bad reasoning, and the difference between the mere appearance of something and the real thing.
I had long since understood that words can as easily lead to evil as to good, but I admit I had wondered why philosophers obsessed about them so, sometimes at the expense of what seemed to me to be more important aspects of learning. It had long been true that the purposes of ancient thinkers had been neglected in the search (philo) for truth and wisdom (sophia), but Capital-P Philosophers especially seemed to me to have turned the entire purpose of the search for truth into an exercise in logic. While I agreed logic was useful and important, in its own right, I knew it was not everything, certainly not the heart and soul of philosophy.
But then the politics of the 1990s illustrated how easily spin can thwart truth and justice, and I came to understand why we needed more logic and critical thinking in our education, albeit a better kind than the mere analytic logic I was taught, which might be useful for matching wits at cocktail parties and conferences, but little else. The power to make meaningless words seem meaningful and to make rationalizations, and even venomous lies, seem true is poison to healthy deliberation, and a corrupting influence everywhere in our culture, an essential element of how we keep people too blind to see how thoroughly they are being controlled by forces that are capitalizing on their ignorance.
And so it’s easy enough to guess why it is that students make it all the way to college having learned nothing about any of this – even what a fallacy is, much less that there is a clear difference in good and bad reasoning, and a way to tell the difference between truth and deceit! This is why philosophy was born with democracy itself, because it’s the freedom of speech that gives rise to the proliferation of BS, and thus, this is when we need the search for truth most. And philosophy ought to improve our BS meter, since miscommunication is like “spokes falling off a wheel,” as Confucius says.
But it’s perfectly obvious (at least to anyone with a healthy sense of cynicism about the power of unspoken conspiracy), that this omission of dialogue and critical thinking from our curriculum is actually deliberate (there are even bills being put forth to critical thinking in Texas schools). For certainly, if we could recognize empty rhetoric when we hear it, few of us would fall for the tricks of advertising, and who among us would continue to buy into all those PR campaigns that keep us falling for the spin and rhetorical tricks of politicians, religious leaders, medical paradigms, and yes, educational institutions themselves, all selling us these products like so many more consumer goods. At the very least, we should worry about ever needing justice at the hands of a a jury system made up of people who’ve been told to sit down and be quite all their lives, and now are trusted with the responsibility to make a reasoned case up against eleven others who disagree with them. Good luck with that!
All of which underscores the importance of dialogue, especially in the classroom, where a dearth of it too often exists. As Alfie Kohn observes, when students are asked “what it means to ‘behave well,’ the most common single answer had to do with keeping quiet.”(164) “As McCaslin and Good see it… ‘Students are asked to think and understand, but in too many classrooms they are asked to think noiselessly, without peer communication or social exchange.’”(348) (And how many can verify this by their own memories of being scolded for ‘talking with our neighbor.’)
So it would do us great good to come to see that we use words in different senses, that some have more truth than others, and that there is a real and discernible difference in justified truth and rationalized untruth – the difference being that the former is just, while the latter is probably not. Illuminating the need and encouraging the power to understand the difference in the mere appearance of something and the real thing has become a fundamental purpose of this book. We are raised in a culture that teaches us that appearance are all that matter, but the ancients understood that these are not enough to make us happy. True happiness requires real self-respect (not mere self-esteem) and this kind of self-knowledge cannot be faked, but must be earned. It is reserved for the worthy.
By way of a few brief examples, consider the word friend. Some appear to have thousands on facebook, but how many of them would qualify as true friends? The difference between a real friend and the mere appearance of one is a worthy discussion…that we never seem to have. Likewise, the word love – how many who profess to love as a means to winning, say, a young girls virtue actually mean by this word what the beloved hopes? And how often does what we call happiness or intelligence or democracy even remotely resemble the deep and true senses of these meaningful words that could be our highest potentials?
Another good example is the word science. When most of us think of it, we typically think of those peer reviewed studies that are published in journals to prove or disprove this or that hypothesis. This hypothetico-deductive method is part of the discovery process, to be sure, but science in the broader and deeper sense goes beyond this and extends to include the advances made in theory at the cutting edge of every discipline. Take for example mathematics and ecology, complementary fields in which extraordinary thinkers have stretched our understanding of the natural world in ways that explain and diverse observable phenomena (including fractal geometry, chaos theory, and global systems theory, to name a few interconnect systems of ideas). For hundreds of years we have used the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm that examines three dimensional matters from outside looking in, Whereas ecological systems theory, as its often called, would give us a better understanding of those perspectival insights discussed earlier (see Power of Ten) regarding scale and expanded vision. The ancients would remind us that the real advance of scientific thinking can be found in the patterned system of ideas that envelope all phenomena, including both math (fractal geometry) and ecology (chaos and systems theory). (See more here…)
Likewise, Capitalism might be better understood by a study of capitalism in the broader sense, and Communism by way of communism as the ancients would recommend, just as Philosophy might learn from it’s origins in philosophy. Comparing how we typically understand these words to their broadest senses can likewise stretch our minds to greater understanding of all that is.
The thing is, we cannot hit a target we don’t aim at, as Aristotle made clear. So it’s in our best interest to think and teach better about the truer senses of words themselves and the reasoning we follow to accomplish our purposes. We more often miss than hit the mark of what is possible because we don’t aim to realize the higher ideals we are capable of achieving.
A lesson that changed me for good in this regard came from the work of Robert Axelrod and others on the prisoner’s dilemma, and of Daniel Bateson and others on altruism and egoism. In both their work we can see a still largely ignored lesson about the echo effect of selfishness and the self-fulfilling prophesy that ruins lives when we make assumptions about ‘human nature’ and go about trying to get what is not actually good for them on the logic that everyone does it. Everyone does not do it – but we do create the need to self-defense in others when we treat ‘selfishly’ treat others as if they are ‘naturally’ selfish. This assumption is build into our very ‘economic man’ conception of ‘human nature’ – itself a fallacy – more self-fulfilling prophesy than innate, since this belief induces us to treat others in a way that actually brings out the worst in them. Likewise, the idea of the ‘survival of the fittest’ (which Darwin never actually said, btw) is just a spin on the sense of ‘fitness’ he actually tried to convey, not the athletic conception that implies winning and loosing, but rather, the ecological sense of “fitting into the natural order.”(Allen, 1998) For this reason, enlightened self-interest is the life strategy illuminated by ancient wisdom because our interests are inextricably intertwined with those of all others, and we actually have the power to bring out the good in others by way of our own good.
So given all this and more, I came to understand why the ancients were so insistent that we learn and teach better about the true meaning and higher senses of words. There’s no telling what the world might have become without the persistent slight of tongue that has served no one well, even and perhaps especially those who prefer hierarchical domination to the egalitarian social justice that would be better for us all, even – arguably – those who resist it most.