Words Matter: In Defense of the Politically Correct
The old saw we learned as kids is not so: “sticks and stones may break your bones, but names can never hurt you.” They can hurt. We knew that when we heard them. And we know now that, by stimulating and reinforcing behaviors, words can hurt us plenty.
When Hillary Clinton, during her campaign for President, responded to the leaders of Black Lives Matter, that “All lives matter,” I knew immediately that she didn’t get it. She wasn’t hearing because she wasn’t listening. Yes, all lives matter, but that isn’t the point. The point is that black (and brown) lives have not mattered as much, if at all, in American society. And that hurts many of us who have lived and labored in black and brown communities.
When Trump as President tweeted that “there are very fine people on both sides “(of the Charlottesville demonstrations), I grasped immediately that he had an apocalyptic world view of “two sides,” both equal in conviction and validity, one bad and the other good. That hurt many of us who have studied the history of white supremacy in our nation and western civilization and who passionately feel its continuing presence.
When we call other people “fags,” “niggers,” “Christ killers,” “baby murderers,” “feminazis,” “elitists,” “rednecks” and often even “fascists,” “liberals,” “radicals,” and “fundamentalists,” it is often not an expression of thoughtful opinion. Nor an expression of reasoned argument. It is a declaration that I am on one side, the good one, and they are on their side, the bad one. It is a naming and blaming. An abandonment of thinking. It is also an abdication of taking responsibility for our own history in all its complexity, of acknowledging reality as it stands today, and of despair for a common future.
Words matter. They are expressions in the human way of coming to terms with our environment. By “words,” I do not mean only verbal expressions but all human expressions in our world — the “memes” that constitute our culture analogous to the genes that constitute our organisms. Memes are human artifacts: ordinary words, objects of art, religious symbols, scientific formulas, political policies, and all other institutions through which we shape, live, and know our world. [“meme is a unit of cultural information, as a concept, belief, or practice, that spreads from person to person in a way analogous to the transmission of genes. Word origin. coined by R. Dawkins (1941- ), Brit biologist.” Collins Dictionary.]
Evolutionary psychologists, neuroscientists, and child development specialists have demonstrated that humans discover and structure their world through verbal and nonverbal images or symbols that represent and classify sensations into entities (persons, places, things) relating to each other in a domain of meaning. Speech, the conversation with others and with ourselves, is thinking and we have organized our speaking and thinking activity and the products of our thinking, i.e. our thoughts, ideas, beliefs, and words into various kinds.
1. Ordinary languages with which humans learn, augment, and organize their everyday world enhance the opportunities for and reduce the threats to biological life and prosperity.
2. Artistic expressions consist of images, sounds, tastes, and feels which enhance the world and deepen our everyday experience and fill culture with beauty and meaning.
3. The more specialized expressions of formulas and models predicting outcomes that can be verified by sense experience is the language of empirical science.
4. Religious symbols including art forms and ordinary words in creation myths, stories of gods and heroes, moral teachings, and rituals of renewal indicate the less empirical and more transcending aspect of humans being in the world.
In the Hebrew and many other cultural traditions of the ancient mid-East, God created the world by speaking words. Angels were messengers bringing words from God. And so were the true prophets who heard the words of God in dreams and in prayer. The five books of Moses, the first prophet of God (Yahweh or El), told the story of creation of people, of the chosen people of God, and of the Law of God as God revealed them to Moses as contained in the Hebrew Scriptures or the Book.
Christian tradition influenced by Greek thought, held that “in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God (Theos).” Indeed, the Word was God. Jesus was the ultimate expression of God which led to the doctrine of the Trinity in which the Word is both one of three persons (persona, masks, characters) and also the nature of the One Creating, Speaking, Abiding nature of God. Jesus, as in the Roman tradition, was anointed (christified) by early Christianity not only by God, but as the incarnation of the Word of the One God as written in the Gospels.
The Muslim tradition assimilated the Judeo-Christian tradition by affirming Mohammed as the last Prophet, after Moses and Jesus, who culminated their traditions as instructed by God (Allah) in words to Mohammed who, with his disciples, wrote them down as the Koran.
Other traditions also have their sacred scriptures which are words in stories, laws, and doctrines that inform and guide the people in their beliefs, values, and behaviors personally and socially. They are called religions of the Book starting out as oral legends passed and eventually written down and gathered by groups of people in process of becoming one nation superior to all the others.
Words matter. They create our world. Didn’t the God of the Book give humans the power to name all the animals and things on earth? And in this way, they extend God’s creative activity.
The monotheistic religions of Yahweh, Theos, Christos, and Allah, all had one fundamental teaching in common. The prohibition of idolatry. The teaching started out as a tribal defense that God was their God and above all the other gods. The teaching evolved so that God is the One and Only, not only for a few, but for all, people — yes, even the people not like me. Only the One God is to be worshipped. No thing or person, no fabrication, no name or word, no representation should be worshipped as divine. According to the Book, to possess the name of any being is to have a measure or control over that being. Therefore, true religion claims not to even know the Name, much less the Mind, of God. Like Socrates, the true prophet knows that he does not know. Thus, the chief commandment that only God is God, nothing else, is the proscription of idolatry.
Yet in that same moment idolatry is born again and practiced. If my God is the God for all, only those who worship my God, join my nation, and fight on God’s side are right and true humans chosen by God. Since divine icons are forbidden, they should be rejected and smashed. Purists of the true religion therefore carry out campaigns to destroy the words and representations of God or the gods. Iconoclasm and idolatry are companions. They are also polarities that create the tension of human existence between nihilism and absolutism. Words that become stereotypes to put people in unmovable boxes and so end thinking take on characteristic of the divine and thus are idols.
I read in the New Yorker interview of JD Geear, the head of the Southern Baptist Convention, who disdains President Trump’s character and behavior but intends to support him for the Leader of America, the Commander in chief, and America’s exemplar to the nations because Trump claims to adopt Evangelical positions on abortion, on the dominance of western civilization by Christianity, on the evils of homosexuality, modernity, and the liberal order. From my point of view, Greear is idolatrous because he proclaims the doctrines of the Christian Evangelical Church over the witness, character, and activity of Jesus who he proclaims is the Christ. This makes his doctrines, his words and names, and his beliefs absolute.
I admit however that Dr. Greear and I, influenced by different historical schools and scholars, read and meditate the accounts of Jesus far differently. He is a man with whom I feel great affinity, much more than most white evangelists who practice and preach idolatry and have discredited Christianity among most thoughtful people. He shakes up his own convention by declaring “Black Lives Matter.” He recognizes the sin of racism that permeates our culture and our political economy. I suspect that it would be easy to discuss, and even agree to disagree, with him in matters of theology and politics. I surmise that we are both heretics and protestants as was Jesus.
Now please bear with me as I try to explain humanity’s greatest gift of speech as I learned it through my mentors Maurice Merleau-Ponty and other existential phenomenologists equipped with evolutionary anthropology and neuroscience.
Speech goes far beyond the words it utters. Far beyond the system of words in which those words take meaning. The context that gives meaning to words is not merely the language as found in a dictionary or grammar book. The unspoken and hidden context of meaning for words, phrases, sentences is the intent, the history, and the presence of others listening. Also involved in the act of symbolic expression are other persons in the present, from the past, and yet to come.
In the act of human expression, there is silence with the sounds, the invisible in the visible, the feeling of the touch, the mystery surrounding the defined, and transcendence in the here and now. For instance, to appreciate the story of narrators, we must attend not merely to the definition of the words but to the style of its narration. To appreciate an object of art, we must notice the panache of the artist, we must move with the dancer, paint with the painter, compose with the composer, take on the élan, spirit, verve of the artists living in and through their acts of bodily expression.
I know it is difficult to grasp the sense of the invisible in the visible and the transcendence in the immanent as we put forms onto our environment through speech. This difficulty is precisely the reason for the errors of idolatry and iconoclasm, the worship of symbols as permanent and the denial of symbols as temporal. The burning of books, the toppling of statues because of their transiency or the sacralization of ideas, writings, constitutions, and objects of art because they are absolute.
At this point we stand between the ephemeral and the unconditional, the transitory and the permanent, in beliefs, values, and certainties. Here we feel the tension between our conservative and progressive instincts. To honor and preserve the ideas and the institutions we have inherited that work for us and yet to criticize and reform the ideas and institutions that hold us back is the very tension of being and acting in the world. From this comes our original sin to judge and destroy others, sometimes cruelly, especially the stranger, the outcast, the offender, the sinner.
Both in and beyond the words, the monuments, and the laws are the character of the person and the soul of the nation. The words we choose, the statues we erect, the statutes we pass reveal our soul. In speaking them we reveal our intention, our passion, our openness to the future, and our soul as a person and as a people.
Words matter.
I hereby defend “political correctness” in our speech with one another that results in policies and action. To speak politically correct is to act and be correct politically. To speak inclusively is to act to include. To speak nonjudgmentally is to acknowledge a diversity of viewpoints and to search for a unity in that plurality.
Yes, it’s important to keep a sense of humor and not take yourself too seriously. In fact humor, same root as humility, is the ability to laugh at yourself, to put yourself down with everyone else— which I think is the height of political correctness. Political correctness is a work in progress for all of us who desire to be one people as well as individual persons. Putting one cultural identity or social class over another, making one nation and its flag exceptional over all others, seeing oneself or sect as divine or divinely inspired, above criticism and change is idolatry. Tearing down the others’ meaningful symbols to lift one’s own uber alles is idolatry become iconoclasm.
I cringe when I hear pundits and politicians attack with the charge of “political correctness” against those with whom they disagree. I cringe when people create without critique a world of war among civilizations. I cringe because I fear they are denigrating politics itself — the speaking and acting by which we become individual agents with unique styles of composing and singing the world and persons who value each and all of us as a people.
Do we want to confront the racism, bigotry, superstition, chauvinism, machismo, violence, and cruelty that is built in the memes of our cultural, religious, and political economic systems of values and behavior? Therapists tell us that to heal, we must acknowledge the sickness. The healing of humanity at war with itself and our world can start by reflecting on the systems by which we see and live our world — starting with the speech that includes listening.
Words matter. How we use them is important to our self-understanding as individuals and as a people. All words are “code words.” Do they signify hate or love for ourselves and our neighbors? If we will affirm human existence and its creator, we will acknowledge the tension and never submit to absolutes, never make our beliefs ultimate.
If you attack me as a “conservative” because I praise and defend great ideas and institutions in history or if you attack me for being a “progressive” because I think we are better by critiquing and changing certain ideas and institutions which disparage persons and nations, please recognize that these words too are human fabrications that are sometimes helpful and often destructive as stereotypes.
If you charge me for trying to be “politically correct,” I thank you.