I’m currently reading a book by one of my favorite writers, Barbara Brown Taylor. The book is called When God is Silent, and it is made up of a series of lectures delivered at Yale Divinity School in 1997. Now, before you worry that this is a religious, end-of-the-world type blog, let me reassure you that it’s not. It’s simply a blog about words and our relationship with them.
More than anything, Brown Taylor’s lectures center around what she views as a crisis facing speakers. And she asks an interesting question. One that is particularly salient today. She asks: “What words, what speakers, do we trust to tell us the truth about our lives?” The question that underlies this one is, do we trust words any more at all? It’s an interesting thought for anyone who uses words. And that’s all of us. So let’s aim to answer these questions by looking at when we lost our trust in words and what we can do to regain it.
The Crisis
In her book, Brown Taylor identifies literary critic George Steiner who says that what humans saw as a pact or promise between the word and the world broke sometime between 1870 and the end of World War II. Brown Taylor says, “consider Steiner’s case in point: in Germany in the 1940s, we discovered that a person who can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, who can listen to Bach and Schubert while getting ready for bed, can also get up the next morning and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz. With this discovery, Steiner says, the ascendancy of the Word came to an end.” In other words, when the best of art and language and music don’t affect the way we live our lives or engage with others, what value is left in them?
Fast forward to today, when the term “fake news” has come into popular usage. We live in a time where the word is no longer taken at face value as a representation of truth. We understand that every word spoken is chosen by the speaker to represent his or her version of reality. Millions of dollars are spent by political candidates, media entities, and religious institutions. And the secret is out. They are using words to sell us their interpretation of truth. In his book Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong says that the printed word has become a commodity, something we buy and sell. And we often distrust things connected to money.
But words are central to our human experience. Some might even argue that they are the primary vehicle by which we make sense and understand our human experience. So what are we to do if the pact between the word and the world has been broken?
The Solution
What are we to do? Well, the solution is both terrifying and full of hope. We keep talking. But we do so with new realizations.
- We talk knowing that others might disagree with us.
- We work to understand other perspectives.
- We seek out sources and speakers that we might disagree with, and then we listen.
- We discuss and debate, knowing that someone might hold as tightly to another interpretation of reality as we hold tightly to ours.
- We take our roles as communicators seriously.
- We acknowledge that we are rarely, if ever, presenting some unquestionable reality.
- We recognize that we are actively engaged in the process of creating meaning every time we choose a word.
- We get honest with ourselves about the end goals of our words.
- We get transparent with our consumers and audience members about those goals. (Steiner might remind us that the gig is up, and has been for some time now. We are operating under a new pact.)
- We balance our strong opinions and convictions with both information and grace.
All of these things don’t mean that we repair the old contract, the one in which words held some magical monopoly on truth. But these things do help us write a new contract. The new pact won’t rebuild our trust in words, but it just might help us rebuild our trust in each other, the users of words.
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