THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation
IT'S NOT JUST SEMANTICS
Sermon by Rev. Mike Young
Preached September 19, 1999,
at the First Unitarian Church of HonoluluIn Eugene O'Neill's The Great God Brown Dion says, "We all speak in code and no one has the other's key."
As we were planning for the beginning of the religious education program this year, I found myself a little sidetracked into an issue that niggles around the edges of my pessimism. There have been times in my career when I have had the feeling that no one should be left anywhere near a Bible, religious teaching, or any of the doctrines of the heritages of the species until they were old enough to engage in abstract thought. Yet, all religious traditions want to get these ideas into their children as early as possible.
Nan and I were talking about which of the Old Testament stories to pass on to our kids as a part of the R.E. curriculum. We were wrestling with the necessity for them to understand so many of the references that are a part of western literature and that require a familiarity with those stories. Yet, when you read those stories, they're dirty! They're mean! They're vicious! I mean, Noah cursed his grandson because the son saw him naked ! Lot's daughters get pregnant by him while he's sleeping. Abraham passes his wife off as his sister to get a temporary financial advantage. Jacob steals his brother's birth right. These are the patriarchs? About King David and King Solomon ? Don't ask !
How do we share that heritage with our kids without, in the process, so distorting that heritage that in order to own it as a mature faith they have to go back and unlearn practically everything we teach them in school?
It was as I was wrestling with this that I began to read a book which my daughter Caprice gave me for my 60th birthday. It's not small and it is not a quick read. It is by Alfred Korzybski the father of general semantics. Korzybski insists that human beings on the face of planet earth are crazy. Absolutely insane. We are so completely creatures of language. We say back to ourselves who we are. We reinforce who we are and how we are and what it means to be a human being in language. We treat that language with no sense at all of its richness and depth. In the process, we distort our own self-understanding, distort the language, distort our own heritage. As one result, from the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories we tell each other, we become literally divorced from the reality in which we live.
Not until a youngster is of the age of perhaps ten to thirteen are they even capable in any significant way of engaging in abstract thought. I watched it interestingly with my own son Jot who's eight years old. He's been fascinated with dinosaurs ever since he was about three years old. For him to get even the beginnings of a sense of the time that's involved--those millions of years--he needs to manipulate some rather daunting abstractions. He understands that the dinosaurs are gone but, to him, that's recent. Everything happened before he arrived. That sixty-five million year stretch is a leap of imagination that a 3-4-5-6-7-8-year-old literally cannot make.
Here we are trying to teach kids Bible stories that occurred three thousand, four thousand years ago, and it is as if they were in the same category as dinosaurs. The map in their heads of the changes that take place in history bears almost no relation to the map in our heads of the sweep of that history.
Recently we tried having a Friday movie night. Other than Nan's family and mine, there was only one other person there. As it turns out, it was just as well. The film was Ben-Hur. It came out in '59 and won Oscar awards. It was THE BIGGEST THING that had ever happened in the history of movies. But I didn't remember that it was four hours long ! And had an intermission in the middle of the doggoned thing ! It portrayed in wonderful ways the setting at the time of the life of Jesus. It does it as well as or better than Hollywood ever has. Jot sat there, the only kid. He noticed that they didn't have telephones and cars. But that's about it. He loved the chariot race, though.
At our church in Tampa, Florida, we did a whole series with the kids on Y0K Palestine. We literally turned the grounds of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Tampa into a first century village for three months. We had the help of Dr. Strange, biblical archeologist at the University of South Florida. As nearly as we could, we recreated that era. We made shoes the hard way. We pressed olive oil. We really tried to immerse the kids in what it was like to try to live in a first century environment. If we can't do that with time, why do we seem to think we can do that with high-flown, complex, abstract ideas?
Every word, insists Korzybski, in every sentence that human beings speak is an abstraction. Every word in every sentence is an abstraction. Of all the things that could be said, described or paid attention to, some are singled out and singled out at a particular level of complexity.
If you read the first chapters of Genesis as a story at the most concrete level of nuts and bolts and rocks and the creation of dirt, it is a very low level of abstraction. If you then turn that story into a high level abstraction statement about meaning, it won't mean the same thing; it won't mean in the same way.
When we talk amongst ourselves we talk constantly at these different levels. We may be talking about morality, but sometimes we're talking at the level of gossip and sometimes we're talking at the level of abstract principles of justice. Not infrequently, when we get into arguments, we find that what is at the core of the disagreement is that one of us is talking at this level of abstraction and the other is talking at that level of abstraction; and we don't understand why we don't meet.
The Catholic Church, back in medieval times, had a whole book for the benefit of the priests in doing confessions; called "casuistry." The Catholic Church recognized that abstract moral principles don't "tangibilitate," as Sweet Daddy Grace used to say. The book assisted the priests in applying the moral principles to concrete acts at the everyday level of our lives. It was an exceedingly complex and complicated enterprise to engage in. It was not something you teach third-graders in Sunday School.
Lovers courting do this. They talk all around the edges, closing in on the subject. Are they going to "do it"? Finally, they decide to "do it" and one is looking around for a bed and the other is looking around for a ring. They are functioning at different levels of abstraction.
The mystic seeker at the hot-dog stand in Coney Island says, "Make me one with everything." The joke works because it conflates levels of abstraction.
This kind of thing is all through the very ways in which we tell ourselves who we are. The mystical insight is that life and its processes flow into one another in such seamless ways that everything is interconnected. In that moment one might say with awe, "I am one with God." But that is very different from the delusional person in the mental hospital who says, "I am God, and you'd best obey me."
There is a universe of difference between saying, "I am implicated in racism," recognizing that I have, however unwittingly, been blessed by, advantaged by my imbeddedness in a social system riven with distinctions based on wealth, power, position, gender, education, appearance, race, ethnicity, speech patterns, and a complex knowledge of how the system works. That is totally different from saying, "I am a bigot, trying to keep you in your place." But we lose those distinctions of levels of abstraction and commence to bash on one another.
Every word in every sentence, says Korzybski, has a denotation and a connotation. A word identifies an act, a fact, or a relationship (the denotation). It also carries emotional tones (the connotation). There are no emotionally neutral words; though often we do not pay attention to that emotional loading. Even numbers. An early researcher in the physiology of meditation thought he had found an emotionally neutral mantra for his subjects to chant. The word was "one." Emotionally neutral ? See above !
The same fact, act, object or relationship can be specified in many differing ways, and the connotation--the emotional load of those differing ways of saying the same thing--can vary just as much in the emotional message as in the differing words that we might use to specify the thing or act. The power of words to hurt one another lies largely here.
Have you ever had the experience of something happening and on that particular occasion you had just exactly the right word to say in exactly that situation? You got the bon mot off on cue and really zung 'em. Wow, did it really feel good ! Usually you only think of what you should have said thirty minutes later. Only a few times in my life have I gotten those zingers off at exactly the right moment.
I was working in the Los Angeles County Central Juvenile Detention Center once. One young man was refusing to go back to his room while I was trying to shower 32 juvenile delinquents, all of whom were bigger, meaner, badder, tougher than I was. He was running up and down the hall agitating people, and I kept telling him to get back in his room. He stood there in the middle of the hallway and said . . . . Well, in this particular case, in good taste, I can't tell you exactly what it was he said. It was something to the effect of, "You Caucasian Oediply-conflicted matriphile, you can't tell me what to do." And I turned to him and I said, "I am obviously Caucasian. I am married and I have children. My wife and I still have fun together. I am a Caucasian Oedibly-conflicted matriphile Get back in your room." He did. He also didn't talk for two days.
What confused him was that I had reacted to his words at the lowest level of abstraction, paying virtually no attention to the emotional load of the words. It left him absolutely dumfounded.
All of the words that we use for talking about what it feels like to be a human being are scrambled-together pieces with emotional loads on those words that have roots deep in our own background. The culture says some words are magic words and have the power to create the reality they describe. We fear them when we hear those words, when we speak those words. The very emotions on our insides are sparked, are set off. We react to them. And that reaction is interesting from some of the research recently done. One of the things that's involved here is that these emotional reactions to what we see, hear or even think, short circuit directly to behavior without passing through gray matter. That's the way we're wired.
Is it a great surprise that we get so confused by, confounded by, and end up killing each other over some of the most emotionally significant language that human beings use: religious language ? This is the language for saying how it is for me, what my relationship to what's out there seems to be for me, what is of ultimate and deepest importance in my life ! These are areas of high level of abstraction, areas of incredibly intense emotional load, and when we scramble them it is all but guaranteed that we sow confusion in our own minds and conflict in our relationships.
Korzybski insists that this is true of every relationship in our whole lives. Every situation in which we use language, which is to say almost every situation in our lives, has this scramble going on. Unless and until the human species begins to understand general semantics we will continue to shred our arguments, tear up each other's lives and not be able to deal effectively with the problems that confront us in the real world.
In a theological argument in college, one of my fellow sophomores, insisted that life is simply "come and joy juice." He may have been saying that life is nothing but a concrete, biological event. Everything else is baloney. But he also may have been saying, "I am not comfortable with the high-flown abstractions that you are slapping on all of these ordinary relationships of human life.
It turned out that was what he was trying to get me to see.
Most theological debates have at the core of the conflict those differing levels of abstraction and of emotional load. The would-be theologian wants to make connotations--emotional loads--at very high levels of abstraction into instruction--denotation, fact things at a very low level of abstraction. And the would-be scientist too often wants to do exactly the reverse. The would-be scientist wants to take descriptions at very concrete levels of reality and attribute to them, turn them into wonderfully high-flown abstractions fraught with deep emotional meaning. Little wonder that historically they have regularly come into conflict and that today that conflict still eats around the edges of the body politic.
But I am more concerned here with what it does and how it informs the ways in which we try to share our own religious heritage with our kids. It is a really sticky mess fraught with all kinds of all problems. How do you talk to kids at age 6, 7, and 8 about the life and the meaning of the life of Jesus of Nazareth without filling the kids' heads full of all kinds of things that you did not intend to fill it with ? How do we talk about religious insights with children without guaranteeing the misunderstanding; even if, as Sunday School teacher, you are really good and said it right? You are guaranteed that something else is going to be learned.
It is necessary for us to inform our kids of what the world really is out there. We want to send them out into the world we have however unintentionally created for them with as much knowledge and understanding of the dynamics of that world, the content of that heritage, the significance, the meaning of that heritage as best we can. But if we can't manage between us to make head nor tail of it because of our own misunderstanding of the very ways in which we create meaning, we stand little chance of being able to pass it on to them in meaningful ways.
There is no solution to this problem. I have not here prepared a precis of how to solve the problem for the Sunday School teachers, nor how to solve the problem for you. It is not one of those problems that are solvable. We sometimes have the impression that if you can just say the problem correctly then there is a solution to the problem. This is not one of those that has a solution. It has only the possibility of dawning awareness as we slowly begin to understand how we use language, how we respond to the ways in which other people use language. We can but begin to slow down the short circuit that so often goes between emotion and behavior; to inject enough awareness into the ways in which we respond to the issues of meaning in our lives so that those things do indeed have the opportunity to pass through gray matter before they rush to conclusion and to action.
The title of this sermon is a line that has been yelled at me, spoken to me, insisted at me over the 30-some years of my ministry again and again. As I try to wrestle with the ways in which human beings shape meaning into their lives, people tell me, "That's just semantics." It is as if Lewis Carroll was right. "A word means whatever I choose it to mean." Someplace down inside we know that's not true, which is why we laugh when Lewis Carroll says the line. If you wanted a classic illustration of it, this past year we got one from the President of the United States: "That depends upon what your definition of 'is' is."
Not !