Posted by
Buster Foghorn on Monday, February 07, 2011 2:29:12 PM
Language needs to be based upon truth and users of language need to be held accountable for their words, words “that can be understood, stood by, and acted on.”
In Standing by Words, Wendell Berry explains how language plays a role in the health of individuals and their communities. A cause and effect relationship exists, he argues, between the disintegration of individuals and communities and the increasing disintegration of language, language that is “either meaningless or destructive of meaning.” For a statement to be meaningful, it must be both complete and comprehensible. Berry says it must contain “language that can be understood, stood by, and acted on.” For a statement to be understood—that is complete and comprehensible by itself—“the community must know what it is.” For Berry, truth-telling and accountability are all important, and words require precision, restraint, and discipline.
Mr. Berry provides examples of what he means by “truth-telling”, first providing examples of some who are less than “truth tellers.”
Several English teachers who argued, in two textbooks, that truth varies depending on the purpose of the message.
After the Three Mile Island Accident, two Commissioners discuss (reported in a transcript) what they will say in their public announcement. They were unable to tell the truth to the public about the seriousness of the situation facing them, Berry notes, because they were wedded to their language, “a language that” Berry says, “is diminished by inordinate ambition”.
Words from a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley portray a “loneliness of personal experience”, but fail to balance the internal (private) with the external (public), or to provide a context for understanding, appealing instead for pity and playing on our emotions.
Two authors report on “improvements” in the production of milk, focusing on quantity rather than quality. Berry argues that by focusing on “how or how much” rather than “why,” they are creating costs that cannot be fully accounted for.
R. Buckminster Fuller is described by Berry as a technological romantic and identified as a “modern” thinker; he is a man focused on dreams of what technology might do, creating a future “global village”, a life in the future which cannot be questioned because it doesn’t exist. And since it doesn’t exist, notes Berry, he cannot be expected to stand by his words, because his words have no meaning.
For those that are not “truth-tellers,” Berry says language is about manipulating words: using words to secure power, to achieve a particular purpose, to advance their own self-interest above the greater good. And for all of them, Berry says, there is no sense of the great chain of being or the value of community or of staying in one place and making a stand. Instead, in each of these cases, it is all about a “world of words.”
Mr. Berry also offers contrasting examples of truth-tellers including: Shakespeare’s King Lear, because, unlike Shelley, Lear provides context for his words; Milton because he reminds us of Genesis; and Faulkner because he reminds us of Milton and Genesis. And all three, says Berry, work “toward the definition of personal place and condition, responsibility and action”, reminding us of “the human place in creation.”
If truth is the only reliable standard and if users of language need to be held accountable, then the practical use of religion, says Berry, keeps any accounting of language in a larger context and “forces the accountant to reckon with mystery”. It is only when we have religion, Berry argues, that we can consider the unsolvable, the Mystery X—an understanding that some questions cannot be answered because some things are unknowable. And “all answers must be worked out”, says Berry, “within a limit of humility and restraint, so that the initiative to act would always imply a knowing acceptance of accountability for the results” – a willingness to use only language that can be understood, stood by, and acted upon.
Berry makes the case for a community that places science “under the rule of the old concern for propriety, correct proportion, proper scale…an external standard of quality”, a world rooted in the present with a respect for the past, and a world focused on love, the love of pledging to take a stand that provides for someone else’s future rather than our own.