Abstract words do not have simple meanings or straightforward uses. From their complex and confusing richness arise all sorts of demands, seductions, lures, and traps.
Philosophers, social scientists, cultural observers, linguists, politicians, advertisers, and anyone else with an interest in what influences people know that nothing, not even so-to-speak real events, has as much power over people as does the language that human beings contrive to use.
George Orwell wrote in “Politics and the English Language”:
Political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
Smart people are likely to harbor the sense that they routinely see through the common tricks played on them by those who use language to tyrannize, persuade, or sell. They know to smile wryly at another “new and improved” or “buy two, get one free.” They shake their heads when clerics, politicians, and economists speak. They understand the game being played by television talking heads, where fiery debate is just another ratings ploy. Smart people are likely to feel far above the ubiquitous fray of language manipulation . . . but of course they aren't.
Not only are smart people not immune to this power, but they are doubly influenced by it. Just as everyone else does, they find themselves ensnared by the metaphors produced by their society, by their media, and by their ruling classes. Even though in a corner of awareness they may know better, they end up as manipulated and coerced as anyone else. On top of that, they create their own ensnaring metaphors with the power to hold them in sway even for a lifetime.
Their very smartness, which causes them to love language, to find language pregnant with meaning, and to use it as their primary organizing tool, inclines them in the direction of turning language into existential handcuffs. How does this work? It works in extremely simple and straightforward ways. A young boy reads a book about the missing link and ends up with a PhD in archaeology and a lifelong attraction to Africa. Even if at some point he finds the idea of a missing link passé, unnecessary, or wrongheaded, and even if he no longer sees himself on that particular quest, he has nevertheless organized his whole life around a pregnant phrase that somehow meant so much to him when he first encountered it.
For a budding Einstein, the ensnaring phrase might be unified field theory. For a budding writer, the seductive string of words might be great American novel. The snare need not be a phrase—it can be a single word. For one smart person it might be painting; for another it might be cosmology; for a third it might be justice. Words and phrases of this sort are like magnets that organize the iron filings of our feelings, beliefs, needs, and values into powerful demands and elusive holy grails.
These words and phrases are experienced as powerful meaning opportunities, as the place to make meaning, and as such can trump all other considerations, including those that really ought to be considered. Yes, accounting may not possess the meaning charge of performance artist but when, because of the power of language to ensnare, we lose our chance to even think about whether some profession or way of life might actually serve us, we severely limit our real possibilities.
Words like novel or spirit are bundles of meaning that, like bundled kindling, ignite into blazing fires in the imagination. How beautiful, brilliant, and dangerous they are! To what extreme places can a word like novel or spirit take a person! The novelist may remain poor forever, the monk may remain silent and celibate forever, all for the sake of what a word is signifying in her imagination. It is time that we understood the tremendous extent to which all people, and smart people in their special ways, find their lives both illuminated and constrained by the power of language to create the psychological experience of meaning.
What should a smart person do about the power of language to affect him like this? There is no simple answer and worse, no really good answer. If you stick a pin in every word and consciously drain it of its power to affect you and of its ability to hold meaning, you have effectively reduced your chances of experiencing meaning and dwindled your actual experiences of meaning. You are wiser, yes, but also sadder. To take the magic, mystery, and potency out of words like painting, cosmology, and justice is to make life smaller and duller. Is that what's wanted?
On the other hand, if you never deflate the puffed-up words and phrases that you are using as your life's organizing metaphors, then you will find yourself caught in their snares, led around by the nose by them. You will experience powerful negative consequences if, as so often happens, their reality is not equal to their resonance. If, in pursuit of the truth, beauty, and goodness generated by the word justice, you become a death penalty lawyer and in thirty years of practice grow exhausted as you save not one single person from execution, how well has the power of the word justice served you?
Because natural psychology identifies meaning first as a subjective psychological experience, second as a certain sort of idea, and third as a certain sort of evaluation, we have a way to think about this profound dilemma. Using the ideas and language of natural psychology, the death penalty lawyer in question might say to herself: “I am getting no psychological experience of meaning from my death penalty work, even though I still love the word justice. I don't want to pull the plug on that word, but I must completely reevaluate to what extent I want to organize my life around that metaphoric word as opposed to organizing my life in some other way. What should I do next in the realm of meaning, and how should I hold the word justice next?”
It isn't that a painter must stop being a painter or that a cosmologist must stop being a cosmologist just because she sees to what extent the words painting or cosmology have lured her and ensnared her. Rather, she must step out of the snare and examine her situation with fresh eyes to see whether she wants to reinvest meaning in painting or cosmology or whether she wants to seize some other meaning opportunity, realizing that her next meaning opportunity, rooted as it is in language, may itself mesmerize her, mislead her, and ensnare her.
You are obliged to see through language, so as not to be fooled by its seductive power too badly or too often. You are also obliged to embrace language's magnetic resonance, or else life will feel gray and listless. However language came to be, it came with these two properties built right into it: that with it we create meaning and that with it we create lures and traps. One word can provide us with meaning for a lifetime; one word can enslave us for a lifetime. And yes, it might be the very same word.
The exact same issues stand when it comes to logic. Smart people love logic, but logic, and especially the semblance of logic, can also prove to be a lure and a trap. Logic and semblances of logic can create justifications for any position—including positions that a smart person himself does not support or believe in. It is tremendously easy to spin out a string of logical-sounding premises and conclude that it is immoral to eat meat or that it is essential to eat meat, that it is necessary to travel to Mars or that it is ridiculous to travel to Mars, that it is imperative to sign this peace treaty or that it is vital to wage this war, and so on. Smart people know exactly how to do this.
It is very easy to learn how to use semblances of logic to justify yourself. You begin a sentence with “I was taught that . . .” and end with an argument from authority. You counter a request with “You want me to take out the garbage, but you won't have sex?” using the logic of symmetry to disguise your refusal and your complaint. You use causality to make your points: “The school shooting wouldn't have happened if (guns weren't so easy to obtain) (they didn't teach evolution in the schools) (teachers were better paid) (parents did a better job of disciplining their children).” A smart person can get good at this and win arguments by ending them as soon as they begin.
Certainly, some smart people have the patience or the desire to examine arguments to see if they are sound and solid—to see, for example, if the argument's premises already include its conclusions or whether terms and phrases have been used clearly and consistently. However, not many people, smart or otherwise, have the time or the energy needed to analyze the arguments foisted on them wherever they turn. Consequently, in a world of light logic and talking points, no smart person has all that much trouble arguing his case—irrespective of the truth of the matter and irrespective of his own beliefs.
Why is this important? Let's consider just one example. Freud was brilliant at moving from a thought, for instance that some dreams are perhaps interesting in revealing what a person is thinking and feeling, to grand conclusions like the dictum that “dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.” He used language and semblances of logic to create a profession where none existed and did such a beautiful job of sounding right that, a hundred years later, people are still recounting their dreams to paid professionals and engaging in what they presume is a helpful process that will reduce their emotional distress.
It is very alluring to use language and logic in such ways, to feed our ego and our everyday narcissism by creating whole fields or even gods out of whole cloth, and to stand preening alongside our creations. The ease of this and its alluring nature leads to, among other serious problems, whole generations of bullies, some as smart as the original thinker and some not so smart, who from their master's hand possess resonant metaphors and serviceable scripts that allow them to look professional and earn a living.
If, for example, you are a client in therapy with a certain sort of analyst and have the audacity to want to chat about something that did not appear to you in a dream, the analyst simply will not allow it. This may strike you as farfetched, and yet it occurs all the time. Here, for instance, is a report from one such client, as reported by the analyst Louis Breger in Psychotherapy: Lives Intersecting. The client reported:
In my first session, this psychologist prompted, ‘Did you have a dream?’ I did. She listened attentively and then offered some interpretation. When I told her that the interpretation didn't really resonate, she explained that this was due to my resistance. This irritated me. She indicated that my irritation was an indication that her interpretation had touched a nerve, and that we were, therefore, on the right track. The sessions were always the same—I would begin by talking about events in my life—she would listen impatiently and eventually interrupt me with, “Did you have a dream?”
It is terribly easy for a smart person to use language and light logic to leap to conclusions that serve her—emotionally, egoistically, professionally, or in some other way—and to then stand behind them in an authoritarian, unrelenting, bullying way. It is terribly easy, for example, to take constructs from science, romanticize them, and turn them into spiritual and occult metaphors that their theoretical reality doesn't support. The special combination of alluring language and light logic can come together and, without any justification, can turn scientific speculation into proof of the existence of gods.
As a smart person, you can make believe that you have landed on an incontrovertible truth just by stringing words together in a certain way. If, for example, you say that this partakes of that, then you have created two things just by saying so. By snapping your fingers, you've simultaneously created and proven dualism. All you have to say, for example, is that chocolate ice cream, in order to be chocolate ice cream, in order to have that real ontological chocolate ice cream-ness, must necessarily partake of an essence of chocolate ice cream-ness, which means that essence of chocolate ice cream-ness really must exist, which in turn must mean that there are other dimensions in which the platonic idea of chocolate ice cream and vanilla ice cream and strawberry ice cream hover without melting.
There is nothing easier than creating a permanently refrigerated ice cream heaven.
You may be smiling while reading this, but in the history of human affairs, this is no smiling matter. These machinations and manipulations become the intellectual structure upon which everything from totalitarian governments to the psychiatric labeling and then imprisoning of dissidents to witch hunts and inquisitions hang. It is one thing to create an astral plane for ice cream flavors and another to create gods to whom you must swear allegiance. Here, for example, is Bishop Berkeley's proof of the existence of God as described in his Principles, #29:
Whatever power I may have over my own thoughts, I find the ideas actually perceived by Sense have not a like dependence on my will. When in broad daylight I open my eyes, it is not in my power to choose whether I shall see or no, or to determine what particular objects shall present themselves to my view; and so likewise as to the hearing and other senses; the ideas imprinted on them are not creatures of my will. There is therefore some other Will or Spirit that produces them.
Ipso facto: God. No actual gods existed at the beginning of that paragraph and no actual gods existed at the end of that paragraph, and yet somewhere in those words, the existence of a god got proven. Any smart person can do this. Any smart person can use alluring language and light logic to explain why he should be paid more than someone else, about why his theory is more correct than another person's, and so on. I can do this; you can do this; all smart people can do this.
Maybe you understand this and are careful not to use alluring language and light logic inauthentically. The following challenge and its attendant pain will still remain. If you are aware of this dynamic, then you will see evidence of it all around you, and that is bound to make you angry. What if you see right through the latest, hottest pedagogical tool brought to your school by a well-known speaker? You can't begin booing and also keep your job. What if you get only mishandled logic from your fellow jurors? You can't run to the judge. What if the talking points of your town fathers are such thinly disguised power grabs that they make you want to scream? Will you embark on the heavy lifting of multiple recall petitions?
There may be virtually nothing you can do or literally nothing you can do in such situations. There you will stand, enraged, mocked by circumstance, and in pain. At the same time, you will be sorely tempted to use language and logic in exactly these same ways. Like every smart person, you will feel moved to use language and logic to defend yourself, make your points, and serve your interests. Therefore, you will have your own hypocrisy to deal with. These are the multiple horns of the dilemma that arises because our brain runs imperfectly on language and logic.
We'll continue this discussion in the next chapter as we examine the lures of fantasy and mysticism. For now, let me summarize. Our brain works in a certain way. It employs that fantastic and amazing thing: language—and language is a multi-edged sword. It comprehends logic—and can torture it and manipulate it. Many brain seductions and traumas occur by virtue of these twin talents. We may be seduced into a lifetime of work that barely interests us. We may be seduced into creating theories that rest on air—and then feel obliged to defend them. For a smart person, language and logic are miracles—and monsters.