Essay #2: Words, Words, Words

For Those Who Have Ears to Hear

In his fascinating book on moral intuition, The Righteous Mind, psychologist Jonathan Haidt tells the fictional story of what he calls a “harmless taboo violation.” A sister and brother, Julie and Mark, are traveling together. While staying at a beach cabin in France, they decide it would be a fun new experience to have sex with one another. They take strict precautions to avoid pregnancy. They make love and enjoy it. It makes them feel closer. They then decide never to do it again. They keep the incident a secret between them.

When test subjects were presented with this story, they reacted strongly at first: “It’s totally wrong.” But when questioned about why it was wrong, they were stumped. There’s no danger of pregnancy. The relationship isn’t damaged. No one else knows. The subjects began to hem and haw — but even so, they stuck to their position that the act of incest was wrong.

“People were making a moral judgment immediately and emotionally,” Haidt observes. “Reasoning was merely the servant of the passions, and when the servant failed to find any good arguments, the master did not change his mind.” In other words, our moral intuitions are not based on reason, and some may be mere evolutionary remnants, no longer legitimate.

My own reaction to the story, however, was very different. I thought: It’s wrong for Julie and Mark to have sex with one another because they are sister and brother. That is part of what the words sister and brother mean.

Words are rude tools with which we communicate the human experience. Portions of that experience are secondary constructs that can be analyzed to reveal their component parts. But some experiences are primary. They are not made of smaller pieces. They are what they are and the ramifications emanate from their essential nature. You do not have sex with a sibling or an offspring because it is a violation of the nature of those relationships. This is why, in much of medieval Europe, it was illegal to sleep with your stepchild. This is why filmmaker Woody Allen’s reputation was destroyed when he ran off with his wife’s adopted daughter. Despite what materialist thinkers tell us, morality is not merely a question of the potential consequences of bad actions. It is designed to guard the integrity of relational life. It is designed to keep the human experience human.

Only an intellectual could be foolish enough to think otherwise. The late American philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson, for instance, thought she could justify abortion by comparing a baby in utero to a concert violinist who has been connected to you for dialysis. But your baby is not a concert violinist. He is your baby. You’re his mother. Your responsibility to preserve and nurture his life is woven into the nature of that relationship.

My Daily Wire colleague Matt Walsh scored a well-deserved success with his comic documentary What is a Woman? Matt traveled from place to place asking the title question of expert, activist, and passerby alike. The respondents’ embarrassing inability to answer him was a sad and hilarious commentary on how transgender ideology has poisoned our culture. But the sorrow and hilarity of the film did not derive from the fact that there is an answer to the question What is a woman? They arose from the fact that we don’t need an answer. We simply know.

Of course, you can construct material definitions for the word sibling or woman or mother. A sibling is the offspring of your same mother; a mother is a woman who has carried or is carrying a child; a woman is an adult human who, when physically complete and healthy, has the potential to become a mother. But these definitions do not really tell you what these people are any more than a material definition of a Lamborghini tells you what it is like to drive one. Primary words like sibling, mother, woman convey not just a set of biological facts but an entire relational reality that is an essential part of our inner lives.

The post-modern idea that words do not adhere to these meanings is nonsense. The late hipster comedian George Carlin had a famous routine called “The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television.” In it, he repeated a string of obscenities over and over to make the point that the prohibition against them was irrational. It’s a funny routine, but misguided. Just as I can say the words pine tree and communicate the idea of a pine tree, I can use a four-letter word to convey a materialist dehumanization of the act of love. This is why wise women don’t curse. They pay a far greater price for dehumanizing the body than men do and therefore have a far greater investment in preventing it. Think about the modern prevalence of foul-mouthed females and then think about the podcast Whatever, where foolish women defend their right to degrade themselves sexually. These two phenomena are not unrelated.

Now obviously human reality is not God’s reality, and so our experience is somewhat fluid. Some truths are variable. They are of their culture and of their time. What is becoming modesty in a woman may be different in New York than it is in Abu Dhabi. But there are greater truths that are true always. Modesty in a woman is a virtue because of the essential relational experience of being women and men.

Academics, adolescents, and other buffoons sometimes believe that the fluidity of human experience negates the existence of human truth altogether. If people believe in different gods, there must be no god. If they have different tastes in art, then beauty must exist only in the eye of the beholder. “What is a crime here is often a virtue several leagues hence,” explained the Marquis de Sade. He was making the case that we should all enjoy raping, torturing, and murdering those weaker than ourselves. Why not, if morality is conditional?

The fact that spiritual perceptions differ in different times and places gives us good reason to be tolerant and to keep an open mind. But the idea that it negates the essential truths of the spirit is patently absurd.

When people’s opinions differ — about God, say, or morality, or the qualities of a work of art — it is often because some of those opinions are wrong. The evolution of our eyes did not create light. Our eyes evolved because light was there, and our eyes give light its human appearance. The same is true of our moral and religious senses. They did not create spiritual truth; they were created because spiritual truth is there for us to perceive. If you look upon a candy cane and see a gorilla, you are mistaken. Likewise if you look upon your fellow man and think it would be fine to murder him.

Language can convey these spiritual perceptions, and we should think long and hard before we dismiss its deepest meanings. We are able to calculate the trajectory of light over millions of miles using numbers that are just as much a human construct as words are. We can also say without hesitation that Michelangelo is a greater artist than Thomas Kincaid. We are designed to know the truths of the world rightly, whether those truths are visible or invisible. Some people get their calculations wrong, some people get their spiritual reality wrong. That doesn’t turn truth into an opinion. The truth remains the truth — and that is what gives words their meaning.

William Shakespeare, who understood everything, understood that our trust in the human experience of reality rests on our faith in God. His play Hamlet is, in my reading, a reflection on the religious doubts that arose from the Reformation and its fragmentation of the church. In the famous scenes where Hamlet pretends to be mad, the symptoms of his madness are a compendium of post-modern maladies. Moral relativism (“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”). Loss of stable meaning (Is a man “like an angel” or merely the highest form of dust?). And, by necessity, alienation from language. (What are you reading, Hamlet is asked. He answers, “Words, words, words.”)

But at the core of the Christian faith is the confirmation that the human experience reflects reality. It can be gotten right, and its truths can be spoken. When Moses saw the burning bush, he saw the universe in full, creation and destruction without end. From that eternal process, came the voice of God and his name: I AM. The dance of being emanated from a person, a person who could speak his name and his nature. Because of that, I AM could ultimately take human form and speak the truth about our lives.

The Word — and all the words, words, words with which he spoke of it — became flesh.

Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.