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Are There Words to Live By?
While watching the news the other day, it occurred to me that
people who have live by this or that set or words often begin
to attack and even kill others. I remembered my own angry attitude
from years ago, when I could easily use words to justify violent
thoughts which might have become violent actions. Words are valuable
tools, and yet it seems that they can be more dangerous than
gunpowder if we try to live by them while disregarding context.
For a moment, imagine two men facing each other, pointing
past one another. One man is pointing at a tornado that is coming.
The other is pointing at a raging fire headed towards them. They
each see their own truth and each is angry at the sight of the
other's hand. They feel that the other's hand is "wrong."
This seems silly, but replace the tornado and fire with any modern
issues, and the hands with words, and this scene describes how
we often try to communicate.
People point past each other with their words, arguing as
though they are looking at the same facts and experiences. They
want to prove that their words are the right ones, instead of
learning to look at what the other's words are pointing at. Words
are seductive, and for all their undeniable usefulness, they
also can lead us away from understanding when we focus on them,
when we make them more important than the truth they are meant
to point at.
There Are No Words to Live By
It isn't just a matter of communicating with others. We often
focus on, and get trapped in a net of words that we use to explain
the world to ourselves. We easily call things "right"
or "wrong" for example, according to how they compare
to our "definitions." However, word formulas and definitions
can never encompass the whole truth of reality. You can say that
stealing is wrong, or helping others is right, but you can also
imagine a circumstance where "stealing" would be right,
and "helping" someone wrong.
This isn't an argument against language or logic. It is just
that both only go so far. Like a car that takes you across the
country or world, they're useful, but like a car, they are only
useful in certain ways, and you have to get out of them when
you arrive at your various destinations. Taking a car to the
lake isn't a problem, but taking it into the lake is. This is
what we do when our words and logic take us to dangerous situations.
Can having words to live by really be dangerous, though? Absolutely.
I once heard an otherwise compassionate person say he was against
animal cruelty laws because he couldn't find a logical and defensible
set of words to defend them. If he saw a new machine, would he
refuse to believe it existed until he could explain it and describe
it? Reality, and the reality of right and wrong, exist outside
of words - they are not the words themselves.
I watched a man say on the evening news that we have the right
to drop a nuclear bomb on Iraq, and that we should. As he explained
why, you could see that whatever compassionate impulses he had,
they were over-ruled by his total allegiance to his words, logic,
and where these take him. It never occurred to him that maybe
there is truth outside of his words and logic.
It's great to have guidelines, like "don't lie,"
or "we have the right to defend ourselves." It is even
better to remember that these rules will someday fail us, and
we will have to make new ones. Words are just tools. There are
words to die by, but there are no words you can safely and permanently
live by.
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