Mission Statement
When God saw that people were working together to build the Tower of Babel:
“The Lord said, ‘If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.’”
Genesis 11:6-7.
The story of the Tower of Babel is essentially a story of people failing to accomplish an audacious but achievable goal because they could not communicate effectively. We face a similar problem today in the United States. We have lost our ability to solve problems, in no small part because we have been unable to communicate effectively with each other. We still argue about policy, but we don’t recognize and call out bad arguments, and don’t demand good arguments from the other side. Instead, we settle for name calling and shouting past each other.
Part of the problem is the way our brains work. From Sophocles confronting the Sophists to Daniel Kahneman and Amos Twersky explaining how our brains routinely reach unsound conclusions, it has been made abundantly clear that we have trouble sticking to facts and logic. We are wired to be suckers for bad arguments, especially when we use “Fast Thinking”. One of my goals is to engage and train the “Slow Thinkiing” parts of our brains, and I introduce a tool to help with that.
But aside from normal problems with perception and judgment, there is a more insidious side to the problem. Some of the debaters are deliberately incoherent, not in the sense that they mumble or are ungrammatical, but that they say things that don’t stick together. They deliberately distort the meaning of words. In Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll gave voice to those who do not consider themselves bound by what words actually mean.
Modern day Humpty Dumptys, the sophists of our age, may feel they gain an advantage (either in winning an argument, or in getting their way despite a losing argument) by abusing language. And so they distort language and logic for short term gain — a short term gain that comes at an enormous cost to the rest of us.
When we sit by idly and fail to call out the abuse of language, we lose the ability to criticize intelligently. The words we would use as weapons in the fight have lost their edge. And it is worse when Humpty Dumptys use a word to mean its opposite. Doublespeak fosters an environment in which words and positions are meaningless. Ultimately it is a way of disempowering people.
So another modest goal of this blog is to reclaim rhetoric as an honest profession. I will call out abuses of language, particularly in the area of political rhetoric, as a way to empower people to solve problems that so desperately need solutions.