Thursday's Thought for the Week: 17 Mar 2011

I've read a few translations of Chapter 23, from which this week's WQW was taken. The original text of the Tao Te Ching was written in Ancient Chinese, which is notoriously difficult to translate, and so you can find for many of the poems inside a very wide variety of translations, some with very different and even contradictory meanings. Of the translations I read of Chapter 23, they varied from the very metaphorical to the very literal. I decided to go with one of the more literal versions as a jumping off point for this week's TTW, only because it better serves me in talking about the particular subject of this post, that being the topic of communication, although I could as well have used it to speak about a number of other topics had I decided to go with a differing interpretation.

The quote I provided yesterday seems fairly explicit. Nature is capable of making great statements (if you will) not only despite their being brief, but also because they are brief. Humans too, the reasoning goes, should endeavour to be so forceful and succinct with their words. Few people, especially in this day and age of constant interaction, would argue that point much. Email, instant messaging, Facebook, all those confounded doo-dads the older generations dismiss are a double-edged swords at times, especially now that we carry them all around in our pockets. Aloneness is almost a foreign concept, at least where such technologies are prevalent.

Consider also, if you please, another very old saying along a similar vein. It suggests that there is an inversely proportional relationship to how much you talk and how much you ought to talk. I would give you some direct quotes, but history is so replete with examples and variations on the theme, that it would give me great astonishment that someone reading this blog should never had come across it before. The point is, I imagine anyone who has come across a statement to this effect would not lodge any disagreement with it, at least not in principle, unless perhaps that person happened to be the argumentative type. They may even nod sagely in view of this great wisdom, maybe with a knowing smile in someone or other's direction, and lament the way our society has turned towards this need for constant stimulation.

This is a sad state indeed, largely because such people are heedless of this advice with astonishing flair. Now, I'm not about to whinge about people being too undisciplined to actually follow through with advice they know is worthwhile, because goodness, it's not as though I haven't made my opinion on that fact before. No, I would much rather take the simpler recourse and ask people to actually go out of their way and try to, every now and then, shut up.

Those who know me closely will likely scoff at the idea of me being a particularly quiet person, as I can be as unnecessarily boisterous as anyone, given the right conditions, but with that said when I'm with people I'm not very close with, even if they're friends, I'm much less likely to be as loud or talkative. A lot of people tell me that this is some sort of a problem, as though my reluctance to say something in such a scenario is some sort of extreme shyness or antisociability, and I should try and be more "outgoing". The fact of the matter is, however, that if I am with people I don't know, or don't know well, then if I don't have much of substance to say I'm not terribly inclined to talk. There's very little point in flapping your lips around and making noise that nobody particularly cares to listen to, don't you think?

Now, if there's something to be said, or if someone asks you a question, there's little to be accomplished in staying quiet, or being abrupt. That is just as unproductive as talking when you shouldn't. Know when to speak and when to stay silent, and I think you will find that you learn much more from listening to other people than you could from taking over conversations or perpetuating inane and pointless chatter. Live and let live, as they say - if there is business to conduct, then conduct it. If not, relax, enjoy yourself, but remember that like many other things, the more words you offer, the cheaper each word becomes.

On a related topic, and incidentally the initial thought behind this post, is the matter of essay-writing and speech-giving. If you're ever in a position to be writing essays or giving speeches, you will likely be trying to persuade someone, and it is a matter of common knowledge that a good way to persuade someone is to impress them. Following this line of thought, people can and often are tempted to pull out a thesaurus and start using the longest synonyms they can find at every opportunity, even though they may not be aware of the common usage such words may hold, or any particular connotations. This is often a bad idea because people often see such people as either being genuinely unpleasant intellectuals or insincerely unpleasant poseurs attempting to look smarter than they are, but that is not why I bring it up - this is not a blog about essay-writing techniques.

What point I would much rather push is the idea that you shouldn't go out of your way to use big words for the simple reason that it gets in the way of your communication. Now, obviously, if you're referring to a very specific concept you want to get across with some accuracy, then by all means be as technical as need be, but if you're trying to say a very mundane thing in a very round-about way, then all you are doing is wasting time, wasting breath and wasting those precious words I was talking about before. Not only that, but all people should value the truth (I hold that to be a self-evident truth for the time being). If you are using words that your audience doesn't understand, then you are obscuring your argument; you not only make it harder to understand your sentences, you make it harder to understand your arguments, your points, and to do that is to obscure the truth. The truth is, in many cases, as plain as it is simple.

Am I saying you should never lie? Maybe yes, maybe no. That is not the point of this post. Am I saying that we should always be completely upfront and honest with people, no matter how they feel? Possibly, but again, that is not the point of this post. The point of this post is not what people say, but how they choose to say it, and how free they feel to do so. Save your words for things that need to be said. Be forceful. Let yourself have meaning in your speech, not only when you address a crowd or an authority, but at all times. Do not devalue your ideas by throwing them into a sea of nonsense and triviality that serves no purpose other than to alleviate some ill-founded notion of awkwardness, or social mores.

Or perhaps I'm just rambling.

Thursday's Thought for the Week: 24 Feb 2011

One of my favourite quotes of all time, and one that strikes me as being both extraordinarily deep and truthful without being particularly vague or cloudy is one of the so-called Socratic paradoxes, that no one does evil knowingly, which I believe is from The Apology by Plato. It might at first seem a strange thing to suggest, because it would seem on first inspection that people quite regularly do the wrong thing, and when they do so they are rarely in anything other than a perfectly conscious state of being with a complete awareness of their actions. To suggest therefore that the statement is obviously incorrect on these grounds is premature, however, for it manages to completely miss the point (indeed, anybody who has taken a philosophy class will see students claiming that an argument is obviously wrong and are perplexed at how anyone can disagree when they themselves are the ones to have missed the point through misinterpreting the argument, but I digress). The point is something I consider to be rather self-evident, in fact, and something few people would take umbrage with, and is that when a person does the wrong thing, they are not intending to do something wrong, because to them and by their own system of judgement it would extremely illogical to do anything "wrong".

Perhaps I should explain more. Let's say that a person is hungry and steals a loaf of bread. In the eyes of the law they have done the wrong thing and it is unlikely that the perpetrator will be ignorant of that fact, but by the same token that person would also not be ignorant of their hunger and their need for food and, having weighed their obligation to the law against their survival instincts, went with stealing the bread. Whether they did in fact weigh the situation correctly is irrelevant; to the person in question, their actions were justified and so right. Another example: take the case of a man who kills his wife in a crime of passion. There certainly couldn't be said to be much weighing up of options and consequences in this example, but rather a straight-forward, momentary acquiescence to murderous rage. Certainly the man knows that on the whole it isn't a great idea to murder his wife, but at this point he is acting on his emotions alone. Why? Because he has learned through his life that his emotions are important and he needn't restrain himself from acting on them, supposing they are strong enough to warrant it. This is not a conscious matter, but a subconscious one. The man is aware of what he is doing, but he does not act knowingly because the rational part of his brain has gone on a momentary holiday, and logical notions of right and wrong have gone with it.

Keep this idea in mind for the moment, because I'm going to take you on a slight detour. Let's put aside philosophical notions of "right", "wrong", "good" and "evil" for now and look from a strictly legal standpoint. Consider a child who commits what would be considered a crime if performed by an adult. Perhaps the child is only five, but through a series of inactions causes a person's death; it would seem bizarre to say the least to charge the child with criminal negligence. Why is this so? Because five year olds are stupid? Perhaps... but what if it were a thirteen year old? To some extent at least, a child of the age of thirteen has sufficient understanding of the law to know that, say, stealing is wrong. Regardless, in this country as in most others, a thirteen year old would not be tried as an adult for theft (if at all). Why is this so? It's not a trick question, the answer is quite simple: minors are understood to lack sufficient responsibility to be held accountable for legal indiscretions. They are too young, too inexperienced, too naive, too innocent, too ignorant to know better. It would be as wrong to charge a young child with a crime as it would be to charge a dog (and would make as much sense too).

This notion can be cautiously extended to ethics. Just as children are ignorant of the law at a young age, so too are they ignorant of right and wrong, at least to some extent. This seems an uncontroversial point on the face of it, just as I think it is uncontroversial that ethics is a hazy and not yet fully understood subject, which is the reason why it seems so hard to agree on anything. But if our collective understanding of ethics is somewhat fuzzy, and a person could be forgiven for not having all the answers (none of us do, after all), then could they not be said to be ignorant, to some degree, of what is "truly" right and wrong? The connection here to the Socratic paradox should be evident now. What is actually the fact, or even if there is such a thing when it comes to morality, is understood by very few people, and even they disagree! In the face of such uncertainty, the natural response is to do what comes naturally; the person knows no better after all.

So if we can allow that people can in varying degrees be ignorant of right and wrong (and just about all consistent ethical systems will disagree on what right and wrong are) then it does not seem unreasonable to my eyes to extend the legal/ethical analogy from children to all people, supposing their ignorance is sufficient that they not be aware of what have done wrong. This may seem peculiar at first, but only if we imagine that everybody instinctively knows right from wrong, an absurd claim made an absurd number of times. That the law should need exist at all is strong evidence to the contrary. The beauty, in fact, of this humble proposal is that it can be executed by a person of any ethical system. If someone does wrong, don't chastise them, don't look down on them with disgust, don't expect them to do better next time. Instead, recognise that they act out of ignorance, forgive them for doing wrong unknowingly, and if possible try to help them learn. Regular practice will ease the ire you feel for those who act against you, which is sure to keep you humble, for the more often you force yourself to recognise the ignorance in others, the more likely you are to see it in yourself.