Refudiate

Oh my stars, I’m agreeing with Sarah Palin. Thus surely shall the world end.

Let us not for a moment pretend that our language is static. New words are added to various dictionaries every year, and every year old, no-longer-used words are removed. Sometimes the meaning of a word shifts over time (which is why “flammable” and “inflammable” mean the same thing), sometimes words are created from other words (anyone enjoying a “staycation” this year?), and sometimes a word is born from simple human mistake. (The word “glamor” is actually a 10th century corruption of “grammar,” reflecting a belief that people who could read and write were thought to have almost-magical powers, a meaning that has itself drifted with time.) Languages are fluid things, with lifespans (the Ako-Bo language of India’s Andaman Islands was declared extinct just this year). And although I have a particularly extensive knowledge of current spelling and grammatical rules in English, I have always been perfectly willing to break those rules when an occasion seems to call for it. (One of my heroes, Bernard Shaw, devised a grammatical system entirely his own, eliminating most uses of apostrophes, for instance, so that he wrote “isnt” rather than “isn’t.”)

Recently, Governor Palin tweeted the following:

Peaceful New Yorkers, pls refudiate the Ground Zero mosque plan if you believe catastrophic pain caused @ Twin Towers site is too raw, too real

Yes, we liberals are tempted to snicker. Plenty of us are snickering. But here’s the lie (actually there are two, but I’m going to focus on one): the ones snickering don’t actually give a damn about the sanctity of the language, they’re simply doing it to score points against Ms. Palin’s policies. No great surprise, but it’s unjust and unfair and dishonest, and I don’t care who’s doing it, a lie is a lie and my job here is to call people out on lies. Even if that means taking the side of Sarah Palin.

(By the way: the second lie came when Governor Palin went back and corrected her tweet so that it says “refute,” which is correct. [Although “repudiate” would have actually been the better choice.] The usual practice with such things is to leave the original as it was and to add a notation afterward that the usage was in error, or that new information has been received. She should have done that. But it’s an easily-understood, human temptation to want to simply fix something so silly rather than have it live out there, so I’m really not bothered by it at all.)

But then a little later, the Governor tweeted this, as justification:

“Refudiate,” “misunderestimate,” “wee-wee'd up.” English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!

Okay, now she’s pushing it. Yes, Shakespeare did indeed make up new words. (And for that matter, in Shakespeare’s time even spelling was more fluid than it is today—there are multiple spellings of the Bard’s own name that survive, including “Shackspere” and “Shaxpere.”) But inventing words in a literary context, where the invention is deliberate and considered (see Shakespeare, see Joyce, and so on) is a very different thing from using a word incorrectly in a political context and then trying to pretend that it wasn’t a mistake but was instead part of some grand tradition of linguistic invention. That’s simply politics piled on top of politics; a lie on top of another lie. (Like turtles, they go all the way down.) There’s also a difference between Ms. Palin and the second President Bush, both of whom “coined” new words because they don’t particularly know or care about the language except to the extent that it can be used as a political tool, and Obama’s “wee-wee’d up,” an odd expression to be sure but no one doubts that this president understands the language and sometimes uses it colloquially (and deliberately, with consideration) for effect. Language is a living thing, yes, but politics is still politics and let’s please not pretend that it ain’t.

Okay, good. I’ve managed to work my way back around to criticizing Sarah Palin. I feel much better now.

The Big Lie

There is no such thing as heresy. No such thing as a “wrong thought.” You might take an action that society as a whole has deemed wrong, like killing a person, but I must maintain that the idea of killing a person is only wrong when put into action. (How many times have you thought “I’m gonna kill that sonofabitch” but not actually done it? Thousands of times, probably. This is okay, it’s really truly okay.)

Thought has to remain free. As in Socratic dialogue, it’s the tension between orthodoxy and what is labeled heresy that ultimately yields new ideas, new truths. If orthodoxy is never challenged, it stagnates and dies (and does a lot of damage in the process); and heresy is only heretical when it has an orthodoxy against which it can push. (Galileo springs to mind here.) The Catholic church tried very hard, through the burning of heretics and so forth, to suppress what it considered wrong thought; the Protestant Reformation happened anyway, and it can be argued that it happened more forcefully because of the attempts to suppress it. Thousands of lives, horribly wasted (burning, hanging, disemboweling, the whole bloody host of inventive ways they found to make someone not only die, but die hideously), all in a fruitless attempt to suppress an idea.

Let me be as clear as I possibly can:

The only way to effectively counter an idea is with a better idea. Period.

I bring this up because I was watching a documentary the other day, and one of the people interviewed said something that resonated: “We are dying of literalism.” By literalism, she meant all those groups that believe in, and take action on, the notion that only a literal reading of primary religious texts can be accepted. Jesus literally walked on water because the Gospels of John, Matthew and Mark say he did; Jerusalem must belong to the Muslims because the 17th sura of the Quran tells us that it was in Jerusalem that Muhammad began his night journey. And so forth.

These literalist groups include the jihadists who plotted and carried out the attacks of September 11th, influenced by—and taking action because of—the work of Sayyid Qutb, who wrote “The Prophet—peace be on him—clearly stated that, according to the Shari'ah, ‘to obey’ is ‘to worship.’ . . . Anyone who serves someone other than God [i.e., any secular government] in this sense is outside God's religion, although he may claim to profess this religion.” It also includes the current Texas GOP Party Platform, which declares that the party supports “the historic concept, established by our nations’ founders, of limited civil government jurisdiction under the natural laws of God, and repudiates the humanistic doctrine that the state is sovereign over the affairs of men, the family and the church.”

The original documents come from God and are therefore infallible. Anything that comes after is the work of man and therefore fallible. Thus thousands of years of thought get discarded instantly, and millions of “heretics” die in support of rigid orthodoxy. All in pursuit of something that only pretends to be truth, but is more pernicious than that: certainty. And, of course, that other word that begins with a C: control.

My overwhelming problem with the Bible is its endless emphasis upon blind obedience. Here I focus upon the Bible only because it is the text with which I am most familiar, but I’m pretty confident that the Quran has this flaw as well. (Certainly Qutb believes it does, except that to him blind obedience is not a flaw but an imperative.) Here’s the example that really leaped out at me when I read it, coming from probably my least favorite book of the Bible, Leviticus (Chapter 10): the sons of the high priest Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, perform a ceremony wrong. They offer incense in an “unlawful” manner. And for this, God burns them to death.

What do I take from this? Don’t interpret. Don’t think for yourself. Don’t ever dare to try something different from the way it has always been done. Individual thought and initiative will be punished; blind conformity will be rewarded.

It is impossible to overstate the enormity of my reaction against such a lesson. And the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, is full of this crap. Samson is told, do not allow anyone to cut your hair. The hair has nothing to do with anything, it’s just an arbitrary instruction, a way for YHWH to test his subject’s obedience. But of course Samson blabs, the hair gets cut, and so God strips him of his great strength and allows him to be captured and tortured. That’s what disobedience will get you. And of course Samson, suffering greatly, then relents and conforms, and is given his strength back—so that he can then get bloody, un-Christlike revenge on his tormentors (and die himself in the process).

Get thee hence from me! I care not for what thou wilt teach!

But for thousands, tens of thousands, millions of people, the Bible, the Torah and the Quran are the literal words of God and must be obeyed. Don’t worry about the parts that contradict each other, the priests will sort that out. Just obey. Only obey. Never think for yourself, never do anything but obey. And by the way, since the priests and rabbis and mullahs are chosen by God to carry out his will, you should go ahead and obey them too.

Which of course brings us to control. Once you’ve got your people conditioned to blind obedience, controlling them is easy. (That’s why Hitler created the cult of himself and insisted upon perfect loyalty. It worked like crazy.) The Palestinians already have a homeland, it’s called the Kingdom of Jordan. But they’ve been told that only the land currently called Israel is allowable in the eyes of God, and the result is decades of murders and reprisals and wars. (Similarly, the Israelis were offered other lands to settle after World War II, but only that land, the land promised to them by God, would do. With the results that we have seen ever since 1948.)

We are dying of literalism. And yes, I understand the whole notion of letting go your conscious self and surrendering to something greater, but the Buddhists manage this just fine without going out and killing thousands of people. (Well, mostly. There is such a thing as a “militant Buddhist,” believe it or not, which simply demonstrates that anyone can be lied to and manipulated, anyone can succumb to hideous literalism.)

There is nothing wrong with myths, nothing at all. We’ve been conditioned to think of a myth as something false, but it isn’t false, it’s simply a story that probably didn’t happen in real, literal life, but that nonetheless has instructive value. The tale of Icarus flying too close to the sun loses none of its resonance and power because it’s a myth—and the tale of Jesus walking on water wouldn’t either, if only we could detach it from dogma. If only people could accept that something doesn’t have to actually happen for it to be true.