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6 min read

Our language use is leading to a cultural abyss

We are witnessing a profound loss of commitment and discernment in the use of language, writes Oliver Wright.

After 15 years as a lawyer in London, Oliver is currently doing a DPhil at the University of Oxford.

Four rugby players stand and watch beside a referee gesturing with his arm.
Rugby players wait upon Wayne Barnes' word.
RFU.

The 2023 Rugby Union World Cup Final was one of the most iconic international matches in living memory, involving two of the most iconic teams – the All Blacks and the Springboks. It’s not surprising that after reaching such a pinnacle of a sporting career, there should be retirements that followed. But two retirements caught my eye. Not from players, but from referees: Wayne Barnes, the most experienced international referee in the world, the main match official, and Tom Foley, also highly experienced, the Television Match Official. Why? Wayne Barnes’s statement is particularly gracious and thoughtful. But the reason given in common with Tom Foley, and indeed many others in similar situations and similar high-pressure roles in the public eye, is worrying: online abuse. After the cup final, death threats were even sent to the school of Foley’s children.   

Online abuse has become an endemic, worldwide problem. There are real people issuing these threats and abuse; and there are real people receiving them, and responding in some way. Of course, there is also the problem of online ‘bots’. But they only succeed in their abuse because of their imitation of real abusers.  

It’s worth asking why, because we can go beyond the helpless handwringing of ‘the perils of being online’. There are philosophical and indeed theological reasons, and philosophical and theological ways, I suggest, of climbing out of the abyss.   

In fact, all words ‘act’ in some way. Even plain truth-describers assert something, such that an interlocuter can learn or discern for themselves. 

Let’s go back to the 1950s, when two important advances in the philosophy of language and in religious language occurred. The first came from Oxford, and the White’s Professor of Philosophy, J.L. Austin. The second came from Durham, and its then Bishop, Ian Ramsey.  

Austin, whose remarkable life and work has now been brilliantly documented for the first time in the biography by Mark Rowe (published by OUP, 2023) was a decorated Second World War veteran in the intelligence corps who was widely recognised as being one of the masterminds of the success of the D-Day Landings. On his return to Oxford in the late 1940s he perceived with great dissatisfaction a certain philosophical move which accorded the greatest importance in language to words and phrases which described things, which indicated some form of empirical truth about the world. For sure there were other kinds of use of language, religious language, emotional language, and so on, this argument continued. But that was fairly worthless. Describing cold hard scientific truth was the true utility for language.  

Austin’s most famous response was in his book How To Do Things With Words. The function of language goes way beyond the scientific description of the world. Language acts, it does things. We promise, we name, we cajole, we threaten, we apologise, we bet. There is no real ‘truth’ as such conveyed in such ‘speech-acts’. Their importance lies, rather, in what is thereby done, the act initiated by the words themselves. Or, in the Austin-ian jargon, the ‘illocution’ within the ‘locution’.   

But Austin realised something even more important as he investigated this form of language – these performative utterances. In fact, all words ‘act’ in some way. Even plain truth-describers assert something, such that an interlocuter can learn or discern for themselves. What matters is how ‘forceful’ the relevant act of speech is in each case. Sometimes the speech-act is very simple and limited. In other cases, such as threats, the performative aspect of the utterance is most forceful indeed.   

Austin’s student John Searle took the idea of performative language to America, and developed it considerably. Most notable for our purposes, however, over against Austin’s idea, was the separation of speech from act. By analysing the conventions and circumstances which surround the performance of a speech act – a baptism service for instance – we can observe how and why the act occurs, and how and why such an act might go wrong. But the debate was then divorced from the context of speakers themselves performing such actions, an integrity of speaker and action. The philosophical problem we then hit, therefore, is that a spoken word and the associated act (‘locution’ and ‘illocution’) are two entirely separate ‘acts’.  

Let’s move now from Oxford to the great Cathedral city of Durham. At the same time as Austin was teaching in Oxford, the Bishop of Durham Ian Ramsey – apparently unaware of Austin’s new theory of performatives – investigated religious language to try and get to grips with both how religious language does things, and what it says of its speakers and writers. Ramsey developed a two-fold typology for religious language – that of commitment and discernment. First, religious language implies two forms of commitment: there is the speaker/writer’s commitment of communicability, a desire to communicate, to be comprehensible, to ‘commune through language’; and the speaker/writer of religious language also  entertains prior commitments for the language adopted – language is rarely neutral when it comes to religion. Second, religious language implies a form of discernment about the words that are being invoked and for what purpose. They are not universals, but carry special meanings according to the particular conventions involved. Commitment and discernment.  

But this new innovation in the philosophy of religious language too was taken up and developed away from Ramsey’s idea – particularly in the much more famous work of John MacQuarrie, a Scottish philosophical theologian who spent much time teaching both in the States, and in Oxford. In MacQuarrie, writing at the height of the influence of thinkers such as Heidegger and Bultmann, Ramsey’s ‘commitment’ and ‘discernment’ got subsumed into existentialism and myth. The religious speech act became merely an event or an act for the self, a personal matter which might involve transformation, but might not.  

 These two strands, of the philosophy of language as it got taken up by Searle and his American counterparts, and of the philosophy of religious language as it got taken up by MacQuarrie, have for some time now predominated. And it is only recently that scholars on both sides have begun to perform a ressourcement, both on Austin, and on the nature of religious language in the wake of Bultmann.  

 The Twitter-sphere seems irrevocably to have divorced the bonds that tie speaker to their acts. In these fertile conditions, abuse flourishes. 

We can now return to the cases of Wayne Barnes and Tom Foley, and many others in many different walks of life just like them. Undoubtedly, the emotional, existential, and physical distance secured by interacting online has created the conditions for online abuse to flourish. But at a deeper level, what we are witnessing is a profound loss of commitment and discernment in the use of language, in society as a whole and also in the Church. Real people feel free to use language oblivious to any inherent act contained within it. The Twitter-sphere seems irrevocably to have divorced the bonds that tie speaker to their acts. In these fertile conditions, abuse flourishes. Similarly, in the Church, the commitment and discernment which has lain behind millennia of liturgical and doctrinal language has become a private spiritual matter; or indeed has been neglected in public when religious witness has not been matched between word and deed.  

How do we walk back from this cultural abyss? There is an ethical, and, potentially, a religious choice to make. The ethical choice is to think about what our language does to those who read (or hear) it, and to change the way we speak or write, accordingly. Ramsey's modes of ‘commitment’ and ‘discernment’. The religious dimension is to recognise that our words bind us to a system of belief, whether we like it or not. Saying one thing and doing another in a religious context implies a diminution in value of language for all concerned, not just the private life of the individual believer.  

Actions speak louder with words.  

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5 min read

I’m not sure Christopher Nolan has actually read The Odyssey

The director has drunk the Kool-aid of modernity, and done so deeply
the head of a classical statue looks up amid embers around it.
The odyssey poster.
Universal Studios.

Greek myths are full of hubris. Full of it. I feel like ‘hubris’ isn’t a word you hear very often anymore. It means excessive pride or self-confidence that leads to a downfall, in case you were wondering. “Boris Johnson’s hubristic underestimation of the effects of ‘Partygate’ was the final nail in his political coffin,” we might say.  

In one myth, Icarus is imprisoned, but given wings held together by wax in aid of his escape. He is warned not to fly too close to the sun, because the heat will melt the wax. Guess what he does? Yep! Flies too close to the sun. The wings melt and he falls to his death. Hubris

Another myth tells the story of Prometheus. No, not the slightly underrated Alien prequel. (That’s right, I said underrated, but that’s another article for another day). Prometheus defies the Greek gods by stealing fire and giving it to humans. As punishment, Zeus ties Prometheus to a rock and has an eagle eat his liver, only for it to grow back overnight so the eagle can come back the next day and start again. Hubris. 

Greek myths are full of hubris. Full of it. 

And so, this is why I find the new poster for Christopher Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of Greek epic The Odyssey so … bizarre. But then I’ve been nervous about Nolan’s adaptation since it was announced. Nolan is a wonderful filmmaker, but he’s also deeply naturalistic in the messages he conveys. By this, I mean that all his films suggest that nature – the physical, material world of atoms and things – is all there is. Even when he has opportunity to explore themes of the mystical, or magical, or the supernatural, he only does so when a purely ‘natural’ explanation for such things is possible.  

For example, in The Prestige (and HUGE spoilers for the film here: it’s incredible, please watch it if you haven’t), Nolan tells the story of two rival magicians, played by Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale. Robert Angier (Jackman) is trying to work out Alfred Borden’s (Bale) teleportation trick. The secret? (Seriously: big, big spoilers here). Science. Nikola Tesla has invented a device that can clone someone but send the clone to a different location. The trick – the mysterious MacGuffin at the film’s heart – has a natural, scientific explanation. Magic isn’t real and you’re a fool if you think otherwise. 

Perhaps this is also why Nolan directed the wonderful Dark Knight trilogy. After all, Batman’s superpower is just wealth: it’s entirely naturalistic, with nothing that can’t fit into a scientific way of understanding the world. Or we could point towards the science fiction that underwrites Inception, Interstellar, and Tenet. For a filmmaker so gifted at tension and intrigue, he has surprisingly little truck with mystique, mystery, and the divine. But this is a problem when it comes to The Odyssey. A huge problem.  

Let’s return to that poster I mentioned earlier. It shows the head of a classical Greek statue, flames ember underneath it. The caption? Defy the Gods. And it’s at this point I start to wonder if Nolan has actually read The Odyssey. Because The Odyssey takes questions of divinity and their authority very, very seriously. Like many Greek myths and poems, the message of The Odyssey isn’t ‘defy the Gods’. No: it’s ‘trying to defy the gods is an unbelievably stupid, futile, and dangerous thing to do’. Nolan would seemingly have us raze Mount Olympus to the ground.  

Look, all we have is a poster so far. Nolan might prove me wrong. But we shouldn’t be surprised if Nolan reworks The Odyssey in such a way that ‘defy the Gods’ becomes its central message. Because Nolan is a quintessentially modern filmmaker.  

In a 1965 book called Freud and Philosophy, French philosopher Paul Ricœur described the modern period as dominated by a climate of suspicion or scepticism. Within this ‘climate of thought’, the straightforward understandings of things are actually deceptive, instead hiding hidden, deeper, and ‘truer’ meanings. He described Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Karl Mark as the ‘masters of suspicion.’ And so the world around us is to be approached suspiciously, to uncover the ‘truer’ meanings about our subconscious (so Freud), our false, religiously imposed morals (so Nietzsche), or our exploitative economic systems (so Marx). 

Each of Ricœur’s ‘masters of suspicion’ might be mapped on to one of the villains in Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. Liam Neeson is Ra’s al Ghul, a Freud-like figure who helps Bruce Wayne navigate the psychological effects of his parents’ murders in childhood. Heath Ledger’s mesmeric Joker is Nietzsche’s stand-in, exposing our misguided systems and structures of ethics, tethered to a religious framework we no longer hold to. Tom Hardy’s Bane is Marx, freeing Gotham’s proletariat from the economic structures that oppress them so. 

It's not a perfect fit, but I think there’s more than enough evidence to say that Nolan has drunk the Kool-aid of modernity, and he has drunk so very deeply. And this would be fine – absolutely fine – if he wasn’t planning to adapt The Odyssey. Because, as a quintessentially modern filmmaker, Nolan’s work emerges out of and celebrates a culture wherein ‘defy the gods’ is a slogan that can only be heard as heroic, courageous, and noble, rather than dumb and futile, as The Odyssey would stress to us. 

Defying divinity is not heroic. The Odyssey knows this and knows it well. Defying the gods never ends well for humans stupid enough to try in Homer’s work. Our modern sensibilities encourage us to be suspicious of institutionalised power, especially when that power takes a religious shape. We are predisposed to imagine that invocations of the divine are nothing more than thinly-veiled power-grabs. And sometimes they are. But The Odyssey is right to say that divinity itself is not to be trifled with. Renounce your creator at your peril. 

Like all his other films, Nolan’s The Odyssey is likely to be tense, wrought, and cinematographically immaculate. But also like his other films, I worry it will be deeply naturalistic in the way it handles the inescapably divine and supernatural elements present in Homer’s epic. The Odyssey has an important message for our increasingly hubristic society. I just worry that Nolan’s not the man to convey it as it deserves. 

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