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.

Oliver Wright

Oliver is a Junior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford, writing and speaking about theology and AI.

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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11 December 2023

6 min read

For want of better words... the impact of the indescribable

Confronted with a question about belief, Henna Cundill found herself stumbling for words. She contemplates the link between our self-identity and what we can communicate.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

A woman stops in her stride down a street and pensively runs her hand through her hair as she looks to the side.

Joseph Frank on Unsplash.

I recently got into conversation with a young man who asked me, “Do you believe in God?” When I replied, “Yes,” I almost regretted it, because his next move was to ask, “Why?” and I found this question troublingly difficult to answer.

Of course, I could have dredged up the old philosophical arguments for the logical existence of God – but none of that would have really captured the thing I have no words for. Belief is like… Oh, what is it like? A glitch… no, a glimmer… no, like a glimpse of… No. Goodness. What is it? I’m lost for a word or even a metaphor that will somehow express what it feels to say “yes” and “I believe in God” and in that moment, even if only for a moment, to feel oneself transported or transposed out of this tiresome, human existence and into something that is... well, it’s something…

I think it's fair to say that conversations about believing in God are unusual these days, especially when the circumstance is an 18-year-old lad talking with a woman in her late 30s – albeit the lad in question was a philosophy undergraduate and we were at Cumberland Lodge, where such conversations are welcomed amongst those of all faiths and none. Even so, it still felt rather unusual to be asked a question like that, not out of hostility but just casually over dinner, and to see him genuinely and respectfully interested to hear what I might have to say in response.

Eventually I did come up with some kind of an answer; I can’t remember what. And naturally, I turned the question back on him. Turns out he did believe in God, in fact he was Jewish, so he stumbled out some kind of answer too, but I think it's fair to say that he was hardly more erudite than I was. Eventually, we both agreed that it was rather difficult to describe the indescribable, and our conversation turned to rather easier topics - the food, the weather, geopolitics...

There is a loneliness to the feeling that there is a bit of ourselves that cannot be valued because it cannot be shared, and it is hard to recognise a part of our inner world as ‘real’ and valid if it cannot be communicated and affirmed.

The question of believing in God was done with. Yet here I am weeks later, still pondering why it was so hard for me to articulate what it means to live with that belief, and why that part of the conversation ended, but still felt so unfinished.

Has faith always been so indescribable? I suspect it rather has not. These dark evenings always tend to lure me to my bookshelves, seeking out my “comfort books” that I read and reread year after year. Mostly cosy fiction of course, but alongside those, a non-fiction favourite is Sheila Fletcher's, Victorian Girls: Lord Lyttleton’s Daughters. The book is a fascinating study of a family of young women in the Victorian era, faithfully compiled from their own real letters and diaries, so that the voices of Meriel, Lucy, Lavinia and May Lyttleton themselves can all be heard clearly on every page. I just love to read this book over and over again, entering into the hopes, sorrows, loves and ambitions of these young women – so similar and yet so different to my own.

One thing that stands out particularly is how clearly and easily they each articulate their sense of faith. They were, of course, heavily schooled in Victorian public piety, but there is most certainly a real faith there too. A favourite passage of mine is an excerpt from the teenage diary of Lucy Lyttleton, recounting the day of her Confirmation. She speaks of a ‘nice and stilling’ drive to church, with her parents either side in the carriage, and then:

I seem to remember nothing very distinctly till I went up and knelt on that altar step, feeling the strangest thrill as I did so… and I know how I waited breathlessly for my turn, with the longing for it to be safe done, half feeling that something might yet prevent it.

Oh, to be so thrilled by a religious ritual, and to have both the words and the courage to write about it. After all Lucy, what if someone might be reading your diary 150 years later?

In mainstream society nowadays, most of us simply don't talk about faith, religion, and what it all means to us personally in that way. It’s not the done thing in a (presumed) secular society. Consequently, it is now very hard to write about it too. Yet, many philosophers in the past century have observed a link between our self-identity and what we can communicate. For example, philosopher Charles Taylor describes how our sense of ‘self’ is formed in “webs of interlocution” wherein what we take to be “good” relies on what we can effectively talk about, and thus have affirmed by those we talk to. If we turn Taylor’s idea around, might we say that when there are parts of ourselves that we cannot talk about, parts for which we cannot find social recognition and affirmation, then we cease to value those parts of ourselves as good, or may cease to recognise them at all?

With that comes a sense of isolation. There is a loneliness to the feeling that there is a bit of ourselves that cannot be valued because it cannot be shared, and it is hard to recognise a part of our inner world as ‘real’ and valid if it cannot be communicated and affirmed.

To me it feels that, as we talk about faith less and less, and as the language of faith becomes ever more confined, not even just to private conversations but to our own inner worlds, our “webs of interlocution” are beginning to shrink and disintegrate – until believing in God can feel more like dangling on a loose and solitary strand than being part of any kind of web. It’s a lonely place to be – there is a part of me that feels important, but no one can affirm it.

And yet, by simply asking the question of each other, and being ready to listen respectfully to whatever answer was forthcoming, it seems that me and a teenage lad managed to connect two lonely strands together. It was of no consequence that we worship in different faith traditions, or that neither of us really found the words to say what we wanted to say – a conversation took place, and a certain web of interlocution started to form. For some, reading this, there may be a feeling of resonance, or a moment of understanding, and perhaps that too adds a little to the web, as different people’s words and thoughts and experiences begin to connect across different times and places.

Webs do more than just create connection; webs capture things too. Perhaps, as this web spreads between different readers and thinkers and speakers, that’s what will happen to this question of believing in God. After a certain point, such a web may even become large enough and robust enough to finally start to capture some useful words, or an apt metaphor, that will really help me to say something about what it means to have faith. To be able to say it is to be able to share it, and in these lonely times, being able to say something is really not nothing.