Essay
Character
Comment
Language
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.  

Article
Character
Comment
Freedom
Politics
4 min read

Elon will learn that speech is never free

We see the cost of our words in our daily lives.
Elon Musk, wearing a t-shirt slouches forward, holding a mic, while sitting on a stage chair.
Musk, not talking.
Wcamp9, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Nigel Farage presumably still believes Elon Musk a ‘hero’ for reintroducing absolutely free speech on X- despite the Billionaire concurrently suggesting that Farage isn’t cut out to lead the UK’s Reform party. If he is truly committed to the free speech cause, Nigel should welcome this verbal attack from Musk as proof that he can take what he often gives out.  

This turn of events demonstrates free speech to be a misnomer. Whatever we say - and do - is never free, and always has a price to pay. Farage and Reform ended up paying the embarrassing cost of Musk’s pointed comments this time round, bemused by the volte-face from the man who was in talks to donate to Reform just weeks ago. 

We see the cost of our words in our daily lives. Saying ‘sorry’ costs us our pride, saying ‘thank you’ costs us our independence, saying ‘I forgive you’ costs us our chance at revenge, giving a compliment costs us a battle with our own insecurities, and so on. And these are positive words- the verbal price is plainer to see when we have caused hurt, upset, or distress. I am grieved often by a thoughtless or hurtful comment given or received.  

The impact of Musk’s words on Farage is clear to see, but there is also an impact on Musk’s inner life. This is the hidden cost of negative speech; the speaker poisons themselves with the negativity they are channelling in what they say. A Hebrew proverb states that ‘death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruits.’ Continuous negative speech will twist a person entirely in on themselves, slowly reducing any capacity to love or bear goodness. Eventually the tongue dictates the whole person; what victimising speech comes out is the sum total of the defiled heart that propels it. There is little ability to pull back- what was once a conscious choice to engage in vitriol has become the unconscious reflex of a vitriolic heart. 

Advocates of uncensored speech are usually trying to say something society does not generally accept, and therefore often something extremist. Recognising there is great cost to hurtful speech both to the speaker and the target might encourage those tempted to vent their deepest fears in the form of insult to consider again the power of the tongue.  

Questioning Farage’s politics may not be an extremist thought, but we must pay attention to the fact that the ‘hero’ of free speech, Musk, appears to have fallen out with Farage because of their differing opinions on Tommy Robinson, the extremist whom Musk has continued to platform and refused to censor. Farage has distanced himself from Robinson and seemingly incurred Musk’s wrath. Furthermore, Musk’s vile comments over the weekend about Keir Starmer and Jess Phillips demonstrates that repeated insults curate a dark heart. 

Perhaps we should not be surprised that Musk seems to be on a concurrent campaign to disrupt democracy as he tries to advocate a total absence of censorship. The role of democracy is to protect minorities; the reason we trust elected officials to vote laws in for us is to protect those unlike us from mob rule. In our society, our elected officials should be protecting the migrants, refugees, ethnic minorities, criminals, the disabled, those unable to work, and any others who are ripe for victimisation by wider society.  

These protections, the rule of law, and the court system, means we can live together without our basest human instincts for violence ruling our better judgements. Ours is a society built on biblical principles, and the care for the foreigner and the poor is found continuously from cover to cover of that book. Not only does democracy offer a system of government that offers the protection of the law, but it also incorporates universally just principles with regards protecting minorities. 

This is the reason that free speech is curbed to an extent in Britain by the ability to prosecute hate speech. Our elected officials have decided that the cost of some speech is too high to pay. This is not a totalitarian imposition, but a recognition that in an internet age, hateful opinions spread too quickly and too visibly to be tolerated. 

In order to attempt to curate a society of gentler and healthier hearts, we should turn to the teacher whose words operated exclusively in grace and truth. Jesus recognised that speech was not free, saying on one occasion that each person would have to account for their careless words before God on the day of judgement. Deeper than even the consequences for our own selves and the recipients in the immediate moment, this eternal cost should remind us of the responsibility to use our words wisely and to deal in truth, encouragement, and wise critique.  

All our words have tariffs - Jesus’ earthly life was full of negative reactions to his speaking the truth. And yet, for ourselves, for our societies, and for those who need protection from hatred: we must think twice before we speak. For our words cost more than we will know in this life. 

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