My friend Fish wrote an interesting piece on the decay of language, inspired by the miniseries The Tudors. What impressed him most about the show was the language – how the courtiers spoke with such elegance and precision, and how much more they were able to communicate. He found himself feeling conflicted: he would love to speak more like them, use his whole vocabulary to get more of his meaning across, rather than speak within the limits of the common work vocabulary — but to do so, he would have to use unfamiliar words, and suffer being understood even even less precision that if he’d stuck with crude, everyday words.

He’s stuck with a choice: speak precisely and be understood with no precision at all, or speak imprecisely and at least be understood a little.

The paradox: The more precisely he speaks, the less precisely he is understood.

He then goes a little deeper:

There is another paradox, however, that fascinates me even more; how language is at once the vessel to new rational understanding and the horizon that bounds our ability to conceive. It is both the device of perception and the blinder.

… The very construct that we use to break through our boundaries and create new communicable understanding is also the barrier that we must break through if we are to mature our intellectual capabilities as a species.

This is probably my favorite problem in the whole world. Luckily, it’s a very popular problem. I’ve put a lot of work into studying other people’s responses to it, and tried answering it myself, looking for clues in my own experience that point to new ways to ask the question that might yield even clearer, more productive answers.

Basically, what Fish is talking about here is the problem of totalities. Each of us has a range of personal experiences, which we understand with concepts, articulated with words.

We all share a world of common phenomena and we also share a language, or at least a subset of this language. When the shared language is attached directly to the shared phenomena, it’s pretty easy to communicate meaning unambiguously. Because it is easy, everyone can participate and come to agreements. Because there is so little controversy in this realm, the continuity of what we are able to share readily is more or less unbroken, and we can achieve almost perfect consensus. This sphere of being can be called “gross reality” (also called ontic truth, to use a precise term that nobody understands until they really need it).

In the realm of gross reality, there is room for almost infinite degrees of precision, but these degrees themselves are also understood in principle by all. There are animals, but more precisely there are dogs, there are terriers, there are Jack Russell terriers, and there are wire-coat Jack Russell terriers, etc. In this realm, most reasonably disagreements center around either precision of category, or the criteria of inclusion for a particular category. Of course, there are also unreasonable disagreements — that is, disagreements over the existence or nonexistence of a phenomenon — but these disagreements raises questions of personal credibility of the dissenter, and the answer in these cases is nearly always sheer dishonesty or insanity.

So, if we want to communicate more precisely in this realm, it’s generally pretty smooth going. People might think you’re a pedantic jackass if you cry out “Behold! A single wire-coat Jack Russell terrier stands before before us in the road, directly in the path of this 2010 Mazda3 with a 2.0 litre engine, of which you are the driver! Apply the breaks sharply!” When you could have yelled “AAAAGH! DOG!” But while and the driver you are scooping the dog guts over to the side of the road, you’ll have no trouble explaining what distinguishes the various breeds of terriers, because the concept of a breed of dog is accessible to anyone over the mental age of four.

And this is why 95% of the population equate gross reality with reality. It’s easy to talk about and to reach agreement on. For most, reality equals gross reality; everything else is “subjectivity” — an arbitrary and ghostly world of whim, about which little can be said but “there’s no accounting for taste.”

And it is here that culture starts swirling down the shitter. Because in the end it is subjectivity we most need to share if we are going to have real friendships, if we are to make appeals to one another for cooperation, if we are going to share any sort of Why. It’s shared subjectivity that really binds us and makes us feel like human beings among human beings, at home in the world.

But in the subtler realms of being misunderstandings are much harder to work out. We all know how to ask questions about gross reality: What is this? How does it behave under various conditions? How do we predict what it will do? All that.

But once we start trying to make sense of the rest of reality — that which transcends phenomena and our conventions around phenomena — we often have have trouble even indicating even what we are trying to mean. We can’t even get the sense of our statements across. “What the hell are you talking about?”

To someone has never raised a particular question, an answers to it will sound like nonsense. Or it will make total sense — but the wrong sense. For instance, there are people out there who read Genesis 1 as a scientific treatise, positing rival theories to the Big Bang and evolution. Why? Because they’ve got no mode of understanding besides gross reality. They only know how to ask: “How did all these objects come to exist?”

This is why atheists and fundamentalists love to fight with each other. They’re both limited to thinking about gross reality. They don’t even understand what serious theologians are talking about, so they just exclude them from their debates, and go after it with hammer and tongs, thesis-versus-antithesis, in comfortingly fruitless circles.

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Many people have tried to connect Why to gross reality. They point to brain biology, to the fundamental needs of organisms in general, to evolution, to emergent properties of the purely physical — but all this is driven by the need to share Why, and the rules of the game dictate obedience to reality.

It is this kind of rule that is fucking us. The rule was born from the belief that gross reality is reality. And following this rule makes it difficult or impossible to think outside the horizon of gross reality. This is the structure of morality. It is a pattern of behavior and belief that self-stabilizes and self-perpetuates.

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There are many more of these rules of morality, ethics and etiquette — many tacit, and nearly all unconsidered — that secure the horizon and blind us to everything over its edge, and warn us not to go peek over the edge where “there be dragons.”

And this is what all those goony postmodern people are always going on and on about. And most of them are students who have only become experts on what other people have said about all this stuff, who haven’t encountered these realities in full force in daily life. But despite the confident claims of presumptuous ignoramuses they are talking about real stuff, and once you’ve learned the unfamiliar vocabulary and the unfamiliar concepts it actually helps make much better and deeper sense of the world.

And that’s what I’ve been trying to do most of this decade: Point some of these concepts (if not the words) to experiences people have every day in the workplace and say: Hey, that — that experience you are having right now, that we are all having, that we have all had before — that’s not some ‘subjective’ accident — that is a real, universal, recurring experience, and it can and ought to have a name…”

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The words I’ve used more than any other is anxiety — and anxiety’s extreme, perplexity.

It is anxiety that signals the approach of the edges of our protective-confining linguistic fortress walls. It is perplexity that announces we have succeeded in breaking, through. For our hard efforts we are rewarded with intolerable disorientation, frustration, irritation, darkness, loss of sanity — pretty much everything a normal person would kill to avoid. And we get freedom. Freedom ain’t free.

*

It is anxiety that hides behind the colleague’s ridicule of fancy intellectual language, and attempts to articulate unusual, “useless” concepts. Notice: we are forced to use words and concepts by which nothing new can be communicated.

It is anxiety that has invented the etiquette of listening, that we must take short turns speaking and listening. Notice: the tit-for-tatting must be rapid enough that nothing new can be said.

It is anxiety that demands that we consider the listener and use only nomenclature, metaphors and mental models with which they are already familiar. To say: “it’s not what you say, it’s what other people hear” usually means, it is rude and maybe immoral to challenge the other. Notice: we are required to dumb it down for comfortable consumption.

It is anxiety that hides behind the famous, brusque impatience of the C-level executive. They have no tolerance for what stands outside the domain of their mastery. They’ve got the gist and a gist is good enough. “Execute, execute! Don’t think! Do!” Blah, blah, blah. They’re intellectual cowards, hiding behind heroic, brainless, endless action. We are only allowed to speak in elevator pitches, executive summaries, graphs, backs of napkins…

The collective C-mind is well protected from the painful insights of the A-students and all their irritating, irrelevant, overprecise nonsense. It is precisely in the details, the irrelevance, the irritation where the challenge to the C-mind’s mastery lives. Notice: The collective C-mind is protected from ever confronting the limits of its own mastery… by its own resources.

The collective C-mind is the product of a long intellectual coddling that’s made him, not exactly stupid, but the master of a very tiny domain. And yes, that was a Seinfeld reference.

And we applaud this. Perhaps we applaud it because we, too, like to see this constriction re-affirmed.

We like to see the taboo against anxiety enforced.

We are anxious toward the other.

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We’ve been trained like animals against gross xenophobia, against any group who can be physically classified as different. We embrace diversity of pigmentation. But this only sublimates the xenophobic instinct, and makes it flow out toward spiritual difference.

*

So basically what I am saying is this: if you want to get beyond your own self-imposed linguistic limitations — and, by the way, this is not always advisable — you’ll have to learn to mistrust the gist.

It is not our gists that lead us beyond our horizons. On the contrary, our gists patrol our horizons. They drive around in steamrollers and flatten everything that tries to break through.

No — it is our anxiety…

… it is that suspiciously urgent boredom that wants to cut off conversations…

…it is the gas behind that artful logorrhea that holds its sphincter shut just long enough to be polite, then blows out a folksy and time-consuming tale of wisdom…

…it is the compulsion to interrupt, to talk over — louder and louder, la, la, la…

…it is the need to intimidate other people into being brief and nervous…

…it is what forces us to finish the other person’s sentence and seal it shut.

We’ve got to get a little braver and deeper if we want to stop destroying and start building up our culture. We’ve got to start interpreting anxiety differently. And we need to start interpreting gists differently — and all other refusals to hear.