3 January, 2021 – Bill Bush
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight.
This reflection is about words – the power of words. My starting points are two traditional sayings.
Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me
and
The pen is mightier than the sword
Here we have two traditional sayings pulling in opposite directions: one asserting that words are insubstantial expressions that should have no power to hurt. Whereas the second saying seems to be asserting that words are instruments of power and violence.
Sayings like these are born out of years of folk wisdom. Surely they can’t both be right?
Our Christian theology is no stranger to contradictions like these sayings: how do we reconcile the blessing in the Sermon on the Mount of the Peacemakers and the blessing that Jesus left us: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you.” (John 14: 27) with his statement that:
“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword, for I have come to turn ‘a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in law against her mother-in law – A man’s enemies will be members of his own household (Matthew 10:32 – 34).
Such instances of apparent contradiction are at one and the same time both daunting and intriguing.
Well I don’t know about you but I have been hurt by words. Children have an exquisite capacity to fashion words as sharp and lethal as stilettos. And I defy any of us to claim that we have not been hurt by words as an adult. I keenly recall my rejection as a Lifeline counsellor. The pain of that was all the keener because the training course led us all to expect, that the respectful insightful process would inculcate the reflective self-awareness of one’s unsuitability. For me the message that I took away was that this group of people, to whom I had revealed so much, simply did not like me.
Then too were my efforts to develop some competence in public speaking. Fellow members of the group would critique our efforts in the presence of the whole group. On that particular day a colleague itemised in excruciating detail my failings that I could and did itemise to myself. He was entirely right but that didn’t allay the hurtful humiliation of the experience.
To experiences like that or to bullying at school, one is told to harden up, bear it and move on. Yes, but the memory of such exchanges lingers long after the scar of a childhood physical injury has disappeared or assumed the status of badge of honour.
And I keenly remember the hurt I have caused others. The interaction may have occurred under colour of duty. As a supervisor, I remember the tears in the eyes of someone in the course of an assessment. I knew he would not take it well so I tried immensely hard to frame what I said in the most constructive way I could but those tears told me the keenness of the hurt I caused him and their presence only added to his humiliation. Since we have parted he did not respond when I tried to reach out to him on the occasion of the death of a contemporary of ours – of one of our colleagues. I fear that he will hold against me for his life the fact that I bore witness to his vulnerability.
So words may not break my bones but they certainly can wound. The adage should be adjusted: we should not let words hurt us. We should have the insight to recognise their justice or to deny unjust or unkind comments the power to disrupt our peace of mind.
Peter, the beloved of Jesus who proclaimed with sincere conviction: Lord “I am ready to go with you to prison and to death” (Luke 22:33) yet after the cock crowed thrice “The Lord turned and looked straight at Peter.” (Luke 22:60). It is recorded that Peter “went outside and wept bitterly” (Luke 22:62). Are we permitted to ponder the hurt Jesus felt in that moment of supreme loneliness?
So words can hurt us if we let them but surely words cannot rival the sword in their might. Don’t jump to that conclusion quickly. The regulations of The Uniting Church refer to “Ministers of the Word” a succession of whom have served this congregation. True, I don’t recall any presiding with a broadsword at the hip; nor does the description fading violet fit any of them. They used words to effect.
In the public sphere I can recall instances of the missuse of words. Here my culture comes in. In Australia our culture respects free speech that over my lifetime has seen it wax even as the application of the law of blasphemy has waned: remember the Last Temptation of Christ, the Life of Brian and Piss Christ? I don’t mind admitting some of that I found offensive. Even so, I carried my freewheeling Australian culture to Malaysia where I spent 2 ½ years teaching as an Australian Volunteer Abroad and found a troubling constraint on freedom of political expression in a society riven by ethnic divides that on May 13th 1969, less than two years before my arrival, had seen violent outpourings of ethnic and religious hatred that some of you may still shudder to remember.
The ruling Malay Government had no hesitation in pointing to words being implicated in that madness: the delicate balance between races: the insecurity of the Malay sons of the soil made to feel like strangers in their own land by the numbers and economic success of the Chinese and Indian immigrant communities.
Positive discrimination in favour of Malays entailed reduced opportunities for the Chinese and the Indians. Individual injustice was assessed to be the price of communal harmony. Pointing out this was off limits. A radical Opposition leader was detained under Internal Security Legislation dating back to British colonial times.
These constraints around free-speech offended Australian sensibilities championed by Don Chipp. I remember thinking that this smacked of a holier than thou approach that was a bit rich coming from my own country that still embraced the White Australia Policy.
I found myself in a country torn just as I was between values: between the liberal value of free-speech that in Australia was said to embrace: the ”the right of people to say what you don’t like, not just the right of people to say what you do like”.
Here I felt myself in that taut borderland encapsulated by the bidding of the Angels: “on earth peace to men on whom his favour rests.” (Luke 2:14) Clearly the angels did not mean peace to everyone. I paraphrase the bidding to mean “peace on earth to all people of goodwill”.
Jump 45 years forward from Malaysia to the introspective furore in Australia wrestling with whether to amend section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. That act stood as recognition that free-speech might have to be constrained.
It can’t be in the United States. The Second Amendment to the Constitution makes free-speech an absolute value no matter how hurtful that speech may be.
Opposition leader, Mr Abbott, described free-speech as a “sacred principle”. “Any suggestion you can have free speech as long as it doesn’t hurt people’s feelings is ridiculous.” In government his Attorney General told Parliament that people “do have a right to be bigots”.
The government had sought to replace the words “offend, insult or humiliate” in section 18C with the term “harass” – which others feared would have substantially eroded the current protections against hate speech.
Tony Abbott defended his absolutist view of free-speech on the ground that this freedom was of the essence of democracy. A couple of years on and we are seeing how unconstrained free-speech has the capacity to destroy the fabric of democracy.
In the hands of people of ill will, words can insinuate themselves into the fault lines of any society destroying the common cultural underpinnings that provide the resilience without which social cohesion is impossible.
Always remember that the cultural underpinnings of democracy and social norms take an age to develop, but can be torn down in a trice.
The devil led Jesus to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour. He told him, “all this I will give you if you will bow down and worship me” (Matthew 4:8).
Today the devil would have offered Jesus the tools of social media. All you have to do is to rile people up enough “because anger disrupts the ability to seek, rationalise and weigh information.” (76). Create a sense of grievance and play on it. In the United States Fox News audiences were told “they are part of a group of ‘ordinary Americans’”(76) who are put upon by policies that favour minorities. “Fox works because it grafts an identity onto the minds of viewers, who then begin to interpret a debate about ideas as an attack on their identity. . . . In this condition “alternative viewpoints actually strengthen the audience’s resolve in their original belief, because they sense a threat to their personal freedom. . . . The more entrenched the audience’s views . . . the angrier they became” (77).
Riled up one can understand how attempted analysis of racial discrimination and fake news can be dismissed as an attack on one’s own identity. It is all too easy for the devil to win in this world of social media just as he prevailed on Herod to slaughter the toddlers.
And this intrudes into this year’s Christmas Bowl appeal. Not only has democracy in the United States and the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom been subverted but so has the Rohingya refugee crisis been fomented. Religion was the fault line in Burma – the Buddhist majority versus the Muslim Rohingya minority.
“In August 2017, hate speech surged on Facebook targeting the Rohingya . . . with narratives of a ‘Muslim-Free’ Mayanmar and a call for ethnic cleansing of the region went viral. Much of this was propaganda created and disseminated by military personnel conducting information operations. After Rohingya militants launched a coordinated attack on the police, the Burmese military capitalised on a surge in support they received online and proceeded to systematically kill, rape and maim tens of thousands of Rohingya. Other groups joined in the slaughter, and calls to action to murder Rohingya continued to go out on Facebook. Rohingya villages were burned and more than 700,000 Rohingya refugees were forced across the border into Bangladesh. Facebook was warned repeatedly by international and local organisations about the situation in Mayanmar. The company banned a Rohingya resistance group from the platform but left the military and pro-government groups on the site, which enabled them to continue spreading hate propaganda. This was despite what United Nations officials called a ’textbook example of ethnic cleansing’.
“In March 2018, the UN concluded that Facebook had played a ’determining role’ in the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya people. Violence was enabled by Facebook’s frictionless architecture, propelling hate speech through a population at a velocity previously unimaginable.” (226 – 27).
So I think the answer is clear as to whether the pen is mightier than the sword. So too is the Christian answer as to how the word can be mightier: that answer is in the lectionary reading for today:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God; 3 all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. 4 In him was life,[a] and the life was the light of men. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7 He came for testimony, to bear witness to the light.
9 The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world. 10 .
14 And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth;
AMEN