He was here a minute ago
A demanding couple of weeks got me away from my ongoing reflection on words, but I find myself coming back to this basic element of the communication and consideration that marks us as human beings.
Our public language has been leached of all moral content, and this privation has been transferred to our personal conversation and our institutions. The classic example is the misapplication of the word tragedy, which came to my attention twenty-four years ago when an archbishop of my acquaintance described the 9/11 attacks as a “tragedy.” Indeed, that day brought tragic consequences to the lives of people affected, but that was no tragedy – that was an attack and a crime. These words have moral weight and acknowledge and assign guilt. 9/11 was not an assortment of consequences, but rather an action with an agent who committed a crime, and not only by breaking a statute or law.
Such verbal sleight of hand appears also after such an action, further hiding or ignoring the true nature of what occurred. If a widow says “the days since the death of (my) husband” have been hard, she is being charitable and preserving her own equanimity. But if what happened is more accurately and more fully described and the dead man’s murder, then most likely the motives for using a value-neutral term “death,” as if it was from a cerebral aneurysm rather than a bullet fired in malice, are mixed at best. Using value-free terms shifts the action and therefore the responsibility to the one who died rather than the ones who inflicted death upon him.
This shifting of responsibility has been underway in our discourse for decades. If our society cannot call a murderous terrorist attack by its proper name, how can we order our behavior as members of society? When we focus simply on the consequences of an action, especially the emotional consequences, we ignore agency and intention and fail to identify the real responsibility. When our strongest term of approbation is to say that an action is inappropriate, or that people are not comfortable with it, we have lost the ability to teach our children basic morals. When these words express our evaluation of actions, they shape the evaluation of actions. Everyone reduced to using these terms becomes impoverished of the moral faculties that are proper to responsible human beings.
This poverty is what we cannot survive, and what we dare not bequeath to our children. At our most recent meeting, the school principal and I were considering an intentional change of the words we use in defining and addressing student behavior. Common terms like inappropriate do not accomplish the instruction and formation that we are obliged to give the children and the families of our community, and do not allow the teachers and administrators to hold their charges or themselves to the moral excellence to which they and we are called.
Right and wrong, good and bad, generous and selfish are objective criteria that we have the faculties to discern and to define. Immoral is just as discernible and just as definable and hurtful. Forbidden is a term that has real weight whether is it situational (touching a newly frosted birthday cake) or absolute (other kinds of touching). These words need to come readily to our lips when we speak of human actions, including our own. We need these words to decide what we can and should do, and to teach others who depend on us for guidance what they can and must do.
Conversations about what actions are right and good and what actions are wrong and bad should indeed happen in serious reflection and mutual charity. But we who live in Christ Jesus have been given the treasury of truth revealed by God that is the absolute standard and ultimate foundation of every evaluation and action. We cannot demand that the whole society accept this whole truth, but neither can we accept the demand that there be no moral evaluation, no personal guilt nor innocence, no obligation or responsibility, but only perceptions and expectations that are completely fungible. The only tool we have for exploring and explaining reality as a society is the most marvelous tool we have, and that is words. When words cease to obtain, we cease to live as human beings.
Monsignor Smith
