David McElroy

How confident are you that you understand what I write? Are you certain that you know exactly what I mean — and that your understanding can’t be mistaken? I wrote Sunday about the difficulties involved when humans communicate — how a message can be completely misunderstood because of the difficulty of moving a message from the abstract of one person’s brain to the abstract of another person’s brain through the medium of words.

Rarely have I ever seen someone so completely prove my point by disagreeing with me. The response that someone wrote is funny and ironic, so I want to share it with you as evidence of what I was saying. Sunday afternoon, a friend shared my article about communication on her Facebook page. A friend of hers shared it to his own page in order to write a rebuttal. Here’s what he wrote:

Since I am well convinced that David McElroy, in this clearly argued and written piece, perfectly communicated exactly the point he wanted to make and that I understood it perfectly well, McElroy’s own thesis — namely that objective communication in human language is defect, “imperfect” and semi-impossible — is thereby refuted. He commits the “self-reference-exclusion fallacy”: his thesis can only be true if its own content is excluded from what his thesis asserts. (Please spare me an extended discussion of Russell’s “theory of types” now: it is backassward and changes nothing.)

Throughout the years, my own Dad has often exclaimed to me: “Communication is impossible!” To which I always blithely answer: “Yes, I know exactly what you mean!” He’s never yet grasped my refutation.

It’s funny and ironic because this person proves my point. He states what he believe my thesis was — and he completely gets it wrong. He misunderstood what I was saying, because he was bringing his own biases to what he was reading. He thought the issue was about objectivity and whether it’s possible. That framing never crossed my mind. It wasn’t my point. So his assertion that I’m wrong because he perfectly understood what I wrote is the very thing that illustrates my actual point.

I can’t tell you how amused I’ve been about this.

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I’ve been talking a lot recently with a woman who’s from Europe. She lives in this country, so her English is excellent. Still, since English isn’t her native language, there are times when there are tiny gaps in communication between us — enough that it’s prompted me to think about how people use words to communicate.

There are times when I might use a particular word or phrase and she will interpret it as something entirely different from what I intended to convey. It’s not that she’s misunderstanding the words themselves. It’s simply that English words can mean so many different things in different contexts.

I’ve noticed from talking to her that some things we say — that we understand to mean certain things — can mean entirely different things if you interpret the words literally and don’t have decades of experience in learning the cultural context.

Even simple things can be confusing. She was going through something potentially difficult this past week, so I sent her an email to encourage her and say that I’d be “thinking about you” as she went through the issue. She had to ask — just to be sure — whether “thinking about you” means something different from “thinking of you.”

The whole experience has given me a new appreciation for how difficult English is to learn for someone who doesn’t grow up speaking it.

As I’ve pondered how language works between us — how it sometimes facilitates communication and sometimes impedes it — I’ve thought about why miscommunication of all kinds between humans is so common and why it seems to be so hard to improve.

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During the 1964 presidential campaign, an actor named Ronald Reagan got seriously involved in politics for the first time by endorsing Republican Barry Goldwater. Nobody knew then that Reagan would be elected himself just 16 years later.

The ’64 campaign was a polarizing one, because Goldwater and his supporters were the hard-core, rabid conservatives. They beat back moderate elements of the GOP to win the nomination. Goldwater talked about liberty and cutting the size of government. He even suggested making Social Security voluntary. His campaign slogan was, “In your heart, you know he’s right.” His Democratic opponent, President Lyndon Johnson, painted Goldwater as an extremist, mocking him with, “In your guts, you know he’s nuts.” Johnson also hit Goldwater with one of the earliest television attack ads.

The election was a disaster for Goldwater. He carried only six states. But his campaign was the beginning of a growing conservative movement that would expand and organize itself into something capable of completely taking over the Republican Party and propelling Reagan to the White House in 1980. The Goldwater campaign was the first part of the long process of switching the Solid South from Democrat to Republican. So much of what became the so-called Reagan Revolution never could have happened if the Goldwater campaign hadn’t happened in 1964.

I’ve been thinking about Goldwater and Reagan because I’m trying to project what effect Ron Paul is eventually going to have on the Republican Party or on U.S. politics. Only the most stubborn Paul supporter could possibly still claim that he has any chance of winning the nomination this year, much less being elected president, but it’s clear he’s energized a group of rabid, hard-core libertarians. At the polls, he’s going to lose badly. But will his influence come far down the road, as was the case for Goldwater?

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