Archives for May 2012

It was a year ago today that the world was supposed to end, according to California radio preacher Harold Camping. Of course, when it didn’t happen, he suddenly found new evidence in scripture to support his revised calculations and said the end would come five months later. That date also passed without the world ending.

It’s easy to make fun of a nut such as Camping — and I did my share last year — but there’s a lesson here for anyone who’s so certain of the accuracy of his own beliefs and predictions: Any of us can be wrong. Certainty doesn’t make a person right — and dogged determination to stick to a prediction or position might just mean the person is arrogant and stubborn. (Unfortunately, strident confidence in error is rewarded in politics, while thoughtful candor is punished.)

How did Camping and his followers go so wrong? I’ll never know. Anyone who knows the Bible know that there’s nothing there to make a reasonable person believe he can predict the end of the world. Anyone who tries is simply bringing his own assumptions (and his own arrogance) to bear in order to come up with a date that isn’t there. (If you want to get a heated argument going, ask people from certain Christian groups to get together and compare notes about what’s going to happen when the world ends. Then hide the breakables and get out of the way.)

On the rare occasions when I could get away with disagreeing with my father when I was a kid, he would tend to say, “Well, you just think you’re right.” That statement always puzzled me. Obviously I thought I was right or I wouldn’t hold whatever position I held. Isn’t that true for all of us?

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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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