Dear Audience of Zero: Long Time No Blog!

I know that you, none and all, have been waiting with bated breath for this moment to arrive: more bloggings! I am, as usual, going to attempt to do this more often. I'm going to try to spew at least a few unfinished thought out onto this medium per month, as hard as that is for me to do.

So here's something I was thinking about today. Good, clear thinking is boring. Seriously, in terms of convincing people of almost anything the ability to turn a clever phrase is far more important than precise articulation of ideas and clearly defined terms. Well reasoned, meticulous, and logically supported arguments are often simply to tedious to be truly compelling, and they have relatively little to do with the way humans make decisions or accept or reject ideas. These things are done far more with the emotional faculties than with the rational, even for the most pedantic and academic among us (I might even contend, especially for those).

This is not purely a bad thing; the positive and negative sides must be understood. Here are a few as I see them:

A well-turned phrase can be a a formidable tool for casting truth in an irrefutable light. For example Jim Eliot's statement "He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose" has spread so widely and lasted so long because it reframed the issue of dangerous mission work so effectively and forced people to think in different terms than those they were used to. Reframing and redirecting thought are powerful effects of compelling language.

The ancient Jewish moshelim used to intentionally phrase their sayings tersely and ambiguously to force their audiences to engage them. Short phrases were easier to remember, and tightly packed or ambiguous sayings begged for further reflection and engagement long after they were first heard. Thus clever phrasing can lead to increased engagement from one's audience.

On the other hand, clever use of language can be used effectively to dissuade. It is well known that one of the best ways to cause someone to abandon a belief is to make them feel foolish for believing it, but few people pay attention to exactly how this is done. Many times it has to do with a disconnection between the connotations (emotional loadings) of words and phrases and their explicit meaning. A word or phrase with negative (or better, condescending) connotations is placed within an argument in which its denotative meaning is perfectly appropriate. The audience reacts strongly to the negativity or condescension in the word rather than to the substance of the argument and feel foolish. An example: a friend of mine made an entire classroom at a theological institution very uncomfortable by describing prayer as Christians speaking to an "invisible person". True, most strands of Christian theology hold that God is both personal and invisible. However, when those two words are put together, they take on a meaning that is more than the sum of their parts. They sound irrational, childish, or simply delusional. Why? Because the phrase "invisible person" and more specifically references to speaking to invisible people are most often found in the arena of mental health. In these cases the assumption is that the invisible people are not real, phantoms in the mind of sick, unbalanced people. Surely no rational person would speak to an invisible nonentity. The association with irrationality transfers most readily to the theological statement, and the controversy of the statement then becomes the implication that prayer is communication with a phantom, a nonentity. Most people do not have the critical tools to realize that this is the source of their discomfort, however, and simply feel foolish for speaking to someone who is not there.

I think the last example is the one most often used, seldom intentionally, and most often confused for solid reasoning. The source of the problem is hard to recognize, because it is not in the explicit in the definitions of the terms, and the connotations of said terms (which are far hazier and less easy to pin down) must be examined and confronted.

Scholars walk a thin and dangerous line as they engage in the transmission of knowledge and agenda. When is it appropriate to obscure reasoning in order to communicate a point or convince someone of an idea?

This got real long all of a sudden. I'm done.

I need to work on conclusions.