I often encourage journalists to think more directly, deeply,
systematically, and from various angles about the many modes of action
and effects of their chosen medium of expression -- language.
Journalists use many of these modes, but very often without a
conscious understanding that they are doing so. As a result, they often
aren't aware of the full range of impact their language is actually
having on the people who read, watch, and listen to their stories.
Every piece of journalism, for example, attempts to persuade readers
of beliefs and premises at deeper level than the explicit content of
the article. Even writers who take pains to keep personal opinions and
bias out of their articles still must persuade readers of the accuracy,
authenticity, and authority of their reporting. And, they have to
persuade readers that their writing springs from a moral standpoint and
a world view that is basically compatible with theirs.
This invites a study of reportorial journalism, not only opinion
journalism, as rhetoric. The use of poetic techniques and tropes in
journalistic writing, even sometimes in straight news reporting,
similarly invites a deeper study of journalism as poetry; and
journalistic narrative techniques invites a study of journalism as
non-fiction literature; and so on.
My brief here is to suggest that journalists and scholars of
journalism urgently need to open themselves to a branch of language
ethics that to the best of my knowledge remains virgin territory as
regards its application to journalism and the media.
That is the study of language as an ethical force in itself, as a
bearer of a positive or negative moral charge that transcends any
specific language message, and which plays a key role in the
development of individual human personality, character, destiny, or
even, one might say, of soul.
Plato essentially began this line of inquiry in the Western
tradition, and many religious, spiritual and moral figures ranging from
Jesus, Buddha, Lao-Tse, Confucius, St. Augustine, Kabir, Hafiz, Kant,
Kierkegaard, and Jaspers have carried it through to the present day.
What is odd is that over the past 200 years the mass media has
exploded, vastly deepening the amount and types of impact that it has
on individuals and societies. As almost never before in history, a
thorough accounting of languages as a means of moral action is needed.
Who is doing it?
No longer does language approach us primarily through the spoken
language of those people we directly know, plus books and newspapers
and television and radio. Now language comes at us in a raging cataract
through the Internet, emails, advertising, podcasts, PDAs, wide TV
screens hanging in elevators and waiting rooms and restaurants, and
seemingly infinite other ways. Increasingly -- because it could be no
other way -- the thoughts and ideas and feelings conveyed through all
these omnipresent electronic means become our own personal thoughts and
ideas and feelings.
But what is the overall effect of this upon our selves? Our
communities? This is very much an extension of the original Socratic,
Christian, and Buddhist questions about the moral impact of spoken and
written language upon the individual soul and upon society. Again,
where is the debate?
In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates questions the widespread development
of writing, because writing, he argued, would surely weaken the human
faculty of memory and therefore harm individual moral character and
weaken social bonds. Buddha's doctrine of Right Speech posits that
using language in a moral manner is the first and most important link
between the wholesome moral intentions that arise in spiritual
meditation, and the positive actions that can lessen suffering in the
world.
Conditions in the early 21st century cry out for the application and
updating of these moral theories to mass communication practices, chief
among them journalism, the one branch of the mass media dedicated to
civic aims.
A journalist might object that journalism after all is only a slice,
and a tiny slice at that, of the overall mass media that is generating
such torrents of language upon individuals and the public, to such
as-yet-unknown effects. That is certainly true. Newspapers, radio and
television news programs, and news magazines today are increasingly
mere dits and dots in the organization charts of giant multinational
conglomerates that generate profits mainly from movies, pop music,
advertising, merchandising, and the cross-marketing of their
entertainment and communication services.
And yet the small size of journalistic organizations within these
behemoths is itself an argument for its moral and symbolic importance,
as a civic practice serving, at least theoretically, public as opposed
to private commercial aims. This charter should theoretically allow
journalists, above all workers in today's media communication fields,
to do the deep kind of thinking about language that I am here
proposing. And then, experimentally at first perhaps, to begin to apply
the conclusions reached from such considerations, to the actual
practice of gathering, writing, and publishing the news.
From at least one other angle, besides the unquestioned impact of
mass communication on government and civic society and individuals
today, it's truly a mystery why language's moral essence has never been
systematically studied in application to journalism. Because there is
such abundant evidence in our daily individual lives of a yawning gap
between what we claim we believe are the importance and effects of
language upon us, versus the objectively observable effects.
Possibly because language is an ephemeral medium as compared with,
say, a hunk of metal or a clump of clay, we tend to discount the impact
of language on self and community. ''Sticks and stones may break my
bones, but words will never hurt me,'' we intone as we launch into yet
another vicious public debate that leaves all parties more hurt and
angry than ever before. We say that such an outcome, and the acute
discomfort of such exchanges, is the price we pay for democracy.
It is high time to make a clear-eyed accounting of what exactly we
are accepting as the price of our democracy, when we make such a claim.
And we need to examine the logic of our defense of free speech of this
type, too. Can we really achieve a more perfect union, through the use
of language that bitterly and permanently divides? Where does our
journalism and our mass media, in terms of tone as well as message, fit
into this calculation? Are our means and ends well in accord here?
The daily language that we commonly use to describe the mass media
and our use of it, shows that at some level we understand the basic
moral relationship of self and society to language, and the very high
stakes involved. Generally this language revolves around the metaphor
of food.
We speak about ourselves as media ''consumers'' who ''ingest'' a
''daily diet'' of news and entertainment. We face a ''menu'' of media
choices, ranging perhaps from ''dry'' or ''lean'' or ''unpalatable''
programs at one end, to ''meaty'' or ''yummy'' or ''rich'' programs at
the other. Reading gossip magazines is a ''guilty pleasure'' like
eating ice cream, while watching public affairs programs like The
Lehrer News Hour or the BBC news is a matter of civic duty, like
''eating one’s spinach.''
A small amount of reflection on the media-as-food metaphor leads to
a terrifically deep mystery, one that is really central to this issue
yet one that humanity's greatest thinkers have yet to plumb.
One could pose the question his way: If a steak and potatoes dinner
nourishes the physical body, what kind of ''body invisible'' does
language feed and enrich, or poison and deplete?
The number of human beings who have ever lived who could credibly
claim to answer this question probably is in the few dozens, or even
less. One can, of course, look to the explanations of these few, such
as the recorded words of Jesus or Buddha. But the problem arises that
such explanations of the body invisible always include the caveat that
describing the body invisible transcends language itself.
The body invisible, say the great sages, can be known only through direct and personal experience.
''Lift a rock and I am there, split a piece of wood and I am
there,'' says Jesus says in the Gospel of Thomas. This is one way that
he describes not only his, but the common human body invisible. This is
our inner body that for all its complexity is proportioned roughly the
same for us all, just as each of us as individuals has a head, a torso,
four limbs and interior organs that we call our ''physical'' selves.
But we can never map the body invisible with the same amount of
detail as we can the human physical body. Because the body invisible,
by definition, cannot be seen. Not only when we look outside at the
world do we see as through a glass darkly, but even more so, when we
look within.
Charts showing ''chakras'' and ''meridians'' and ''auras,'' the best
ones anyway, are perhaps are not as bogus as their detractors say. But
even these maps of the body invisible, according to the sages, don't
divulge the deepest understanding. Because the body invisible is
essentially one of infinite change, like a confluence of rivers of
feeling, thinking, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching
that are endlessly surging and mixing and then emptying finally into a
infinite ocean.
At the most ultimate level, the sages say, beyond even these rivers
of thought and feeling and perception and sensation that we mistakenly
take to be ''us,'' lies a formless unconditioned void that contains all
energy and all forms. Any chart or map is a mere cartoon compared to
this.
''Within the fathom-long body, the entire universe may be known,''
the Buddha said. We need to begin to understand this statement, and
similar ones made by the sages of other traditions, before we can begin
to understand the the practical and moral impacts of language on the
human soul.
We live usually in a practical, not metaphysical, realm. How does
one create a social program that offers guidelines for using language
in the media in a way that enriches the body invisible?
To do so successfully is probably not as impossible as it sounds.
After all, humanity has advanced a lot in understanding how the
physical human body is either nourished or poisoned, and by what types
of foods or toxins, and how those foods or toxins pass through various
physical and energy states inside the physical human body. All of these
are all quite precisely known and even visualized.
We need to begin to understand the body invisible, as much as we have the physical body.
Practical aid can be devised and implemented, even as the ultimate
realities remain well beyond our grasp (for most of us, anyway).
Understanding the role of language, especially the use and broadcasting
of language to masses of people -- thereby either nourishing or
poisoning the body invisible of those individuals and their masses as
may be -- is an especially urgent task.
We need to get started.
