Animal Stories, Part 6 : The Seduction of Language

February 25, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Let us not be merely spectators at our own lives, but also those who are really living them.

It is so easy to let others live important parts of our lives for us, to leave us living second-hand lives. If they give us our beliefs, our values, our ambitions, our duties, we may be living their lives. Then who will live ours?

We play many of life’s games by others” rules, because we are a social species, and must learn to play well with others.

But in other areas, where our integrity and authenticity are involved, we need to honor our own higher values, for no one else is likely to do that. Allegiance to our highest values is what we have to offer to our world, what we bring to the table.

Let us be sure that our commitments and allegiances are to people, relationships and causes that are worthy of the best in us. We must care that the laws and customs of our country serve us, serve the needs of most of our brothers and sisters, rather than just the few who have fought or bought their way into making our rules.

Life is a game of give and take, cooperation and compassion, and it is seldom meant to be about us. Yet we too are among the players. And sometimes, the ball is in our court, and then it is our move. Let us find the will and the courage to make that move. Amen.

SERMON:

The word “seduction” is an interesting word. Most people are surprised to learn that it has the same root as the word “education,” as well as induction, deduction, conduction and abduction. The root, “-duc,” means “to lead.” The prefixes tell you how and where You’re being led. So education means to be led out of yourself and brought up into something bigger. Induction is to be led into something – like the Hall of Fame, or the Army. Conduction means to be led through something, like electricity through a wire, and so on. And seduction means to be led astray: led astray to be used for someone else’s agenda, at your expense. It’s an especially tacky form of deception.

There are tons of stories of seduction and deception. They’re some of our favorite plots. Think of the Trojan Horse, where the Greeks gave the Trojans the gift of this big carved wooden horse. But after the Trojans brought it into the walled city, at night a bunch of armed soldiers climbed down from inside the horse and destroyed the city. That’s what seduction is like. You’re taken in thinking you’ll get something you want, then learn too late that you were just taken to the cleaners, used, robbed or worse.

But it’s one of our favorite stories, in its perverse way. I can name a few examples, and you’ll be able to think of a dozen more:

“Will you walk into my parlor, said a spider to a fly”.”

The spider in this poem from 1829 (by Mary Howitt) lured the gullible fly into its web by flattering it, then ate it – and the moral of the poem was about the fly’s foolishness.

Or these famous six lines:

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,

“To talk of many things:

Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax

Of cabbages and kings

And why the sea is boiling hot

And whether pigs have wings.”

If you know this poem from Lewis Carroll’s book Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, you know that the walrus’s words had nothing at all to do with what was really going on. The words came at that moment when the game of Bait-and-Switch turned from “Bait” to “Switch.” They had lured a bunch of oysters to join them for a long walk on the beach. The oysters were looking for fun and adventure, the walrus and the carpenter were looking for supper. The walk on the beach was the advertising brochure; the reality was that the oysters were dead meat.

You could say this was about the oysters” foolishness, but haven’t we all been deceived or seduced by someone in the past – week?

People who play the spider, or the walrus and the carpenter, can use language to cast a spell, or set up an alternate reality, and we are drawn in as easily as flies and oysters. It’s not the way we’re used to thinking about language. we’re used to hearing people talk about language as the pride of our species, what sets us apart from other animals, the key to culture, and so on. But if we think of human language as just one means of communicating, and at culture as a non-genetic way of shaping the social world we live in, it’s clear that most animals have cultures – especially social animals – and all animals have means of communicating.

There is a nice, and somewhat seductive, story about using language. It’s about a chimpanzee named Nim Chimpsky, who communicated with humans through American Sign Language. Sometimes, he used signs in creative ways. At least one of them – the sign for BITE – seemed to take the place of actually biting when he was angry. Nim learned the signs BITE and ANGRY from a picture book showing Zero Mostel biting a hand and exhibiting an angry face. A little later, Amy, his trainer, began the process of transferring him to his new trainer Laura. But Nim didn’t want to leave Amy and tried to drive Laura away. When Laura kept trying to pick him up, the chimpanzee acted as if he were going to bite her. His mouth was pulled back over his bare teeth, and he approached Laura with his hair raised. But instead of biting, he repeatedly made the BITE sign near her face with a fierce expression on his face. After making this sign, he seemed to relax. A few minutes later he transferred to Laura without any sign of aggression. On other occasions, Nim was observed to sign both BITE and ANGRY as a warning. (Jeffrey M. Masson, When Elephants Weep, p. 233)

This is pretty remarkable. Nim Chimpsky made, in a small way, the transition we have made through our language: substituting the word for the real thing: using language rather than actions to express strong emotions. We hear this, and think Well, that’s a good thing that he could just tell her he wanted to bite her, without actually biting her. Especially since a chimpanzee’s canine teeth are as dangerous as a panther’s.

In our own species, we can also use words to replace actions. “Talking things out,” using diplomacy instead of war, and so on. Most psychotherapy is about getting clients out of their heads and into incorporating their feelings.

Language can create an alternate world and seduce us into it, often triggering powerful emotions in us. After all, it’s what comics, novels, movies, television shows, political rallies and religious gatherings are about. When someone can be brought to tears by watching a movie or reading a novel, you see the power of language, not only to create another world, but to draw us into it effortlessly.

We can cry at the story of a spider dying in “Charlotte’s Web,” or be emotionally drawn into stories like “Babe,” “Schreck,” “Jungle Book,” “Bambi,” as well as comic or tragic movies. You can probably think of a hundred. Language, especially in stories, advertisements and propaganda, has an amazing power to seduce us into an imaginary world and play with our emotions, completely bypassing the part of our brain that knows it’s just a story. Just a few minutes ago, we all seemed to buy the idea of spiders, flies and walruses that talk, and oysters that take a walk along the beach.

Sixteen years ago, I had a powerful experience of just how easily and quickly this works, at a two-hour program I’ll never forget. I was in Michigan, but the program was done by an anthropologist named Robbie Davis-Floyd, who was from Austin.

Her program was called “A User’s Guide to Ritual.” She said ritual has two parts, the vehicle and the loading. The vehicle is neutral, and the loading usually carries an agenda. Unless we can tell them apart, we’ll be easy to manipulate by those who control stories and rituals. She was marvelous at controlling the audience of about seventy professors, ministers and chaplains, repeatedly saying she could tell us a story that would take half of us to tears, even though we knew full well there wasn’t a word of truth to it, and how all our graduate degrees couldn’t stop her from doing it. After a few minutes of this baiting – and she was very good at it – the level of anger in the room was palpable, and someone finally said, between clenched teeth, “Then do it!”

She laughed, and said well, she couldn’t do it in this atmosphere. First, we’d need to clear our emotional palates, get rid of this angry mood and get back to a neutral place. She said we needed a mindless activity, something we could do without thinking, that might be fun or at least goofy. She proposed that we all sing a song together, one to which we would already know all the words, and she asked for suggestions.

If you think about it, there really aren’t that many songs that a roomful of people might know the words to, and only a few were suggested. Finally, we decided on “My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean,” and she had us sing it. It was certainly a goofy thing to hear seventy people do. After we’d sung it, she asked if anybody felt anything, and got some laughs. Somebody said, “Nausea,” someone else said “A desperate need for voice lessons.”

But the trap had been set. “My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean” was the vehicle, and she then took thirty seconds to add the loading. This was April 1991, just a few months after the first Gulf War. She said, “Your daughter, your wife, your beloved, Bonny, is in the US Army in Iraq. Three days ago her platoon was captured. You cannot get any information from the Army because they don’t have any information. You don’t know whether she has been raped, mutilated, killed, or all three. You haven’t slept in three days, and have never been so scared in your life.” She paused for about five seconds, then said, “Let’s sing the song.” We sang very slowly and quietly, and there was audible sobbing in the room. We all knew it was a complete fiction, but everyone in the room was emotionally affected as we sang the words, “Bring back, bring back, oh bring back my Bonny to me.”

Her point was that all it takes to seduce us is a story that hooks us, and we can be hooked by amazingly simple stories. Truth has nothing to do with it. Dogs, birds, chimpanzees and other animals can trick each other. But it seems that, through our language, we alone can be taken into make-believe worlds this easily and powerfully. We are a propagandist’s dream.

I remember a wonderful old professor 25 years ago who met with students to play “Dungeons and Dragons.” This very professorial man would dress up in what looked like a medieval monk’s robe with a hood – his wife made it for him. He would join the students, in their costumes, and pass through an imaginative doorway into the world of Dungeons and Dragons every Sunday night. Was the Dungeons & Dragons world real? Well, it was certainly real to him! He was no longer a quiet little man, hard of hearing and with a speech impediment: he was the Dungeon Master! It was “real” – but of course not really.

It is this disconnection from the real world around us, which lets others manipulate our fantasy worlds to lead us astray. Because, seductive as they are, the imaginative worlds have left out something important.

There is a metaphor invented by the philosopher I did my dissertation on, Ludwig Wittgenstein, that captures some of what is going on here, and why it’s potentially so misleading.

“Imagine this game”I call it “tennis without a ball”: The players move around on a tennis court just as in tennis, and they even have rackets, but no ball. Each one reacts to his partner’s stroke as if, or more or less as if, a ball had caused his reaction. (Maneuvers.) The umpire, who must have an “eye” for the game, decides in questionable cases whether a ball has gone into the net, etc., etc. This game is obviously quite similar to tennis and yet, on the other hand, it is fundamentally different!” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, p. 110)

It is fundamentally different because without a real ball, without real-world constraints on our imaginations, our movements just aren’t what they seem to be.

The “My Bonny” experience is what lets us get hooked by seeing a photo of a starving child, hearing stories of disasters like Katrina. We enter into the story’s world, respond emotionally, and that can drive our behavior. We send money or offer to help. When that happens, we think it’s a good thing that we can be moved so easily.

But those who make their living influencing us through stories, ads and political rhetoric know they can play bait-and-switch just as easily, and more profitably.

The game of bait-and-switch isn’t a human invention. You can find examples of it in the animal world, too. Think of Angler Fish – those big ugly fish that look like a rough pile of rocks (though they probably don’t see themselves as ugly) who have this thing dangling in front of their snout that kind of looks like a worm. Fish come close, swim up to snatch the bait, and then the Angler Fish opens its mouth and eats them. It’s a fish version of the spider luring the fly into its parlor.

And earlier in this sermon series, I told you the story about adolescent chimpanzees who would lure a chicken behind a wall with food, then once the chicken has come after the food, they beat it with sticks. It’s a game they seem to have invented to fight boredom. This is a story of chimps playing bait-and-switch with a chicken. The bait is, “we’re going to feed you!” And the real story is, “we’re going to beat you!”

The fact that this game happens so often shows that it’s as much a part of our nature as it is part of the nature of angler fish, chimpanzees, and ten thousand other species.

But we can even fool ourselves. I once had a professor, a theologian, whose excellent lectures were filled with lessons about how the God of the bible was above all else a God of radical love. Pretty words. But in his treatment of some of his students, one of whom I knew well, he could be a petty and vindictive man. In his mind, he was an agent of his God of radical love. In his behavior, some of us just saw a mean and hateful little man. He had used religious language to pull the wool over his own eyes – but not over the eyes of many others.

In religion, this has been the key difference between prophets and priests for thousands of years. Priests call us to believe as we are told, to recite the creeds or repeat the rituals we are taught. Prophets and sages say it doesn’t much matter what we believe or what rituals we practice, but only how we treat one another.

We use words to create imaginary worlds, where we can see the world made small, and can find an imaginative place that gives us meaning and purpose. But the farther we get drawn into the story world and drawn away from the awareness of what our behaviors are doing to ourselves and others, the more easily we can be led astray through the bait-and-switch tactics of those who know how to use language to control us. The chaos of life is given form by virtue of what we choose to omit. Language often omits the cost of what we have excluded, including the effect of our actions on ourselves or others.

Then we are in the land of seduction, where those who create the stories can demand and get obedience, where chimps lure chickens to their doom, where the language of the walrus and the carpenter has no connection at all to their actions, intended only to trick and trap. And all this can happen because language is often like a game of tennis without a ball, without emotional connections to actual people or the environment around us.

Using language of high ideals and emotional stories to cover over actions that are greedy, imperialistic, murderous, bigoted and hateful is playing bait-and-switch. Wrapping low motives in high phrases, covering nastiness with nationalism or ungodly actions in godly chatter, covering recklessness with rhetoric – these are examples of the seduction of language, of how easily and effectively we can be taken in. That’s how language can be like a Trojan Horse.

Of course, the language we use to build character, to raise our sights, the language we use in education and religion, the language I’m using here every Sunday, is also trying to take us in, also trying to lead us somewhere.

All the best religious stories are trying to educate us, to lead us into bigger selves, and to counter all the other stories that have taken us in, those stories playing tennis without a ball, which have misdirected us to avoid looking at the terrible costs of some of the greed and brutality that have taken over so much of our society and our world.

For example, we’re seduced by a phrase like “freedom and democracy” but not shown the actions we’re taking in Iraq under that high-sounding banner: selling off their assets, taking control of their oil, invading the country based on complete lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction, killing over perhaps 650,000 of their men, women and children, losing over 3,100 of our soldiers killed, and over 20,000 who have been wounded. That’s the picture from inside the spider’s parlor, the picture of this game of bloody tennis played with the ball, and it has nothing at all to do with freedom or democracy. That’s how we’re seduced by language.

Another fine-sounding phrase is “free-market economy.” It sounds good. We believe in freedom, after all. But behind the rhetoric, we have found a brutalizing economy of corporate greed that moves to limit our economy to policies, trade and tax structures that benefit them at our expense. That economy isn’t free; it’s imprisoned in corporate headquarters.

Here’s another seductive phrase: the “clear skies act” of 2003. It sounds good; we certainly all want clear skies! But inside that spider’s parlor, we see companies polluting our skies with abandon, while seducing us with clever language.

And recently in the news, we have our governor saying he believes with all his heart that he should insist that all sixth-grade girls in Texas be forced to be vaccinated with a drug made by the Merck Pharmaceutical Company. Meanwhile, on the pages of other newspapers, we”ve been reading for a week that the Merck company has agreed to stop paying lobbyists to pressure or bribe state officials to stick young girls with their vaccine. The language of vaccinating girls to protect them from cancer sounds noble, until you realize that our governor and others are apparently saying it because they have been rewarded for doing so, or promised future rewards, by Merck, the company that manufactures the drug and stands to make a killing in the eighteen to twenty states where it has planted its lobbyists in the fertile soil of our worst politicians.

We need to have a healthy suspicion of people who wrap their messages in idealistic language. We need to be very wary of abstractions and the appeal to high ideals until we see what behaviors are hiding behind them: where the “ball” is.

It’s good to have leaders, depending on where They’re leading us. But what we want and what we need is to educate ourselves into a more aware and compassionate perspective, to induct one another into the company of those better angels of our nature, to conduct ourselves and our nation according to behaviors that treat others as we would want to be treated, to resist being abducted by alien agendas into blind alleys that will leave us, in the end, with nothing but our regrets, our tears, and perhaps the compromise of our very souls. For that’s what can happen.

Just yesterday I read Maureen Dowd’s editorial in the New York Times, where she chastises John McCain for being so eagerly seduced by anything and anyone who might get him more votes. Her final line, her punch line, was, “Sometimes I miss John McCain, even when I’m with him.” (From Maureen Dowd’s “A Cat Without Whiskers,” published 24 February 2007 in NY Times)

That’s what we don’t want: to miss ourselves, even when we’re alone. We don’t want to miss the richness of our relationships, even when we’re together. We don’t want to miss what’s noblest about America, while we’re in it. And we don’t want to miss the chance for an empowered and authentic life, even while we’re living it.

I think I’ve found that ball, that ball missing from these games, the ball that brings the games into the real world, where we have a say about who gets to hit it, and how.

That ball, as almost always, is in our court.