The Weight of Words
Traditional wisdom about speaking as a counterweight to fear of 'misinformation'
“Words are invaluable, speak them if you must. Weigh them carefully before you speak them out.” – The Mahabharata
If truth could be built from nouns and verbs just as flat pack furniture is assembled from their pre-prescribed plan, speaking would scarcely matter. All we would be doing when we choose something to say is either aligning with correct statements, or making a mistake. This is the kind of world we would have to live in for ‘misinformation’ to make perfect sense. Yet despite the hopelessness of ever separating truth and falsehood with the ease of sifting grain from chaff, censorship of so-called ‘misinformation’ is now wielded with great flippancy. There is a grave mistake about language here, and one that we could never adequately express in mere logical statements.
The metaphor around which Stranger Worlds revolves is that while we all live upon the same planet, we live in different worlds. But this inherent diversity to our experiences, these wildly unique ways of understanding who we are and what we do, cannot destroy the legitimacy of truth. Rather, the truth always exceeds us. Words are never able to capture the entirety of the truth of any topic any more than landscape maps can depict the hopes and fears of the people who live in the spaces they depict. What is true is that which crosses between worlds. This can be the dull yet robust truth of objects (‘objective truth’) that allows us to calculate things such as the quantities of hydrogen and oxygen that combine to make water, or it can be the deeper truths of wisdom that travel by the more elusive paths of metaphor and poetry.
When we talk of the ‘weight of words’ we immediately understand that what is meant is not expressible in kilograms. The wisdom of the quote from the Hindu epic above is that words are precious, and we should metaphorically ‘weigh them out’ before speaking them aloud. The same wisdom appears in the Christian and Jewish traditions in Proverbs 15:28:
The heart of the righteous weighs its answers, but the mouth of the wicked gushes evil.
And the Muslim traditions have a saying too:
Three things cannot be retrieved:
The arrow once sped from the bow
The word spoken in haste
The missed opportunity.
And this last one brings us back to the Hindu traditions:
A wound inflicted by arrow heals, a wood cut down by an ax grows, but a wound inflicted by harsh words does not heal. Arrows of different sorts can be extracted from the body, but a word-dart cannot be drawn out, for it is seated in the heart.
These adages from the different traditions trace both virtuous advice and warnings against harm. Positively, the idea of weighing your words, of a righteous heart taking the measure of its answers, encourages us to speak with care. Negatively, they warn that words inflict metaphorical wounds that may never heal. It is a rare person who has not encountered the practical consequences of these proverbs, and perhaps this in part explains why dread for the harms of speaking have come to outweigh the worth of speaking freely.
What happens to this wisdom in the context of social media, the primary venue for communication in the industrialised nations...? Because we are no longer speaking to anyone directly, we cannot know who we are talking to with any clarity. All these myriad people drifting around in the vagaries of an algorithm are nobody to us, and an entire generation has grown up with the blunt habit of ‘blocking’ whichever nobodies say anything they find offensive. It’s funny, but for all that the youth of today feel rigorously appraised of the ‘evils of religion’, even the most secularly inclined seems to fall prey to those very evils the moment they go online!
Respect for the power of speaking may seem like the least of the casualties of contemporary censorship - whether by the heavy-handed arrogance of technocracy or the casual feedback loop of ignorance entailed in social media blocking. Yet seen from a suitable vantage point, this loss of respectful conversation is the greatest price we have paid for the convenience of the internet. Civilisation is built upon foundations of discourse. It is endangered by those who fear the terrible weight of words yet remain oblivious to the immense wealth of the truth within our own hearts.
"What is true is that which crosses between worlds." - Would love to hear more on this. Of course, analogy has covered this idea because the term "metaphor" refers to "crossing over."
I'm reminded too of "sticks and stones may break your bones, but words cause permanent damage." And at the moment I can't recall what film or television series that's from.
We definitely babble way too much. That first quotation says "speak them if you must." That means don't speak unless you have to. That's the reverse of the X twitterverse where every errant thought gets unleashed. I've deleted all social media excepting substack. I really don't care to be inundated with garbage and I truly don't understand why this has become a serious preoccupation. Folks should be bored by now. The only reason I can see for it is addiction, and that should be taken to court because it's designed to induce addiction.