When I began studying communication in college I discovered various theories about the origins of human beings’ communicative capacity. I was intrigued — and still am.
We don’t know precisely how human language “evolved,” but we can discuss one interesting thought: Communication is a gift.
You and I did not create our communicative abilities. We did not fabricate the capacity for gesturing or speaking, lying or truthtelling, remaining silent or speaking up on behalf of others. The ability to communicate was forged before we came along, even before historical records. Communication is a gift that we have received and that we surely ought to pass along for the benefit of future generations.
A somewhat mysterious gift? Yes. At least I think so. I’m astonished that the ancient Hebrews described God as a speech agent, not just a thinker, listener, or creator. Perhaps there is something extra-biological in humans’ capacity to converse deeply, morally, and faithfully about nearly anything. Maybe even something extra-natural, supernatural. Consider prayer, one of the most widely practiced forms of human communion with God on behalf of others.
The twentieth-century rhetorical critic and theorist Kenneth Burke wrote about human beings’ symbol-using (and misusing) abilities. According to Burke, humans invented “the negative” (the capacity for moralizing, for saying “no” as well as “yes”) and created their own, unnatural communications “instruments” (or media). In today’s world, this is a compelling way to look at the origin of language as a purely human concoction. But as Burke adds, humans’ symbol-using and symbol-misusing ability, when viewed from such a purely humanly creative standpoint, results in a strange conclusion; humans are “rotten with perfection.” If we are a bit god-like (perfect) in our speech, we are also a bit devilish (rotten). We are simultaneously devils and angels.
While the research about the origins of language continues, we can still accept the gift, no matter how perfect or rotten the gift seems to make us at times. Generally speaking, gifts engender gratefulness even when they are not exactly what we wanted. We tend to be thankful enough to accept a gift because of the generosity of the giver. We don’t just study the gift. We don’t question the motive of the giver — at least not usually. Instead we celebrate the gift and, if appropriate, use it well in order to reciprocate by honoring the giver.
So I offer thanks to my parents for teaching me the value of language. To the teachers who helped me learn how to speak and write well. To friends who guided me as an adult to use the gift as wisely as possible. Indeed, I offer thanks to all of those who contributed along the line, through the centuries and even millennia, to the forms of speaking and gesturing that equip us to know and love each other, near and far. May we all have enough grace to avoid rotten communication while never pretending perfection. Finally, and most mysteriously, thanks to the extra-biological instigator beyond and before the apes.
Each time I listen, speak, read, or write, I assume that something positive could occur. I assume that I will be able to understand and to be understood. I believe that my utterances, like those of others, are worth the time and effort.
Why?
This is one of the great questions about human communication: Why do we believe that our communication can make a positive difference?
One answer is that our life experiences teach us that communication is worth the investment. We can recall when our communication mattered: when we successfully conveyed to a restaurant server what we wanted for dinner, and we thereafter enjoyed the meal; when we asked someone for help and they reached out to us; when a family member humbly requested forgiveness and we gratefully accepted their wishes; when someone taught us and we learned; when we told a story that our friends enjoyed.
Of course we all recall situations where our communication failed. When I grade student exams I realize that I have not always instructed well. Sometimes I assume that the students are at fault. That questionable assumption partly protects my ego until the next round of exams.
But whether I blame myself or others I still strive to communicate well. I continue trying even when circumstances seem to make communication impossible. I communicate faithfully, expecting to serve others and to be served by them.
For instance, my mother and I had a turbulent relationship. Partly because of her lifelong illnesses and partly because of my immaturity, our communication was stressful. Too often we ignored one another. Worse yet, we sometimes exchanged unkind comments, verbal jabs at the heart.
One day I was driving home from campus and thinking about whether or not I should stop to visit her. I felt obligated to do so. After all, I was her son, related by blood. She had given me life. How could I not commune regularly with her even if it was sometimes painful? While contemplating my mixed feelings about visiting my own mother, a strange thought seduced me. I felt called to ask her about her upbringing during the Great Depression.
Still driving along University Boulevard, I wondered where that thought had come from. To the best of my knowledge, I had not been reading, writing, or conversing about the Depression. Maybe the thought came to me because my mother suffered from depression; maybe I swapped one meaning for the other one. To this day, I don’t know the origin of that thought. In any case, the thought called me. I had to answer it.
Here’s what happened.
I stopped to visit my mother. I asked her about growing up in the Great Depression. Then I listened. She spoke emotionally for a long while. I paid attention, taking in her response. She told me amazing stories of family difficulties. In fact, I learned for the first time that one of my aunts was actually adopted because her own parents could not care for her during that trying time. As a result, my mother lost parental attention. And she grew desperately jealous. As I listened, I discovered that my mother was a hurt human being who needed to be heard, understood, and appreciated. For the first time in my life, I empathized with her beyond our blood relationship, beyond my obligation to respect her. For the first time in my memory, I had compassion for my own mother. I realized how her past, largely beyond her control, had affected her. My mother’s recollections touched my heart.
These kinds of heart-to-heart breakthroughs give us special faith to continue communicating. They point to better relationships that are more trusting, empathetic, and ultimately satisfying. From that day forward I was able to love my mother in ways that I never thought were possible for me. Our relationship was never easy, but it became ever more peaceful.
Years later I received a call from my brother who lived several thousand miles away. At that time our mother lived near him. Mom was dying, he said. He had taken her to the emergency room where doctors discovered that she was severely ill. Cancer. Very advanced cancer. Stunned, I booked a flight and began preparing emotionally to spend her final days with her. Sitting in the plane, jammed in a seat with little physical room, I exercised my mind and my heart. I contemplated that day when I had journeyed unexpectedly down University Boulevard toward her memories of the Depression. I wondered what else I could or should say to the dying woman who had birthed me. Time goes frightfully fast and painstakingly slow when traveling by memory toward an impending ending.
It took me the rest of the day to catch several buses over 150 miles from the big-city airport to the rural hospital. When I arrived, my brother and I hugged. I then leaned over my comatose mother, took her hand in mine, and said close to her ear, “Mom, it’s Quin.” She suddenly opened her eyes widely, looked directly at me, mumbled, and fell back asleep. It was the last time that she opened her eyes or spoke. She died that night.
I wonder what she said. But I also wonder if I really needed to know. I had already heard her heart speak to me on that day when I had asked her about the Depression. By faith, I had then reached out to her. I had listened, heart to heart. I humbled myself so that I could empathize with my own mother. That act of faith — a gift and a calling — gave me reason enough to go forward after her death, word by word. Faithfully.
Why did the monastics sometimes take vows of silence. Is silence better than speech? Is there anything fundamentally wrong with speech?
It’s probably true that if we are busily talking we might be less inclined to listen to others. To observe them. To pay attention to them. Monologue does not guarantee intimacy. (Does dialogue? That’s a topic for another essay.)
If we don’t listen to others we can’t get to know them as distinct persons with their own hopes and fears. We can’t love them because we fail to truly know them and how to serve them. Mutual listening is a kind of communicative foreplay for relationship.
The ear is just as important for intimacy as are the eye and the hand. By listening to others we can learn to caress them in our minds and hearts. To inch toward being one with them.
Perhaps human silence is not really empty. Maybe silence speaks in a special, sometimes mysterious language of the heart. We can then hear the birds. The wind. Our own thoughts. Who we really are. Whose we are. (Below is a video in which I address the topic of this blog post.)
Could it be that we fear silence because we fear ourselves — what we might think or feel or desire? Oh, lonely solitude! What is beyond your void? What ghost of ages past speaks through your discomforting resonance?
What if our silence is actually an opportunity to listen? What if silence is always important because someone has already spoken, long or shortly before we open our mouths and move our lips? What if the creator of the universe “speaks” through the creation? Could we even identify let alone understand that “speech” if we are noisy rather than silent? What does it mean to “listen up”? Why are we content to “listen here”?
Strange possibility: We in high-tech societies are becoming media-rich and relationship-poor. We are noise-oppressed. Silence-deprived. Love-challenged. Spiritually shallow beings in a darkening sea with rising miasma. Do the words “I love you” mean much today?
Maybe we can learn from the monastics how to regain the love in silence, to speak only if we can improve upon the silence. Maybe such silence can equip us for tasting heaven on earth, with open hearts to hear beyond our own words.
“Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,/ Take me to You, imprison me, for I/ Except You enthral me, never shall be free,/ Nor ever chaste, except You ravish me.” –John Donne, Sonnet 14
To improve upon our self-induced silence, shall we first listen up?
Augustine of Hippo believed that human beings were originally created as perfect communicators, living in complete unity with each other and God. I’m not so sure he was correct.
How could we creatures commune perfectly with other persons, let alone God? We’re finite creatures. Even if we could communicate perfectly with each other surely we couldn’t commune with many people at once. We’re limited by the quantity as well as the quality of messages. Email today proves the point— lots of messaging but lots of confusion and ignorance, too.
Although we can imagine perfect communication in concept, we can’t imagine it in specific actuality. We get to taste a bit of intimate communication here and there, but the full banquet is beyond us. We’re physical, embodied creatures. If we want to enjoy food most fully, we have to savor less than what we might desire. Similarly, we have to practice self-restraint in order to experience fuller communion.
We humans imagine communication only in terms of evaporating time, not in terms of the possibility of timelessness. We all wish we had more time to communicate what really matters in life, with people who really matter to us. We even hope to find more time so that we can matter more to others. Yet we seem to be limited by the daily avalanche of messages that demand our attention. We don’t have the time to imagine what our communication could be like outside of the limits of time! Some of our most pleasurable intimacy with others — when we really connect — seems timeless at the time. But how could we implement that timeless vision in our time-bound lives?
So here’s an irony: We humans are able to send and receive messages faster then ever, almost instantaneously from place to place, around the globe, and increasingly through space. Yet at the same time (in the same high-tech era, too) we don’t have enough time to discern how to use the speed more meaningfully. Meaning evaporates just as quickly as we can shower ourselves with messages. Time both equips us to communicate meaningfully and limits the intimacy of our communication.
Did Augustine contemplate this irony when his scribes furiously wrote his sermons, letters, and books for others to read? I can’t believe that he imagined five million-plus of his words still “in print” 1600 years later, communicating across geographic space and through the generations. His words, however much they are misunderstood today, still resonate with readers. By reading his Confessions (the first Western autobiography) we can transport ourselves to northern Africa, around the year 400 A.D. Perfect communication with Augustine? No. But pretty amazing nonetheless. Augustine’s body is gone but his ruminations endure.
How is that really possible? What does it say about our creaturely natures? I don’t know. It’s time for me to go.
These days we tend to focus on using communication to influence people. For example, public speaking books emphasize the skills needed to influence listeners. Public relations and advertising practitioners assume that the market value of communication is related to its impact on others. Modern politics, journalism, preaching, and teaching are similarly focused on impact. Who wants to invest time and energy in crafting and delivering ineffective messages?
As the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle put it in Rhetoric, a skilled public communicator learns how to use every available means of persuasion in a given situation. In other words, public discourse is essentially persuasion, getting others to think, believe, or do something. Ancient Roman orator Cicero largely agreed, although he focused on the power of communication to delight and inform as well as persuade others.
Clearly messages don’t have to be blatantly persuasive in order to impact listeners, viewers, and readers. Most of us enjoy delightful persuasion, such as TV commercials during the annual SuperBowl coverage.
But there’s more to the nature of human communication than good or bad, serious or playful, impact.
One aspect of human communication not so fully appreciated today is ethos—the image of the communicator as perceived by the audience. Nowadays we talk about ethos as “persona” or “public image.” Politicians are particularly cognizant of their ethos. They realize that a positive ethos can translate into popularity and eventually votes.
The ancient Greek and Roman orators recognized that there is something about the human communicator as communicator that becomes part of the message and thereby part of the message’s impact. That “something” is largely personal, a result of the nature of humans as persons, not mere animals. Philosophers and theologians have long speculated on the “nature of human nature,” using terms like “soul” and “essence” to try to understand our distinct humanness as person-communicators.
When we listen to the radio, read a blog, view a movie, or converse with a friend, we implicitly assume that we are connecting with other people, not just transmitting impersonal (or “person-less”) messages. We assume that people have crafted the messages and intend to accomplish something by so doing. Like the wizard of Oz, someone is behind the scenes, casting images, pulling the verbal and nonverbal strings. Of course that “someone” could be a non-profit organization or a for-profit corporation, a single individual or a creative group of artists. It might be a preacher or an essayist. Still, we assume that one or more characters are the source of human messages. Meaningful messages cannot create themselves.
This assumption is so powerful that it leads many people to posit that there are personal communicators behind just about everything, from apparent UFOs to the physical universe. People see Martians in the shadows of Mars photos.
The ancient Hebrew poets imagined that the hills “clap their hands” and that the “mountains declare.” They believed that a personal God could speak via any “medium,” even a glorious sundown or the death of a friend. God’s character—His ethos—is thereby revealed in these messages from afar, suggesting the Creator’s majesty, power, and glory.
One interesting way of grasping the personal-ness of human communication, then, is to look at a messenger’s character, not just to consider the intended or unintended impact his or her messages. Nowadays we often refer to a “character” as someone who is a bit different from others: “Uncle Charlie is a real character.” Sometimes we even use the word “character” to describe non-human creatures such as a beloved pet. (Below is a related video in which I talk about character, communication, and saintliness.)
My family once owned a one-of-a-kind dog, an endearing character with his own quirks. For instance, he howled only when a particular pair of female dogs was outside at one of our neighbors’ homes. Nothing else elicited the lovelorn mutt’s howls; no other dogs or people or squirrels or chipmunks or sirens or anything would cause him to wail like a suitor who had just lost his only love. He was a character. Because of some of his other traits, too, I called him the “beast of the field.”
In the history of Western culture, however, the concept of “character” also meant a tendency to think or act particular ways. Character was a way of defining a person’s nature or attitude, the “qualities” of their person. For instance, today we talk about someone’s distinct personality. Occasionally cultural critics will even refer to the character of a nation or group. We assume that cultures can collectively act, like people, as distinct persons. When they do, they create a shared ethos both among themselves and outsiders. I recall asking a Russian what he thought of English-speaking persons in general and North Americans in particular. He chuckled and said that Americans’ use of the English language sounds like barking dogs especially to those Russians who do not know English. That got me thinking about my own stereotypes of French and Italian speaker—among others.
What would happen to our public and private communication if we focused not just on communications skills but also on character? What intrinsically good virtues would we want to promote? Patience? Empathy? Honesty? Courage? Love? Kindness?
For years I have asked my current and former college students about their college professors. Who are or were their favorite professors. Why? I don’t ask for the names of specific teachers (Maybe confidentiality can be a worthy virtue!). Interestingly, the students have always focused primarily on the character of their professors. They really appreciated teachers who cared about them personally. My students say that while in college they were willing to be very charitable toward professors who are not most skilled teachers as long as the instructors demonstrated that they cared about their learners. These students were even willing to help their teachers become better-skilled instructors when they sensed that the professors cared.
In the Hebrew and especially the later Christian traditions, this kind of charitable caring, caritas, was defined by love, not influence. A caring person treated others as she or he would want to be treated. In the language of Jesus, the caring communicator loves his or her neighbor as self.
So there’s a clue about the character of communicators. Truly distinct characters in today’s world recognize that:
caritas = character
The best ethos is not just image, but soul. To be a person of character is to personally care. Character communicates. Sometimes blessedly so.
