Between muddle and ambiguity
Over these past days, I have been reminded again that at our best, to be human, and to be human community, is to live betwixt and between muddle and ambiguity. We are, unavoidably, marked by profound inconsistencies and misdirected hopes. We are an enigma—even, and perhaps especially, to ourselves.
A few months ago, the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams gave an outstanding lecture on what George Orwell can teach us about the language of terror and war. In that lecture, he drew not only upon Orwell’s work but also upon that of the Trappist monk, poet, and social activist Thomas Merton. He argued that each in their own way were concerned with the power and the misuse of language. Williams suggested that “our current panics about causing offense are, at their best and most generous, an acknowledgement of how language can encode and enact power relations.”
Certainly, the spirit of the age in which we live is characterized by efforts to entrench unquestionable power, power that makes unwelcome voices of dissent, and which feels little or no responsibility to those who do not serve its own proximate interests.
