This is part 2 of a longer essay about spirituality, which I'm be posting here in installments. I recommend reading the parts in order. Read Part 1 Here.
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Denial is pretending conditions aren’t there, or insisting they shouldn’t be there. Denial involves judgment, which is always a form of attack. When we deny something, we are to some degree at war with it. But you can’t fight something and see it clearly at the same time. Fighting and seeing are two different activities. You also can’t fight something without becoming exhausted.
Denial is easy to write about. For one, everybody’s used to it. “Fighting and exhausted,” after all, is a fair description of much of humanity. Denial is the way of the world—the currency we trade in personally, socially, and politically. Denial says, “I don’t like this. It’s wrong. It shouldn’t be here.” Sound familiar?
But denial is easy to write about for a more fundamental reason. It’s baked into the nature of language and logic.
In the modern westernized world, language and logic are how we believe we answer our questions about reality.[1] No Western philosopher was a painter. Even though paintings convey information and meaning, the Western tradition demands that philosophers and scientists convey their wisdom by writing it down.[2] Western culture believes that the most important, brass-tacks information about the universe can and must be conveyed by some combination of language and logic. If it is conveyed in another form, it might be interesting, amusing, or thought-provoking, but it isn’t really real.[3]
Language and logic are a huge help in solving technical problems and in conveying certain kinds of information.[4] They are also based on separation and exclusion: red is not orange, right is not wrong, the US is not Mexico, straight is not gay, and so on.
The building blocks of language and logic themselves are separate from each other. Every word I’m writing here is separate from every other word. Language and logic, by their nature, divide up reality into abstract elements that exclude each other. This is a helpful way of modelling certain aspects of reality for our convenience. But it’s far from reality itself. In fact, close investigation reveals no definite or permanent boundaries of any kind in reality.[5]
Once language and logic divide up reality into abstract elements, they lay out these abstract elements in lines. One thing follows another along the straight line of a sentence or logical statement. There is no other way to use language and logic except in this sequential way. They are inherently linear. In a painting, you can dab a little red and then a little yellow on top of it to get some shade of orange. But when things are laid out in the lines of language and logic, they can’t be in two places at once. One location on the line denies another location. Things aren’t allowed to blend, curve, fold, overlap, or branch.[6]
Yes, we can express nonlinear concepts and images using language, but we have to express them in a linear way.[7] I can say, “Jennifer blends with Edward,” but you still have to take in the information one word at a time in a sequence. (Which might lead us down more linear paths like “Why did I put Jennifer first? Is she more important than Edward?”) This is not how we experience reality. In each moment, reality presents itself to us all at once. Nothing is denied. Our experience is all here now.[8]
Just as a hammer was made to pound nails, our Western way of understanding reality was made to separate things and lay them out in lines. Any time we think this way, we are slicing up the wholeness of reality into mutually exclusive chunks and arranging them in a sequence. We aren’t encountering reality directly. We’re representing it in our minds in a way that makes it appear to be a “this-or-that” proposition. We’re telling ourselves stories about our experience. These stories simplify our experience and sometimes make things more convenient. They also make denial easier.[9]
You probably know the saying, “When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” We could also say, “When all you’ve got is modern Western thinking, everything looks separate and sequential.” We tend to use the hammer of this modern Western thinking to bang on everything we encounter. Even when it’s not the right tool for the job.
Next Up: Detachment
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Footnotes
[1] Most people don’t realize how different various ways of human thinking can be from our own—in tribal societies, for example. Such different styles of thinking are equally legitimate even if they emphasize different aspects of reality. Not every human culture, for example, is as fascinated by technology as ours is. I explore this more in my book Of Geometry & Jesus, particularly in the essays “Country Bumpkins,” and “You Are Your Philosophy.”
[2] I believe the exchange rate is a thousand words per picture,
[3] Contrast this with pre-literate cultures in which the deepest wisdom was conveyed by spoken myths. The people in such cultures were also pragmatic. They used logic in making tools, tracking animals, and so on. They just didn’t imagine that logic and pragmatic language was sufficient for expressing deeper truths about reality.
[4] Despite what some postmodernists seem to believe.
[5] This may sound like a bold or even ridiculous claim. I explain it more in “Division Vision,” an essay in my book, Of Geometry & Jesus, and also in my blog post about the word division.
[6] Poets try to overcome this limitation of language by using words in unconventional ways and laying them out visually in ways that break up the usual linear arrangement of prose sentences.
[7] Marshall McLuhan’s famous pronouncement “The medium is the message” is relevant here. The medium of language and logic always subliminally sends a message that reality is divided up and linear, regardless of what other message we think we are conveying.
[8] Evidence shows that learning to read changes the brain. Literate people have a reduced capacity for facial recognition and for recognizing overall patterns and gestalt wholes. (See The Weirdest People in the World, Prelude.)
[9] Postmodernists are right to conclude that language and logic cannot convey or reach ultimate truth. They are wrong if they deny the extreme value of language and logic within the realms where they apply, like, you know, inside the computers and stuff. And anyway, most postmodernists don’t have the courage of their convictions to detach from all human concepts. Most use their own form of logic, which goes something like, “All human concepts are invalid, therefore mine are right.”
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