Designing the World We Want How Human Beings Work Shifting the Planetary Conversation
Creating Peace in Language
- June 27th, 2008Watching Our Thoughts
In George Orwell’s novel, 1984, the Thought Police was an external agency that patrolled the inner sanctum of the inhabitants of Oceania. Today, we have to be our own thought police, watching for errant thoughts that wreak havoc on our lives and create chaos and violence in the world. Furthermore, by watching what we think, we will then watch what we say and thereby create. Words hold the thought-form. The thought is energy, and the words give form to that energy.
Why is such diligence necessary? We use language constantly but not consciously. Language is so second nature to us that we rarely stop and think about how it works, what the assumptions are that underlie how we string words together, and how it affects us personally and socially. By using language more consciously, we could eliminate some of the seeming violence in our lives.
The Violence in How We Speak
Let’s look at how we inject violence into our speaking and hence our world. We say things like “I’m fighting a cold” or “Research will find new ways to combat cancer” as a matter of course. What’s really going on in your body when you have a cold? Your immune cells are doing their job to heal you! The healing of cancer has become a battle ground (notice the metaphor) where chemical weapons (chemotherapy) are used to “treat” the patient. No wonder so many cancers don’t heal–those aren’t the thoughts and words and reality we’re creating! Our words reveal our underlying assumptions about how the world works. So many of our words reveal the assumption that we are in competition with or fighting against everyone and everything else in this world.
War Metaphors
So, to create a peaceful world, we need to look at our assumptions about how we relate to the world, and we can do so by looking at what we say. You will see that our everyday speaking is replete with war-based or violent metaphors. Here are some examples:
“Democrats brace for a long battle.”
“The arthritis is attacking my joints.”
“He is known for his many conquests.”
“The warm moist air being drawn north is clashing with the cooler air behind the advancing front.”
War-based metaphors are commonly used when talking about illness, politics, sports, love, and even the weather, to name just a few. I’m sure if you looked in the newspaper or listened intently to the news you will find many more examples. Try it and see for yourself.
Let’s Get Creative with Language
There are so many other words and metaphors in the English language that we could use to describe these same situations. It is up to us to be creative and think of new ones. Instead of “fighting” a cold, you could be “eating” a cold, since the immune cells are literally eating the pathogenic cells. Instead of casting politics as a battle, perhaps we should see it as the game that it is and use those metaphors to describe the moves that the players make; for example, “Democrats checkmated Republicans in this election.”
We have such creative imaginations; let’s use them to design and build a peaceful world.
For a longer essay on this topic, please see my hubpage: http://hubpages.com/hub/Creating-Language-for-Peace
For other essays on language, please see my blog:Author of The One That Is Both, an adventure story that pushes cutting-edge science over the edge into spirituality.
Lisa Maroski
June 28th, 2008 at 8:18 am
The chess example brought an immediate thought to my mind: so many games, and chess in particular, are actually modelled after war, and are perfect illustrations of the points made by Lisa. Chess is literally a simulated battleground with the pieces representing all the different combat units and hierarchies. The same is true of many other games. That is not to say that games can’t be based on a different paradigm, and I had an interesting conversation with friends not long ago about competitive and non-competitive games. But it does make me think that even when choosing games as more creative metaphors for a culture of peace, we need to be careful of which games we choose.
June 29th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
Thanks Fulvio for your comments!
Two thoughts: Perhaps the world needs to specifically design and create new games based on creating a world at peace. I’m sure people are already designing games of a sustainable world for example. The other issue is how to channel the natural competitive spirit that people have in such a way that it isn’t so locked into battle and killing. Surely competition can be fun and healthy!
June 30th, 2008 at 9:19 am
Thank you for pointing out something I didn’t fully think through. I’m not an avid chess player, and it was the first thing that came to mind. Of course, all games that require one party to win and one to lose will have some element of aggressive competition to them, and that will always have them connected at least superficially to war. Perhaps now that we see that nobody really wins in a war, games with winners and losers will be more innocuous than games with only losers! There’s still the problem of making “winner” and “loser” mean something, ie, have an inherent value judgment (one is better than the other) attached to it. I think that’s the crux of the matter. How do we separate or remove the value judgments?
In Metaphors We Live By, the authors point out just how associated many of the metaphors are. For example, look at all the ideas associated with “up,” including good, just, happy, wealthy, spiritual/religious, rational, and so on. So we would have to contend not just with the value judgments associated with peace and war, but because they also associated with values relating to good and up, all those other areas help to support and solidify each other.
Everything truly is interconnected, and we can work with that or have it occur as an obstacle. I’d prefer the former.
April 19th, 2011 at 12:36 am
That is a Great post. I enjoyed it very much. Keep up the good work, Johnathon Kronberg