by Andy Singleterry
Image by Daniel Sunkari via Midjourney
Our theme for this issue of The Mural is Language and Cultural Differences. How does the language we speak affect the thoughts we think? What is universal and what is particular to places and peoples?
I’ve been thinking about this theme recently because two of the most provocative points I’ve read in the past year speak to language and culture, universals and particulars. In Churches, Cultures, and Leadership, Mark Lau Branson and Juan Martinez talk about how the grammatical structures of languages encode the cultural perspectives of their speakers. For instance, English sentence structure drives us to assume linear causes and effects, and English adjectives tend to be grouped in opposing pairs. But negative descriptions are more precise than positive ones. “This means that it is much easier to criticize and define what should not be done than to praise and describe desirable behavior.” (CCL, page 128)
So American utilitarianism and cynicism come with the English we speak. As much as we give our particular cultural perspective to our words, they give it to us. If we try to put ourselves in other worldviews and imagine other ways of life – as I hope we do – we’re swimming upstream against the currents of our language. Language traps us in the particulars or our cultures.
At the same time, some universals run even deeper. In Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that all of human life is experienced metaphorically. We share some common experiences as infants which create in each of our minds a universal storehouse of references, and all of our subsequent ideas and understandings draw from that supply, which constantly expands with each new metaphor we add. The more we draw on a metaphor, the stronger the connection becomes in our minds. According to Lakoff and Johnson, the human brain is, essentially, a metaphor machine.
It’s all a bit esoteric; I don’t know if I’ve explained their theory very well. But, Metaphors We Live By did wake me up to metaphors and their subtle power. For instance, just in these last three paragraphs, I’ve used metaphors of swimming upstream, traps, deep water, storehouses, machines, and waking up, all without a “like” or “as” that would make the comparison explicit.
Much of the book pulls these basic, tacit metaphors into the light and examines how they work; one in particular haunts me. “With few exceptions, the following principle holds in all the languages of the world: the word or grammatical device that indicates accompaniment also indicates instrumentality.” (MWLB, page 135) This means that people naturally elevate their tools to the level of our companions – we give names to our cars and say, “we’ve been through a lot together.” Likewise, we diminish people as objects, only as valuable as they are useful or enjoyable. I remember reading that and thinking that the whole tragic history of slavery and scapegoating had just finally been laid bare before me: we automatically, unthinkingly instrumentalize people, confusing humans for tools. Such destructive prejudice happens before we even think.
That’s a tragic universal, at a level deeper than words. We all mistake the image of God for images of man-made implements. So we all must work to subvert our own subconscious metaphors. To do that, we’ll need more than human words describing the conscious surface. Only the divine Word can shine the light of truth into our darkest depths.
Perhaps because the issue’s theme is about language, this Mural is wordier than most. We hope you enjoy these reflections and poems on language and cultural differences!
Andy co-leads the Servant Partners site in San Jose, California and is Editor of SP Press. He is the author of The Gifts for the City.