Our modern digital technologies are designed to foster impersonal ways of living. But we’re made for real relationships. How do we fight this? Some thoughts on ‘On Writing Well’ and ‘The Life We’re Looking For.’
I don’t write much about what I’m reading. I’m going to do that now. As is often the case when reading multiple books at the same time, the connections come deeper and richer when ideas can cross pollinate. This cross-pollination is at work with the books I’m currently reading: On Writing Well by William Zinsser and The Life We’re Looking For by Andy Crouch.
I’ve had Zinsser’s classic on my shelf for almost 20 years but had never read it. I’m reading it now as part of a book club I’m leading at work. We recently finished the chapter on usage—all the nuances and inconveniences and debatable details about what goes into “good English.”
Our discussion eventually came around to defining the term usage. What is it? What is it good for? Why does it matter?
At the heart of usage is a heart for genuine relationship. Here’s how Zinsser finishes the chapter:
I would suggest a similar guideline for separating good English from technical English. It’s the difference between, say, “printout” and “input.” A printout is a specific object that a computer emits. Before the advent of computers it wasn’t needed; now it is. But it has stayed where it belongs. Not so with “input,” which was coined to describe the information that’s fed to a computer. Our input is ought on every subject, from diets to philosophical discourse (“I’d like your input on whether God really exists”).
I don’t want to give somebody my input and get his feedback, though I’d be glad to offer my ideas and hear what he thinks of them. Good usage, to me, consists of using good words if they already exist—as they almost ways do—to express myself clearly and simply to someone else. You might say it’s how I verbalize the interpersonal.
Emphasis mine. Good usage of a particular language in a particular place with a particular people ought to foster deeper, more real interpersonal interactions. Good words help make good relationships.
“Reclaiming relationship” is the goal of Crouch’s latest book, published last year, and which I recently picked up from the library. In The Life We’re Looking For, Crouch builds on the foundation he laid in The Tech-Wise Family to show how our easy-everywhere, “superpower” technology robs us of much of what it means to be made in the image of God as a “heart-soul-mind-strength complex designed for love.” As such, we are made for deep, meaningful relationships. But modern digital technologies undermine or subvert that need. Crouch writes:
Is it coincidence, or just a kind of grand irony, that loneliness has spiked just as our media became “social,” our technology became “personal,” and our machines learned to recognize our faces?
In fact, this is no coincidence. Our relational bankruptcy has been unfolding through the five-hundred-year story of technology, from its earliest stirrings in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to Silicon Valley in the twenty-first. There is a consistent shadow side of the bright promises and genuine achievements of the technological world: It has been based all along on a false understanding of what human beings really are and what we most need. We thought we were looking for impersonal power, the kind that doesn’t need persons to be effective. And now that we have it, with everything we want delivered straight to our doorstep by processes and systems we scarcely understand employing persons we never see . . .
This “shadow side” of this technology darkens our everyday word usage. For example, I don’t know how many times I’ve talked about “not having enough bandwidth” for this or that area of life. That is poor usage because it is using machine terminology to talk about a heart-soul-mind-strength complex designed for love. It is poor usage because it is impersonal. I am not a WiFi router: I don’t have bandwidth, nor can I increase it. You are not a computer: you don’t have input, nor can you give it.
The words we use shape our perception of the world around us. Our words create emotional, mental, and spiritual “realities” in our souls, even if they actually untrue.
More Crouch:
And so one day we find ourselves in the dead zone of an airport, or perhaps in a whole world that feels like a dead zone—a place where we are never recognized, where no one knows our names, where no one names our souls. We feel our hearts, souls, minds, and strength dwindling—or perhaps they have dwindled so much we do not even notice.
The honest truth is that often, we just give in. We make choices that accelerate the patterns of emptiness and loneliness rather than reverse them. And thanks to a particularly tricky design feature of our heart-soul-mind-strength complex, it can initially seem that these small consolations and addictions offer us just enough of what we long for to get by. Human beings have made these kinds of choices ever since the pain of being persons was first felt. But today, we happen to have access to a way out of disappointment that offers more false comfort than our ancestors could ever have imagined.
Early on in our foster-care days, Lindsey and I went through Texas Christian University’s Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI) program. (We’ve taken some refresher classes from time to time, including one this past January. It’s always refreshing and challenging.) One of the techniques we were trained to use when encountering an emotionally dis-regulated child was a simple prompt: “Use your words.”
I loved this so much a bought a sweatshirt with these very words screen printed on it from Cotton Bureau. I wear that sweatshirt for my own edification.
Use your words. So simple. So hard.
I don’t always use good words. It’s inconvenient to remember my child’s unique history. It’s much easier to “swipe right” on patience and give into hurriedness and irritation. Poor usage is impersonal. Life-giving usage requires grace.
This is what Christians talk about when we talk about the Word becoming flesh. Jesus, the living Word, took on blood and bone to transform our words and restore the most significant relationship we could ever have. And his usage was an embodied one, an emptying, long-suffering one.
Behind our children’s unwanted or unhealthy misbehavior is a person. A beloved, sinful, broken, heart-soul-mind-strength complex desperately hungry for ways to verbalize her interpersonal needs. My job is to pay attention to the words they may not be using and to pattern the words they can use so that they can see that flourishing and connection are possible.
Usage matters. Fighting against the impersonal forces always at work in our current age matters. Good, true, and beautiful words can destroy these easy-everywhere strongholds. They can also, by God’s grace, build up homes and hearts fashioned after the likeness of the eternal Word.
So. Get out your dictionary and put away your phone.