106. WHAT WE HAVE HERE IS - On Our Failure To Communicate

As both a teacher and a writer I think a lot about communication. The practice of making another person understand the idea in my head. As a teacher, my lesson has failed when the information I believe I have conveyed to my students has gone entirely over their heads. But I may not know that I have failed in my effort to communicate unless my students communicate themselves. For me to know they have not understood me, they have to convey their own ideas back at me. And just as I might not be aware that I haven’t communicated what I intended to them, they might believe they have clearly communicated their lack of understanding when in reality I have not picked up on the true meaning of their words or actions.

For example - I deliver what I believe to be a clear lesson communicating some abstract idea in philosophy, perhaps Berkeley’s “master argument” for idealism. Students answer all my questions satisfactorily and complete all my tasks. But then I ask them to write an essay on it a few weeks later and am surprised to discover that very few of them get it right. There is a lot to unpack in such situations. Perhaps my questions did not seek the right kind of feedback for proper understanding? There is a big difference between asking “does everyone understand?” or “can you explain to me how Berkeley’s master argument works as a sceptical challenge to the indirect realist view?” The first question can be answered by the blank-eyed nodding of heads, whereas the second requires actual sentences of information which can be properly assessed for both accuracy of content and logic of argument. A nodding head can be interpreted as “yes I understand” but is actually meant to communicate “I just want this lesson to be over with as little inconvenience as possible so I will nod so we can move on”. A student explaining back to me perfectly Berkeley’s argument may not be communicating the great philosophical knowledge that I think it does, however. It might only be communicating “I have a really strong short-term memory and can repeat the things you said a few minutes ago back to you…but by lunchtime none of this will have stuck.”

Interpretation is a big problem because there is a significant distinction between the premise:

a) I said certain words which intended a certain meaning

and

b) The person hearing those words heard my precise meaning

Often we hear people say something that they didn’t think they said at all. They might accuse us of not listening, or being ignorant of certain things, but the fact remains that if you say X and I hear Y, then you did not communicate X to me, you communicated - whether intentionally or not - Y.

An extended family member is not speaking to me right now. They stayed at a hotel when we visited at Christmas and did not sign their name to my Christmas card or my birthday card from the rest of their family. They were insulted by some things I tweeted over the last 18 months about how schools have handled the covid crisis. When I wrote them, this person did not once cross my mind. I was communicating my own frustration at specific things my own school was doing, and things I was seeing being done across the country or hearing about from others in the profession. When the pandemic hit we hadn’t spoken since Christmas of 2019, so I had no idea what any of their views were about schools and covid. I of course knew that they were, themselves, a school leader, but several school leaders were sharing the same sentiments as mine at the time on social media. They might just as easily have agreed with my stance. By Christmas that year I tweeted an angry and sweary tweet about people who had voted for the current government in 2019 being responsible for the many failures of their response to covid. I used the “f-word”. I have never spoken to this family member about their voting habits, but I found out later that they thought I was directly aiming the word at them. Through what I believed to be a clear communication of general frustration and fury at an ongoing and awful situation, instead I communicated a series of insults to this family member. When I found out they were harbouring hurt feelings which they had not communicated to me, I wrote an explanation I hoped would communicate that no ill-will was intended. I never got a reply. Only their absence at Christmas and their disassociation from messages of festive and birthday goodwill. Obviously whatever I hoped to communicate did not come through.

I often wonder about Philosophy Unleashed too. How many times I think I am sending an idea out into the world that is clear and well explained only for many of you to read it and take something completely different away? The title of this post, for example. Who knew that I was trying to communicate a reference to a Guns N Roses song called “Civil War”? Who instead thought it was a reference to the movie Cool Hand Luke, from where the soundbite heard at the start of the GNR song was taken? Who didn’t even notice that a reference was being made?

I know that I have done it with some of the many songs that I have written over the years. Around the same time that I was unintentionally upsetting that family member on Twitter, the government dropped their slogan of “Stay Home, Protect The NHS” for the utterly vague and useless “Stay Alert”. Quickly I picked up my guitar and wrote a song called “Stay Alert” which I thought was an obvious and clear warning to “stay alert” to the government’s total lack of concern for our health and wellbeing as they forced us back into dangerous workplaces. A few months later though, the more I sang the song the more I realised the words could easily be taken as endorsing the various anti-vaxx or anti-lockdown conspiracy theorists who equally railed against the government putting us at risk but whose views I didn’t agree with at all. The “clear” idea was not so clear. A similar thing happened with my song “Social Distance”. I wrote that one the first week of the first lockdown as an optimistic take on the fact that, prior to covid, there was already “social distance now for far too long” between people in society and that lockdown perhaps gave us new opportunities to connect and give mutual aid to one another in the absence of any serious government support. I wrote and recorded it within days. Of course, when the anti-lockdown protests happened, the phrase “there’s been social distance now for far too long” could now be seen as a rallying cry in support of people I didn’t support at all.

And then there’s religion. How many divisions, sects and denominations have been formed over a different reading of the same phrase of text and the arrogance of thinking that they best understand “the word of God”? If, as the Abrahamic faiths tell us, God made us in God’s image, and so often we believe we are communicating something clearly only to fail to communicate clearly at all then perhaps this would also be a trait of the divine? All these contradictory revelations and conflicting religions might just be the outcome of a supreme being repeatedly trying to say something as clearly as they possibly can and, as we all so often do, failing.

In RE lessons I often raise the possibility that God might actually fail divinely as an argument in support of the authority of religious scripture. That, being omniscient, God would know exactly how badly we would mess up the message we are sent, but also exactly what needs to be said in order for us to mess it up in such a way that we forget the exact words God shared, but remember the correct message in what we misremember. So, paradoxically, the most reliable holy scripture would not be the one most unchanged since God first revealed it, but all the ones we know have been twisted, forgotten and misremembered. It’s not fidelity to the exact words that ever mattered, but to the message beyond the words. A message which might require an intended failure to comprehend from the prophet who receives them.

I got the idea from my mother. It was not an explicit theory she ever stated, and the origin lies not in theological discussion but in the way she ordered food at restaurants. My mother was the classic confident New Yorker who knew exactly what she wanted and would often order food and drink with various caveats such as “no anchovies” or “with the dressing on the side”. But most of the time these instructions failed and she would then become the other classic New Yorker - the one complaining about terrible service and how some idiot has messed up her order. This happened to her so much she began to believe the whole world was stupid, but I began to realise it wasn’t the world that was the problem, it was the way she gave her instructions. Bombarding the waiter taking her order with so much information that the only thing they could remember at the end of it all was the last thing she said, I noticed that the way the orders would be messed up followed a pattern. “No anchovies” would lead to loads of anchovies. “Dressing on the side” would lead to loads of dressing or no dressing at all. Basically they were remembering the gist but not the whole thing: something about anchovies, something about dressing. The “recency effect”. And, forgetting the complexities of what exactly was desired with the anchovies or the dressing, they made a guess. I told mom to give fewer instructions and see if it helped, and it did when she remembered.

Maybe God was similar? Knowing we would translate 90% of revelation into garbage, God revealed a lot of garbage safe in the knowledge we would be smart enough to understand the actually important 10%. Unfortunately, we weren’t even that smart. Even though there are so many common beliefs across all these different faiths, we would rather cling to the idea of our book being the right one than admit they are all cobbled together collections of confusion and hope.

But of course God couldn’t do that because God is all-knowing, right? Well, only if we believe we can know about God If we can’t (which is also supposed to be true, God being transcendent and unique) then who knows what attributes and limitations God might have? Or, for that matter, what “all-knowing” actually means? Philosophers still dispute what we mean by “knowledge” and have identified many different kinds of knowledge. God might have all objective propositional knowledge and still be considered “all-knowing” despite not possessing all subjective knowledge. For example, God might know that failure is possible or that I am sick…but maybe God, as a perfect being, can’t fail or be sick themselves, meaning God would never have the qualia of what it is like to be sick or failing.

The point is even something as commonly held as the idea that God is all-knowing can communicate different things to different people who may all, on paper, think that they all believe the same thing.

I don’t even believe in God. So when I communicate ideas like the ones above, I believe I am just kicking about an interesting concept and playing with a theory. Others, however, might take what I say as blasphemy, or might tell me certain things I have suggested are not possible given what they know to be true of a personal God in whom they have great faith.

Like God, other authorities believe they have communicated their thoughts clearly only to fail to communicate at all. At present we see the British government in hot water over holding parties at Downing Street at a time of national lockdown. As others were isolated and alone, as families were unable to visit loved ones dying in hospital or attend the funerals of those already dead, our leaders were bringing their own bottle and socialising together. At the time, I wonder how many of them recognised what their actions communicated? I certainly know that their official communications, such as the aforementioned “Stay Alert”, or the utterly futile “masks are now mandatory (except for those who are exempt)” tend to do a poor job of giving meaningful direction despite their belief that guidance has been given. Similarly, how many workplaces see new initiatives die on the vine as a new big idea is spoken about by those in charge one or two times, but not followed through on or rolled out in a way that actually makes the communicated idea anyone’s reality? Institutional change is one of the hardest things to achieve precisely because communication is so difficult. How does information trickle down, or trickle up, in a way that everyone is on the same page and knows exactly what change is being sought? Most of the time, the logistics of communication are seldom considered. An email, a meeting, and that’s it. “I’ve told you once”, as John Cleese says in the Monty Python sketch where he and Michael Palin disagree about the distinction between an argument and mere contradiction.

I suppose the take away here, if I am to have communicated anything at all in this post, is to recognise that communication is difficult, and communication is imperfect. To recognise the likely pitfalls of communication is to recognise the necessity for more of it, not less. The need for actual discussion, clarification and fine-tuning an agreement of terms if we are to all understand what someone desires to be understood. To ask questions. To spell out what you think ought to be obvious. To check, double-check and check again. To embrace a democracy of language and realise that all communication is entirely one-sided until we have checked in with one another about where our interpretations merge and diverge and find that agreed common ground on which we can move forward. in other words, to do philosophy with one another and get to the heart of what we are trying to say. That is, of course, depending on what you believe I mean by “do philosophy”.

Author: DaN McKee

My book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE  and from all good booksellers.  Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com