By: Joseph K. Woodard

We’re all suffering from a ‘confusion of tongues.’ So many of our most important words have somehow gotten twisted, jumbled and blurred. Some call it tolerance.  Some call it intolerance. Some call it liberation. Some call it insanity. But whatever it’s called, people are finding it harder and harder to have a simple, normal conversation.

Our ordinary, everyday words have become unmoored from our ordinary, everyday experience.  So we constantly ask each other if we understand what we’ve just said. Or someone tells us ‘what’s really going on,’ and they assume we understand. Worst of all, many of our words have been weaponized, or turned into war-paint for identifying the ‘enemy’ and clubs for smacking them. Often, when we first meet someone, we’ll float vague ‘code words’ to see how they react – whether we can safely say what we really think.  

Our situation today echoes the old Bible story of the Tower of Babel. Mankind’s first tyrant, Nimrod, whips everyone into a work levy, in order to build a tower up to God, challenging God. Next thing we know, we all suddenly find ourselves babbling different languages, completely unable to understand each other, in a ‘confusion of tongues.’ So we all scatter, splintering into a multitude of nations, at least temporarily free from the tower-building tyrants.   

Today, though, there’s one big difference. It’s not a physical tower we’ve been building, but a language idol, a golden calf of public regulations and elite censorship, imposing the mythology or political religion of materialistic Scientism. Over the past two centuries, given a huge growth in population, communications, technology, and trade, there’s been an inevitable ballooning in the public administration, the bureaucratic bubble, squeezing us all. Bureaucracy-speak now dominates our public discourse, completely divorced from Reality.

As economist Thomas Sowell says, “For bureaucracy, procedures are everything, and the results are nothing.” Bureaucracy’s check-box mentality has crept in everywhere, into our schools, hospitals, social services, the global community, and even private corporations (like Dilbert’s). This is true now even in hospital wards (medical care?) where nursing clerks check-off killing their docile patients as ‘successful treatment.’

Reality is still out there, and sooner or later, the whole golden calf will collapse under its own weight — the inflexible realities of human reproduction, society, and productivity that it refuses to see. The question is, what can we do, to protect ourselves from the language debris, and maybe draw some family and friends away from their idol-worship?

It’s pointless to obsess about how the university, media and government have screwed up our language and culture. Certainly they have, but it’s pointless to blame people who have either honestly or arrogantly believed that they must make the rest of us good, by engineering the way we speak. The more we challenge their golden calf, the more they feel forced to double-down in their ambition to change our speech for our own good.

What we can do is save ourselves, by recovering all the real language that bureaucracy and its lap-dog scientism (not real science, but materialistic myths) have corrupted. We may cling to our faith in God, but we’re still corrupted by Scientism’s superstitions, denying everything True, Good, and Beautiful in nature and in us, the creatures of a loving Creator. We’ve had dark glasses forced over our eyes, robbing our world of its colours. It’s not enough, simply to take off the glasses. We now must relearn the names of the world’s strange hues and what they all really mean.  

Where Do We Look?

This discussion was going to be called An Introduction to Reality or Reality 101, but this quickly hit a problem. There’s already a Reality 101 out there. There’s also An Introduction to Reality, A Short Introduction to Reality, A Very Short Introduction to Reality, and A Very, Very Short Introduction to Reality  – which may make Reality sound boring. Yet, what were they introducing?  Not Reality.  They were all theories about Reality: particle physics, ancient and modern mysticism, neuro-psychology, astrophysics – almost anything except our immediate, undeniable experience of what’s really ‘out here.’ Some explain different splinters of Reality, but they do not describe the whole experience –  what folk singer Van Morrison called the “really, really, really really Real.”  

Suppose, for example, one of these theories is proven false? It seems well established that all the solid things around us are made up of very tiny bits called molecules, and those of very, very tiny, precise atoms, and those of extremely itsy-bitsy, mysterious sub-atomic particles. Everything around us exists apparently by obeying the laws of particle physics.

That’s well and good. But suppose the news arrives tomorrow – and all the scientists agree – that they’ve been wrong all along. They misinterpreted the data. In fact, they all now believe Reality is made up of an indivisible vanilla custard, gelling or hardening into all the things that we experience in our daily lives. Not atoms. Custard, specifically vanilla custard. Whoops. They had it wrong, but now they’ve got it right. Oh well. Move on.

The question is: has Reality changed? No. The explanation of How Reality works has changed, but What Reality is, that’s all still here, like it’s always been. And it’s not ‘Our Reality.’ Real things endure – fresh water lakes and salty seas, elms and thistles, guinea pigs and coyotes, old folks and babies, and we who live with them. You can change the explanation of the basic causes, the underlying causes, but Reality hasn’t changed.

You can change the explanation of the basic causes, the underlying causes, but Reality hasn’t changed.

Do We Really Matter?

Some scientists make a big deal of the theory that our universe is 13 billion light years in radius and contains a billion trillion stars. Apparently, this fact is meant to put us in our place, since it ‘proves’ that we’re not so special after all — just specks on a speck floating nowhere and no place. After all, any one of these trillions of stars could swallow our whole planet (and us) without blinking, and yet so vast is the vacuum of space, even the massive (compared to us) Red Giants are just so many dust motes floating in the vast vacuum of our infinitely expanding vacuum. And this wisdom makes those scientists special, of course, because they’re the only ones who know that we’re really not special.

Yet – without either affirming or challenging the truth of all those numbers: so what?  

The 17th century French scientist Blaise Pascal once said, “The silence of the infinite spaces terrifies me.” But why? There’s almost nothing there, and what’s out there are just huge (compared to us) balls of burning gas. What is supposed to terrify us? People have always known the ocean is huge – unimaginably huge –  and if we’re treading water in the middle of it, it’s a terrifying place. But we’ve always known the ocean is more huge than we can imagine. So what if there are even bigger balls of burning gas in an even bigger vacuum that we also can’t imagine? 

The British writer G.K Chesterton once argued, This is all just the “prejudice of size”, like wrestling fans worshiping a sumo wrestler.  If we’re supposed to be intimidated by stars, because they seem infinitely bigger than us, can we lord it over atoms and molecules, just because we seem infinitely bigger than them?  We can’t come close to imagining how tiny atoms and molecules are, so should we puff ourselves up and lord it over them, just because they’re so tiny? (Paraphrase of an argument by G. K. Chesterton, based on Orthodoxy (1908), Chapter VI, “The Paradoxes of Christianity.”)

We might say something about those huge, burning gas balls, but they’ve got nothing to say about us. Certainly the vastness and antiquity of space and its galaxies are worthy of discovery, contemplation and wonder.  But we’re the ones doing the discovering, contemplating and wondering. After all, huge, burning gas balls are even more stupid than golden retrievers. They don’t even know we’re here.  They don’t know that they’re there.

Christian astrophysicist Stephen Barr of the University of Virginia argues that our human scale is smack-dab in the middle of the universe’s size and time scales — both. Stars are extremely big and slow, and electrons, extremely tiny and fast. Nothing very complex can happen at either extreme. But human reality (or Reality) is precisely in the mathematical middle of the Big-to-Little and Slow-to-Quick scales. Barr calls it the sweet-spot for natural complexity, the Golden Mean. Physicists aren’t surprised by this, he says, because the middle is where most interesting natural phenomena actually occur.  If you look only at the forest, or at a single root-hair, you miss the most complex thing in between — the tree.  And after all, Barr says, “In-between is where human awareness is lived out.” 

Inventing Artificial Realities

The ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras once said, “The human is the measure of all things, the things that are, that they are, and the things that are not, that they are not.” And there’s a sense in which that’s true, and a sense in which that’s very, very false. Modern scientism takes that to mean that Nature (and human nature) is just so much raw material, so that we can make and remake Nature (and human nature) anyway we want. That attitude is dangerously false. It puts ‘the experts’ in charge of re-engineering human life itself, claiming the authority of science, with their purpose or end-goal being their own ambition to be the engineers. (See C.S. Lewis’s Abolition of Man.)

The Christian reading of Protagoras’s assertion arises from the revelation that Nature is the Creation of a loving God, who ordered “the earth to bring forth living creatures of every kind,” and “saw that it was good” (Genesis 1-2). God then breathed His own image, the Imago Dei, into the most noble member of nature, the human being, as a sort of bridge between His material creation and the Spirit. He brought every living creature to the man, “to see what he would call them, and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.” So God created us the first scientists, with our own intuitions knitting “every kind” into the coherent fabric of nature, recognizing everything as part of a poetic whole.     

How are we the “measure” of all things? And what has gone wrong? Our measurements are an iconic example. The inch is roughly the length of a carpenter’s thumb, and the foot (or twelve thumbs) roughly his foot, and three feet, roughly his stride or a yard. Those “base-twelve” units endured across cultures from Egypt onwards, since they had the advantage of being divisible by two, three, and four (so a quarter-foot is an even three inches. A thousand strides (mile passus in Latin) is a mile, the longest distance someone might measure by habitually counting paces. Though not precisely standardized, such ‘weights and measures’ grew up across cultures in people’s natural use.

The elite assault on natural measurement began with the French Revolution and its artificial religion, installing a statue of the Goddess Reason on the altar of Notre Dame. Lacking any natural humility, they overthrew all the natural measurements of length, volume, and weight with a ‘rational’ system on a ‘base-ten.’ For length, they invented the meter, as what they declared to be one ten-millionth the distance between the North Pole and Equator. This they divided into a thousand millimeters, a hundred centimeters, and ten decimeters (that nobody uses), and they multiplied the meter by ten into decameters (that nobody uses), by a hundred into hexameters (that nobody uses) and by a thousand, into kilometers, roughly six hundred paces. These ‘rational’ measurements in base-ten haven’t proven any more ‘practical,’ except in the mathematical sciences.

From the days of ancient Egypt onward, there’s always been the need for standardized ‘weights and measures,’ particularly in keeping merchants honest. So, for example, King Henry I made his foot the English standard. Over time, the growth of trade compelled the adoption of a global standard, and by the 19th century, the British ‘Imperial System’ was a natural choice — outside France and its erstwhile European conquests. Then, in the 20th century, ‘anti-colonial’ elites outside the Anglosphere began imposing the ‘rational’ French system on their own peoples. So today, ironically, only the pragmatic Americans have kept the natural (British) system. Even the English have gone decimal.

In the 1960s, in amusing faux-patriotism, the (French) Canadian political elite imposed the metric system on its people, despite the fact that eighty percent of Canadian trade goes south to the Americans. This extra friction for Canadian exporters has been merely one cost of the global elite’s artificial rationality.  

What does Recognizing Reality Mean?

The issue, in the grand scale, is not which system is better, foot-pound-quart versus meter-kilogram-liter. Every system of weights and measures must have fixed standards (like King Henry’s foot), and their practicality depends largely on whatever folks grew up with. The broader meaning of the example, the cultural issue, is that our political and intellectual elites imposed the French meter on the world as a deliberately artificial construction, making every homemaker, manufacturer and tradesman subject to meter sticks, spawned of the Prototype Meter Bar in a Parisian vault. They thus empowered their science, at the expense of our daily practice, our natural connections to the weights, lengths and volumes of everything around us.

Real science has obviously been an enormous boon in our daily lives. No-one raising kids would deny the enormous value of antibiotics. But there is a tragic difference between real science and our modern, political superstition of Scientism.

There is a tragic difference between real science and our modern, political superstition of Scientism.

The ancient Egyptian and Mayan priesthoods were truly amazing astronomers, but in their all-too-human ambition (now known as Original Sin), they translated their astronomy into popular cultures of slave labor levies and mass human sacrifices. Life ruled by astronomy or particle physics inevitably degenerates into treating real human beings as raw material, mere numbers on a spread sheet. Again, Scientism has been like a pair of very dark glasses, robbing our sight of all the natural colors of the world.

As the old Roman poet said, “You can drive out Nature with a pitchfork, but she always comes back.” The real foundation of a humane and truly progressive society is the natural family, life at the human scale, the golden mean between stars and atoms. Life at the human scale arises from our natural experience as creatures of a divine Creation, recognizing and harmonizing with the order of everything around us. As we’ll see later, even real science itself depends on being grounded in the real poetry of daily human life.

Where do we begin to recognize Reality? As Aristotle said, “With what people say.” Our language still has all the natural words, binding our immediate, everyday experience to Creation. We must begin by simply examining what our words really mean. So we have a kind of paradox in our very word, ‘recognize.’ In both English and Latin, it means to grasp or intuit immediately who or what someone or something is. Yet, the Latin root, recognitio, implies ‘re-thinking,’ a kind of ‘thinking again’ of something that’s already been thought — by both us and its Creator. When I recognize a cat, I see an idea.

What we need to do is recover our natural words, words that we still use on a daily basis, but which have been robbed of their colour by bureaucracy-speak and our widespread cultural Scientism. When we recover our natural words, we recognize Reality, and this experience alone is all we need to free ourselves from the insanity.  Words like truth, goodness, beauty, nobility, friendship, reason, and happiness are all still rooted in our common, everyday experience. We simply need to recognize their real meaning.

Joseph K. Woodard earned a BA at University of Alberta (Pol Phil), MA’s at Dalhousie and St. John’s (Great Books), Greek and Latin diplomas at Berkeley, and a PhD at Claremont. He invested fifteen years as an academic (Bethany, Brock), fifteen as a journalist (Alberta Report, Calgary Herald), and eleven as a tribunal judge (Citizenship Canada). He has helped his wife, Kathy, raise ten children with homeschooling and parent-run school start-ups, and always taught adjunct at independent high schools and colleges. He writes for websites like The Imaginative Conservative and Public Discourse, serves as director of research for the Canadian Centre for Home Education, and moderates Great Books seminars online with Angelicum Academy.