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We Can Misunderstand One Another…If We Intend to Do So
My college football team was known for running the ball. But one year we had a quarterback who couldn’t run the ball, although he had a rifle arm. I remember one practice as clearly as if it were yesterday – our rifle-armed quarterback threw an absolute missile on a drag route. The tight end was maybe 8-10 yards downfield, just behind the line of scrimmage, he turned his head on time, and the missile just bounced off his chest – the pass was just too hot, and he couldn’t catch it, even though he was an exceptional receiver.
Our coach yelled at the quarterback. The QB yelled back that it was a good pass – he hit him right between the numbers. And then our coach, who was not known as a deep thinker, said something which has stuck with me ever since: “The idea of throwing a pass is for somebody else to catch it. If he doesn’t catch it, then it is a bad pass. No matter how perfect it is. And that’s it.”
Paul Grice once wrote a paper in which he imagined a professor asking another professor for a recommendation for student “A” for a Ph.D. philosophy program. The response was, “Student ‘A’ has beautiful handwriting.’” Mr. Grice points out that that response is clearly intended to say, “Student A doesn’t know crap about philosophy, and you don’t want him in your Ph.D. program, although I’m too polite to say this directly.” And that is clearly how it would be interpreted. Obviously. But why? That’s not at all what he said. So why is his meaning so clear?
Because both the writer and the reader are making an honest effort to understand one another. If that were not the case, then who knows what might be made of such an off-topic comment? The professor might think that the student has beautiful handwriting or something. The intended message was lost, simply because one side in the conversation intentionally ignored the intended meaning of the writer.
Bob Thompson recently reminded us that Moliere said, “A learned fool is more a fool than an ignorant fool.” Moliere is clearly contemptuous of those who misunderstand because they intend to misunderstand.
American leftists are forced to ignore history, as well as present-day realities, so they can pretend to believe in things that are clearly not true. This seems odd to many of us. But our leftist friends feel they are throwing perfect passes, which is ok even though the rest of us simply cannot catch them. They don’t work, and we lose whenever such passes are thrown.
While the rest of us feel that if the pass is uncatchable, it is simply a bad pass, and we should try something else instead. It’s difficult to try other approaches. But it beats losing.
The only way this Kabuki Theater is maintained is by one side making an active effort to misunderstand the other side.
Throwing better passes won’t help. Not until our quarterback cares more about completed passes than he does about beautiful passes.
And as long as our society is comfortable and wealthy, I don’t think this can be fixed. We need to lose a few games, to remind us of why we throw passes to begin with.
The whole idea of throwing a pass is for someone else to catch it. So we all need to have the same goals. Which is why Critical Race Theory, etc., is such poison. They care about perfect passes. But the rest of us care about completed passes.
And that’s it.
If Americans ignore Martin Luther King and instead consider ourselves to be on different teams, then we will lose. A house divided cannot stand. No matter how beautiful the pass is.
And that’s it.
I won’t post this essay on Twitter or Facebook, because it would be censored, fact-checked, and erased. So why bother to engage my political adversaries? I’ll just throw perfect passes, in practice, and if they’re not completed passes, then I can still feel good about myself.
And that’s it.
Wow. That was awesome. What a beautiful pass…
Published in General
This is one of the greatest things you have written.
Bravo. That has got to be easy to catch.
C’mon @saintaugustine. I mentioned Paul Grice. That’s like a command bid in bridge. You can’t just ‘like’ that and scroll on…
So cutting off the healthy body parts of children while the debt climbs rapidly towards a catastrophic economic collapse should not be a national priority?
Why, you intolerant bigot, you!
I never studied Grice.
Also, I’m the guy who would have assumed it was a serious comment about the handwriting. It’s a struggle for me to understand the idea of people not meaning what they actually say. I wouldn’t have wanted the student, but I would have thought the recommender was a real weirdo.
That’s more like it…
Did you study Paul Grice?
I can’t remember where I encountered him, but it wasn’t in a college philosophy course. Are his writings studied in college courses these days?
I view nearly all philosophy written after 1900 to be worthless. His is less so. Which is high praise, from us Philistines…
A friend of mine was working in Japan. He was trying to get a flight back home. He called the airline, and the very nice Japanese woman on the line asked him, would you like to fly home on Friday? He said no I would rather fly home on Thursday.
She asked if perhaps the gentleman would prefer to fly home on Saturday? He said no I would prefer to fly home on Thursday.
She asked again, perhaps you would like to fly home on Friday?
They went back and forth and back and forth.
Eventually, he finally realized, that she was telling him that there were no flights on Thursday or Saturday. There were only flights on Friday, you freaking moron. But in that culture, women do not directly contradict men, so she could not say so directly. This is one of many reasons that Japanese view Americans as slow-witted. THE ARE NO FLIGHTS ON FRIDAYS YOU MORON!
This was not a misunderstanding. This was simply a cultural problem. Within American culture, such things can be explained only by intentional efforts to misunderstand the other side.
No, I haven’t. Yes, he is studied. I remember him coming up in grad school sometimes.
I favor the classics myself. But some of the new stuff is great, and will last. It’s the classics too. It’s just that not everyone knows it yet.
As a rule, sure.
But it’s not a universal rule. Some people are really, really bad at explaining themselves in English sentences. Some people don’t even know what they’re thinking until they’ve tried explaining it for a few minutes, the first minute of which ends up being a muddled or even inaccurate statement of what they mean. And some of us are kind of autistic or Aspergery (being able to score pretty high on the assessments as Psychology-Tools.com), and rarely have any clue what people are thinking except when they can say it directly.
That’s why I write essays on Ricochet…
Best essay I have read about the Stanford law school fiasco. Those idiots could not catch a perfect pass. Can’t wait to sue it again. May be close.
Many, many years ago when I was working as a consultant to a Korean engineering firm, one of their senior engineers advised me that when I asked a junior engineer a question, I should try to phrase it so that the answer could be in the affirmative, as by custom the junior person did not like to give a negative answer. It took me a while to get the hang of that.
I have that problem. My daughter has named it “the Road Runner effect” from the cartoon. “You just have to wait a minute for Mom. She’ll get there.” :) :)
Humans communicate with text and subtext. “Text” is anything communicated in words (written, spoken, even signed), and subtext is the rest of the message.
I just chided a fellow on another thread for what I call “pretending not to understand” in order to maintain his dubious objection.
Imagine my joy at finding this post, and especially your Japan comment:
DING DONG! Stog is right to gently object that this is true only as a rule, but not for every case. Fine. Stipuated. Still, true as a rule, and we need not satisfy every case. We cross the street without checking for falling pianos, and I do not care about the nth degree of potential objection.
What passes for “honest debate” is frequently trolling via an affected refusal to understand. Subtext of affected refusal: “You’re not talking about this the way I want you to talk about it.”
These are different things.
For many, the process of writing *is* the process of thinking. It’s only natural that the first page or chapter should be looted for gems and then scuppered.
I had a 5-paragraph rubric for college which expands nicely when needed:
Write the intro, write the three supports, write the conclusion, then ADJUST THE INTRO to match the conclusion. Any remaining hammering or sanding is probably constrained to the second paragraph. Works when your thesis is not carved in stone.
As for the first problem, simply being bad at it, I suppose that there are three options — keep trying, try harder than others, and stop trying.
Great post!
As someone who works very hard at communication, I am keenly aware that any failure of my audience to understand is my fault. What I say does not matter. What is heard matters. And so it is essential to always seek to ensure that the audience hears as clearly and cogently as possible.
What amazes me is that this process has no perfect end-product. There will always be ways to improve, and reasons to do so.
This made me wonder about this with our relationships with G-d. G-d clearly does not work very hard to make sure everyone understands Him. If He did, there would not be so much variation in faith and practice.
So I ask myself: why? Why is G-d so hard to understand? Why don’t I know for sure what He wants from me in any given moment?
I think my working answer is that G-d wants us to grow by reaching upward, by striving and struggling. He won’t throw soft, easy passes that we can catch without effort. Our growth requires us to communicate well with G-d and other people. But it also requires us to keep thinking, to keep trying to parse the expectations G-d has for us.
G-d’s purpose is not necessarily for us to catch the ball. He wants us to become better receivers. Because the purpose of this particular game is not making life easy, but creating and building holiness.
?
Brilliant thought…
The metaphor of the football pass implies communication, a process in which both parties must make an effort to effect the transmission. That is not really what the Woke do. There was no attempt to offer a different vision of law to the visiting appellate judge at Stanford Law. The Red Guards, the SS, Antifa, and other totalitarians are in the business of closing down two-way communication and punishing those who don’t comply with what comes through the remaining channel. Communication skills become superfluous if there is only the Narrative. You don’t need to refine your playbook and practice hard if the other team is forbidden from taking the field.
I knew a brilliant old priest who had studied moral theology and ethics at world-class institutions who said that his first ethical reference point was still whether this act, this decision would be the sort of thing of which his parents and siblings would approve. And I find that I sometimes consider whether my late father would approve of something when I’m about to hit Send on Ricochet (When in my teens and tossing off half-assed opinions, he asked me not to agree with him or be on his side if my reasoning was idiotic. Go and embarrass the other side, please.)
I mention these examples because sociopaths and cult members do not have some rational, personal reference point that checks the drift into falsehood. (You Freudians, is that a well-formed Super Ego thing? You Thomists, are we talking synderesis here?) The woke are not just an ideological variant but persons suffering from characterological damage.
The first open conflict between Hitler and the Catholic Church was a papal letter urging parents not to put their kids in Hitler Youth. [The response from many German Catholic parents: Oh, c’mon Your Holiness, it’s just fresh air, exercise, some good future contacts, and a plus on college applications–what’s the harm?] The pope’s fundamental objection was that Nazism places loyalty to the state above duties to parents and faith. Pius XI and Hitler both understood the centrality of youth character formation and the origin and nature of that inner voice that tells us what is right and true. So do the perverts and commies in our current education system but do the rest of us get it as we should? And how do we restore that voice once it’s removed?
There’s about five or six really good posts in that comment…
He’ll roll you a beachball now and then.
Wade Boggs has said that if you hit a foul ball, even if it was a 375-foot shot that just barely landed on the wrong side of the foul pole, then it was a bad swing.
God rolled a beachball to the atheist communist Whittaker Chambers when he first held his daughter in his arms.
There. That was easy.
I once gave a telephone reference for someone. It was some 20 questions. Every question but the last one I answered “I cannot answer that.” That last question was “Does this person arrive at work appropriately attired?” and I answered, “Yes! I can answer that question. Yes, he does.” The one checking the reference laughed and said, “Oh! Now I get it. Thanks.”
I’ve been going back and forth on this for the last week. A guy I’ve known for fifty years, who is a sociopath, was asking for something.
I’ve written a few responses but sent none, but they had this in the first TL;DR paragraph:
I haven’t sent any response because any attempt to communicate is utterly pointless.
Yeh Doc, it’s really unfortunate. They don’t want to hear what you are saying. I think it’s because they are very uncertain of their own thoughts…down deep…so they unite together and scream so loud that they can only hear themselves. And because that’s still not enough, your words still might get through all of the noise, so they use all of their resources to make your words disappear. It might really be a perfect pass that you have thrown. But if your receiver never puts his arms out, he can never catch it.
Great comment, and I don’t even know who Paul Grice is!😎
No. A quarterback can fiddle with a great many variables, but he has no control over the instructions sent to the receiver’s fingers. Suppose a receiver has been paid off by the mob to throw the game. Come the clutch moment in the fourth quarter, the quarterback throws a spiral right between the numbers. The receiver is looking for the throw, he’s open, the ball goes right where it needs to, and the guy simply doesn’t catch it.
You can’t tell me that quarterback threw a bad pass.
Now, in a good 95, 98% of the situations the rule is handy. If you take responsibility even for unforeseen circumstances then next time you’ll take those possibilities into account and you’ll be a better passer/communicator/golfer/whatever because of it. But that one time in twenty, in fifty, you’re better off cutting your losses.
No, they’re still poison. Even if the Soviets achieved what they described as true communism it would be monstrous.
It’s also a pretty awful thing to do to the student. If you can’t recommend him to grad school, then why did you agree to write a letter of recommendation? You wouldn’t be communicating entirely in subtext except that think the message you’re trying to send is somehow shameful.