The Theology of Invective

Dr. Michael Bauman

The Church needs to call things by their real names. Dr. Wm. Glasser, noted education reformer, apparently doesn’t know how to do this.

“Slovenly language makes slovenly thought possible.” Richard Mitchell

I can see no other way. We must learn once more to confront nonsense in all its forms and to call things by their real names. We must learn that euphemisms are lies and that patience, tolerance and gentleness sometimes do no good. Worse still, they often do injury. Count on it, when you treat a fool with nothing but kindness, he remains a fool. If you pat him on the back and stroke his ego, he does what any fool does; he mistakenly concludes that everything is all right with him, rather than realizing that you are simply being kind to ignorance the way you are kind to all other forms of poverty.

We must revive the ancient and honorable art of invective, which is to language what justice is to law – a means of giving people what they deserve. What some of them deserve is a good kick in the pants. This article, therefore, is dedicated to telling the fools to bend over and grab their ankles. The beatings will now commence.

1. The Theology of Invective

If, like me, you are a Christian, you often encounter brothers and sisters in the faith who are, to put it plainly, mush-minded invertebrates. They seem unwilling and unable to grasp with clarity or conviction that some things are wrong and some are wicked. Even if they could grasp that fundamental truth about the world, they lack the courage to call evil and error by their real names. They do not understand that if you fail to speak evil of evil you are treating it no differently than you would if it were good, about which you do not speak evil either. The only thing they seem able to oppose publicly is the small collection of Christians who speak forthrightly, Christians who are less afraid of giving offense than they are of aiding and abetting wickedness and error.

This will never do.

We Christians rightly recognize Christ as the very embodiment of love. But Christ was no bleeding heart and He was no invertebrate. The gentle Jesus meek and mild never existed. He is a nineteenth and twentieth century fiction. At various times, and when the situation demanded, the real Jesus publicly denounced sinners as snakes, dogs, foxes, hypocrites, fouled tombs and dirty dishes. He actually referred publicly to one of his chief disciples as Satan. So that his hearers would not miss his point, He sometimes referred to the objects of his most intense ridicule both by name and by position, and often face to face.

No doubt His doing so made the invertebrates around him begin to squirm because they realized how offensive this tactic would be to outsiders. Nevertheless, Jesus persisted. He did so because He knew better than His jellyfish camp followers that alluding to heinous acts, and to those who continue to practice them, in only the most innocuous and clinical language does no one, least of all the offenders themselves, any good. I can not say it forcefully enough: Christ did not affirm sinners; He affirmed the repentant. Others He often addressed with the most withering invective. God incarnate did not avoid using words and tactics that his listeners found deeply offensive. He well understood that sometimes it is wrong to be nice. I deny that we can improve upon the rhetorical strategy of Him who was Himself the Word, and who spoke the world into existence.

The objection raised by the invertebrates that Jesus spoke aggressively only to self-righteous Pharisees simply misses the point. Any sinner who rejects repentance, or any sinner who holds repentance at bay because he somehow believes it is not for him, is self-righteous.

Paul’s Example

Paul talked the same way.

Although his invertebrate comrades probably considered it offensive and indelicate of him to do so, Paul did not hesitate to suggest to several churches publicly, plainly, and in writing that his many detractors ought simply to emasculate themselves (Gal. 5:12). If you believe that circumcision makes you right with God, he argued, why not go the whole way and really get right with God? If Lorena Bobbitt was reading the Bible on the night that made her famous, this was the verse she read.

Furthermore, in the same letter, (in fact, in the space of but three verses) Paul twice refers to his Galatian readers, the very people he is trying to convince, as fools (Gal. 3:1, 3). Subsequent events indicate that his shocking words, though clearly offensive, were not ineffective. The Galatians chose to follow Paul rather than the Judaizers, whose tactic was, in Paul’s words, to win the approval of men, the very tactic urged upon us so indefatigably by the invertebrates, though never in gender specific language.

In short, if the religion and practice of the New Testament offend them, the invertebrates need to argue with Jesus and Paul, not me.

The Great Writers’ Example

Furthermore, like Christ and his chief apostle, the greatest Christian writers of the Western world also refused to subscribe to the principle that language deeply offensive to one's readers or listeners ought to be shunned. Neither the greatest writers of Western tradition (such as Dante, Erasmus, Milton, and Swift) nor the best of the present day permit their language to be censored or vetoed by the hyperactive sensitivities of inchordates. Great writers select one word over all other words because that word, and that word only, most fully conveys their meaning, and because that word, and that word only, can best be expected to produce the author's intended effect. That meaning and that effect are occasionally, and sometimes intentionally, offensive.

Verbal precision, not inoffensiveness, is the traditional hallmark of the West's best writing and the West's best books, some of which were deeply and intentionally offensive to great numbers of those who first read them. Dante's Inferno consigns a number of Catholic notables -- including popes -- to Hell. Erasmus's Praise of Folly excoriates monks and theologians as a shameless and squalid mob. His Julius Excluded locks Pope Julius out of Heaven because he was an adulterous, blood-thirsty, syphilis-ridden, mammon hound. Some of Milton's political pamphlets and poetry are, among other things, timeless handbooks of insult and invective. Great portions of the works of Jonathan Swift constitute a veritable eschatologist's Bible. These works and many like them would never have been written or published had the modern preoccupation with inoffensiveness been then the controlling consideration. Because that preoccupation now prevails, these books and many like them are being harried out of the literary canon. In other words, the guidelines according to which the invertebrates want us to write are guidelines that not only would have radically recast many of our cultures great books had they been followed, but would have prevented some of them from ever having been written at all. Had modern guidelines been previously in effect, they would have banished many of our civilization's most important and memorable texts for more effectively and extensively than has the politically correct curriculum at Stanford or Harvard.

Invertebrates cannot comprehend that despicable conditions inevitably arise in a fallen world. Those distressing conditions sometimes require us to employ the language of shock and of confrontation in our unflagging efforts to push back the frontiers of evil and error. But the spineless do not like it when we do. They want to police the way we speak, literally, to erase words from our language. I have been told by one Christian professor, whom I like and whom I respect, that there was never a time when shock language was right. Such language, I am asked to believe, ought to be eliminated. But though others delete it, I shall not. The fewer words you have at your disposal, the fewer thoughts you are able to think or to articulate with full precision, and the fewer points you are able to make with your desired effect. When the range of words is small, the range of thought is small and the power of speech is diminished. In that sense, word police are thought police. The invertebrates want to put you under arrest/

Resist.

Language, like liberty, is not normally lost all at once. It slips through our hands a little at a time, almost imperceptibly. Don't let it happen.

Slang words and shock words have their legitimate use. Sometimes the right word is a slang word or a shock word because no other word conveys your meaning as fully or as accurately, and because no other word elicits the response you desire. Sometimes the right language is language that falls beyond the pale of civil discourse.

So much for theory. Let me give you an example.

2. Good-bye, Columbus

Almost no idea is so preposterous that some school board somewhere won't pay you a handsome fee to promulgate it and some newspaper won't write it up as a breakthrough. The inanities of education experts, especially as related by the semi-literate babblings of many news reporter, are some of this world's most egregious assaults on the human mind.

If you don't believe me, listen to this, drawn from Marilynn Fryer's newspaper account of Dr. William Glasser's keynote address to something called a "teacher in-service". In-service what we are not told. Apparently, despite all grammatical indications to the contrary, "in-service" is a thing, not a description of a thing. Because language of this sort sounds like that grammar-free-zone known as educationese, I hold the teachers responsible for the initial gaff. But because Fryer and her editor should have known enough not to repeat it, the final blame rests with the paper. Glasser's intention at this in-service, if this story can be trusted, was to insist that "quality must be the focus of all American schools."

If you are like me, you naturally expect that "the focus of all American schools" ought to be education. Perhaps that is what Glasser meant but could not find the words to say. Or, if he could, Fryer could not. But when a news story tells me that something other than education, something like "quality", ought to be a school's central concern, my interest is piqued. I sense a joke approaching. This could be good, I think to myself. I want to hear what a man who actually agrees to speak to something called an "in-service" says about the quality that allegedly displaces education as our schools main objective. I want to read on.

It was what I expected.

"Quality" Not Definable?!

Although "quality must be the focus of all American schools," Glasser said, "no one can define quality." Shockingly, Fryer does not report that any of the in-servicers interrupted Glasser to point out that the impossible had indeed been done, and done many times. "Quality" is, in fact, definable. The editors and compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, have done it in spectacular fashion. With characteristic precision, the OED identifies nearly 30 definitions for the word "quality", which it arranges under four headings and 13 subheadings, all of which it supplements with more than 90 illustrations drawn from texts written during the last 400 years. Apparently "quality" can be defined, and in wonderful detail. We know what the word means. But not one in-servicer pointed out that obvious fact to Glasser, and that fact did not strike Fryer as significant. What a scoop she missed: "Local Teachers Cannot Use English Dictionaries."

If Glasser had said that "quality" is a word that neither in-servicers nor those whom they hire to entertain them understand or can use properly, perhaps I would concur. But he did not. Instead, he apparently delivered a full-length lecture on something neither he nor anyone else in the room could recognize as definable or defined. Judging from Fryer's account, no in-servicers walked out, muttering as they went that they had much better things to do with their time than listening to interminable lectures on topics the lecturer himself could not even define.

It makes me wonder: If teachers identify this as acceptable discourse from someone with a doctorate, what drivel must they deem acceptable from third graders, or from themselves?

Undaunted by the apparent impenetrability of his subject matter, and buoyed by the fact that no in-servicer had either the insight or the courage to walk out, Glasser then insisted that although "quality" could not be defined, he knew it when he saw it. How something can be undefinable and recognizable he apparently did not say, and Fryer, unlike most reporters, did not ask. Glasser did proffer the profound observation, however, that "quality is always useful in some way", which can only mean that "quality" has something in common with hand grenades, bubble gum and suppositories, things also "useful in some way."

I suppose now is a good time to tell you that this guy's most famous book is called Reality Therapy.

"Quality," Glasser then insisted, "can be a learning skill, discovering something to help society," or "creating a work deemed intellectual or artistic by others," or so Fryer reports. Learning a skill, however, is not quality; it is training. By this mealy-mouthedness did Glasser mean (but not actually say) that learning a skill was quality training? But if quality training is learning a skill, how does quality training differ from mere training, which is also learning a skill? If the difference between the two is a difference in degree of competence (and not competency, as those fluent in educationese are wont to say), what degree of competence distinguishes training from quality training, or is that undefinable as well? Furthermore, discovering a way to rid the world of malignant menaces like Hitler and Stalin (or their modern counterparts) will "help society", and is "always useful in some way" to boot, but is not quality. And that "others" deem your efforts either "intellectual or artistic" signifies precisely nothing. The Flat Earth Society still insists that calling the earth flat is intellectually respectable; some still say that a plastic Jesus submerged in a tub of urine is art. They are wrong. Such aberrations are neither "intellectual or artistic", even though they are deemed so by "others". The identity of the truly "intellectual and artistic" is not determined by someone else's mere assertions. Their assertions in no way make something "quality". Things are what they are, regardless of how "others" deem them. "Others", after all, especially if they are in-servicers and their gurus, are often widely mistaken.

Glasser then hit full stride.

Glasser's Touchy-Feely "Quality"

Having determined that "quality" was something recognizable, "useful", "helpful to society", "deemed intellectual and artistic" by "others", but yet could not be defined, Glasser then told the enraptured in-servicers (Or are they in-servicees? I suppose it depends upon whether they were in-serviced or were in-servicing.) what "quality" is not: quality is not teaching students "things that are necessary to them, such as when Columbus discovered America."

And you thought I was exaggerating when I mentioned the Flat Earthers.

Exactly how to determine what is or is not necessary for students to learn, and precisely why the fundamental facts of American history and of world geography fall into the latter category, Glasser did not think to say and both Fryer and the in-servicers did not think to ask. The omissions are staggering.

Returning then to his original tack, Glasser added even more definitions to the already burgeoning litany of characteristics ascribable to the undefinable notion he was explicating. "Quality," he said, "always feels good."

I remind you that his book is called Reality Therapy.

Glasser next observed that "a quality school can always be improved."

At least as Fryer reports them, Glasser's last two statements imply that correcting a student's errors, which rarely feels good to the student is no part of a quality education, and that an absolutely perfect school, were one to exist, could not be a "quality" school because a "quality school can always be improved" and perfect schools cannot.

The Columbus howler mentioned above should have taught you that I'm not exaggerating. Teachers who correct students' errors are not part of a Glasseresque "quality" school. In a "quality" school, Glasser explains, "all students are asked to check their own work. "Why teachers are spared that burden, why they foist it off onto the students and still expect to be paid with taxpayer money, and what to do if students refuse to do this job when "asked" are not explained either by Glasser or Fryer. Perhaps Glasser expects the number of errors needing correction to be exceedingly few. After all, in a "quality" school "all tests are open book."

In "quality" schools, teachers are spared not only the burden of correcting student errors, they are also spared the necessity of dealing with students who need individualized instruction. In "quality" schools, Glasser asserted, "a corps of good students will be trained to serve as tutors for any student who needs one-on-one." One-on-one what, like in-service what, is left unspecified. Considering the staggering possibilities, perhaps that is better.

Please read Fryer's rendition of Glasseriana again. When you do please note that when a "corps" of students -- obviously a plural entity -- teaches "any student" who needs individualized instruction, that mode of instruction is termed "one-on-one". From this, I deduce that Glasser, the in-servicers and Fryer all consider one an undefinable word.

If could be that Glasser never actually said that you can always make a quality school better. After all, as Fryer summarizes Glasser's point, "Other characteristics of a quality school is that it can always be improved." I don't know to whom this grammatical failure belongs; to Glasser? to those who gave him a doctorate? to the in-servicers? to Fryer? to her proofreaders? to the editor? I know only that somebody somewhere must be the product of a "quality" school that did not teach students things that are not necessary to them, things like correct English.

If the picture is not yet clear, and if you have not figured out why people like Glasser get paid great mountains of money to address in-servicers, let me explain. This all happens 1) because in-servicers know that if they can ever come up with a "quality" school, they will no longer have to teach boring subjects like American history or world geography, 2) because they will not have to grade student papers, 3) because any student who needs personal attention can be taught by the student tutor corps, and 4) because everyone will always "feel good."

In-servicers might be mistaken, but they are not stupid.

Reprinted with permission from the March 1995 edition of The Christian Conscience

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