speaking truth, causing offense
Someone said about Ann Coulter that there's one thing he'd never heard her say: "I'm offended." Maybe that's the one good thing you can say about Coulter. She never ever hides behind that singular, ubiquitous armor, so flimsy and so uncontestable in our age: the claim that something you have said in argumentation, whether valid or not, is "offensive."
This is the daughter of the logic so prevalent in the middle of last century:
The daughter, though, is savvier and far more effective. Hurt feelings have become a kind of trump card. But of course the problem is that the metaphor of a card game, friendly or unfriendly, is false. The better metaphor is that of strip-mining. You can get what you want, at the expense of everything else.
The grass and trees and open sky of logic call us. If you hurt my feelings by saying I eat too much, then maybe the fact that my feelings are hurt is less important than that you might be right. If I am unhealthy, the solution is for me to get healthy, not for me to reprove you for saying something hurtful.
Catherine and I sometimes go round on this issue, in talking about our children. As good couples should do, we've already started child-rearing, long before the children come. We discuss overall philosophies, tactics, and endless what-if exercises. What we've come up with is that the Biblical instruction to "speak the truth in love" is right on the mark. You should never withhold valuable information from a person you love in the fear that it might hurt their feelings (or in the knowledge that it definitely will); but you should also remove any vestige of hurtfulness that's not strictly necessary. It's OK for me to correct you, but it's never OK for me to be snotty about it.
What Catherine has helped me to refine is the concept of what's involved in speaking the truth. After all, truth is truth, and there's nothing you can do about it. It sits immutable in the cosmos. But speaking the truth is a different matter. It's a transaction. And you can speak truth in several ways.
I used to be, I'm afraid, one of those people who pride themselves on brutal honesty. And the truth is that I often enjoyed the brutality as much as the honesty. (This was brutally made clear to me in college, at what I now view as a turning point.) So, this life is a process of getting rid of the brutality, of speaking more and more truth with more and more love.
I've come up with a corollary to the maxim: The more love you have when you speak truth, the more true it is.
This is the daughter of the logic so prevalent in the middle of last century:
Person A: Millions of innocent people are being slaughtered by that corrupt government.
Person B: Oh, don't say such a thing. How horrid!
The daughter, though, is savvier and far more effective. Hurt feelings have become a kind of trump card. But of course the problem is that the metaphor of a card game, friendly or unfriendly, is false. The better metaphor is that of strip-mining. You can get what you want, at the expense of everything else.
The grass and trees and open sky of logic call us. If you hurt my feelings by saying I eat too much, then maybe the fact that my feelings are hurt is less important than that you might be right. If I am unhealthy, the solution is for me to get healthy, not for me to reprove you for saying something hurtful.
Catherine and I sometimes go round on this issue, in talking about our children. As good couples should do, we've already started child-rearing, long before the children come. We discuss overall philosophies, tactics, and endless what-if exercises. What we've come up with is that the Biblical instruction to "speak the truth in love" is right on the mark. You should never withhold valuable information from a person you love in the fear that it might hurt their feelings (or in the knowledge that it definitely will); but you should also remove any vestige of hurtfulness that's not strictly necessary. It's OK for me to correct you, but it's never OK for me to be snotty about it.
What Catherine has helped me to refine is the concept of what's involved in speaking the truth. After all, truth is truth, and there's nothing you can do about it. It sits immutable in the cosmos. But speaking the truth is a different matter. It's a transaction. And you can speak truth in several ways.
I used to be, I'm afraid, one of those people who pride themselves on brutal honesty. And the truth is that I often enjoyed the brutality as much as the honesty. (This was brutally made clear to me in college, at what I now view as a turning point.) So, this life is a process of getting rid of the brutality, of speaking more and more truth with more and more love.
I've come up with a corollary to the maxim: The more love you have when you speak truth, the more true it is.
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