A Review of Scott Allen’s 10 Words to Heal Our Broken World
In Chinese philosophy, Confucius has a principle called the Rectification of Names. According to this principle, the relationship between a word and that which it signifies should reflect reality. In times of disorder, the names assigned to things no longer reflect their actual function, and we fail to act towards those things as would be expected from the name we give to them. As Confucius argues, the man who is called governor should be the one who actually governs and people should treat him as governor. When this isn’t true, there is no social order. For example, if a warlord is the one who actually governs and the governor is his puppet, to such an extent that the people can treat the governor with disrespect but bow to the warlord, this condition must be remedied.
Scripture gives us a parallel of this concept in its many representations of disordered society. Isaiah 3:12 states, “As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them.” The Apostle Paul gives us a similar image of a disordered world in Romans 1:22-23. “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things.” There is a quote commonly attributed to St. Anthony which says, “A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.’” Hollow words and false concepts reduce people to a state of slavery and disorder by severing the connection between our minds and what is real. Words become false idols, and human intentions turn from what is actual to the deranged products of disturbed minds.
All of these expressions represent a fundamental disconnect between human beings and reality that takes place at the level of language. People are assigning incorrect names to things in their world, or are acting towards these things in ways that are not predicated on their names. When we call Christ Lord, but we treat Caesar, Caesar’s ideology, or Caesar’s government as Lord, then we have failed to rectify the names. Foolish people say that they are motivated by love, but their “love” is like giving an alcoholic a fifth of whiskey. Christ tells us that even a wicked father does not give his son a stone when he asks for bread, so what should we think when we see a man called father who does give stones to a person he calls son?
Scott Allen’s new book, 10 Words to Heal our Broken World deals directly with this crisis in modernity, where the words we use have ceased to relate to the reality in which we find ourselves. He takes ten key words that are fundamental to our ability to relate to reality and describes the way that these words are frequently manipulated to indicate something entirely distinct, and in many cases opposite, to their meaning.
In ten chapters, Allen goes through each of the ten words to explain their original, Christian meaning and contrasting it to the adulterated meanings applied by the secular world. He cites a number of discrete and interesting sources, from the Word of God to Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, all of which illustrate the centrality of that word’s meaning to our lives. It was an amusing game for me to read the book and laugh out loud when each of my favorite quotes on the various topics emerged in the chapter. I was pleasantly surprised as well to read his take on Richard Rorty, and how he comes to the same conclusion that I did on the most “wrong but honest” atheist philosopher.
A key element to Allen’s approach is one that is also found in Alain Besançon’s book, The Falsification of the Good, which identifies the nature of modernity as a counterfeiting evil rather than a negating evil. Modern culture doesn’t attempt to destroy the good in society but replace it with a false good in the hopes that most people will not know the difference. Who hasn’t had the experience of buying a product and discovering that the shiny exterior hid a reality of shoddy workmanship? Do we all not see the way that television and mass media news serve as inferior replacements for community and real citizen participation in government? Are we not consumed by phony, astroturfed political “causes” that distract us from the greater injustice of a regime which has fully and completely turned away from God? Rather than strike directly against justice, love, and truth, the strategy of the modern world has been to falsify those concepts. By calling hate love and love hate, the parody of secular morality confuses and distracts Christians who ought to be standing in clear opposition to evil works.
Several of the chapters will take on topics that are of political salience as of the writing of the book. The chapters on human nature, marriage, justice, and love all bear on issues that are extremely controversial. Nonetheless, this is not a political book. It does not proscribe a path to political victory or even suggest public policy solutions to any of the problems highlighted in the text. The goal of 10 Words is first and foremost restoring the ability of Christian communities to understand and converse about the central issues of modern society and the errors which are sapping the Church of its members. If we cannot come together with a common language and common understanding, then we will remain divided by fake partisan controversies and distracted by that mass-media brouhaha.
10 Words is written towards a general audience and not to academics. There were points in the text where I was tempted to quibble over epistemological or ontological questions, or where I would have stated the issue in a different language more appropriate to the discipline of philosophy. Specialist readers should avoid this temptation and focus on the key principles being applied in the way Allen systematically approaches the key distortions that modern secular society has imposed on some of the most important words in the English language. While there is certainly a place for people like me to get into the weeds of a Christian ontology or theory of mind, these kinds of criticisms are missing the point of the book. It is the everyday usage of the Ten Words that has become a problem for Christian communities, and the pressing issue is dealing with the practical consequences of a perverted vocabulary.
This book is not going to convince everyone of the need to rectify the names of our world. As philosopher Martin Heidegger said in his book, Being and Time, there is a basic decision which each person must make if they wish to think authentically about the world: either that the world they see is fundamentally ordered or fundamentally chaotic. This is a faith-based decision that nobody can make for anyone else, and isn’t subject to logical argumentation. Those who look at the universe and see no underlying order will never be able to accept that there can be any such thing as truth or meaning except the ones they make up for themselves. On the other hand, those of us who look at the universe and see order should act resolutely on that principle and care that the basic concepts of our worldview have been misidentified. The meanings of words like justice, love, and truth have a deep and abiding impact on the way we live our lives, and when those words are abused we lose the ability to interact meaningfully with reality. Leaving these definitions up to contingency, fashion, and cultural consensus leaves our very capacity for understanding at the mercy of arbitrary forces and petty, partisan political agendas.
There is room for disagreement and dialogue within the tent of 10 Words. I make no claim that Allen’s definitions are ultimate or final. This should be a starting point for an ongoing conversation among Christians about the need to restore a common, reality-based vernacular around which Christians can have meaningful discussions. Too much of what passes for Christian dialogue becomes an exchange of equivocal terminology, where neither participant understands the meaning of the other. This is the reason that Allen’s book is necessary for this time and place. So long as Christians continue to outsource meaning to the secular world, we will remain trapped within their semantic environment. It’s time for Christians to break free and invest in our own intellectual world.
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