The Destructive Power of Misinterpretation

Failure to account for the differences between languages can lead to devastating results. In 1945, when Allied leaders met in Germany at the end of the Second World War, Truman, Churchill, Stalin, and Chiang Kai-shek sent the Japanese premier, Kantarō Suzuki, a declaration of surrender terms, asking that Japan surrender unconditionally. The declaration also stated that any negative answer would elicit “prompt and utter destruction.”

When reporters questioned Premier Suzuki about his reaction, he replied with the usual political fallback that he was withholding comment. The Japanese word he used, mokusatsu, derived from the word for silence, can be translated in multiple ways, from “remaining in wise inactivity” to “taking no notice” to “treating with silent contempt.” In a diplomatic failure of epochal proportions, an ill-chosen translation was interpreted in the West as a hostile response. In now-unclassified documents, the National Security Agency writes:

The word has other meanings quite different from that intended by Suzuki. Alas, international news agencies saw fit to tell the world that in the eyes of the Japanese government the ultimatum was ‘not worthy of comment.’ US officials, angered by the tone of Suzuki’s statement … decided on stern measures. Within ten days the decision was made to drop the atomic bomb, the bomb was dropped, and Hiroshima was leveled.

--- Viorica Marian, The Power of Language: Multilingualism, Self and Society. 2023.

Post‐truth v.s. Alternative Facts

The process of gathering and analyzing data, and inferences about what the data mean and how they should be understood, are open to different approaches. But the truth uncovered – what the facts or the data show – is accepted as impartial, evidence‐based truth.

 

Evidence‐based truth is accepted unless subsequently proven false by a changing social reality and/or a new scientific discovery that may temper the known facts; we thus say that science, including social research, is an inductive, empirically grounded process. These are the principles that underpin sociology as a social science. As the well‐respected sociologist Claude Fischer notes, science “is simply the systematic collection of observations and the application of logic to explain them.”

 

These principles have been subverted in recent years in the political sphere. For years before he himself ran for political office, Donald Trump frequently asserted that Barack Obama was not born in America (though he was: in Hawaii on August 4, 1961). Obama was dogged by this false accusation, one that was not denounced as false by other leading Republicans, and it continued even though he released his birth certificate demonstrating proof of his US birth. Trump's penchant for “uttering untruths” was a routine part of his own presidential campaign and pervaded his presidency from his inauguration onward, so much so that amid the whirls of misinformation, the notion of post‐truth society gained currency.

 

The various false claims routinely stated by Trump and his senior staff were defended by his aides and supporters as "alternative facts. The well‐respected television news interviewer Chuck Todd responded in one exchange that "alternative facts are not facts. They are falsehoods.” 

 

How to deal with the issue of “provable falsehoods” has become controversial among reputable journalists and news organizations. Concerns about how to distinguish between “truth” and “lies” have intensified due to politicized attacks on the “fake journalism” of reputable mainstream media, the denial of the scientific consensus on climate change and on Covid and other vaccines, as well as the emergence of a more general narrative framing science as “fake science.”

 

--- Michele Dillon, Introduction to Sociological Theory:

Theorists, Concepts, and their Applicability to the Twenty-First Century. 2024.

Real Love Includes Truth

Real love—the kind described by the God who created and is love (1 John 4:8)—always includes truth. The two are inextricably intertwined, since true love celebrates truth (1 Cor. 13:6). Christians are called to this kind of love regardless of whether we feel empathy or not. Christians love because Christ first loved us, not because we feel a certain way or have had a particular experience (1 John 4:19).

 

That’s why empathy is different from love and why it also must be submissive to love. Putting yourself in someone’s shoes may help you feel their pain, but their pain isn’t determinative of what’s true or false, right or wrong……

 

--- Allie Beth Stuckey, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. 2024.  

How to Identify 'Toxic Empathy'

Kindness is good, and empathy can be good too. But empathy that affirms sin or lies is always misguided. How can we tell when empathy has become toxic? Here are a few red flags that we’ll see repeatedly in these pages:

 

1.      THE USE OF EUPHEMISMS: Euphemisms obscure the truth to make a position seem more palatable. Think “reproductive rights” for killing an unborn child, or “gender-affirming care” for bodily mutilation. In every conversation, advertisement, article, or podcast, you must carefully look out for the use of euphemisms. Ask yourself, “What does she mean by that?” and try to identify the reality her language choice is hiding.

 

2.      CONTRADICTIONS TO GOD’S WORD: Sometimes these contradictions are obvious (e.g., “Jesus isn’t the only way to heaven”), but most of the time, they’re not. Just like the Devil tricking Eve or tempting Jesus, unbiblical statements are often paired with something true. Think “Christians are called to love the foreigner” to justify chaotic border laws, or “The early church shared everything they had” to justify socialism. Just because something sounds good doesn’t mean it is. It’s crucial we know our Bible and train ourselves to think critically about the things we read and hear—especially when they’re viral or catchy.

 

3.      EXCLUSIVELY POLITICAL ENDS: When calling for empathy, inclusivity, and love, are they talking about how we treat these people as individuals, or are they actually speaking of achieving certain political ends? For example, “love is love” isn’t really a call for us to love gay people by recognizing their innate worth as human beings and treat them with kindness; it’s a call to legally redefine marriage and family…… These are examples of the exploitation of empathy to achieve political power, not peace.

 

4.      CHRISTIAN-SOUNDING WORDS WITH UNCHRISTIAN MEANINGS: The concepts of equality, equity, liberation, oppression, inclusion, and social justice can all be, in some way, found in the Bible, but the Bible defines them differently than progressive activists do. Biblical equity, for example, means fair, impartial judgment (Ps. 99:4). Progressive equity means equal outcomes…… equal outcomes are impossible outside of extreme, oppressive government intervention, and nowhere does the Bible indicate that justice means everyone having equal resources.

 

5.      EMOTIONAL LANGUAGE: Manipulative rhetoric lacks substantive, logical arguments and replaces them with demands that you feel a certain way. If you’re really loving, caring, understanding, empathetic, etc., you will buy into a particular position. Often, your rational points will be rebuffed with accusations of callousness instead of thoughtful responses. When they call you hateful, bigoted, racist, or any other epithet, it usually means they don’t know why they believe what they believe, so their insecurity manifests itself in anger…… You know such an allegation is ridiculous, and you don’t need to dignify it with a response. Simply continue to kindly, humbly, but confidently stand your ground. It may be that this conversation planted a seed in them.

 

When these red flags show up, it means someone is using toxic empathy to capitalize on the Christian’s righteous desire to be compassionate to the outcast and the weak, distorting biblical love into progressive activism and manipulating women into supporting issues that are harmful and, in many cases, sinful.

 

--- Allie Beth Stuckey, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. 2024.

Cuteness in the Arts

How a society deals with this tension may explain whether cuteness appears in its art and literature.

 

Take medieval Europe as an example. Life there was anything but dull. On the contrary, as the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga writes: ‘Life was brimful of play: the joyous and unbuttoned play of the people, full of pagan elements that had lost their sacred significance and been transformed into jesting and buffoonery.’ Huizinga singles out ‘pagan elements’ because religion had transformed the social perception of play, if not people’s tendency to engage in it.

 

However, play remained pagan because Christians saw it as a frivolous distraction from God. Art was meant to express serious, religious themes, which might explain why cuteness appears far less in the art of medieval Europe than it did in Japan.

 

And yet Western artists did occasionally play around. Monks who spent many hours copying manuscripts sometimes doodled in the margins of the books they were working on. These marginalia include images of monsters and animals acting like humans, but they tend to look grotesque and strange. However, a few of them might be considered cute.

 

--- Joshua Paul Dale, Irresistible: 

How Cuteness Wired our Brains and Conquered the World. 2023.

Man with Telos & Logos

Telos - every object in creation is directed toward an end. The value of an object lies in its capacity to achieve the purpose for which it was designed. Facts and values aren’t separate things—values are embedded within facts.
 
What does this mean for human beings? What makes a man virtuous is his capacity to engage in the activities that make him a man, not an animal—man has a telos, too. What is our telos? Our end, according to both Plato and Aristotle, is to reason, judge, and deliberate.
 
So, according to both Plato and Aristotle, what makes us “virtuous” is doing our job: look at the world with our reason, discerning the final causes for which things exist. This is our purpose. Just as Adam is tasked with naming the animals in the Bible, so we are tasked with recognizing the telos of the world around us in Greek thought.
 
As philosopher Leo Strauss suggests, no society can be built on a multiplicity of end goals. In order to avoid arguing incessantly over end goals, therefore, the Greeks had to posit an objective, underlying logic to the universe: a Grand Designer, an Unmoved Mover. Were the universe a chaotic, arbitrary, and random place operating according to no design, it would have no telos. But if a grand plan stands behind all of creation, our job is merely to investigate that plan—to uncover the natural law that governs the universe.
 
Heraclitus (535–475 BCE) was the first known philosopher to use the term Logos to describe the system of unified reason behind the world we see and experience. Man could understand the universe because a force had created the universe; man’s mind mirrored that force to the extent that man could uncover its purposes. As historian Richard Tarnas writes, “As the means by which human intelligence could attain universal understanding, the Logos was a divine revelatory principle, simultaneously operative within the human mind and the natural world.” And philosophers were tasked with uncovering this Logos; by doing so, they would be fulfilling both their own telos and discovering the telos of mankind more broadly.
 

- Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: 

How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great, 2019.

 

Happiness is Moral Purpose

Pleasure can be gained from a variety of activities: golf, fishing, playing with your children, sex. Amoral activities can bring us pleasure—that temporary high, that feeling of forgetting our cares. However, that pleasure is never enough. Lasting happiness can only be achieved through cultivation of soul and mind. And cultivating our souls and minds requires us to live with moral purpose.
 
This has been clear since the dawn of Western civilization. The very terminology for happiness is imbued with such meaning in both the Judeo-Christian and the Greek context. The Hebrew Bible calls happiness simcha; Aristotle called happiness eudaimonia.
 
What does the Bible mean by simcha? It means right action in accordance with God’s will. In Ecclesiastes, Solomon laments, “I said to myself: ‘Come now, I will mix [wine] with joy and experience pleasure,’ and behold, this too was vanity.”
 
The Bible doesn’t seem to care very much about what we want. Instead, God commands us to live in simcha. How can He command an emotion? He can’t—he can only command our enthusiastic pursuit of an ideal He sets forth for us. If we do not pursue that purpose, we pay a price: we serve foreign gods, which cannot provide us any sort of true fulfillment.

- Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: 

How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great, 2019.