Right Speech and Interpretive Communities
Tonight we'll look at the Buddha's guidelines on right speech, continuing on from our conversation about relationships a couple weeks ago. Our words are often the most important way we connect with each other, but there are so many ways now for words to go wrong! We hurt each other unintentionally, add opinion or defensiveness unconsciously, or fall under the sway of politicized memes instead of speaking what is our own to express.
We'll see how far we get into this, but part of where this is going is an exploration of what it means to participate in communities of interpretation, and how through language we share one large system of understanding, or mind. Except, of course, that it's not "one" but many, and the fragmentation that has come with the siloed communication of the social media era means that statements of truth are now fragile in a way that they haven't been before.
The standard progressive critique to the right wing idea that truth is malleable is to insist that it is not: that there is such a thing as a fact, and that it can be reported accurately, without excessive distortion through a politicized lens. This is true for a certain narrow type of fact, but unfortunately for progressive politics, it is less true than we might wish it to be.
The Buddhist understanding that all experiences are conditioned and contingent upon context plays easily into the claim that truth is whatever you perceive it to be. We have to deconstruct this elision if we want to not end up mistakenly agreeing with the right by misinterpreting emptiness. Deconstructing communication is part of mindfulness of the aggregates because everything we say or hear is a saṅkhāra, or karmic formation—stories are mental constructs that reflect the conditions through which they come into being. Basically—and this is the definition of positionality—who you are conditions what you are able to think, and by extension describe your experience in words.
So other than the absolute truth that no words can describe, everything can and will be described differently by different people. The "post-truth" world is radical, not because truth is somehow different than it ever was before, but because it politicizes difference. A wise Buddhist understanding of emptiness avoids the trap by understanding that just because everything is contingent doesn't mean experiences are meaningless or infinitely malleable. Deconstruction just helps us be clearer about what levels of rhetoric we're speaking through—distinguishing between description, interpretation, opinion, research, etc.
We'll start tonight with the Buddha's basic definition of right speech, and go on from there to explore some of these deeper threads in communication, interpretive community, and culture.
