Language Isn't Everything

Where does all this come from? How is our Ground Truth formed? Are we born with it and it’s true for our whole lives? How do our experiences shape it? What does trauma do to our brains, and how we experience our lives? What about experiences like growing up in dual-language or dual-culture families? Or the impact of immigration? Does the Ground Truth form first or do values? Or does it all form together? How solid does it stay over time? How much does it change? Or is it only the language that evolves for different life stages? Do we even have a self? Are we just a bundle of electrical reactions? Are we distinct souls made in the image of a Creator?

Real questions I’ve asked and don’t have answers to.

With all my enthusiasm for Unboxable Leaders and this process, I don’t want to overstate its value. It can be tempting in writing about business or “making the world a better place” to position one’s ideas or experiences as the Answer to All the Problems. I don’t think that’s what this is. I think it is useful. I think it is powerful—but it’s not everything.

Lulu Miller’s book “Why Fish Don’t Exist” is one of my favorites because she holds fast to the dangers of language as a method of pinning things down super tight and precise. “Precision” and “order” are aspirations that can lie to us when we pursue them against the facts of the world.

My feelings about Lulu in a photo

In her book, Lulu Miller weaves a wondrous text that is part biography, part memoir, and part science writing. Not unlike her roots in radio reporting (she now hosts Radiolab) which really does weave those things all the time. The biography thread tells the story of David Starr Jordan, an obsessive “taxonomist”, labelling all the “fish” he could get his hands in through complex labelling systems. Miller draws a clear line between this obsession with categorization opposed to evidence and his stance as a eugenicist—someone who advocates for involuntary sterilization of “undesirables” to improve the human species. If that sounds like the Nazi party, you are correct. Jordan’s work did show up as an influence in those policies.

Oh and Jordan is the first president of Stanford University. And may have murdered Jane Stanford, the founder’s wife?

(Yep. The book is also part murder mystery. Seriously, this book is UNBOXABLE and I love it.)

When we insist that all of what we see must have a name and that name is the RIGHT AND TRUE NAME, we can fool ourselves into thinking we have a handle on the universe. That we’re the ones in charge. That we can control what is and what happens next.

For Miller, the obsession with trying to understand the meaning of life was a big part in breaking her. She writes about suicide ideation and chronic depression that has followed her since childhood. How to make sense of it all? Was there an answer in religion? In Darwin? In science’s categories of names and meaning? No. Letting it all go was the only way to make it through.

The metaphor for all of this was giving up the word “fish” which contains within it the category of “fish” which is itself a lie. Fish do not exist. There is no actual way to differentiate any clear edges to such a term. For so long, we’ve said that under water mammals were “not fish” but everything else was… and yet there was a time when whales were also considered fish. And the frame keeps breaking the more we learn about what lives under the water that makes up the vast majority of the earth’s surface!

Miller talks about the freedom of broken categories this way:

When I give up the fish, I get a skeleton key. A fish-shaped skeleton key that pops the grid of rules off this world and lets you step through to a wilder place. The other world within this one. The gridless place out other window where fish don’t exist and diamonds rain from the sky and each and every dandelion is reverberating with possibility.

To turn the key all you have do… is stay wary of words. If fish don’t exist, what else do we have wrong?

Language can help us see the truth—or it can obscure it. Language lies. A name for your work might not be what you need right now. Fine with me. It’s dangerous to insist that anything is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Words are also not the measure of a purpose.

Verbal acuity does not determine value. A preverbal kid or a nonverbal person has as much life as anyone else. To suggest otherwise is gross ableism.

Miller again, bolding my own:

I have come to believe that is our life’s work to tear down this order, to keep tugging at it, trying to unravel it, to set free the organisms trapped underneath. That it is our life’s work to mistrust our measures. Especially those about moral and mental standing. To remember that behind every rule there is a Ruler. To remember that a category is at best a proxy; at worst, a shackle.

My deepest fear in putting my work in a solid form, between two covers, is that something I make will piss on someone’s inherent dignity. That I added to the weight of “shoulds” we all carry around, another assignment in the imaginary work that “must be done” in order to matter.

And if I stand too boldly on language and words and naming as something required for meaningful living, then I have in fact pissed on dignity.

As much as I currently have the skills to do so, I have drawn a tight fence around what this work is and what it can do. I must. Because as I’ve said before: I love you. And I want to do right by you. And I will mess it up. To quote Saint Swift in Folklore: this is me trying.

In that spirit, I offer my book and thinking with humility.