When the like-minded circle their virtual wagons around the cyber campfire, it points to a particular type of language use
The question: How should we talk about God online?
How does anyone talk about God? All language, unlike God, is limited. Wittgenstein warned: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Can anything else be said?
Liam Hudson was a Cambridge educationalist. In 1966 he subjected a sample of schoolboys to a Getzels-Jackson test (including one magic question "How many uses can you think of for a brick?"). He concluded that there were two kinds of learner. The wisdom of either, pushed to its logical extent, appeared folly to the other.
Convergers, often physical scientists, deal in literal prose. Divergers, more often practitioners of the arts, lived in a world of metaphor, symbol, and poetry. To a linear converger the only proper answer to a question was direct and contingent. A diverger used questions as open springboards for surprising cognitive leaps.
Convergers tend to espouse particular package deals of faiths and denials of faith. Their language is a medium for birds of a feather to flock together. Groups of the like-minded circle their virtual wagons around the cyber campfire, within a ring of words designed to reassure fellow believers (or unbelievers) they are right. Its main purpose for outsiders is to evangelise them.
Discussion within convergent charmed circles is largely preaching to the choir. There is a tendency towards sarcasm, in-jokes and name-calling. The purpose of discourse is to build and fence the common ideology. An occasional heretic is flamed, but the hottest roastings are reserved for outsiders.
Divergers use language use not to bolster positions but to extend them, marking multiple shades of colour and potential meaning. They prize creative active listening, along with diversity of outlook. Divergent theology (or anti-theology) is a form of poetry, drawing its power from way beyond mere words.
Those who use language in these different ways can talk to each other as well as themselves, but only, of course, if they want to and are willing to expand their own bandwidth by temporarily suspending their instinctive disbelief about the other approach. Divergers may well find this easier to do for convergent logic than convergers for divergent ideas.
Narrow convergers may easily fall back on that faithful old British Army standby, the Bloody Fool theory. According to this approach anything surprising, paradoxical, over-complex or foreign is evidence of a Bloody Fool at work. Since a Bloody Fool is anyone who produces material that is surprising, paradoxical, over-complex or foreign, the logic loop converges perfectly. The result is unwitting functional intolerance founded on what the Roman Catholic church used to call invincible ignorance. Whereof I cannot speak, thereof you must be silent.
We are fast approaching the point at which we can communicate with anyone we want in the world. Whether they will think we have anything to say is up to us, but also up to them. We can use it to open up, or close down on other worlds as we want.
Roy Hodgson Hacking Energy Science fiction The Archers China
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