Wordsworth: The Meaning of Peace

Anyone who knows me knows that I live in a world of words. I consider it both a blessing and a curse.

On the one hand, language gives us the ability cut through the bullshit and build towards common understand. By finding agreeable common definitions and sticking to them as a baseline, common goals can be articulated, plans can be organized and understood, and progress can be charted and learned from for the future.

On the other hand, seizing on meaning can alienate you, beat you down and at times launch you into a world of contradictions. It’s hard to be consistent in meaning and even if you excel at it, by language’s own nature it will always slip out of your hands and on to floor the minute you think you have it pinned.

And then there is the matter of who’s definition we are talking about. As 1984 taught us, there is danger in focusing language to the exclusion of ideas that difficult to describe or disturb the order of things. I think we come up against this now as we look at catchall quality of the word “terrorist,” the white houses constant battle to avoid a firm definition for “torture,” and the fight for universal health care reduced to the empty threat of “socialized medicine.”

In the spirt of the fight for meaning, I bring you Wordsworth, a posts on words.

To start things off, how about something we all should agree with, the meaning of peace.

The following link is a story from NPR’s The World. As part of their Christmas show, reporter Alex Gallafent interviewed politicians, diplomats, religious thinkers and others from around the world to find how out they defined the word “Peace.” The results reach from the War on Terror to the fight for a federal “ministry of peace” to meditations on human nature itself. As often come up in deep discussions of meaning, everyone has common ideas about peace, but few seem to be willing to step up to it’s implications.

An interesting listen for the coming new year.

Pea….ummm…holla yall.

http://www.theworld.org/?q=node/14949