Why should this be? How does George W. Bush get to become president with supposed narrow majorities (not actually elected either time) and with either narrow Republican control of Congress or none and enact a thoroughly Republican agenda, while Barack Obama gets elected with a healthy majority and control of both chambers of Congress (the latter lost in the midterms) and achieves hardly anything of what Democrats supposedly elected him to do?

Here’s my own summary understanding of the situation.

The Republicans primarily represent the economic interests of the establishment - the very small minority who control the essentials of what happens in the United States, and a larger minority of associates who feed at the same trough. Based on control of the establishment media for a long time, they have successfully propagandized much of the American public into accepting that the basic features of the American economic and political system are the only right way to do things.Not only are communism and socialism successfully demonized (though understood so poorly that Democrats in general and Obama in particular are considered by many to be “socialist”), but also the term “liberal” has negative connotations and European models of government and economy are dismissed without consideration.

Inequality is more extreme in America than in other industrialized democracies, but it is oddly much less considered a problem in the U.S. One reason is that (uniquely) the labor movement has never achieved any direct political representation there, so the basic idea that the effects of capitalistic competition need to be ameliorated by government action have never been legitimated. A recent New Zealand Labour prime minister, David Lange, used to say that one of the functions of government was to make sure that the big kids don’t get all the lollies (candy). American government functions much more to transfer the candy the other way, from the little kids to the big ones.

Americans also hold the fond idea that even if they are poor now, they could be rich in the future, so they tend to be remarkably unenvious of those richer. They hope that they, or perhaps their children, might be rich one day, so they are oriented much more to individual upward mobility than to greater social justice. In fact social mobility is less in the U.S. than in most industrial democracies

Language has always been an absolute fascination of mine, ever since I suddenly learned to read, in one afternoon, aged 5. It was all there, as it was—words, sentences, phrases, ideas, knowledge, a stream of intelligence and awareness I suddenly saw a way to tap into. I didn’t have to fit any pieces together; I didn’t really have to learn to read in progressive stages. When I told my teacher how it happened, she didn’t believe me. It was just all suddenly “there,” my brain awash with direct understanding and excited verbal epiphany. I am a very verbal person by nature and tendency. Before that moment, I remember living in a world where my head was open. In this world I moved on feeling, rather than thought, and energy was free-flowing. Still, this new tool of language was like a gift from Prometheus himself. 

I think things like this affect us more deeply than we know. Learning to read was perhaps one of the most formative and happy moments of my entire life. It was also the saddest and most frustrating when my teacher didn’t believe me. Evidently, my way of coming to language didn’t fit the prevailing program of childhood education, which seemed to be force-feeding facts into one end in the hope that they’d come out of the other in some kind of useful fashion, like sausages, neatly wrapped, linked, and orderly. My thoughts never looked much like sausages. 
My dad was always very insistent on language being used properly, as in his eyes, it was the key to everything in life. I had to pronounce all my T’s and H’s, and not lapse into the heavy local working class Bristolian accent—which, frankly, makes the speaker sound a little bit “thick.” For him it meant me getting on in life—a better job, a better husband, better doors opening—but in my terms, it meant self-understanding, too. “I think, therefore I am” translates a lot better into consciousness if you have a broader vocabulary with which to think. Vocabulary expands the barriers of self, to some degree. It’s well known that, rightly or wrongly, language creates assumed barriers of class, culture, intelligence, and so on, and therefore, barriers in self-perception and cultural self-identity. I was raised in a “mixed-class” home: a working class mother, and an upper middle class father. So I guess it’s natural that it was my dad who insisted on the importance of language; he’d seen more of what that could mean for me. 
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Language is power. Something I’m beginning work on with some friends is a digital literacy program for indigenous people worldwide. The aim is to get indigenous people on the internet, and to get them heard. If a farmer or factory worker in Brazil or Thailand can write a blog, or check their commodity prices on the Baltic Dry Shipping Index, they then have some power, voice, and the chance of getting a fairer price and fairer treatment from the global market. There is the chance of asking for assistance, survival, human rights. Simple. I have little doubt this project will encounter much resistance in the world, particularly when the forces of trade and industry that currently rule the planet consider it enough of a threat. But we’ll see. I’m hopeful that I can bring these unheard voices to the world with as few obstacles as possible. It has already had a strong effect on me: through undertaking this project, I have come to realize how privileged my life as a reasonably educated white person is.

In my late 20s, I moved to America. The move proved an interesting study not just in culture shock, but what I call “language shock”—aka the need to learn American English. I’m not sure whether, over the last 9 years, I’ve successfully made the transition; it’s a work in progress. American English has a liking for complicated words such as “beverage” and “automobile” where “drink” and “car” do quite adequately in England. This kind of vocabulary seems linked to the American Dream, that sense of pride in who Americans are. It’s almost a patriotic step-up in self-importance somehow, the linguistic equivalent of buying a red sports car during middle age. It never fails to make me smile.     

Then there’s E-Prime, a modified form of English where all forms of the verb “to be” are eliminated, which is kind of like a language of the indefinite. In E-Prime, in place of the “is” words come words and phrases like “could be” and “possibly.” This model might have the potential to open up new possibilities in otherwise closed minds. It helps us expand our thinking from binary, black and white, either/or, into a far greater number of possibilities. Indeed, the implications of this kind of communication for things like international diplomacy, health care, and business could be huge: we could make the leap from the win-lose of the Westernized world into the win-win of global tolerance and cooperation, a change that is needed now more than ever.

One of the useful things to come out of Scientology has been the focus on simple, direct communication and the checking of listener comprehension insisted on by its late founder, L. Ron Hubbard. As an example of what I’m talking about, did you really understand the sentence that began this paragraph? Try and repeat what I said. This way of communicating and listening is a useful practice. 
 
Throughout the last fifty years, there has been a lot of interesting work done in the realm of language by the likes of Alfred Korzybski, Richard Bandler, and Robert Anton Wilson. These men brought a renewed interest in language into the counter-culture, academia and the popular media, and helped bring about some cultural change at the level of language. What united these men was language’s hypnotic power. They recognized its capacity to lead the brain down certain subtle paths—some helpful, some healing, and some, as many marketers and politicians are now aware, sophisticated and destructive.

A book that dealt so masterfully with this last use of language was George Orwell’s 1984. It was a work that taught me a lot during my formative years. The idea of double-speak stuck when I realized, at an early age, that I was hearing it almost everywhere I dared to listen. I have my high school English teacher to thank for introducing me to 1984. He was a remarkable man. Along with 1984, he introduced me to the ideas in the Milgram experiment, which helped me see how humans interacted with presumed authority. Combine these offerings with the magic of Shakespeare’s observations on human thought and behaviour and our propensity for self-destructive tragedy, and you had one intoxicating class.
Language responds to human invention. Many quantum physicists, for instance, had to develop language to keep up with their ideas. New advances in scientific thought like Bell’s theorem, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and Schroedinger’s cat all necessitated a new way of communicating. In the process, it became clear that the thought of the scientist, and therefore the language they used, had an effect on scientific experimentation, an idea previously unheard of in the world of Newtonian physics. (Newton was smart enough to question his own answers.) Fertile ground had been found, from which new ways of communicating like E-Prime sprang.
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Upon realizing the shared space between science, language and mysticism, Nobel Prize-winning Danish physicist Niels Bohr converted to Buddhism. Bohr’s understanding of the unity of reality spawned the great term “quantum psychology,” which then became the title of a book by Robert Anton Wilson. Not since the Renaissance has anything united science and mysticism as closely as modern physics. And for this, we have new patterns in language to thank. Left to its own devices, scientific materialism might not offer any better answers than the bygone eras of dogma and religious superstition. 
The second part of the title of Bandler’s major work, “Neuro-linguistic programming” (NLP), says it all. Rumour has it that he was asked to think up a title for his work under some duress, and the phrase just sort of fell out of his mouth in some kind of magical act of spontaneous poetic creation. I like to think that was true—that it’s a phrase straight from the mouth of the muse herself. Bandler realized early on that language has an extraordinarily profound affect on the constant programming and reprogramming of our brains—and, by extension, the way we live our daily lives. He realized that through changing the language in any one circumstance, we can change our responses; we can even change things as seemingly ingrained in us as our own self-image and the way we think about our health, wealth, and our relationships. Eventually, we can even alter our body chemistry and states of consciousness—and in doing so, we can change the very fabric of our lives.

Masaru Emoto, the Japanese author, documents some very interesting phenomena gleaned from his energetic experiments with water in his book, Messages from Water. In one experiment, pure water—uncontaminated by chemical treatment and, as much as possible, the field of human energy—was drawn from a well in the mountains. A little of the water was put into a number of small bottles, which were then individually labeled with strong words such as “love,” “peace,” “hate,” and “Hitler.” Music was also played to some of the samples. The water was then frozen so that any changes on its structure from the exposure to the words and music could be seen. Remarkably, definite imprints seemingly caused by the words and music appeared, frozen into the water crystals as the ice formed. Looked at under a microscope, it was clear what effect different kinds of energy and sounds did for the water: positive words and music made beautiful crystals, just as negative words and music made ugly ones.

Being, as we are, composed mainly of water ourselves, isn’t it time we became more conscious of the language we use? 
 
Coming home on the bus from work tonight, allowing ideas to flow freely through my brain tissues, I came to the realization: language is everything. Quite literally. It is the interface between consciousness itself and the apparently objective world of “things” arising around us and in us. Everywhere I looked, there was some form of language.
There are, of course, the many Zen masters, Christian monks and Hindu sadhus who insist on silence and a quiet mind—a world without language. But to quote pop-psychology, you can’t eat the menu. True spiritual life is very much a plunge into the realms of feeling, direct experience, gnosis, epiphany—and not a life spent alone on a mountaintop, or reading countless books in search of quiet. At the end of the day, that state of quiet mind isn’t something readily accessible to most of us, is it? Not when we have to negotiate our way through rush-hour traffic on any given day. I, like many people, have not been graced with the life—or patience—of a hermit this time around. I can’t sit around for indefinite periods waiting for this elusive state to come upon me, as I expect most people can’t. There has to be another way.

Language is not self. Self is the place of no language, ultimately. But language is certainly the finger pointing at the moon. We need to be able to communicate where the moon is. The paradox of that, of course, is that language was probably what made us look away from the moon to start with. But somehow it seems logical enough to me that it also represents the means for remembering to look back up again, until we find ourselves seeing the moon again directly. 
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There is a very good reason why my own spiritual master, Adi Da Samraj, wrote so many, many books—and with not a casual or misplaced word in a single one of them. I think that in spiritual circles language has been vastly overlooked as a means to understanding. We’re all reading the words, trying to get the deeper message, without thought for the words themselves, and the structure, the flow, and the effect they ultimately have. Words aren’t just a vehicle for ideas; they are the ideas, more than we realize.

The structure of language itself is fascinating. To paraphrase Adi Da, the ego “I” is the pole upon which the tent of language is hung. So what if that pole was shifted, towards that which is greater? Studying Adi Da’s very deliberate use of language is truly rewarding. He makes use of capitalization in a unique way, capitalizing all the things of greater import than the ego. Words like “Divine,” “Love-Bliss,” “Happiness,” “Prior-Unity,” “Grace,” are all capped and given their proper respect, while words relating to ego are given the lower case to slink around in. This way of rendering language has a tangible effect on the brain, and a real shift in thinking can, and frequently does, occur after exposure to it. It causes enough cognitive dissonance to be worth paying much more attention to.
Some time ago, I heard a curious thing about where sounds are formed in the brain. Apparently, the harder sounds of consonants come from the left brain and the vowels are centered in the right brain. I’m not sure whether this has been conclusively proven, but it’s an interesting thought. If it is true, it raises all kinds of questions about the development of culture in the East and West, with Western language being more predominantly consonant-based than many Eastern languages, with their soft vowel sounds. Like all the other bits of useless information floating around my brain, I wish I knew where I’d first heard that.

Chandira is a writer who lives in Seattle, Washington. She can be reached at chandirah@kdw.net.

      I grew up in a progressive Jewish household that valued literacy and openness to other cultural perspectives. As a result, you’d find some strange bedfellows on my parents’ bookshelves. Bertrand Russell and Isaac Asimov rubbed shoulders with C.S.Lewis and Martin Buber. John Milton and John Donne co-existed comfortably with Rumi, Allen Ginsburg and Rabindranath Tagore; Tolkein and Agatha Christie alongside William Faulkner, Isaac Bashevis Singer and A.B.Yehoshua; Mahatma Gandhi and D.T.Suzuki resided just above or below Karl Marx. It was in the process of perusing these volumes, probably in a book by C.S.Lewis, that I first stumbled across the word “Christendom”, which referred to the multitude of nations that adhere to the Christian faith.

        While it sounds quaint or archaic to our ears today, the Christendom of my childhood was a sprawling geographical entity that encompassed Eastern and Western Europe, the United Kingdom, North and South America, Australia, New Zealand and some smallish parts of Asia and Africa. It also embraced a wide range of believers, including Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox Christians, and as I later discovered, more exotic sects like Anabaptists and Mennonites, Coptic Christians and so on. I knew all this by the time I was Bar Mitzvah.

      It was not until I was in my late teens, studying mysticism, that I realized that Muslims had a similar conception of the Muslim world. The Muslim umma , as it is called, represents the entire community of the faithful, and stretches geographically from Morocco in the West to Malaysia and Indonesia in the East, from Northern China to Turkey, and farther south, to sub-Saharan Africa. It includes Sunni and Shi’a Muslims, Sufis, Alawites and other sects.

      In any case, by my twenties, it dawned on me that the Christian and Muslim faiths encompass myriad peoples, of differing languages and ethnicities, different customs, different skin colors, different cultures, with different ways of experiencing and interpreting the world. The same is true of Judaism, too. But one of the ideas that the Nazis inherited from Christendom is that Jews, unlike Christians, are a distinct race, with specific “racial characteristics”, such as dark skin, a large, hooked nose and an avid, materialistic, tribal outlook on life that is the opposite of the noble Christian ideal, which aspires to spiritual universality. It was because Jews possess these odious characteristics that they rejected the Son of God, and were supposedly responsible for his Crucifixion. Nevertheless, most Christians maintained, Jews could redeem themselves and overcome their hereditary guilt by renouncing their ancestral faith and embracing Jesus as their savior. If they did, they were saved, and worthy of being included in the Christian community - even if they were admitted a little grudgingly, at times.

      Now, this is where “the rubber hits” the road - where we can clearly differentiate between Christian and the Nazi anti-Semitism. According to the Nazis, conversion meant nothing. What someone believes is utterly irrelevant. The Jews’ hereditary or “racial” characteristics loomed so large in the Nazi imagination that our personal convictions, or theological frame of reference (or the lack thereof) simply did not matter. As a result, in Nazi Germany, you could be an ardent, Church going Catholic or Protestant, but if you had one Jewish grandparent, you were labeled Jewish, and were liable to be transported to Auschwitz in due course.

      But though the Nazis thought of Jews as “Semites,” the truth is that the people of Israel were not a race any longer. Indeed, when the term “anti-Semitism” was first coined in by Wilhelm Marr in 1879, it was already an anachronism. Long ago, Jews were in fact a Semitic people, as our common language, Hebrew, attests. As the Bible attests, we began our history as a loose confederacy of 12 tribes, all of which were undoubtedly Semitic. But 10 of those tribes perished or were lost, and nowadays, the phrase that occurs so frequently in our liturgy, Am Israel — which means “the people of Israel” — no longer refers to a discrete ethnic or racial group. It now refers to a community of faith that is as diverse as Christendom or the Muslim umma, despite the fact that there are only about 15 million of us left. How did our tiny, ancient faith acquire its rather startling diversity?

      When the Roman Emperor Constantine had his vision of the Cross, which precipitated his conversion to the Christian faith, it was before an important battle. A Cross appeared in the sky, accompanied by the words “By this you will conquer.”  This image of the Cross as a sword, or an instrument of conquest, is not what Jesus had in mind, but it was certainly predictive of events that followed. Phrases like the “Holy Roman Empire”, “the Roman Catholic Church”, and so on, remind us that Christendom was established in the ruins of the Roman Empire, and founded through a combination of military conquests and resolute campaigns to convert unbelievers.

      Similarly, during Mohammed’s life-time, the umma consisted solely of a group of warring Bedouin tribes. Instead of fighting one another, as they had done for centuries, these tribal factions buried the hatchet under Mohammed’s leadership, and soon after his death, radiated out of the Arabian Penninsula in all directions, capturing other territories, creating a Muslim civilization that eventually embraced more than 50 languages and ethnicities.

      So, despite the vicious caricatures Judaism is not a tribe or a race any longer, but a faith and a culture. The real difference between Jews, on the one hand, and Christians and Muslims on the other, is that whereas Christendom and the Muslim umma were created through conquest and campaigns to convert neighboring or subjugated peoples, Judaism’s diversity is a product of the loss of territory and consequent dispersion — the fact that Jews were expelled from their country of origin, and obligated wander the face of the earth in search of safe havens. As a result, over the centuries, instead of gaining more and more territory, more and more converts, Jews have generally been concerned with mere survival. Until recently, that is. In 1947-1948, Jews who had fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe and the Nazi cattle cars and ovens converged on Palestine, where they fought for the creation of a homeland. They fought bravely, and successfully, but at the expense of grave injustices to Palestinian Arabs — Christian and Muslim alike. The 1967 (or “Six Day”) War gave Israel’s Jews an undreamt of opportunity to reclaim the entirety of the territories they’d been accustomed to thinking of as their patrimony, and while they saw it initially as the fulfillment of a dream, it quickly turned into a nightmare — one that threatens the very fabric of Israeli democracy, and beyond that, its very survival. Despite the ideological and religious illusions of extremists, the long term viability of Israel in the NEXT 60 years hinges very largely on its ability to relinquish the lands it annexed in 1967 and helping to create a viable Palestinian state. The sooner the better. Just how to make this happen, given current realities “on the ground” — that is the problem. Many Muslims currently harbor anti-Semitic stereotypes as vile and intractable as those of their earlier Christian and Nazi counterparts. But that, as they say, is another story.

  Meanwhile, Israel’s policies and practices pose at least as grave a danger to its long term survival as the implacable hatred of is enemies. The current issue of The Atlantic magazine contains an article called “Unforgiven” that lays out the development and complexity of the challenges facing Israel with clarity and eloquence. It also describes the decades long work of dedicated peace-makers like Amos Oz, A.B.Yehoshua and David Grossman, all of whom, like myself, are Israelis and Zionists. The Zionism they embrace is not very well represented in the Israeli Knesset (Parliament), but the Meretz Party, which gave us the Geneva Accords that President Carter endorses as a workable framework for peace, does what it can, and the left wing of the Labor party, led by Ami Ayalon, continues to push in that direction, despite the belligerent posturing of the party’s leader — Israel’s defense minister, and former Prime Minister - Ehud Barak. Outside of the Knesset, the Israeli peace camp consists of a motley crew of Zionists (like Oz and Grossman), post-Zionists (Avrum Berg) and anti-Zionists (Uri Avneri.) Only the first group actually will be celebrating Israel’s birthday — and will do so in a pensive and saddened frame of mind. Nevertheless, and despite the horrors of the Occupation, I will join them in acknowledging the nearly miraculous survival of the Jewish people, and affirming the legitimacy of the Jewish state. Of the 193 countries recognized by the UN, 2/3’s are predominantly Christian or Muslim — or increasingly, a mix of both. These countries occupy about half the world’s land. The Jewish state — prior to 1967 — was merely the size of New Jersey. Surely, if Jewish culture and civilization will survive another 1000 years, there must one place on earth where Jews can just be Jews, and be in a majority, too. If it relinquishes the Occupied Territories, as it should, Israel will remain the only Jewish majority state of the face of the earth. If not, it is doomed, sooner or later, to fall. Let us celebrate Israel’s 60th quietly, reflectively, and pray for peace at last.

Daniel Burston, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Psychology who holds doctorates in Psychology (1989) and in Social and Political Thought (1985) from York University in Toronto. He is also an Associate of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, and on the Advisory Board of the C. G. Jung Analyst Training Program of Pittsburgh, the Advisory Board of Janus Head, and the Editorial Board of the Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis.