Cast Not Your Pearls Before Swine

In a recent Crisis article, Kennedy Hall tells us that he is “done with tolerance”. He goes on to point out that words, adopted by purveyors of a narrative, cease their normal function as words and become something completely different—a summary of the said narrative if you will.

If you live long enough, you begin to disregard keeping up with whimsical social jargon—the stuff of being cool, or whatever it is they call being socially edgy and included these days. Still, if you’re a columnist, no matter your age, you can’t afford to ignore words of any sort, because words are your stock and trade, foundational to your intellectual currency.

Arguments—ideas—are formed with words. That’s the way the mind works. Words are ideation digits. But what happens when words cease to be words and are loaded with a ton of cultural baggage, become arguments unto themselves; arguments that can’t be countered because their content is so amorphous that those who use them can’t articulate them; can’t reduce them to individual idea components?

Welcome to the world of memes, where arguments can be a single word, a word that is expected to hit us like a ten-gauge shotgun slug and decimate all responses. Of the word meme, the Farlex Free Dictionary says: A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another, a definition that accurately reflects evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’ intent when he coined the word from Greek moorings in 1976. Dawkins intended a noun that “conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation,” that could consist of a single word or an entire speech in which that word first occurred.

As most readers know, memes can be pictures, names, or words, perhaps the most common association being a small picture accompanied by some terse saying. As a journalist, the latter isn’t of much interest because they’re very limited as an intellectual currency.

Heavily culturally loaded words—such as tolerance—on the other hand, are important for the singular reason that they are a death knell to intellectual pursuit. The word divisive is an adjective, and, in common usage, has negative connotations regarding the tone of one’s argument. But as a meme, especially in its noun form, divisiveness, it begins to mean needlessly dividing the community against itself toward decidedly nefarious ends; that is, at least, toward what the elites—the intelligentsia—consider to be nefarious ends.

Most recently, the term was applied to those who opposed coerced vaccination with unapproved vaccines, the lockdowns, the masking, the bankrupting of businesses, and the lost jobs. I will spare the reader an extensive list wherein the word divisive is liberally applied to opinions voicing anything vaguely traditional concerning gender, marriage, sexual attraction, or child-rearing. Tradition, that which is the safe-deposit box of cultural unity, is now divisive. How could it be otherwise? In case you missed the memo, all generations before us were ignorant, narrow, unenlightened, and tragically patriarchal.

So goes the logic of the meme divisive if you dig to its roots. Again, a meme is not a word you use in a sentence to present a case, it is an encased argument with a foregone conclusion. And it will quickly be seen that, from the vantage of a segment of the population, Christianity is now divisive: the religion of the ignorant, narrow, unenlightened, and tragically patriarchal.

In the words of that great prophetess of the age, Hillary Clinton, “…deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs, and structural biases have to be changed…” Translation: The culture of death will never fully succeed until we are no longer divided by Christianity.

Note the lovely meme she employed: bias. In Hillary-land, bias is not something that everyone possesses to a certain extent; No, bias is anything that you dare to believe that they, the enlightened, do not believe. See how that works? Any word, repeated often enough, with a certain inference, and in solidarity with fellow intellectual perverts, is well on its way to memeship.

We should not be surprised then to learn that the opposite of the meme divisive is not unitive. No, the opposite cannot simply be a word; of necessity, it is a meme: inclusive. In memedom, inclusivity replaces unity. The divisiveness/inclusivity meme pairing mandates that there are no legitimate reasons for traditionally-minded people not to treat heterodoxy and immorality any differently than orthodoxy and moral goodness. Inclusivity, like all memes, is an absolute that replaces all former absolutes: little things, like objective reality.

There are no actual arguments in a culture of memes because there is no thought; there are no private ideas, only premanufactured, approved culture bombs.

Jesus came to us to be a “sign of contradiction” and called us to be the same. Was he divisive? To be sure he was incisive and decisive—he never wasted words. St. John referred to Christ, in the manner of Aristotle, as “the Logos”, that is, the totality of truth. He is the Word made Flesh. Jesus is The Word, not the meme. No meme with its built-in arguments can hold a candle to The Word. Words matter because ideas matter, and love is the greatest idea. The Word—the idea of God—is the totality of the Truth about God’s love.

Sometimes people in the most unlikely positions respond to the calling of the Spirit, perhaps without suspecting in the least what exactly it is they are about. Take for instance the lyrics to Lennon’s and McCartney’s song “The Word”.

Say the word and you’ll be free
Say the word and be like me
Say the word I’m thinking of
Have you heard the word is love?
 
It’s so fine, it’s sunshine
It’s the word, love
 In the beginning I misunderstood
But now I’ve got it, the word is good
 
Spread the word and you’ll be free
Spread the word and be like me
Spread the word I’m thinking of
Have you heard the word is love?…

Now, it may well be that all John and Paul had in mind was romantic love, but their recognition of the immense importance of the lyrical, poetic beauty of words is, in and of itself, a testament to truth.

Memes, on the other hand—such as inclusivity and divisiveness—are ugly and brutal. There is no poetry written in meme-land, for poetry requires impressions and reflections and other operations of the mind that require words. Memes do not function as words. They are anti-introspective. They are absolutes. Transgressing a meme is a thought crime, in large part, simply because it is a thought.

A meme is a banner of conformity. How can we tell when a meme is a meme and not just a benign symbol? Is the person using it willing to discuss its relative merits at great depth? And to do so without treating you like a low-life thought criminal? To do so without mocking your background and attacking what they assign or assume as your group identity? In the unlikely scenario that they are, it’s not a meme; or, at least, the person using the word or symbol is not invoking it in that manner.

People who live by memes, especially that all too common meme, divisiveness, can never be “signs of contradiction”. Contradicting in the way of Christ requires deep engagement with other persons—a willingness to hit the mat and wrestle out the truth with another soul and mind of goodwill. To be a sign of contradiction is to be a well-trained, well-formed, well-informed, earnest wrestler for Christ—intellectually and spiritually armed and able to hit the mat at any moment.

Jesus (Matthew 7:6) instructs his listeners to “cast not your pearls before swine.” It’s a scripture that always reminds me of the little bit of sales training that I had, training that addressed the need to “qualify the buyer”, the idea being that your product is too wonderful and important and your time too precious to waste it on someone who respects neither you nor your product and displays nothing more than a vulgar, condescending curiosity. Memes are an intellectual pigsty. Learn to recognize them and defer your time to those who will actually engage you with words, those who recognize the value of contradiction in the search for truth and relish a worthy opponent—those who will meet you on the mat.

Some will, no doubt, find the biblical passage above to be very harsh, a judgment against the opponent rather than the opponent’s arguments. If it is harsh it is so because great and holy things are at stake: the believer dares not minimize the value of what he has been given to share. Swine are not evil; they are simply unable to appreciate beauty. Though the truth can set you free, the truth cannot open a heart—only grace can do that—and only an open heart can possess an open mind.

Jesus only writes off the other as an intellectual disputant, not as a soul in need of saving. In following his example, we must never underestimate the power of prayer, fasting, penance, and kindness as weapons to qualify the unqualified buyer, to instill grace where it has been previously turned away. As with memes, but for entirely different reasons, spiritual and physical works of mercy are arguments for which there is no comeback.