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Pragmatics and the Golden Rule

Pragmatics and the Golden Rule

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” 

“Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus”

(verses taken from the ESV)

Breadth and Depth

Jesus was a master orator, the best to have ever lived. Every sentence he spoke was densely packed, full to bursting with meaning. He disarmed interlocutors, turned arguments upside down, and provided answers that are true at every level of analysis. Simple enough a child can apprehend the meaning, deep enough the most learned among us grapple with the full weight of consequence. And, equally incredible, when he provided answers, his answers met the challenge of the moment as well as all the challenges that would come in subsequent centuries, even millenia. 

Look at the first verse above. Stated repeatedly throughout the scriptures, this particular sentence was pulled from Galatians where it is expounded upon by Paul for the sake of the squabbling Galatian church. This short sentence did not originate with Paul - it is first found in Leviticus. Christ, Himself, then reiterates this foundational command as recorded in the synoptic gospels. James also picks up this command and admonishes the followers of Jesus to live according to this principle. 

It is a simple sentence, yet it is deep with meaning. 

As Yourself

Jesus teaches us who “your neighbor” is most famously in the parable of the Good Samaritan. He also tells us what love is: “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” Let’s look at the third part of this concept briefly, not what love is, not who your neighbor is, but what He means by “as yourself.” 

This phrase entails several concepts, necessary pre-requisites for us to implement the teaching.

  1. I am different than you.
  2. You, being different than me, have different ways to understand love than I do.
  3. I am going to love you NOT as if you were me. I am going to love you as if I were you.
  4. In order to succeed in loving you, I must love you according to the way you are to be loved. Anything else is failure.

Number 3 is a little confusing, so let’s explore that a touch. What does it mean to “be yourself?” Among other things, it means intimate knowledge of your own body, mind, and soul. It means interaction and (limited) control over those elements. And it means (granted) ownership of those elements. 

So what would it mean to me to be “as yourself” rather than “myself?” Well, it would mean that YOUR body, mind, and soul would belong to me, YOUR knowledge of self would be mine, and YOUR elements would be under my (granted) purview. I have not imposed myself into your life (my elements going into you, making a second Caleb), exactly the opposite. “As if you were your neighbor” is a way to restate the concept. Not “As if your neighbor were you.” I take off my own being and step entirely into who you are, as if I became you. Jesus does not command us to love one another as “myself.” 

Becoming so much like the other person as to take on their nature… Sound familiar?

This type of “as yourself” love is what Jesus did. He became so like us that He became one of us. “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.” He “took the very form of a servant.” This command to love calls us to imitate Christ in every social relationship we have the way He did. Step out of our own lives in sacrificial love, focusing on the other person and loving them in the way they need. Even if it costs us, as it did the Good Samaritan. And as it did Christ.

Functional Reality and the Therapy Focus

I am not coming at this concept for theological purposes primarily. I am approaching this from what could be called “natural law” or, perhaps more specifically and narrowly, from the lens of speech-therapy medical concepts. I am here for praxis, not theory. I want to know how best to develop social skills and interpersonal relationships. Studying the pattern of our creation and of our creator gives us tangible answers. It tells us what the pattern is and how we differ from it, then by inference, how we re-align ourselves with it. If Christ is the pattern of conduct, then let us align ourselves to that pattern for positive functional results. Reread the second verse listed above. That is what we ought to do if we want functional relationships.

Practical Take Aways

In future posts I will expound on the active elements one can do to improve social skills in discrete ways. Prior to forming good habits, though, we need to stop our bad habits. Most children learn this in sports, music, martial arts, dance, etc. “Let’s break the bad habits first, we can focus on the good habits later.”

Here is the bad habit we will first break: Incorrectly identifying why the social error occurred.

It is very common for what we call “neurotypical”* people to misunderstand “neurodivergent” people. Because there is a measurable, observable difference, we experience this reality but we don’t know how to understand or explain it. Often, what I see is a categorization of the difficulty “they” experienced as something uniquely different than the kind of difficulties “we” experience. In other words, people will often consider the social skill difficulties that an autistic person has as different than the kind of social skill weaknesses we, ourselves, have in normal life. 

For example, consider the difference between these two scenarios:

  • A complex relational situation to juggle where your boss isn’t really a friend (because he is your superior) but you do interact with him on personal terms outside of work and now those two elements are putting you in a tough position when he asks you to do something that isn’t really your responsibility but would be kind of rude to deny.
  • Straight-forwardly dominating conversation with strings of factoids about Pokémon to people that are not interested. Then, not stopping (either through a lack of awareness or a lack of care) despite them signaling that they are uninterested and trying to end the conversation.

What I am positing is this: Since we (all humans) are all the same kind of creature, we experience the same fundamental kinds of struggles. Sure the “clothing” of these two situations are different, and one is far more nuanced than the other, but the fundamental breakdown is in the same core element. Autistic people are not made of different stuff. 

Think of it this way - when Van Gogh made an errant brush stroke on the canvas, that is the kind of error that an amateur makes - an incorrect move of the brush resulting in a misplaced blob of paint. The difference is found not in the type of error, but in the magnitude, the extent, and the combined presence of other errors. Van Gogh slightly over-darkens a shadowed brow, you smear a big streak of unmixed blue across a poorly formed face lacking depth, proportion, and curve. Paint in the wrong spot, both. So similar yet so different.

The two social situations I listed above share a common error. The first failed to establish and respect personal boundaries, leading to discomfort and social awkwardness later on down the line. The second failed in this same category of social boundaries, though far more overtly. The difference is in the scale of that error. There was distinctly no respect for the topical or temporal boundaries of the other people. The second situation also included additional errors such as failure to consider other people’s body language, a factor that was considered and successfully accounted for in the first situation. When you sum up the concomitant errors with the magnitude of the boundary errors, the results between the first and second scenario are vastly different. But, see how the difference isn’t in the kind of error, but instead the playing out and the combination of each element? 

For the more engineering/mathematical minds out there, you can represent it something like this:

  • Let S = standard social expectations
  • Let "S = 1.0" be the normalized reference value meaning 100% of social expectations
  • Let Y = social interaction success coefficient
  • Let  "Y = 1.0" be the normalized reference value meaning 100% success, 0.0 meaning 0% success
  • Let A, B, C = social errors, each of a different kind
  • Let iA, iB, iC = Intensity coefficients for each respective error (each ranging from 0.0 to 1.0, or 0% intensity to 100% intensity)
  • Ideally S = Y
    • Constraints:
    • To ensure the result stays within a normalized range of 0 to 1, the sum of the errors must be constrained: 0 ≤ (iA * A + iB * B + iC * C) ≤ 1.
    • If the sum of errors exceeds 1, the resulting success coefficient (Y) is effectively 0. This can be expressed as: Y = max(0, S - (iA * A + iB * B + iC * C))

The base formula would look like this: Y = S - ((iA * A) + (iB * B) + (iC * C))

Now let’s plug in the information from our scenarios. Let’s have A be the social boundary error.

  • Scenario 1: Y = S - ((0.12 * A) + (0.0 * B) + (0.0 * C))
    • In this instance, the social boundary error is accounted for but it is low intensity, only around an approximate ~12%. Other social errors, such as speech volume violations, are not present.
  • Scenario 2:  Y = S - ((0.83 * A) + (0.12 * B) + (0.46 * C))
    • In this instance, the social boundary error is seen in high intensity, approximated at 83% strength. Other social errors are also present, lowering the social interaction success even further beyond the effects of A.

Even if that is too “mathy” for you, ignore all the rules and just take a look at the two equations. Notice they share the same layout. Notice, also, that situation 1 and 2 are both degraded by the presence of variable A, the variable of social boundary errors. The total success of their social encounter (Y) is lowered by the same kind of error - in this case a social boundary error - though in scenario 2, the intensity is higher (83%) and there are other errors present (variables B and C) which make the final outcome significantly worse. 

If we can understand that all humans operate with the same (frankly, relatively limited) toolset to form, maintain, and repair relationships, then we can begin to understand why some of us have more difficulty than others. The typical “autistic” behaviors are not some unique category. These behaviors are formed from the same underlying toolset we have. The difference between “their” social behaviors and “ours” is due to a difference in the application of the tools. When all the variables are in play and the intensity values are adjusted, one can see that there is nothing “new” added to the system.** 

One final illustration to really drive the point home. If I am laying wire for an electrical circuit, the electricity flows by a set of unchangeable rules. The metals I am using, too, follow an unchangeable set of rules. I can change the wire path or tweak the alloy, adding a bit more gold or a bit less copper, but the underlying principles of metallurgy and conductivity remain fixed. The rules of electricity, in this case, parallel the universal rules of human behavior. The tweaks to the layout of the wiring, the alloys used, etc. are analogous to the differences in neurological activity particular to each human. The delivered result (watts would be analogous to the social outcomes) are dependent on these two factors. While we cannot change the universal rules, God has blessed us immensely in that we can, by applied effort, adjust the “wiring” inside ourselves, thereby improving the quality of the output.

It is a bit of a complicated concept. The core of it is this - all humans are the same kind of creature, made of the same thing, and each an Image of God. When difficulties arise and we are not as we “ought to be,” we can go to the pattern to see the difference of us-compared-to-it, and thereby infer how to return. From Christ’s teaching “Love one another as yourself,” all other social principles can be derived because this is the summation of that universal pattern. I fail, you fail, we all fail in social skills BECAUSE we fail in  omission and/or commission to truly love the other person wholly as ourselves. 

What I’m not saying

A quick word on what I’m not saying. The words above are only saying what they are saying. I am not, in this post specifically, trying to lead to any further implications. So here is a non-exhaustive list of what I am NOT saying:

  • 🚫All social failures are acts of sin 🚫
  • 🚫Neurotypical people are superior in love to neurodivergent people🚫
  • 🚫Social failing is always a volitional action🚫
  • 🚫Capacity is the same as behavior🚫
  • 🚫All people have the same capacity🚫
  • 🚫These skills are static and unchangeable🚫
  • 🚫Anyone beyond the “typical person” is lesser in value, dignity, or worth🚫
  • 🚫Other non-christian ideas🚫

What I am Saying

No matter who you are, what your capacity for love is, what opportunities you have, or how hard it is, go forward in love that you might do the good works God has set forth for you before the beginning of time. Love others as yourself. 

*I am uninterested in running the euphemism treadmill. This term will eventually be outdated and offensive - may already be - just like the terms “retarded, mentally handicapped, special needs, autistic,” etc. have become. It is my desire to respect and love others according to the time and place they live. The terms change and no one could ever be “forward looking” enough to prevent seeming outdated in the future. When these terms I use become offensive, mentally replace it with whatever word you use now which, too, will one day be a horrible thing to utter. 

** I am speaking in general terms throughout this article. Of course, there are instances where something is taken away from the system. A person without the neurological development required for verbal communication cannot produce nuanced intonation patterns. The point of this article is not to speak to those situations. Instead I aim to speak of what occurs in the vast majority of instances where all the same “pieces” are present yet the results turn out different.