We say someone is “speaking in code,” or talk about “codes,” or discuss things that are “in the code?” But what do we mean by “code?” And when someone uses coded language, do they know they’re doing that? When we talk about people or communities using codes to manipulate or control others, are they doing it on purpose? And do we all use codes, or is it always something “they” (whoever they are) do? Dan tackles those questions in this week’s episode.
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Hello and welcome to It's in the Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
I am your host for this series.
As I record this, it's the first time in a while I've recorded in my campus office, and I throw that out because there is some construction going on down the hall, so if you happen to hear any noises in the background, that's what that is.
Always, thank you to the listeners who support us.
I can't do this series without you.
We can't do anything we do on the podcast without you.
But of course, this series is largely listener-driven with your ideas, your feedback, your comments.
I've been making a concerted effort the past couple of weeks to close the gap somewhat on the number of emails I've responded to versus the number that I have.
I haven't closed the gap, but I'm working on it.
And as always, I want to thank all of you and just invite you to keep the ideas coming.
You can reach me at Daniel Miller Swag, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
Love the insights.
Saying that, I want to dive into a topic today that is sort of interesting.
And, you know, once upon a time I started this series and didn't really know what it would look like.
And this is one of those things that might be like, oh, hey, this would have been like a very first episode in the series idea.
And maybe it should have been, but I got some interesting comments or questions from folks and they went something like this, right?
Which was the question of, Do they know, that is, Dan, the people that you tend to talk about, do they know that they're speaking in code?
Do they know that they're using coded language and so forth?
And the they there, right, do they know?
Of course, oftentimes I'm talking about conservative Christians, often I'm talking about groups that I would define as, you know, representing high control religious communities and so forth.
And that question I thought was really fascinating and really pertinent and really relevant.
Um, because the short answer is no, uh, oftentimes they don't, but I'm also more interested in some of the other things that open up from that.
So what I wanted to do today, uh, being the academic that I am, I got that question.
I'm like, Oh, everything in that question is interesting.
Who is the, they, what does it mean to know we speak in a code?
What is a code?
And so forth.
And it got me thinking about.
The really two broad nuances of the word code as it operates and I think informs this series, and I wanted to talk about that because I think that's important for that next part of the question, which is the, you know, do they know that they're talking in this kind of code?
So I wanted to talk about this first, starting with these two resonances of the word code.
So let's jump right in here.
The word code, as I use it, has two broad meanings.
And once upon a time, long, long ago, in one of our earliest episodes, I took an example I think from video games, and I know there's some gamers out there who are way more into like gaming jargon and stuff than I am.
I'm not trying to get things wrong here, but this is where I got the idea from.
And I think it might have been sort of on the spot, but we were discussing something.
I'm not sure what it was.
I think it might have been related to like gender and gender roles and so forth.
And I argued that with reference to American evangelicalism, white evangelicalism in particular, that the patriarchy was, quote, in the code.
And I made a reference to video games to make my point.
And here's what I was getting at.
I'm not a hardcore gamer.
I'm maybe what you'd call a casual gamer.
I don't know, but I do play video games.
And sometimes you run into a glitch.
Everybody knows this.
You get games that are buggy or maybe something was missed in like the testing of the game that makes it into the final version or whatever.
So you get games that have problems with them and sometimes it's a relatively easy fix.
Like maybe there's a moveset that your character is supposed to be able to do that can't when you encounter a certain enemy or something and there's no reason for it.
They put in a patch or something like that.
Or sometimes game designers will do what they call nerfing, which is where maybe there's a character or an ability or a power or something that they decide is overpowered.
If your character has it, they're too strong, it kind of makes the game too easy, and so they go in and they call it nerfing.
They make it weaker and less effective.
The point is, these are problems that are problems for the game, but they're a relatively easy fix, schematically speaking.
It's a tweak to the game.
It doesn't change the game overall.
In fact, it helps to make it the game that it is.
Kind of makes things smoother.
And oftentimes, you know, there are whole discussion boards about these things.
Some problem that comes along, and then they fix it, or they adjust it, or they nerf it, or whatever.
Okay?
But sometimes, There's a problem that can't be fixed without kind of undoing the game.
And sometimes this maybe goes beyond coding.
Maybe it's a flaw in the narrative or the logic that makes a game sort of unplayable or uncompletable.
I played a game one time, I'm not going to say which game, but there was like this narrative you had to follow and you had to sort of unlock areas by doing events in a certain order and so forth.
And I, because I didn't unintentionally, Essentially found a back way around where I did something before you were supposed to be able to do it and was sort of stuck, like the whole game was stuck.
And to go back and fix it would have required basically like redoing the game.
The game became unplayable.
Or sometimes, you know, if the mechanics of a game, the buttons, the controls you have to use and so forth, if they're badly designed or badly laid out or the mechanics engine just isn't any good, it can't be fixed.
Without having to fundamentally alter the game.
You'd have to rewrite the game.
You'd have to recode it to fix it.
And when I first used the phrase, it's in the code, that's the metaphor I was drawing on.
When I was talking about something that, you know, the things we were highlighting in that discussion, many of the things I talk about in this series, the things we talk about in the weekly roundup and so forth, When I say that it's in the code, what I mean is that the things we're highlighting are sort of fundamental to the religious and social expressions in question.
They're not peripheral.
They're not easy fixes.
They are often things that couldn't be given up or modified without changing the religious and cultural identities of the people modifying them as such.
And if you want to think in terms of like worldviews, if that's a way to kind of make that a little bit more understandable or familiar, you could do that.
It's basically the idea that If our worldview is a kind of source code for how we exist in the world, there's a sense that to give up certain pieces of that source code, we become, in a really serious sense, different people than we currently are.
And that's one of the things that I'm interested in, in this series and more broadly with American religion and identity and so forth, are those elements of identity that can't easily be given up or modified.
without fundamentally changing who someone is.
And we talk about a lot of those big-button issues, things like gender, things like sexuality, things like, for some, political ideology or religious orientation or whatever.
For many people, these are fundamental kind of source code issues, and they can't be simply given up or modified or tweaked.
Without really, really changing who they are as people, okay?
So that's one sense of the word code.
If you wanted the language to sort of source code, a fundamental code that can't be modified, that's one of the things that we look at in the series.
It's one of the things I think about all the time.
But there's a second sense that maybe is more familiar to us.
It's the idea of using or speaking in code.
Obviously, these ideas relate.
The codes that I use or speak in are often influenced by the quote-unquote, you know, sort of source code that guides who I am, by my worldview, by my deeply held identities, and so forth.
And here we're talking about where we say or we do one thing to communicate or achieve something else.
We say one thing, but we communicate it to others who are familiar with the code, people who can read the code, people who can hear the code.
A negative example are so-called dog whistles.
It's coded language that may seem innocuous or nonsensical to people on the outside.
Most people can't hear it.
Most creatures can't, but dogs do.
And you can like sort of train dogs or communicate to dogs in a particular way.
That's what we mean when we talk about dog whistles.
It's coded language that may seem innocuous or nonsensical to people on the outside.
People on the inside, people in the know, people who know the code hear the meaning behind it.
And also what it means is that it's often code for things that we want to do in the world.
We all know, if you've listened to this series, I'm interested not just in what we say about the world, the way that we talk about it, but I'm interested in what the language and the codes that we use allow us to do in the world.
And a focus of this series is often on social control, the way that coded language is used to bring about particular social ends.
Okay, so that was the first thing that I was thinking about as a kind of preliminary to this question, you know, do they know that they're speaking in code or expressing a code?
Are these two senses, the sense of a kind of fundamental source code, if you like, and that sense that, again, maybe is more familiar to us, a little bit easier to understand, that idea of speaking in code or using coded language.
And we talk about both of these.
I think both of these are operative in the topics that I try to explore on this series, okay?
So that brings me to the actual question that I was asked is, do they know that they speak in code?
And what that led me to is the second, what?
The second big insight that I think I want us to hold on to, if I'm looking for words here, is that we all have codes.
Okay?
I'm interested oftentimes in decoding a certain kind of religious or cultural American identity, certain forms of political identity.
And that can give some people the impression that when I'm talking about that identity, it's a claim that only they have a code, but somehow we don't.
Or that I, sitting back and examining that code, looking at that encoded language, exploring that source code, It can give the impression that, well, you know, they speak encoded language.
They try to achieve particular social ends.
They use words that mean one thing on the surface but mean something else, you know, to sort of those in the know.
My claim would be, folks, that we all operate that way.
We all operate and draw upon codes in both senses outlined above.
We all have deeply held convictions and desires and social perceptions that fundamentally structure our way of being in the world, right?
And for all of us, there are elements in this code.
Again, we can call it our source code.
If we want to use the language of worldview, we can do that.
We have elements of this that are so basic And fundamental to our sense of self that they are not optional.
To change them or to challenge them, to really entertain the possibility that there could be other ways of being or that they might be wrong in some way or that they might be inconsistent with other things we hold and so forth, to change or seriously challenge them is to challenge or threaten our very identity.
And my claim would be, and I know that this can be contentious, and as Brad, my co-host, would say, I have the receipts, and if people want, you know, you can follow up and I can tell you part of why I say this.
My claim is that this is a universal dimension of what it is to be human, of the human condition.
So I tend to be focused on decoding a range of these codes.
But that doesn't mean that I think I or anybody else somehow exists outside or beyond codes understood in this sense.
And I could and can joke around.
I mean, all the jokes about me and like cargo shorts and like driving sensible dad cars and, you know, things like that.
That's all part of that's all part of code is leaning into the fact that yeah, I'm a you know, I'm a white middle-class dad and I do a lot of really stereotypical white middle-class stuff There are elements of that.
That's the the code that shapes me good bad or otherwise.
This is why I think People have so much trouble changing or challenging these really fundamental ways of being, because in a very serious sense, they have to become someone different from who or what they have been.
This is why I think, for example, for people who truly believe that it is written into the nature of the universe that there are two biological genders and they are divinely ordained, it's no simple matter To just say, oh, well, you know what?
I guess gender exists on a spectrum and it's fluid and so on and so forth, because you're not just talking about gender.
You're talking about so much more.
You're talking about, like, the nature of reality.
You're talking about whether for this person in question, probably, whether there is or isn't a God and what that God is like and everything else that you hold dear is wrapped up in that.
So it's a highly, highly threatening kind of question, which is why people are so resistant to changing, as it were, that source code.
Because just like you can't change the source code of a game and have the same game, we can't modify our own source code and remain fundamentally the same people that we are.
And so we have a vested interest in hardening and protecting these codes and putting up defensive mechanisms to try to leave those codes intact.
And I encounter this regularly.
I talk about, you know, my work with the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery as a trauma practitioner.
I deal with this with my clients a lot because all of my clients have walked away from the religious upbringing that they've had.
They have, in a certain sense, Taken the bull by the horns and they have rejected or found lacking key parts of that source code, of that fundamental worldview.
And one of the things they often wrestle with is who they are now, what it is to be in the world without the guidance of the assurances that that gave.
They experience in a really concrete way the difficulties and costs that can come With the willingness or the necessity of calling into question this kind of fundamental structure of their source code or their worldview.
But again, my contention is this is who we are as humans.
This is part of the way that we exist.
And it also means that as human beings, we all, all, all of us, Speak and act in codes in that second sense as well.
Being people that we are, being the kinds of creatures we are, we communicate who we are and how we identify In a lot of ways, and some of that is with coded language.
We use stylized or routine coded language to communicate to others.
We read the codes that other people employ.
We walk into a room full of people we don't know, maybe on, you know, I'm getting ready to start classes.
Maybe it's on the first day of class, or maybe it's like your first day in elementary school, or the first day on a new job, or maybe it's just walking around the grocery store, or it's out in a park, or wherever.
And we read people and we make initial identifications of who are the people that we think are like us?
Who are the people that are different from us?
Who are people we can recognize as like us in some way?
All of that involves codes.
And sometimes we do that knowingly to communicate to others.
Sometimes we don't.
But it's all coded language.
Again, it's part of who we are.
And this is why some of the simple example of this is code switching.
We're all familiar.
It's a really, really basic one.
We typically don't act the same at work as we do at home around our loved ones.
Why?
It's radically different context.
We work in different codes.
We're communicating different things about ourselves.
It's a different way.
We inhabit a kind of different space.
We use different codes.
We speak in different ways.
Another example can be regionalisms.
I grew up in a part of the country that calls soft drinks pop.
I grew up in Colorado.
When I was in high school, I moved to Arkansas, where soft drinks are all called Coke.
And it threw me for the longest time.
They'd be like, do you want a Coke?
I'd be like, sure.
And they'd be like, what kind?
I'd be like, I just said Coke.
I started saying Coke when I was there because I didn't want to be marked as the guy from somewhere else who talks funny and says pop, right?
I picked up that different code.
Minor example.
We can think of less trivial examples.
I have worked with students who are queer.
Maybe they're trans.
Maybe they're gay.
Whatever.
But they will share the story of when they go home for holidays, they're in the closet.
They communicate a different code.
They adopt the code of somebody who's straight, or somebody who's cisgender, or whatever, because for whatever reason, range of reasons, they are not ready or able to express who they feel like they really are in that context at home.
They switch the codes.
They express themselves in a very, very different way so they can be read as something different in one context from another.
Right?
So those are my big things.
Two senses of the word code.
Source code model, if you like, and then speaking in coded language.
Number two, that we all do it.
It is part of being a human being.
When I talk about this coded language, it's not a criticism.
It's not the notion that if we were more real or authentic, we wouldn't speak in these codes.
Authenticity is itself a kind of coded language for all kinds of stuff.
It is part of who we are as human beings, as the kinds of creatures we are.
Which brings up, finally, I circle around in my roundabout way to that question of, do they know that they speak in code?
The answer is, for the most part, no.
For the most part, we don't experience those codes that structure our lives and that we speak in and that people read on us all the time.
We don't experience them as codes.
They're naturalized.
For us, they just reflect reality or the way things are or common sense or whatever.
Again, that's why they're so hard to bring into view and why it can be fundamentally disconcerting When they are called into question, because it's calling into question reality as we know it, and that is frightening, and that is disconcerting.
Again, we have a vested interest in not seeing that.
Now, having said that, because I can hear the emails from my clever listeners now saying, well, are you a determinist?
Are you saying that everything's determined?
Nope.
I'm not talking about some matrix-y kind of thing where we all live in the matrix of our codes and have no idea that we're being controlled by others and so forth, because obviously we can become aware of them.
We can see them.
We spend our time in this series talking about them.
We can take the same skills we use when we talk about other people and their codes and turn them on ourselves and say, wow, what are my codes?
What are the pieces of my source code?
What are the fundamental things that make me, me, without which I can't be the me that I am?
We can call those into question.
We can, in fact, change.
My clients are such a testament to this.
And anybody who works with people in therapy or clients of any kind can talk about how amazing it is, this human capacity to actually bring into view the unseen and to work our way through it and to become different people than we have been.
So this isn't determinism.
We can change.
We can become aware of these codes and how they shape us and the way that we speak and the effects of our language and so forth.
All of that can happen.
We can't ever be naive and think that we simply choose them or that they're easy to step out of or that we somehow occupy a position outside of them where we can judge everybody else and not ourselves.
Got to wind this down.
I realize that's a relatively kind of, I don't know, academic or philosophical or abstract sort of set of reflections, but I really appreciated the questions that I've gotten from people.
Whether it's from engaging people and being like, I try to talk about this stuff we talk about, people just don't see it.
Right, they don't.
Or the questions of, you know, do they know that they're speaking in a code?
Oftentimes they don't.
Do they know that they have a, what I'm calling the source code that shapes them?
Not necessarily, right?
But that question is of interest because it opens up on these other things of what we mean.
And so this is This is something I just wanted to reflect on and think about.
It's been useful as, you know, I have these two senses of code that I sort of shift between, and so thank you to the listeners who reached out with that thought and that question.
If nothing else, I hope that it highlights why it is that it's so difficult to bring people to a point of change when it comes to things like these fundamental codes and values and so forth.
I take seriously the notion that we wouldn't be the people we are without them, and that it's a real incentive to not changing.
It's a real incentive to surrounding ourselves with other people who are like us.
And in that likeness, it reaffirms that idea that, again, this is just common sense or natural or whatever.
All right.
Thank you for listening.
As always, we can't do this without you.
We are an independent podcast.
Everything we do is generated by us.
We don't have external funding, and so thank all of you patrons who are willing to support us financially, people who listen to the ads and help make it possible to do this, everybody who keeps the ideas and the feedback and the input coming.
Please keep that coming.
Again, welcome, insights from all of you, comments, critiques, whatever.
You can reach me at Daniel Miller, swaj, Daniel Miller, S-W-A-J, at gmail.com.
