Feedly — the RSS/blog reader I’ve relied on since Google Reader was euthanized — was still down this morning. This is frustrating — making it difficult to keep up with all the news and writers I follow every day, and preventing me from accessing the bookmarks for the stuff I’d intended to write about yesterday and today.
This isn’t a simple technical glitch on Feedly’s part. It’s the result of a deliberate attack (or series of attacks) by hackers who are attempting to extort money from the company. That’s not cool.
There’s a very special room in Hell for hackers who pull stunts like this.
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That sentence above in bold is both a biblical reference and a familiar colloquial idiom. That idiom is so familiar — a cliché, at this point — that we tend to overlook its full original meaning. And the biblical reference might seem strange coming from someone like me. I don’t believe that Hell exists, so why would I want to seemingly affirm its existence by saying such a thing? What’s up with that?
I do not believe in the existence of Hell, but I do believe in “Hell” in the biblical sense. My statement above — “There’s a very special room in Hell” for these hackers — employs the term in precisely that biblical sense, conveying no more and no less than what the small handful of biblical passages mentioning “Hell” also convey. Let’s look at that.
1. The statement is not about Hell, it’s about the hackers.
The point — the main point and the whole point — is to express disapproval of the actions of those hackers. To focus on anything else is to miss the point entirely. This is a “teaching” about criminal cybervandals, not a discourse on life after death, or death after death. Treating it as a “teaching” about the existence and/or nature of Hell distorts the meaning of the statement, attributing a literal meaning to a figure of speech that cannot support such a literal meaning while ignoring the meaning that speech clearly and emphatically does convey.
“There’s a very special room in Hell for hackers who pull stunts like this,” Fred says. Fred is not saying that Hell exists and that it contains very special rooms or that others must accept that Hell exists as a literal place containing literal very special rooms. Fred is saying that extortion via a distributed denial-of-service attack is very, very bad.
The statement wouldn’t be substantially different if it said, “There’s a dark cell in Azkaban waiting for hackers who pull stunts like this.” The meaning does not depend on — or in any way suggest — the actual, literal existence of the wizard prison from the Harry Potter books. It only requires enough of a cultural familiarity with those stories for the hearers to appreciate that a cell in Azkaban would be unpleasant.
2. The statement is hyperbolic.
I am quite displeased with the hackers who are denying me access to my customary Web-browsing. I wish to convey this displeasure. “There’s a seat at a Saturday detention for these hackers,” wouldn’t cut it. So I reach for something unmistakable — the worst thing I can think of.
And Hell, of course, is our word for the worst thing we can think of. That’s what makes it indispensable whenever we reach for a bit of superlative hyperbole. This is why no one who has just gotten cut off in traffic has ever leaned out the car window and yelled, “Go to purgatory!”
This is also why it doesn’t matter if each of us brings a different set of Very Bad connotations to the term, or if these disparate ideas and images can’t be neatly reconciled. “It’s like burning … burning forever.” Good! “It’s like being frozen in an endless sea of ice.” Excellent! Sulfur, brimstone, monsters with pointy sticks, fire, ice, cacophony, silence … the specifics don’t matter. All that matters is the extremity of them.
Hyperbole, of course, is not meant to be taken at face value. It can’t be taken at face value, since the whole point is that it’s face value should be incomprehensibly infinite. Such boundless extremity serves to make the reference unmistakably emphatic.
Taken literally, hyperbole becomes ridiculous, or even monstrous. I don’t literally want to see these hackers tortured for their crimes. I would like to see them caught, arrested, convicted and sentenced for those crimes. But that sentence ought to be proportional — not hyperbolic. Their temporal crime — like all temporal crimes — does not require an eternal punishment. If the sentencing judge gave them life without parole, I would think that was obscenely unjust. If that judge further stated that the Eighth Amendment no longer applied to these hackers, and that they should be endlessly tortured and tormented throughout their imprisonment, I would be horrified at his monstrous, atrocious imagination. (And thus would probably say something like, “There’s a very special room in Hell for judges who disregard the Eighth Amendment” or “This judge is a demon from Hell and he needs to be impeached, disbarred, and locked away forever.”)
3. The statement’s reference to Hell is undefined.
It is a reference back to an amorphous body of folklore, not a citation of a specific text in which the existence and nature of Hell is limned, charted, defined or defended. My reference to Hell may involve any of a vast array of notions, stories, images — some complementary, some contradictory. It is highly unlikely that my particular amalgamation of such ideas and images precisely aligns with those of you or of any other reader. Whatever it is in particular that I’m imagining and intending when I say the word “Hell,” that is surely quite different from whatever it is that you are imagining when you hear that word.
That wouldn’t do at all if we were engaged here in a discussion of the existence and nature of Hell. If that were our goal here, then we would need to set about defining our terms with more precision to ensure that what we say closely aligns with what others hear. But such definition and precision is unnecessary for our purposes here. It would, in fact, be an intolerable distraction from our purposes here. A polyvalent, somewhat contradictory, amorphous Hell serves just fine for what we’re communicating here.
“There’s a very special room in Hell for hackers who pull stunts like this.”
“What, precisely, do you mean when you say ‘Hell?'”
“You know … Hell. Very Bad place full of lots of Very Bad … stuff. Fire, I suppose. Pointy things. Badness.”
Whatever set of Very Bad connotations you bring to the term will surely suffice. We don’t need to agree on all or any of those for us both to understand the point of the statement — which is, again, not about Hell at all, but about those rat-bastard hackers who took down Feedly.
The same is true for what is probably and unfortunately the most common idiomatic reference to Hell in our culture: “Go to Hell!” It is almost never the case that the speaker and the person being addressed will share a precise understanding of the nature and meaning of Hell. But this undefined reference is nonetheless sufficient. The point is conveyed quite clearly. And that point, again, is not about Hell, but about the speaker’s emphatic opinion of the addressee.
It seems we’re better at understanding that when confronted with this rude idiom than when we’re reading Jesus’ words in the Gospels. No one ever says, “The guy next to me in traffic just offered a robust defense of the doctrine of Hell.” They simply understand that the guy has just communicated his disapproval in the strongest language available. Yet when Jesus uses the same language to convey his similarly emphatic disapproval of, say, those who fail to feed the hungry, we ignore his main point and pretend he’s just provided a theological lesson about the afterlife.
Jesus’ references to Hell, like those of the rude driver in traffic, assume that the hearer/reader will be roughly familiar with the reference, but isn’t concerned with the specific particulars of how that reference is understood. That’s why it’s always a reference, not a citation of a particular earlier text or specific teaching.
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