There is no new thing under the sun (language, negatives and absolute statements)

In my last post, I had to deal with a supposed contradiction that I really didn't think was a contradiction at all. When David said in the Psalms, "There is none that doeth good, no not one," I didn't think we're meant to take it as absolutely as it was implied. Most likely, he was saying that he didn't know of anyone who does good, or at least couldn't bring one to mind.

I had a song lyric from Jamiroquai's "Virtual Insanity" stuck in my head all morning:

And nothin's going to change the way we live
'Cause we can always take, but never give

There's a lot of negatives and absolutes in those two short lines! "Nothing", "always", and "never"; the language is pretty strong, but how absolute is it actually meant to mean? Taken fully literally, the first line could be thought to be satlying there is no possible thing at all that can change our lives. However, there are physical things that would; like if someone have me a million dollars in cash, it would almost certainly change the way I live. There are also things that are abstract concept, like changing our economy from a capitalist one to a socialist one, that would greatly change the way most of us live. So is the lyricist wrong? Not if you understand idiomatically what staements like "nothing is ever going to change" really mean. Generally, when someone makes such a statement, they are saying they have little to no expectation that any substantial changes will arise.

What about the second line? Well, there's possible additional vagueness there because it's a compound clause, so does the verb "can" just refer to the part before "but", or also the part after it? I'll explain what I mean later. So are we meant to take "we can always take" literally? Probably not, since everyone sleeps, and while we sleep, we can't really take anything except oxygen. So do we take constantly in the time that we're awake? No, that also doesn't quite make sense. I believe once again, we need to see that "always take" is also an idiomatic phrase that means, every time we have the opportunity to take, we will, which even phrased that way is usually hyperbolic. What about "never give"? Is the word "can" at the beginning of the clause implying "can never give"? This is actually a possibility; that the lyric is saying that giving is a physical impossibility. It does seem unlikely, however. One could argue that we're always giving something, of course; in an abstract sense we're always giving people a chance to see what sort of people we are, we are giving off some amount of odor, and a lot of us are giving an attitude. Whatever this might be saying, it's actually pretty obvious that generalizing that nobody ever gives anything is simply not true. What I believe is implied here is that people tend to take without giving back, perhaps. It seems to me to be the most likely interpretation.

So, that's my take on the meaning, and it may be potentially vague, but, "I have little to no expectation that any substantial changes will arise/because people tend to take from the world without giving back to it" doesn't make a good song lyric.

So bringing this back to the subject of Biblical interpretation, the thing I'm trying to say here is that people on both sides--those who are looking to the Bible as a guide for life and those who are looking to it to find problems--should consider that strict literal interpretation can often be misleading. When Solomon says, "there is no new thing under the sun," he's obviously talking in a more non-specific way, as obviously every day there are new people being born, new works of art being created, and new buildings and machines being constructed. It's just that perhaps there is little that is substantially different. This is always the case with language.