It's broad in the human (as opposed to Heinlein's Martian) sense because we engage with religion, philosophy, and science in a largely intellectual way. Yes, even wingnut fundamentalists. They're all highly linguistic things; most of our more mystical traditions have fallen by the wayside for one reason or another.
In the Martian sense, that mystical perspective is far more useful: it unifies their physical reality of transcendent Old Ones and life that can be grown through singing and so on. The presence of a single word signals that they've collapsed all of these things down to a simple concept; the lack of a human analog simply says we haven't.
So to make a long thing short, the word cuts to the heart of a conceptual area that we can but dance around with all of our words and qualifications and half-understandings in the fields of religion, philosophy, and science. The desire to know divinity, to know oneself, to know the universe: these can be streamlined into a single concept, to grok.
Thus why Heinlein goes on to have Mike explain his pantheistic "God is that which groks". The closest English word I know of is not "understand" but rather "suffuse" or "permeate". To me, the reason the word survives the novel as a mere stronger version of "understand" is because most people hand-waved the novel's walk-through of religion as a boisterous critique rather than as a considered and valid approach to life, the universe, and everything.
Comments
Except that it's not actually all that broad.
It's broad in the human (as opposed to Heinlein's Martian) sense because we engage with religion, philosophy, and science in a largely intellectual way. Yes, even wingnut fundamentalists. They're all highly linguistic things; most of our more mystical traditions have fallen by the wayside for one reason or another.
In the Martian sense, that mystical perspective is far more useful: it unifies their physical reality of transcendent Old Ones and life that can be grown through singing and so on. The presence of a single word signals that they've collapsed all of these things down to a simple concept; the lack of a human analog simply says we haven't.
So to make a long thing short, the word cuts to the heart of a conceptual area that we can but dance around with all of our words and qualifications and half-understandings in the fields of religion, philosophy, and science. The desire to know divinity, to know oneself, to know the universe: these can be streamlined into a single concept, to grok.
Thus why Heinlein goes on to have Mike explain his pantheistic "God is that which groks". The closest English word I know of is not "understand" but rather "suffuse" or "permeate". To me, the reason the word survives the novel as a mere stronger version of "understand" is because most people hand-waved the novel's walk-through of religion as a boisterous critique rather than as a considered and valid approach to life, the universe, and everything.