In Praise of the Garrulous Page 16
English came to dominate the popular music scene around much of the world in the late sixties and early seventies, but what was considered a passing fad at the time has turned into a permanent reality. Given the undoubted cultural influence of pop music, this is a disturbing development. Even if you are not concerned about the impoverishment of linguistic heritage, is it wise to leave a decision so vital to humanity to the vagaries of teenage prejudices about what is cool and what is not? This cultural dominance has been more important, in my opinion, than the forces of commercial rationalisation, although I admit that the causes of this phenomenon go back decades to the emergence of the United States as the dominant economy in the West in the immediate postwar period.
In Europe, we need to halt this process before it is too late (otherwise we will end up with two superpowers that have English as their dominant language). Europe’s linguistic diversity has to be defended not only against English but against any other contender for dominance. One solution might be to give lingua-franca status to the languages of the large European states which all have populations of around sixty million, with the exception of Germany which has many more. The “core languages” would therefore be English, French, German and Italian: two Neo-Latin languages and two Germanic ones. Polish should therefore be added to represent the Slavic group of languages, even though Poland’s population is considerably smaller (38 million, less than Spain’s 42 million). To attain a reasonable degree of universality, this system would require every child to be fluent in at least two core languages as well as their own, which may or may not be a core one. An exception could be made for speakers of minority languages, who would learn their own language, their national language and at least one core language, although these children would often be able to deal with another core language as they usually have greater linguistic skills. This is simply one model, and it could be designed in various ways and in accordance with different criteria. The important thing is that no single language should become too dominant. The defence of the core languages would also be the first line of defence for Europe’s wider linguistic diversity, and thus the non-core languages should interpret such a move as a step towards guaranteeing their own survival.
Europe is struggling to create an inclusive supranational state – a kind of voluntary and democratic empire, to which states must apply for admittance. The only problem is that it is not actually democratic and its parliament has no real powers. The commission is a kind of politburo with very limited powers and a very vague remit. This means that on the language question, as with almost everything else, the European Union is quite incapable of developing a coherent policy, and so one evolves by default. It is already happening and it is simply this: English, the winner, takes all. Given that the last two hundred years of European history have been all about the assertion of national cultures, I think the population of Europe as a whole should have the opportunity to engage in an informed debate on this question.
During those last two centuries, the choice appeared to be between empire or sovereign nation, and therefore between imperial multiculturalism or nationalist homogeneity. Previous to nationalism, the peasantry had for centuries been left to develop its own rich and complex languages and cultures, because nobody “of importance” cared what they thought. They exercised no political power, and any attempts at revolt were doomed by lack of organisation and geographical fragmentation. That richness and complexity went largely unrecorded until the nineteenth century or, in some cases, the late-eighteenth century, the very time in which these cultures started to fade. Peoples made their own musical instruments, invented their own songs, recorded their poetry generally by oral tradition and expressed themselves through an intricate series of dances, rituals and festivals.
Internally Europe in the nationalist period was antiimperial (and imperialist outside Europe; in fact European nationalism triggered imperial ambitions abroad). Nationalism’s final victory came with the First World War, and its slow demise started at the end of the Second World War, although it took some time for this to become obvious. Nationalism compresses everything onto an idealised mythical unit: the nation. It therefore suppresses the local and breaks up Empire, or at least forces it to reform its structures (as with the creation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after 1848). Despite the revisionist wind that is blowing through this subject, we should continue to hold onto the concept that empires are oppressive realities in whatever form they take. However, it would be dogmatic not to admit that empires, as supranational states, have some positive functions: they throw many peoples and languages together, and often mingle them; they are often more accepting of minorities and the local than nation states are; and they create lingua francas which, historically, have been much less damaging to minority languages than national languages have been (paradoxically many post-colonial societies have suffered continued encroachment by the cultures of the former colonial powers).
When it comes to empire, we need to distinguish between the mercantile empires of Western Europe and the territorial empires of Central and Eastern Europe. As the European Union is a territorial supranational state, I will say little about the mercantile ones, except to point out that they were more interested in and successful at cultural homogenisation, in spite of being primarily involved in trade and having disparate and “far-flung” possessions.
Nineteenth-century Europe contained three empires that accepted or even exploited cultural diversity: the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian and the Ottoman Empires. This does not mean that there was equality of cultures, but it certainly means that the distinctions were structured and even essential to the proper workings of the state. This was particularly true of the Ottoman Empire, which divided the peoples it ruled over into millets. Although the word millet means “nation”, nation for the Ottomans was a question of religion and certainly not a question of language, and each millet was governed by its religious hierarchy. Millets had different economic roles, and thus the empire became a mosaic of different peoples living together particularly in the cities, but perhaps often leading very separate lives. This uniquely structured system is described in detail in Misha Glenny’s monumental work, The Balkans 1804-1999, and of the empire he writes:
From the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, the imperial army swept all before it, one of the most successful machines of military conquest in history. In its wake, the Ottoman military left not only scorched earth but a unique social and political system. This was sometimes brutal but often more equitable and predictable for its subjects than the early modern monarchies of Europe. Until its collapse in the early twentieth century, the Empire remained overwhelmingly rural in character.3
This static and rural nature of the Ottoman Empire made it possible for both small and large “ethnic” or linguistic groups to survive with little change to their relative size; it was also the cause of the empire’s centuries-long stability and ultimately its demise. It contrasted with its First-World-War ally, the new, dynamic and nationalistic German Empire, which was industrialising fast, and at the same time attempting to extirpate all cultural differences. While Tsarist Russia was something of a hybrid, the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, for all their undoubted and differing faults, do demonstrate that linguistic diversity can be maintained for centuries without the supranational state collapsing.
The nationalist period of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries also produced “mass society”, which involved both the brutal uprooting of ancient societies and their regimentation in new ones. Paradoxically, the ensuing fragmentation and migrations increased levels of individuality, individual enterprise and individual endurance within a system that wished to obliterate the individual. Or in other words, the period referred to as “mass society” produced the most essential form of difference and individualism: a turmoil of ideas. During this period, people were motivated by the type of education Marxists called bourgeois education, but it should more correctly be defined as national education based
on large standardised languages and their written forms. While this was useful for rationalising trade and the bureaucracy, it caused some profound difficulties for the modern state: it enabled the powerless to speak across greater distances, and to organise. The period of “mass society”, which culminated just after the Second World War and then began to die, had many ugly aspects, but it was also a period in which great popular traditions were the main source of artistic expression (the exact period varied according to the art form). Like most things concerning “progress” and rationalisation, the larger linguistic units brought cultural advantages and disadvantages: they facilitated greater inter-comprehension between dialects, but they destroyed the variety, the intimacy and indeed the ownership of language. The so-called mass society was one in which industry required a large semi-educated workforce. As semi-education often leads to excellent education, the mass of grey-clothed workers hid a great variety of individuals with different skills and educational levels.
Today, an over-active propaganda machine (typical of an age of conformity) proclaims our democracy as though it were an ancient and inviolable right, even as democratic rights are being infringed in the name of the “War on Terror”. In fact, our fragile democracy is quite young. “Universal Manhood Suffrage” (to use the Chartists’ term) was finally implemented in 1918 and genuine democracy (equal suffrage rights for both men and women) had to wait until 1928. These rights were not achieved by the Conservative Party, the Banks, the IMF, the armed forces and all the other people who now justify their every action by trumpeting the word “democracy”; they were achieved by the lengthy struggles first of the labour movement and then of the suffragettes. In the former movement, the workingclass intellectual played the leading role, and the workingclass intellectual was typically a product of a national reality.
Today, the multi-coloured consumer mass hides very little indeed: a silent lack of expression that, like a bunch of plastic flowers, sparkles in a gaudy craving to attract attention to its emptiness. The consumer mass is not cruel, but merely disinterested. It is languid and listless. It lacks passions, or takes it passions passively sitting on the sofa with a can of beer. The consumer mass lacks the brutal fanaticism or justified outrage of the physical crowd that throughout history has made its appearance, and in the first seventy years of the twentieth century made its appearance far too often – on some occasions to express its noble solidarity but on too many others to express its ugly prejudices. The consumer mass has learned some lessons and its innate cynicism has some merits. But the consumer mass is overly fragmented and unable to express its undoubted intelligence, because it has no time to stop in spite of its unprecedented leisure, and because it is through interaction between individuals that genuine individualism is created. The consumer mass therefore cares no more about the variety of human language than it does about the whales, the rainforest or aids and malaria in Africa, although it occasionally stirs on the back of “big events”. Very often people do not even care about the disappearance of their own cultures.
Today Europeans may continue to drift and decline, occasionally stirring at the ugly xenophobe’s goad, or it may realise that it has a future – a great cosmopolitan future that is neither nationalist nor imperialist, but a fusion of the two. The E.U., whose greatest problems are constitutional rather than cultural, could create a functional federal state that does not lead to cultural homogenisation. It would achieve this by integrating the nations under a federal parliament with real but carefully circumscribed powers. As far as cultural politics is concerned, this means the creation of careful balances between the “core languages” which could be termed official lingua francas, the national languages and the “minority” languages. It is a matter of finding the right structures, which, I do not deny, is a very difficult task.
In “post-industrial” society, the speed of rationalisation, homogenisation and extreme fragmentation has dramatically increased. These then are the trends: less variety of languages and less variety within languages. Ultimately this means less garrulous subversion and less criticism of the powerful. To overcome this haemorrhaging of our humanity, we need not only to gabble ceaselessly, but to gabble in more than one language. The soulless utilitarians argue that some languages are more useful because they are spoken by more people. This is typical of the simplistic reasoning that now governs our lives – a reasoning based on statistics that ignores the actual ways in which we behave and, in this case, the real purposes to which we put our knowledge of language. We need a language to speak in a myriad of intricate ways to the handful of close friends, relations and colleagues that for most of us suffice for life’s passage, and to communicate with a larger community of strangers and acquaintances on a less complex level. But we can do this with the same richness of expression in a language of 200 thousand as we can in a language of 200 million. Indeed, the language of 200 thousand may well have avoided some of that flattening-out process that affects many larger languages. We do not intend to speak to every speaker of that language; we simply want a language to have the critical mass required for self-sufficiency. Because of the cultural economies of scale, some might claim that only the club of very large languages is capable of achieving that critical mass. One of the principal purposes of this polemical essay is to argue against that “common-sense” belief.
On the other hand, lingua-francas are extremely useful to the traveller, and always have been, although the distances involved are now much greater. Lingua-francas do not need to be fully mastered to fulfil their function. However, a good command of them is advisable for anyone who wants to use them to their full potential: they are attractively cosmopolitan and today their literatures probably reflect the diverse cultural backgrounds of their speakers. Russian can take you through most of the northern and central parts of the Eurasian landmass, the largest in the world. Portuguese can help you understand a global linguistic archipelago that is present in every continent and shares one of these continents with Spanish. English is becoming the lingua franca of lingua francas.
The solution to the dichotomy of small and large languages is simple: speak both the language of 200 thousand and the language of 200 million. If you have the energy, learn the language of 20,000 speakers, and discover the charms of its complex intimacy. Find your own linguistic permutations; practise these different instruments regularly and delight in their different tones; and do not treat languages solely as a means to an end, but also as an end in themselves, for they generate that part of your humanity that has no place and no time.
Chapter Eight
Conclusion
There is, it’s said, a soul to that,
the managed man who cleanly cuts
his actions to the manner of his time,
and laughs.
A baroque well-suited hybrid of a modern man
who smiling greets me across a guarded fullness of himself.
He laughs:
The lazy Gaels who furnished him his empire on the heights,
and more besides who fell, and did not fall but vanished
in the clearing, cleaning ethnic war they fought in peace
that stopped our tongue with the Cheviot fleece.
The greater spirit thinks those greater that it meets,
but this man’s spirit spurns and scoffs:
The lazy Gaels who cut and carried in the peats,
who drove the fattened cows to fatten foreign lords.
The Gaels whose houses burnt like burning weeds,
to plant the lands with fruitless Cheviot seeds.
The door is open or the door is shut,
the heart is feeling or the mind is sprung,
the skin is hardened or the soul is stung;
but this man’s heart and mind are cut
and tailored to a standard form
that laughs:
The lazy Gaels that carved a culture from a sea and land
cut by grandness, harshness, divine and ancient force,
for those who listen let stories still be heard.
This soul-less soul while tramping on the tragic stage,
sees only sands surrounding some exotic bird.
Reflections on being told that Gaels are lazy by an urbane Englishman on a beach in Tiree1
Walking on a beach in Tiree, I met a fellow translator – an interesting, intelligent and contradictory man of the kind that make you think but also tend to prefer boldness to prudence in their own thinking. He told me that Gaels are lazy, and I answered that this sounded a little racist and besides I was a half Gael myself. That last bit of information was totally irrelevant, and he rightly ignored it in order to expand upon his theory which, according to him, was not racist but based on sound Darwinian analysis: because there is little work in the islands, the most intelligent and enterprising leave in each generation and thus impoverish the genetic stock.2 I confess that I still found the idea crass and a little offensive. However, his assertion did get me thinking about the strange relationship between the centre and the periphery, and this immediately pointed to the exact opposite question, one that I have never been able to answer satisfactorily. Why is it that the Gaelic-speaking areas of Scotland continued to supply doctors, lawyers and other professionals, generation after generation? The Western Isles used to produce the highest percentage of graduates in the United Kingdom, and its failure to do so now may be the result of the enormous changes in university education (the numbers have increased as has the dominance of the middle classes). The more likely reasons are a decrease in genuine bilingualism and the fact that the Western Isles are no longer a periphery in the fullest sense of the term: they are more affluent and more like any other part of the country, which is what I have already referred to as the suburbanisation of rural Scotland.