In Praise of the Garrulous Read online

  The answer to my question does not lie in some kind of reversal of my urbane friend’s pseudo-Darwinian theory: the Gaels live in an inhospitable terrain that has made them stronger over the passing generations. It would be absurd to use Darwin to return to racial theories that enjoyed their greatest popularity during the interwar years.3 When Joseph Roth wanted a nationality to represent archetypal peasants in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he thought of the Slovenians, and in accordance with the national prejudices of the time, he made them big-fisted with gummy smiles. In the nineteenth century, Slovenians were nearly all peasants as the capital Ljubljana and some of the towns were German-speaking. Like the Gaels, they were also a society in transition: moving to the towns and organising to reassert their culture. Reading clubs were set up particularly in urban areas, which included cities like Trieste, while active and literate Gaels crowded into Glasgow to campaign on Highland matters. The city reproduced the cultural topography of its hinterland, and in its crowded rooms the air was free from the landowner’s imperiousness. I have been to Slovenia several times, and I noticed no great preponderance of large hands; as for smiles gummy or otherwise, the Slovenians struck me as a polite, well-educated but rather serious people. Like the Gaels, they have the prickliness of a people who have been driven away from power for many generations, to the detriment of their culture but perhaps to the betterment of their souls. In the twentieth century, the paths of these two politically disinherited peoples diverged dramatically: today, the Slovenians are one of the most cultured peoples in Europe and have won the battle to maintain their language, while the Gaels may have lost theirs.

  The relationship between periphery and the centre has been a universal feature of human society since the invention of agriculture and international trade. I believe that one of the reasons for the cultural richness of what might be called the transitional periphery is that it is very often bilingual. Linguistic diversity constantly renews a society, and also helps in the natural process of linguistic renewal, particularly where patterns of dominance and interdependence are complex (this can even affect very powerful languages like German, which at the time of the wall coming down was divided into two mildly different categories that reflected either Soviet or Western dominance). The luckiest individuals are those who spend their childhoods in the periphery and their adulthoods in the centre, which is where ideas can be empowered. Moreover, the periphery can be claustrophobic, while those who are born in the cosmopolitan centre are often unconsciously provincial. In the past, it was possible to establish a degree of stability in this relationship: the periphery with its high demographic growth supplied the centre with new blood, while urban society atrophied those who had lived there for too many generations. Before 1800 all states were overwhelmingly multilingual, and after that date the elusive mechanisms that kept this relationship “healthy” appear to have broken down, slowly at first and at a destructive rate in recent times (I have put the word “healthy” in inverted commas, as this relationship was always an inherently abusive one, in spite of its undoubted social usefulness).

  This breakdown in the machinery of language and interaction between languages is part of the homogenisation of Western society. The West itself has become the centre and the Third World the periphery, but this new global centreperiphery relationship, while as abusive as ever if not more so, does not have the same functionality as in the past. This situation is probably not going to last but in the meantime, it is going to inflict untold damage socially and, what matters here, linguistically. The Third World is irresistibly attracted to the West, and the West needs those people, even though it inflicts terrible dangers upon their inevitable migration. Many landless or cleared peasants of the Third World, who do not make it to the West, end up in an urban limbo, as they feed into the ever-growing sprawl of slum-dwellers in what are naturally called “megacities” and “hypercities”. Something vaguely similar happened for a while in nineteenth-century Europe: Naples and Palermo were examples, but nothing like on the same scale. In the end, the New World provided an escape route that is not as easily available to the inhabitants of Bombay, Sao Paulo or Nairobi today. That nineteenth-century emigration created great expanses of monoglot English, Spanish and Portuguese that dwarfed the original linguistic communities in Europe, which in the case of Britain and Spain existed in states that were to some extent also multilingual. Today English is rushing towards dominance of both parts of a polarised globe, and the Third World is also becoming dangerously homogenised. This is very clearly expressed in Jeremy Harding’s review of Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums:

  This constant production of numbers – and a seamless access between continents – offers us the world as a single, intelligible place defined by universal laws of accumulation and deprivation. Any sense that slum cultures and slum cities might have a specific character, beyond the common lot of misery, is tenuous. No book will give readers the impression of covering greater distances, even if they will feel by the end as though they’d been cooped up in a narrow, featureless room. Homogeneity, Davis would argue, is what late capitalism does: already a billion people live in roughly the same extraordinary way in roughly similar environments. Vast, contiguous slums are the habitat of the future for ever larger numbers, yet the future looks more and more like it did the day before yesterday.4

  It is as though the human population no longer has the antibodies to fight off a process of homogenisation that is destroying its collective social mind while at the same recording it on an unprecedented scale. Soon all the languages will be in libraries and museums, and all the cultures fossilized on tapes and in books. But who will visit them? And of those who do, what will they be able to take away? A mere shadow of the original thing.

  What beckons is a monoglot world in which an Orwellian simplification of language and a kind of linguistic passivity conjoin in a vicious circle. It will be a world in which there is one story endlessly retold (or consumed); it will be the paradise book-burners always desired – one in which a single text survives and there is no longer any need to burn books because none threaten; it will be a monoculture that is not aware of its own existence because it has no “other” to which it must relate.

  Human beings and indeed all nature thrive on diversity and chaos, but humans have an innate drive to order that chaos, and this brings certain benefits as that victory over chaos is only partial and never complete. Our drive to uniformity has until recently been relatively harmless because it was incapable of success. All human activity found a balance between order and chaos, but now our systems are bigger than ourselves and our power to change and to order things in new ways has become almost unlimited. Our small activities are also tainted by the sophistication of our equipment, although mercifully writing has remained relatively unaffected. Take, for example, this book which you have nearly finished. Like all human language, it is a sequence and has to be experienced as a sequence. I have attempted to order the arguments, and I have put forward various explanatory hypotheses. But of course I did not write it as a sequence: switching between chapters, I worked as I was driven by my own erratic brain; I moved text around, I added and deleted, and finally and quite arbitrarily I said, “it is done” and sent it to the publisher, even though there is never any clear reason for stopping work on any book, other than the fact that the writer might be getting bored with it. Moreover, this book is not just the product of recent readings; it is a snapshot of how my ideas and uncertainties have developed in 2007 after fifty-four years of listening, talking, reading and, in the non-linguistic realm, observing. Next year, new conversations or readings may lead me to alter my opinion radically. Even in this effort of one individual to order his thoughts (not a great achievement, one might think), chaos is always present and undefeated (partly because reality is not a sequence and cannot be accurately represented as one). I would even argue that whatever merits this book has are in part due to its inability to overcome chaos and order ideas perfectly. If it had been a better
book, which does not necessarily mean a more ordered book, it would still have failed, because perfect order is impossible – it should be desired but it is not desirable as an outcome.

  Order is so beloved of humanity, because without at least an approximation to it we could not think. We think through language, which is in turn the result of apparently agreed categorisation. But even in the categorisation of an object as banal as a table, we find that no one can produce the perfect definition, although we can all come up with a very good one. In reality a raised plane with varying numbers of legs or supports can do so many things, some of which are not very table-ish. Is a desk a kind of table or something entirely separate? If it is the latter, then what is a writing-table? Obviously with more complex and possibly abstract categories, we find this elusiveness of order more of a problem. But it is not just a problem. It is also the source of our being, our daily strivings: a final victory of order would destroy the essence of humanity. Chaos should also be beloved of humanity, especially now that we are in danger of destroying it through a massive unravelling of the individual mind.

  The lack of equality in the world today (for Marx’s prediction of an increasing distance between the rich and the poor has proved correct on a global scale) vitalises the destructive forces of globalisation and consumerism, which will continue unchecked until the damage is so great that something has to be done – sadly something fairly draconian that may sweep away the hard-won rights of the citizen, acquired over centuries of struggle. The cultural destruction, like the ecological one, will be partly irreversible. I do not, therefore, attempt to persuade everyone to switch off their tellies and start reading, writing and chattering with maniacal zeal, as this would have as much chance of success as attempting to convince humanity to forego violence and live together in brotherly love. This is not an age for slogans and certainties (although peacefulness and garrulousness are undoubtedly virtues). This is an age for attempting to salvage as much as possible from the storm of greed, wastefulness and compulsive subservience to fashion (particularly when it comes to thinking). I can say, however, that whoever does switch off the television (or even better, throws it in the dustbin) will start to engage with idleness and chatter and perhaps the odd book. These thoroughly human activities will often be psychologically beneficial. I am certainly not advocating universal bookishness, but books as an extension of our dialogues and an enrichment of our intellectual interaction can also be helpful as long as they are not accompanied by fanaticism, as in the case of Kien, the misanthropic protagonist of Elias Canetti’s Auto da Fé, who eschewed all human relations in order to cultivate further his almost physical sensitivity towards books and whose one relationship resulted from his mistaken interpretation of another person’s relationship to books (books are dialogues in the reader’s head in which readers never hear their interlocutor’s answers other than through the next passage – as Sartre said, reading is an “act of generosity”, but it should not become an act of compulsion). Passion for books can be for the words they contain or for the objects in themselves, or indeed for both. Books can become just another form of collezionismo, the obsessive acquisition of any particular category of thing. But in the case of determined readers who are careless book-owners, their collections say a lot about their character and the character of their thoughts, and as Walter Benjamin amusingly and accurately pointed out, the books they haven’t read say as much as the ones they have.

  An excessive obsession with books, as with any other physical object, will lead to an inability to use them in a pleasant and relaxed manner governed by enjoyment of the thing in itself – a sequence of intangible words anchored in the very tangible reality of a mass of papers stitched and glued together in a single unit. Books have a feel. They have a history both as pages bound into a whole and as a sequence of words that can be constantly reprinted. Personally I always prefer to read old books in a recent edition. Old editions become objects of value, often irrespective of the text they contain, and I therefore feel they cannot belong to me. On the other hand, old editions have their charm; they should not be loved as objects, or even excessively admired – those passions should be reserved for the text. Like Ming vases, they should perhaps be attentively cared for by museum curators, but not revered and collected.

  Our problems with language are not only the result of technological change which has brought a dominance of the image; they have been exacerbated by recent moves towards the extreme market economy. The shift to a society in which the individual is responsible to himself for himself and for no one else (a process that thankfully is not entirely complete) is probably something unique in the history of mankind, even though the neo-con “philosophers” would have us believe that it most closely reflects man’s natural desires. The neo-con dream is a hierarchical one, but unlike hierarchical societies of the past which were often cruelly static, their hierarchy is a fluid one based on wealth. The typical ancien régime was a complex network of privileges and mutual responsibilities, and whatever its undoubted injustices, the resulting stasis created a climate in which language and language diversity could flourish. The modern free-market economy, in which family, community and the state are incapable of providing security, creates the social atmosphere of a perpetual shipwreck. As the population falls into the rising waters, the strongest or perhaps simply the most ruthless push their way up the masts and rigging, not to security but to a relative security which feels better when one can see so many others failing (because a shipwreck triggers the basest elements in the human psyche). Of course, there can never be security in any human society, as the neo-cons will quickly object, and every society is as exposed as a ship in fierce weather, but when people work together and engage in dialogue, they can confront their problems more calmly and even gain pleasure from their communal efforts.

  If I were to paint the scene of a sailing ship going down on the rocks, I would start with the sloping deck partly immersed in the water. Here I would depict those who fall on their knees and start to pray to their gods (who are perhaps punishing them for their sins). Amongst them are wandering those who have lost the will to act and move in a daze without hope of being saved in this world or the next. Some have fainted in fear. Then I would paint the individualists who have thrown themselves into the surging sea and vainly attempt to swim towards some protruding rock, but cannot match the strength of the waves. The only people who are interacting are those who rushed to the rigging. But their interaction is the wholly tangible one of punching, kicking and pushing – desperate, dumb physicality. No one is engaged in dialogue, because dialogue would be entirely inappropriate. Language no longer has a role and, in any case, cannot compete with the shrillness of the wind. Neo-cons, not entirely without reason, will accuse me of reasoning by analogy. I will now examine these concluding arguments a little more dispassionately, but I would like the reader to bear that image in mind.

  Throughout history, most people have been unable to use language to develop their understanding of the world in which they have strangely been born into consciousness. The reason is simply that they were busy with the business of survival, and society’s productivity allowed leisure only for a restricted number of its members, who were not necessarily the most suited to the task of providing for their society’s intellectual needs. People had to get their religions and philosophies off the shelf. Before the intellectual rigidity of the Modern Era, these ready-made religions worked remarkably well and, to take perhaps the most important examples in the West, Christianity and Islam displayed considerable tolerance, flexibility and indeed rationalism in their early periods. Inasmuch as they were rigid, their rigidity was necessary within societies with limited intellectual resources. Indeed religion generated nearly all the opportunities for intellectual discourse, and early social movements such as the Lollards naturally encapsulated their ideas within a wider religious discourse. The Modern Era liberated the minds of ever greater sections of society, and this constituted a danger that had
to be managed.

  I have shown how everyday language has been affected by writing, printing and the rise of the state, and how this has led to an enormous development in the Social Mind while perhaps lessening our individual linguistic dexterity. Today, other forms of industrial and communications technology mean that leisure for all is no longer an impossible dream. The fact that these developments have actually led to a society in which people work under absurd stresses or have no work at all, does not mean that some other way of organising our society is impossible. Exactly how such a society could be organised is a complex matter beyond the capabilities of my own mind and in any case not appropriate to a book on language. However, it would have to be a more egalitarian and a more educated society than our own and one in which everyone would have the leisure necessary not only for a greater use of the simpler and more spontaneous registers of language used in everyday exchanges, but also of the complex and artificial language we use to examine who we are (the ontological) and what we should do with our lives (the deontological). For the first time in history, we all have the power to become our own philosophers and, by so doing, to pull philosophy down from its unnecessary pedestal.