In Praise of the Garrulous Page 6

  These [mystical and psychological] abstractions are definitely given either explicitly in words – psychological or metaphysical terms – in the Hopi language, or, even more, are implicit in the very structure and grammar of that language, as well as being observable in Hopi culture and behaviour.7

  Curiously, the often valid argument used by Pinker against Whorf – that Whorf worked on translations of Apache for one of his studies, rather than through an intimate knowledge of the language – is equally true of the example Pinker takes from Malotki.8 Pinker provides a very short sentence translated by Malotki, and asks us (who surely have less knowledge than poor Whorf) to take it as proof. Malotki’s translation may be very good and his knowledge of the language better than Whorf’s, but ultimately he is a linguist struggling with a less-known language, which is not his native tongue, and analysing it from the outside, while the most important distinctions he has to record are the nuanced ones non-native speakers often miss. In any event, this problem of translation and creating an exact parallel between two languages must militate against Pinker’s ideas. When it comes to examining language diversity, we are always obliged to express ourselves through the constrictions of one particular language. While Pinker clings fast to the viewpoint of his own culture, it may well be that Whorf overcompensates in his desperate desire to understand the “other”, a worthy aim but one that is also full of pitfalls.

  Pinker confuses sameness and equality (and we are lucky in English that we have separate words for these two concepts). He is desperate to prove that underneath some trivial differences we are to all intents and purposes identical. He enthuses, “The anthropologists Brent Berlin and Scott Atran have studied folk taxonomies of flora and fauna. They have found that, universally, people group local plants and animals into kinds that correspond to the genus level in the Linnaean classification system of professional biology.”9 This is indeed an unlikely claim, but it is the use of the word “universally” that tears away the veil of apparent academic objectivity. Are we to believe that these two intrepid academics studied flora and fauna in every one of the six thousand languages that still cling to life on our planet? They must have had prodigious linguistic abilities. But Pinker has not only discovered the universal language; he and his fellow psycholinguists have also discovered the “Universalized People”. We are surely now well within the realm of pseudo-science. Pinker robustly rejects the idea that his arguments are racist, and he is absolutely right. He points out that genetic differences between two randomly selected individuals within an “ethnic” group can be much greater than the ones between two different “ethnic” groups. Or as I would put it, every city, town or village has its thief, its megalomaniac, its poet, its dreamer, its athlete, its Don Giovanni, its gossip, etc. However, this equality of differences is always mediated through a language and a culture that are often very, very different. One almost gets the feeling that Pinker would have preferred language to be entirely hard-wired, and he is obviously convinced that the most significant part of it is. Although we can agree that the “language instinct” or instinct to learn is always the same, the thing that it absorbs into itself (the specific language or languages a child is exposed to) is not. Otherwise, there would be no point in there being variable language which, as Pinker himself makes clear, has a high cost in brain power and energy. It would be like giving autonomy to a region and being surprised when it makes different laws.

  Language is often compared to a biological entity. Although this is a useful analogy, the two differ in some very important respects: language is intangible and does not have any set life-span. By intangible, I mean that it has no matter and it has no place. Some people might object that it is material in that it exists in the neurons of the brains of every speaker, but clearly several counter-arguments immediately come to mind: no speaker has complete command even of his or her native tongue; every speaker has a different language according to class, dialect and ultimately idiolect (the language that reflects his or her own particular character and linguistic history); language is an idea with which every speaker is familiar, but which even the most expert grammarians and lexicographers cannot define with absolute precision; language carries the weight of history in its DNA; language is not only the sum of the actual words and sentences that have been thought or uttered – it is also a system for generating the infinity of possible sequences of words and sentences. It is true that a partial version of a language exists in the brains of every speaker, and that a language feeds off those partial versions (and indeed cannot survive without them, at least as an oral language), but that is not the language itself, which is an idea or, more prosaically, an agreed convention.

  It can therefore be argued that every language exists to some extent outside humanity. It is rather like a Platonic idea in this sense: it is intangible and has a powerful influence over our being, and we are never quite capable of living up to it. I will examine this argument more fully in the next chapter, which is on the social mind. A human language is produced by humans and handed down in constantly changing forms from one generation to another. It is an individual being with a degree of autonomy, but it lives and breeds in a culture and society. It needs that culture and society to exist, and if that society starts to shrink, it eventually suffocates.

  Language is also the product of military, political and economic happenstance, as well as the natural evolution of language involving such phonological phenomena as consonantal eclipse, final devoicing, etc. It is not even a clearly defined entity. Before the invention of national languages (before printing and often for some time after), continuums often made it impossible to determine where one language ended and another started. No language contains or could contain the sum of human knowledge and experience. Every language influences and is influenced by other aspects of culture, and as languages can straddle such cultural realities as religion and politics, there is scope for infinite gradations.

  I do not wish to dismiss Pinker’s book, which has its merits, particularly when it examines modern English. This Anglocentric work, which relies too much on argument by analogy (when overused this tends to imply a certain didactic contempt for the reader or, even worse, that the writer actually believes that analogy constitutes a proof), could only have been written in English and is therefore evidence against its own thesis. Pinker’s humour is often successful but it does tend to confirm the French assertion in the film Ridicule “that the English don’t do gentle wit (esprit).”10 His linear method of argument is extremely Anglo-Saxon, and doesn’t lack leaps in the logical sequence (non-sequiturs, which can of course be found in all languages, although Anglo-Saxon cultures are often remarkably tolerant of them). His chapter, “The Language Mavens”, is full of very sensible criticisms of language pundits, but he doesn’t realise that he is a bit of one himself (aren’t we all?). He counters with his own rule – “the most important maxim of good prose: Omit needless words”. Is this a universal linguistic truth, or is it just a dictate of American and English schoolteachers reflecting a fashion in post-Victorian English? After all, this dictate would banish one of my favourite writers, Henry Fielding, and most probably Dickens too. What appears neatly succinct to an Englishman or an American might appear abrupt and a little niggardly to an Italian or an Indian, while what might appear amusing and erudite to an Italian or an Indian might sound waffly and evasive to an Englishman or an American. His rule begs the question: what is a “needless word”?

  I want to digress here not so much for an analogy as for an exploration of a parallel aspect of the human psyche. Freud was a very interesting speculative thinker and it is a pity that in accordance with positivist fashion, he chose to claim that his theories were scientific.11 The hypothesis he proposed of an ego (self or rational self), an id (instinctive drives) and a super-ego (the dominant morality and social conventions picked up from the family and other institutions), is a valid refinement of previous philosophical models (whether it is actually correct, we are prob
ably not yet in a position to say, but it certainly seems convincing enough to justify further speculations). Jonathan Haidt amusingly exploits a Platonic image to present Freud’s model in the following manner: it is like a charioteer (the ego) driving a chariot (life) when the horse (the id) has bolted and his father (the super-ego) is telling him where he has gone wrong.12 Here I am interested in the super-ego, which appears to have been universally deplored, even by Freud himself, as the cause of our anxieties and reason why, as Larkin put it, our parents fuck us up. It is seen as domineering and something against which it is impossible to rebel. But surely if there is an instinctive facility within the human brain to internalise the accumulated moral and conceptual knowledge of a particular society, then it is probably good for that facility to be used.

  The attitudes of parents to the super-ego and language in the twentieth century have increasingly come to resemble our attitude towards a new notebook (perhaps one of those leather-bound ones that are now provided in our consumer society). The empty notebook looks so clean and full of potential. Anything, literally anything, could be written there, but does the owner of the notebook feel that he or she possesses words worthy of so elegant a notebook? The notebook becomes both a threat and a promise: its very existence upbraids the owner for his inability to act, but its potential both excites and alarms. So it is with our children: now we are more aware of what we are doing – namely scribbling our stuff over their nice clean super-egos and their language usage – we are terrified of what we could do and overawed by the responsibility. We decide that we shouldn’t impose our religious views (unless, of course, we are part of the swelling ranks of fundamentalists), we should not be too heavy about morality (inability to socialise and display oneself is now a greater crime than lying and stealing, and in extreme cases even violence), we do not choose their activities (as this would interfere with their freedom of choice, something they apparently must learn in order to perform in the free market), and of course Anglophone children are not given spelling tests, in spite of the fact that our bizarre spelling system necessitates this tiresome task. It is almost as though education (in the widest sense of the term, and not just learning in school) does not matter because the child’s internal resources can cope and everything will somehow come right around the time of puberty.13 Pinker’s view of language fits into this cultural template: language is much more hard-wired than Chomsky suggested and those inner resources will produce the required result with a minimum of input from the adult world (paradoxically these attitudes are often accompanied by an adult intrusiveness in children’s play, so that children have few opportunities to explore the world and discover things for themselves).

  What if we got this all wrong, and instead of protecting the child by writing nothing, we should in fact have written much more than we did previously? If, instead of not telling our children about religion for fear of its undoubted divisiveness, we had told them about Christianity, Islam, Judaism, secularism and atheism, they might have ended up as believers in any one of them but they would surely be more tolerant of the others. Although there will always be fanatics, a more varied and complex moral education of this kind would produce in most cases a more profound knowledge of moral, ontological and theological argument, as well as a greater degree of scepticism (an extreme relativist might argue that I am merely expressing my own prejudice, because as a sceptic I am supposedly keen to propagate scepticism).

  Of course Pinker might agree with some of my arguments and he does argue against the Standard Social Science Model, precisely because it interprets the human mind as a “blank slate”.14 Here the argument becomes complex: he rightly argues that we should not force reality to conform to our moral strictures, and should not therefore consider “biological determinism” to be inherently repugnant. Of course, scientific investigation should be wholly detached, but the point surely is that our biology predisposes us to a process by which we learn a unique culture. This system is a delicate balance of conservatism (led by the now infamous super-ego) and flexibility (led by language and rationalism). Over centuries and millennia this can lead to some very diverse societies and very diverse cultures. Margaret Mead might well have been hoodwinked, but this cannot be proof of what history of even just the last few centuries clearly demonstrates: not only societies but even generations think and act in markedly different ways.

  By denying fundamental differences between languages and their influence on the way we perceive the world, Pinker is suggesting that change of language makes no difference. In his very brief comment on the galloping pace of language death, he does define this problem as “sad and urgent”, and he does recall Krauss’s often quoted and, I believe, entirely justified assertion that the electronic media are a form of “cultural nerve gas”. However, the reader, particularly one who has given any consideration to the matter, is wholly underwhelmed. He does not even devote two pages to one of the most important subjects facing humanity in the field of sociolinguistics. You get the impression that what he defines as “Babel in reverse” is something we shouldn’t be too concerned about. We might lose a few curious oddities, but human language will be able to survive. Be that as it may, his theory is important to us here because to deny that there is a significant distinction between languages is to devalue the importance of language difference and ultimately the need for it at all.

  Pinker’s arguments smack of current American thinking in many fields, and they all lead towards homogenisation. Americans do not fear homogenisation, as they believe that this process will always evolve around themselves, but their confidence is possibly misplaced. There is a culture of empire that is spreading through the English-speaking countries: this is damaging for the world and damaging for those countries. Homogenisation always appears superficially attractive. If we all speak the same language, think in similar ways, and have similar values and ambitions, then this will surely facilitate international trade, remove a whole series of unnecessary costs and, most importantly, decrease conflict between peoples. There is however no evidence that a common language lowers the likelihood of strife; indeed it may exacerbate it. Moreover, language diversity is essential for all languages, including the most powerful ones.

  As with other aspects of our children’s education, we should be teaching them more languages and doing more to maintain the diversity created by history and migration. A child with three languages will view the world in three different ways, and will have less fear or contempt of difference. We have to pass on our languages to our children, and because we now have many centuries of literature behind us, we can pass on the language of the past so that they can better understand the language of the present. If they have that greater knowledge of the specificity and indeed the restrictions of their own language (rather than perceiving it as an independent universe), they will be better able to express themselves.

  Of course, language is not the only area in which we should be doing more to stimulate our children. In Hungary there has been a long tradition of attributing great importance to music in education, and it may be that this has produced good results in mathematics and science. The composer and expert on Hungarian folk music, Zoltan Kodaly, claimed that music is an irreplaceable “intellectual food” and that “only art of intrinsic value is suitable for children.”15 As he died in 1967, he happily did not witness the global commercialisation of music, and his voice comes from a time when progress, which may no longer be sustainable as a concept, was at least based on values. He clearly believed that we have to intervene forcefully in our children’s education, and I would argue what he may well have taken for granted: we have to demand more of our children, and they will have no difficulty in responding.

  Kodály also implies that we should be choosy about the stimuli to which we expose our children, although he also emphasised the importance of allowing children to improvise. In spite of the liberal instincts of our generation, I believe that we have to revive this idea of carefully monitoring the language
and music to which we expose our children. We need to impose some values on our children, as long as we are not too dogmatic, and this will give them the freedom and, most importantly, the tools to reject or modify those values. This is the task of each generation. If children are given too much freedom, they risk growing up without the ability to enjoy the intellectual pleasures of this life. Those who believe in laissez-faire will argue that that is their choice, but they’re wrong; it was their parents’ choice. Freedom too early produces young adults who are dependent on their parents materially and, what is worse, intellectually. In other words, by failing to give our children positive guidance, we deny them a real chance to rebel against us.

  Language makes us what we are in essence, but the history of technology has burdened us for millennia with work, and now most recently with a leisure we don’t know how to exploit intelligently. Language, the language of the garrulous and not the language of the passive consumer, is the way back to our human roots. Language and the exercise of language changes and develops the individual, triggers Cartesian existence, removes consciousness to some extent from physicality and places it in the intangible world of ideas. Like a musical instrument, it can only be played well by those who play it often.