In Praise of the Garrulous Page 7

  Chapter Four

  The creation of the social mind

  “Promise me this,” he said,

  “Stay not the onward movement of your mind

  And hold your course when barren talk

  Pervades, and has no scope or sense

  That drives and makes unconscious conscious thought”

  He stood, and waving wide the circle of his hand,

  he lifted up his spear. “The huddled dwellings on the hill

  are not a home to change; and when the fighters fall upon the plain,

  the dullards shudder in their beds and weep their fears, as though the gods could care

  a damn about the frightened witless fools who fail to flee

  the wrathful ruthless horde – the company of the strong.”

  “I have no quarrel with the settled folk,” I said.

  “Nor I,” without a strain he stretched his arm

  and pointed spear, its shining head, towards the tidy shacks,

  “they are the mass, the herd, the herded demos whom we mock,

  they built that fence to keep us out, and considered it an act of will,”

  he laughed, “but all they did was build a pen and turn them selves to sheep.

  For it is right that man should walk or ride upon the mountain ridge,

  and carry spear and thrust it deep to make himself a man indeed.”

  “Who fashioned you that glinting spike of death?” I asked and waited for the rift.

  “A man whose skill is just our stock – to be culled and killed as we would wish,

  and if we are wise, we always leave some living to keep extant the breed of forge-hands,

  and sowers of seed that flocks the plain, and all the rest of settled, soulless men,”

  the sinewed sage, vigoured by his years, drew in his breath and raised his spear

  above his head, half threat – half gesture of his will to power.

  “A force,” I said, “whose only justification is its force, and has no pleasure

  but its exercise cannot be good, and good is when the soul divests itself of power,

  accepts its moral equalness.” “Ha!” he cried, and joyous danced around the spear

  he’d skewered to the ground, “the vapid niceness of this man! But what of life,

  and nature too! Does the lion lick the lamb’s wounds or bite? Does it run

  or aimless sit and make a meal of a meal after having mealy-mouthed

  mouthed a prayer to God? It has no god and nor should we.”

  “I heard the clamour of your words in little Europe’s agora, and felt

  the textured smoothness and the heavy lightness of their weave,

  their troubled truths, alluring lies, and clever, clever talk. You do

  speak true when speaking of the little things, but not the big:

  who are the strong who, unlike you, must travel in a pack?

  And like a flood, a plague, a horde of certitudes go cutting down

  the lives of industry and industry itself. What do you gain?”

  “What do they lose?” he laughed again, “if losing lets them start once more

  to build upon their knowledge of the things this world contains. They scurry

  with their social mind and their own minds are not their own. They worry,

  as retainers of the rich, they slave for us, the strong who know the reason

  for which we came into this world: good war which hallows any cause, and more

  was made from its courageous course than fretting with one’s neighbour’s fate.

  The fools! They value love – its soporific state – and underrate the force of hate.”

  “This is hubris; this is intellect that holds high opinion of itself and structured ways

  to be a man. It belongs to you but not to them, the company that flays

  the folk who work and love and hope in less engrandised circumstance,”

  I answered him with bitter rectitude. “For you would condemn chance

  to always favour bold and not reflective men unless they think like you.

  Your gayness is your rash redress of what your father never knew:

  the power of pleasure and the pleasure of the power to take what pleasure wants

  and should not have.”

  Down they came, the company of power, and what a motley crew:

  one wore a helmet and one a tricorn hat, one dressed the admiral of the fleet,

  another was a moghul lord and brandished yataghan, and yet can these few

  so much power bring to bear upon the sword-less folk? And how well they knew

  the artless and inflated art of being grand! Cold sneer, sadistic laugh complete

  with blackened teeth, a scar, a stare of maddened haughty ice that can browbeat

  the trodden folk. And these alone mark out these grander men whose greatness

  draws on their disdainful look and looks not at the plainness of their fateless,

  surly self that lives in the now and builds our hell on earth:

  removes our plenty and leaves a land of dearth.

  “Here are my brothers,” the wise man sang, and grinned in Dionysian glee,

  “I have lauded all your lordly deeds and more, and asked no fee,”

  he servile nodded to their bloated selves, “except your pleasure.”

  He kissed the chief man’s hand: “Your victories are my treasure!”

  “You’re right,” the potentate pronounced while swinging high his scimitar to catch pure light,

  to form the figure of the strong, to carve his name on centuries long

  with epic deeds of those who kill not for vengeance but for thrill

  of wilful strength that idles – erratic and fanatic, unreasoned

  and unseasoned by the conscious; thus inhuman in its fatal, fateful will to be

  the thing that is and cannot see the weakness of the wilful state that hears no plea

  of compassion

  And down it came and severed air and rived the wise man’s head of hair.

  “Goodbye, old man, you served us well; I speed you on the road to hell

  so you can Dionysian dance the well-marked way your well-intended stance

  marked out when spinning your words to serve us killers of contempted herds.

  His father was a priest, a dogmat of the Christian cult who straight-backed walked

  amongst the herd and joyless confirmed them in their herdish ways and talked

  the talk of life to come and hopes eternal beyond the fierceness of our rule.

  He stole their bodies and he stole their souls; the coarseness of his school

  left little hope of living life up to its brim and going beyond the petty part the pawn

  plays in my hands,” the chief man roared, while wiping blood from the blade he’d drawn

  light-heartedly. “But what of him, the son who came from those he loved to scorn?”

  “He served us well with all his intellectual force and traitored those who work upon the hill.

  And set off on his ineffectual course to go beyond while doing ill

  to those for whom he should have cared. As one of us he could not be:

  we do no thinking in our bold equestrian crowd.

  Proudly we get others to do that paltry thing,

  as others do our digging, forests cut

  and fill our coffers with their well-gotten gains:

  do they not see how we can govern

  and leave so little for their enduring pains?”

  I wept and kept my invisible distance from their jocund and unruffled wrath;

  I buried genius in the sands after placing the spear in both hands;

  I prayed to God for the godless seer and longed for a time when he could appear

  harmless for his bold falsehoods. Dust denoted the diminution of the brutal behemoth

  That he so loved.

  Zarathustra’s Last Interview1

  Language is part
of an enormous apparatus, once wholly intangible but now increasingly tangible, that every human society possesses, and this apparatus could not exist without language – or rather a language that is equally intangible and not hard-wired. Apart from language, this apparatus contains technology, literature (either oral or written), religious and philosophical systems, behavioural patterns (etiquette – that quaint word), and all other forms of knowledge that hold a society together and make it work. This apparatus I have decided to call the “social mind”.2 Language is the stone or endocarp of the social mind, and all the other cultural emanations the pulp or mesocarp: every part is interrelated in a healthy fruit, but the stone is distinct and more durable. Language can and does survive into entirely different cultural contexts.

  Like language, the boundaries between social minds are not at all clear. Geographically, where does one end, and another start? Even in this age of nation states, boundaries do not follow linguistic borders and communities coexist. Then there is the question of mass bilingualism and bi-culturalism. As the centuries pass and inevitable changes come about, at what point do you say that one social mind has died and another has been born? When examining tangible culture, this is all very clear: a castle is there once it has been built and it is no longer there once it has fallen down, but the intangible of a method of building a castle or fortification does not always have such a clearly defined start and finish. This is the problem of periodisation in history, which generally reflects the issues that historians consider to be most important within their own generations, although occasionally events occur that are so catastrophic that no one can challenge them.

  Like language, the social mind is never the possession of any single individual, however learned. And because so much of it is intangible and constantly shifting, it too should be considered an idea or form, not exactly in the Platonic sense, as here I use the term “idea” or “form” as a fluid and, what is more, a dependent phenomenon – dependent on the reality Plato considered merely shadows. Thus it is now a contingent, unrealisable perfection, rather than an eternal one. It is most definitely there, we feel we know what it is, but we cannot define it or ascertain its exact contours and borders. Perhaps it would be better to define the concept of the social mind as a kind of inverted Platonism. The creation of ideas occurs within the social mind, and that is the core distinction. According to the concept of the social mind, a society creates the idea organically through the sum of its individuals and the power relations between them, while in Platonism the idea is a detached and permanent reality that acts on our own shadowy world. For the concept of the social mind, every society has its unattainable ideals that affect its behaviour and tell an outsider a great deal about the nature of that society. There is an ideal table (always supposing the society in question uses tables), there is an ideal male and female physical beauty, there is an ideal language, there is an ideal education and, most sublime of all, there is an ideal republic, to which people are willing to devote and even sacrifice their lives. I am not an absolute relativist, although I freely admit that these ideals are at best partial truths and, in any event, entirely contingent (as are so many wonderful things). Nor am I saying that there is no absolute and eternal truth behind these ideals, although I and, I suspect, everyone else have no way of knowing what that absolute and eternal truth could be, or indeed if there is one.

  Here we are interested in how the social mind influences language and how language, which is part of the social mind, influences the rest of the social mind. In pre-literate societies or societies in which the literary or the liturgical language is not normally spoken even by the ruling class, language is very fluid and reflects changing power relations as well as the rest of the rules of generational shift in language; it is a constant organic evolution that goes pretty much unrecorded. In literate societies and particularly post-printing ones, the layers of ideas and linguistic forms become almost infinite, because so much survives. For instance, the ideal of Saint Augustine’s City of God is an alien concept to modern humanity, and yet it is not irrelevant, if for no other reason than that it continues to be read, albeit mainly in translation. Because it and so many other works have exercised such enormous influence and still do to some small extent, our daily speech still contains the presence of Latin, the language it was written in, which can only now be properly called “dead” for the first time since its birth two and a half millennia ago.

  The social mind is of relevance to this book, because the technological changes that have occurred in the way we communicate through language have also caused enormous changes in the nature of the social mind. The modern social mind is perhaps not so much a social mind as a compendium of social minds or indeed the Universal Social Mind or the Global Mind. I will attempt to examine the twin evolution of language and the social mind, because they cannot be separated. The social mind contrasts with the individual mind, which is the sum of knowledge contained within any particular individual from any particular cultural and linguistic community.

  A hunter-gatherer society would initially appear to have a very limited social mind, as it has no property, its technology is limited and its food is provided by nature. But as this was the generation of humanity that generated language (albeit in a manner that is not at all clear to us), language was something they needed and in all probability it was a means to store knowledge. Hunter-gatherer societies were numerically small and covered vast territories with varied fauna and flora. They needed to have an excellent science of these things, which recorded what was edible, how it could be eaten, at what times it was available, and what was dangerous and how it could be avoided. They also needed accurate geographical knowledge. We know from Francis Yates (talking, of course, about a much later stage in human development) that the human mind finds it easier to remember language (or what we might call “oral text”) when it can associate it with a series of images along an itinerary. It may be that in the hunter-gatherer society, the process was reversed: the text indicated the route; the text was the roadmap. The familiar text was used to recall the itinerary rather than the familiar itinerary to recall the text. This is certainly what appears to be suggested by the “songline” in Australian aboriginal society. It is doubtful that we can entirely base our understanding of the original hunter-gatherer society on modern hunter-gatherer societies, because the latter all survive in a state of near extinction, driven to the margins of their original territories and forced to cohabit with modern consumer society, usually in some quite dependent way. However, these beleaguered communities can provide us with a vague understanding of their past, although there is still the almost impossible task of reconstructing what has already been lost.

  Galileo also made Yates’s point in his Sidereus Nuncius (1610): “Such is the condition of the human mind that every memory fades if not stimulated by images from the external world that continuously manifest themselves to it.”3 The inner world of the memory and the outer world perceived by the senses are inextricably linked together. Perhaps the most stunning illustration of this reality is the following Hasidic story:

  In order to honour God, my grandfather’s father left his home very early, at the first light of day. He went into the wood and followed a path that only he had knowledge of, until he came to this meadow at the foot of a hill. On approaching a spring, he stood before an oak tree and recited an ancient, sublime and secret prayer in Hebrew.

  His son, my father’s father, also left his home quite early, and went into the wood along the path his father had shown to him. And yet he did not go as far, because he was short of breath and had so many troubles weighing on his mind. He had found a birch tree near a burn, and it was in front of that tree that he would intone the Hebrew prayer that he had learnt by heart as a child. Thus, he too was able to honour God.

  His elder son, my father, had little memory, was less pious and did not enjoy robust good health. Hence he did not get up so early, and only went to one of his gardens near his house, wher
e he had planted a sapling, and in order to honour God he mumbled a few Hebrew words in a very inaccurate manner and often full of mistakes.

  And as for me, I have neither memory nor time; I have forgotten where the wood is, know nothing about burns and springs, and am unable to recite a single prayer. However, I get up early and tell this story: this is the manner in which I honour God.4

  This story has many meanings, and perhaps we can all infer new ones. For me, the most remarkable element is the manner in which the decaying memory is accompanied by a shortened itinerary. This cultural atrophy is also reflected in the decreasing nobility of the external world whose stimuli Galileo tells us are the key to memory. First there is the oak visited by the great-grandfather, then the birch discovered by the grandfather, then a mere sapling whose genus is not specified, and finally no tree at all for the seemingly negligent narrator, whose self-awareness perhaps saves him before his God. This process of generational decay is another theme in this book, and is caused by technology which brings, however, its own compensations by unlocking access to so much readily available knowledge. The story also narrates our retreat from nature and our losing battle with time. We modern people may well admire the great-grandfather, but we probably have more sympathy for the great-grandson who narrates. He is one of us.

  Very speculatively, one could argue that hunter-gatherer societies stored an enormous amount of information in poetry and songs and would therefore have had languages designed for the production of oral text in verse. Consider for a moment the syntax of Zulu, clearly not the language of a hunter-gatherer people, but of a farming one with a highly evolved and militarised state. I chose the example simply because it still contains syntactical elements that create endless alliterations that versify everyday language. In the sentence, “our handsome country appears, we love it”, the subject “country” dominates the sentence by affecting all the other words in the sentence with non-functional inflections. The result is something extremely elegant, although the sentences were chosen for comparative purposes and are sometimes rather unlikely (the inflections are italicised):

  ilizwe

  letu

  elichle

  liyabonakala silitanda