Well, here goes another diary posting on a general, philosophical point. I’m not connected enough with the world to come up with specific facts. But this is something that is important, and we should be aware of, and violates conventional wisdom, as does the truth just about all the time.
The starting point was the diary about how the Democratic candidates challenged Wolf Blitzer’s Republican talking point question about English as an "official language." Kudos to Obama, and Clinton, and Dodd, for challenging the question, putting it in perspective, and refusing to follow the false binary choice they were given. We need more of that.
But there is something more to talk about. We need to take the challenge to conventional thinking further. The fact is, English is not a language. No language is a language. No category exists.
Now, that’s a big statement, and one that almost everyone who reads this will have trouble getting your head around. Or one that many of you will dismiss as obvious, yet I believe is left out of our dialog at our peril. Most have probably stopped reading me already, and won’t grant me the courtesy of backing up what I’m saying. Thanks to those of you who are still with me, and I hope to reward your patience.
Now, let’s see if I can put this more clearly. What is a language? According to OED, it’s, "The whole body of words and of methods of combination of words used by a nation, people, or race."
That’s bullshit. Every word of that definition reeks of nineteenth century concepts and prejudices that we now know are wrong.
Now, we, as enlightened people, can come up with a better definition. I was going to use the definition as supplied by Wikipedia, but instead will just link to the article (WIkipedia Link), as it is properly complex; far too complex to simply quote here. This is as it should be.
Because languages are not dead things, unless the people who used them every day with each other are also dead. They are not bound in time or space. They change, evolve, and adapt to place and time.
Here’s an example of what I’m getting at. Actually, two examples. Bear with me. This isn’t easy.
Example One: A friend of mine told me this story when I was living in what was then called Madras, India (and is now Chennai). He was an Indian citizen, and he spoke about ten languages, including English, Tamil, Kanada, Hindi, and Marathi.
I have to give a little background, here. Aside from English, there are fifteen "official" government languages in India. Most are Indo-European, in the north of the country, like Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, and Bengali. The languages of the southern four states, however, belong to their own language family, separate from any others in the world, called the Dravidian family. These include Tamil in the state of Tamil Nadu, Kanada in the state of Karnataka, Telegu in the state of Andra Pradesh, and Malayali in the state of Kerala.
I have to assert, and this is getting ridiculous, that every word in that last sentence is wrong. There are many other languages in those states, and there are people who speak the language of another state in every state. Madras used to be part of the region where people spoke mostly Telegu. And on and on. Nobody in India speaks just one language; they wouldn’t be able to survive.
But back to my friend. One time, he was traveling through the country by car, driving from Bangalore to Bombay (both names have since officially changed, so what?). He stopped in a small town near the border between Karnataka and Maharashtra for gas and a rest. He wanted a drink of water, and saw a water pump next to the petrol bunk building (that’s the words they use there, but it’s English, don’t you know.)
As he walked towards the pump, a couple of guys sitting nearby waved at him and shouted "Tani bund-eh." What were they saying? Remember, my friend spoke both Kanada, the language of Karnataka state, and Marathi, the language of Maharashtra state.
Here was the problem. The word for water in Hindi is "pani." The word for water in every Dravidian language is "tani." In Hindi, "pani bundh hein," means, "the water is stopped up." In Kanada, "tani bundei," means, "the water is flowing." Very close, and he didn’t know which language these guys were speaking, or if it was something in between. That latter was the case; the water was stopped up, and he didn’t get a drink.
Now, think about this. These are two completely different languages, in two completely different families. Yet there was no clear boundary between them; there was instead a mixture, a patois, a blending. So what language were those men speaking?
Example two, and this is somewhat more abstract.
Think of Italy. Think of a man in Calabria, in the south of Italy, talking to his neighbors and friends. He goes to another town, and speaks to the people there, and there’s no problem. They are, after all, speaking the same language. Someone from that town goes to another town further north, and same thing. And so on and so on until we get to the foothills of the Alps on the Swiss border. Indeed, those on the other side of the border also speak Italian, and families and neighbors speak to each other all the time. People in every neighboring town understand each other perfectly.
But take that first man, from Calabria, and send him to the Swiss border. He may well be understood, but he will have a harder time of it that did Cousin Vinnie in that Southern town in the movie. His accent, his pronunciation, his words will be totally different and unfamiliar. But everyone is speaking Italian; we can find no boundary that defines any barrier of understanding or language; yet they will have great difficulty communicating.
The same in Germany. There are defined subspecies of German, including Austrian, Viennese, Hochdeutsch, Plattdeutsch, Tyrolean, Bavarian, and so forth. Everyone is used to these differences, in fact, and deals with them as a matter of course.
And this is in countries in which everyone is identified with a single word of nationality!
The fact is, the borders that we use on our maps do not correspond to anything real. That’s really the problem in seeking to define countries in Africa, Asia, even Europe by language, nationality, or whatever. When it comes down to it, you can divide people infinitely by all these measures. That was what caused so much trouble in the Balkans in the nineties. That is what is at the root of many difficulties in Iraq, Afghanistan, and just about everywhere else you can think of.
As long as we insist that political identity and rights depend on membership in some ethnic, religious, linguistic, tribal, whatever group, someone is going to die. And yet, thanks to Wilson, such dangerous thinking is considered the height of enlightenment.
Lets get scientific for a minute, and consider Darwin. Charles Darwin gave the example of a wren in the English countryside. A wren in Yorkshire will sing and mate and nest with the wrens in the immediate vicinity. And the wrens she gets along with to her immediate south will have the same relations with the wrens to their south. And so on, and so on, even as far as Essex.
But if you take the original Yorkshire wren and relocate it in Essex, none of the other wrens will recognize its song or mate with it; it will be too different. Just as in the case of our travel Italians, songs and behavior, even feather patterns, have gradually, subtly changed in our journey. The scientific definition of a species is that individuals cannot mate and reproduce. But these wrens are considered to be the same species; there has been no boundary between them in our chain of relationships and reproduction as we moved south.
Just as in our example of the Calabrian Italian, we have declared a species, when in fact the boundary between the categories is not clear, defined, or even real. (Hence the problem with the Spotted owl from years ago. We were attempting to define in law something that was not defined in science. Stupid, actually, but forced be the structure of the Endangered Species Act. Better would be an Endangered Biome Act, but that’s another subject.)
This goes for what we call races, and nationalities, and ethnicities, and tribes. They don’t really exist, and people have been killing each other over them since the dawn of time.
So what do we do? What’s the point of this long, meandering, badly written posting that you’ve been so patient getting through?
We must stop thinking this way. We must stop thinking that English is one thing. We must stop thinking that calling someone an Iraqi describes that person in any way at all, no more than it goes for any kind of hyphenated American.
The term in philosophy is essentialism. That’s when we invent these categories, and instead of treating them as useful fictions that let us deal with the world, pretend that our categories are real, that they fully describe any part of the world, much less human beings.
Conservatives and Republicans and fundamentalists and journalists and other enemies of freedom and reason and the American way of life depend on essentialism to foist their lies on the American public. It’s easy to label things, whether terrorists or insurgents or liberals, and then call those who are different evil or dangerous or wrong. It’s easy to lump together things into one category and condemn them all together. It’s easy to accept the rhetoric of categories and differences, and its binary choices, as if life, much less politics, were a football game, with one side winning and the other losing.
But real life, a real economy, is not – or should not become – a winner-takes-all game. The real world is a place where cooperation helps everyone get more than they could in a zero-sum-game world. Real life is also a place where people of different nationalities, tribes is the best word, live in the same cities, streets, buildings, bedrooms. The first step to tearing us apart is giving us labels and thinking that those labels are real.
Don’t get me wrong. There are people out there who want to kill us, and they’re not going to change that because they read some enlightened posting in a blog. We have to deal with these people, and killing them is a perfectly legitimate way of doing so. The danger is when we lump them together with people who don’t want to kill us, and by doing so create more people seeking to harm us, which is what the Bush administration has been doing for the last six years.
Where was I?
Of course, the most dangerous divisions are those we call religions. How easy it is to kill people who reject your god. How hard tolerance can be, especially when killing in the name of The One Truth In The Universe.
There was a group of people who wanted to bridge the gap between the Hindus and the Muslims, two very different religions. So they made their own religion, borrowing from both, and adding new beliefs. And they were called the Sikhs, and from that time to now, both Hindus and Muslims have killed them for being different.
How important it is to understand that we’re all in this together, and none of us are getting out of it alive, in the end. What we really need to do is make things better for not just our children, but everyone’s. Instead, we color the maps of our own country with just two colors, and act as if that describes or explains anything.
And as long as we seek out ways to divide ourselves from others, ways such as "official language" (yes, that is what this long, disorganized, confusing post is about, anyway), making life better will be impossible.
But the problem isn’t just the idea of "official." It’s the idea of "language." And "nationality." And "race." And "religion." And every other division in the world.
So stop it. Stop thinking of English as one thing, as a start. Anyone who’s actually been to England (or Ireland, or Australia, or India, or Singapore, or most of the rest of the world) knows that’s not true. Put people from New York, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, Des Moines in the same room, and you can’t pretend America has one language. Celebrate the fact that it doesn’t. Hell, TV has homogenized our language too much as it is. Variety is a GOOD thing! It’s enriching, and enlivening, and helps the language change, and grow, and adapt.
Just like life, you know. So says Darwin, and he’s right.
And when some blowhard, or just someone thoughtless, starts talking about "official" this or that, pretending that her categories are real, fixed, set, permanent things, gently correct her (or, more likely, his) conventional thinking.
As we all do. Every day. Right here.
Thank you for sticking with me. Let the argument begin.