Hermeneutic Heretic

The Politico But it wasn’t revealing because she was suggesting her husband is “evil and bad.”

It was revealing because — asked about dealing with evil men like Osama bin Laden — her mind seemed to go to her domestic enemies. It’s absurd to suggest that she thinks Bill is evil like Osama. But Kenneth Starr? Rick Santorum? Her joke suggests that she buys into the notion that American and Middle Eastern “zealots” are cut from the same cloth, an idea that dovetails with her belief that there was (and is) a right-wing conspiracy to destroy the Clintons.

This is what she said: “What in my background equips me to deal with evil and bad men? [pause][laughter by audience, speaker joins in]”. Later when quizzed by journalists, she did what she was told by her media coach and repeated her talking points. Sadly in that she didn’t have another option.

But this is what she should have said. “You know. Metaphors and analogies are funny beasts. They seem to lead you down paths opening new vistas and all of a sudden, like in a bad dreams, you’re falling off a precipice. This is because we’re used to metaphors [have a folk theory] only when they fully spell out how something is like something else. But more often than not, they leave most of the potential similarities unexpressed or even unimagined. And sometimes the similarity is even coincidental - based on similar sounding words, alliteration, rhyme or spelling. What happened here, is that I paused at the wrong moment and all these coincidental similarities started rushing into the vacuum of my brief silence. And all the men that I have been associated with in my life from college boyfriends to my husband and his prosecutors were suddenly rushing to everybody’s mind including the audience and myself. But the incongruity of the comparison became immediately apparent and that is why everybody started laughing. What is fascinating about that moment is that none of the analogies were fleshed out, they were simply sketches of what might be and that’s what made them more powerful than the mundane and stressful reality.”

And she would have told the absolute truth! But she couldn’t because the folk theory that all analogies are always complete is simply too powerful and bloggers such as The Politico, the Fox reporter, or this NY Post headline writer would have jumped to even stronger conclusions. This negotiation of analogy boundaries is very common in public discourse and these limits are very fluid. The problem for the public discourse is that its participants are operating under the folk theory that analogies are complete and an accurate representation of likeness or somebody’s belief about likeness. What this folk theory (along with many expert theories) fails to take into account is the indeterminacy or underspecification of all metaphor-like conceptualization. Not only are the mappings from one domain to the other partial, they are also of different levels of schematicity. And that means that sometimes they are going to lead into situations such as these where everybody in the room knows what is happening but it is impossible to talk about it later because in the process of metaphor hypostasis most of the underspecification disappears and is replaced by explicit mappings.

PS: The NY Post has an interesting quote from the ‘common man’:

“She was talking about Bill being a bad man. There was no doubt whatsoever,” said Tyrone Williams, 55, an engineer from nearby Bettendorf, Iowa.

Was 9/11 really that bad? - Los Angeles Times
Has the American reaction to the attacks in fact been a massive overreaction? Is the widespread belief that 9/11 plunged us into one of the deadliest struggles of our time simply wrong? If we did overreact, why did we do so? Does history provide any insight?

So it took about 5 and a half years (to my knowledge) before an major US western newspaper got around to publishing the very obvious. By historical and even current global standards 9/11 was not a particularly significant disaster. In fact, when BBC World devoted a full day to 9/11 in 2002 and only a few specials to Srebrenica in 2005, it was hard not to wonder if one American life is worth two Balkan ones in our attention. Rwanda, Darfour - none of them elicit the ‘we live a post-…’ era phrase which is used to elicit the taboo of 9/11 discussion. Or at least, so a more engaged person might conclude. A symbolic anthropologist would not! It is obvious that to one ingroup the lives of its members are infinitely more interesting and valuable than those of others. Furthermore, the symbolic value of something will outweigh any fact-based value any time (numbers of dead, financial cost, years needed for recovery, etc.).

And then there is the discourse-logistical element. Once a topos (such as 9/11 was an inhumane atrocity) is established it is not that easy to dislodge - just like any change in the symbolic/linguistic repertoir. It would be like speaking without verbs. The author himself interweaves his text with the appropriate topoic warding off ‘bad textual spirits’.

Certainly, if we look at nothing but our enemies’ objectives, it is hard to see any indication of an overreaction. The people who attacked us in 2001 are indeed hate-filled fanatics who would like nothing better than to destroy this country. But desire is not the same thing as capacity, and although Islamist extremists can certainly do huge amounts of harm around the world, it is quite different to suggest that they can threaten the existence of the United States.

Eventhough, it leads the author to an interesting conclusion that allows the profiling of certain information inspite of ritual limitations of discourse, this is most likely still incorrect. I’m not aware of any sustained effort by the Islamist radicals at “destroying America” - they may be fanatical but they are, by and large, not stupid. Their objective is to balance the symbolic scales by causing damage where it symbolically hurts the most. If they could kill a few hundred thousand Westerners somewhere in one go, they would probably take the opportunity but they never imagine that they can destroy the West. There may be a few ritual phrases out there like ‘Death to America’ but no sustained plan or even vision that would justify calling it an “objective”. Unlike the democratizing zeal of the neo-liberals Islamist radicalism is not a particularly proselytizing movement (they recruit from their own middle classes [see my other post today] but do not convert from too far afield).

But it is no disrespect to the victims of 9/11, or to the men and women of our armed forces, to say that, by the standards of past wars, the war against terrorism has so far inflicted a very small human cost on the United States. As an instance of mass murder, the attacks were unspeakable, but they still pale in comparison with any number of military assaults on civilian targets of the recent past, from Hiroshima on down.

Even if one counts our dead in Iraq and Afghanistan as casualties of the war against terrorism, which brings us to about 6,500, we should remember that roughly the same number of Americans die every two months in automobile accidents.

The use of analogy in these two paragraphs (as well as the one in the introductory paragraph bringing to the fore Soviet casualties in WWII) is very typical in most frame-negotiating contexts at this level. Nevertheless the code switching from topoi/taboo broaching to analogy is a very interesting example of the dances of persuasion and assuasion we engage in in the written word. This is an important preface to what follows - a well-reasoned discussion of the origins of the concept of peace in Enlightenment (which itself spawned quite a bit of mayhem) and a critical engagement with John Mueller’s Overblown only to end with the following analogical denouement to his interesting rhetorical adventure.

Yet as the comparison with the Soviet experience should remind us, the war against terrorism has not yet been much of a war at all, let alone a war to end all wars. It is a messy, difficult, long-term struggle against exceptionally dangerous criminals who actually like nothing better than being put on the same level of historical importance as Hitler — can you imagine a better recruiting tool? To fight them effectively, we need coolness, resolve and stamina. But we also need to overcome long habit and remind ourselves that not every enemy is in fact a threat to our existence.

BBC NEWS | UK | Younger Muslims ‘more political’
Young Muslims are much more likely than their parents to be attracted to political forms of Islam, a think tank survey has suggested.

Support for Sharia law, Islamic schools and wearing the veil is much stronger among younger Muslims, a poll for the centre-right Policy Exchange found.

This, of course, is absolutely no surprise to anyone who knows anything about social cognition and group identity. In fact, this is the predicted outcome of a situation where a covert stigma is attached to a whole group. Tariq Ali wrote about this four years ago. It is a much more subtle and complex version of Black Americans using the word ‘nigger’ or feminists using the word ‘cunt’. What is much more interesting (if not at all surprising) is how oblivious the mainstream society is of the pressures put on these groups (non-muslims about muslims, whites about blacks, men about women) and the limited avenues for expression of feelings about these pressures.

“The emergence of a strong Muslim identity in Britain is, in part, a result of multicultural policies implemented since the 1980s, which have emphasised difference at the expense of shared national identity.”Conservative leader David Cameron said the poll was extremely worrying.

“It shows the extent to which multiculturalism has failed, because what the poll showed is that these young people feel more separated from Britain than their parents did,” he told BBC News.

This is, interestingly, both wrong and right. The multicultural policies as implemented have indeed failed but not because they are wrong in substance but because they face intractable frames of expectation about normality. Words about valuing difference were not backed up by reality in which difference leads to equality. The result for the young Muslims is cognitive dissonance (whatever that is). On one hand, they are told to value their culture and on the other all signals they receive from outside their community undermine that value. (The same thing has happened with class warfare. Whereas up to about the 1950s working class people would fight for fair living conditions and opportunities of advancements, the 1960s extended the romanticism of working class and brought in the expectation of equality of moral worth, which was not encoded into the symbolic structures of personal valuation but only in the surface of the discourse.) In much too simple, but useful terms, both of these policies led to a creation of a new middle class which was never allowed to join fully with the existing middle class but remained symbolically impoverished (or ostracized). And, as we know, this kind of middle class is the most likely to start revolutions or blow themselves up in planes and buildings.

The problem with Cameron’s statements (particularly as expressed in full in the BBC Radio 4 interview) is that they are relying on the assumption that what is wrong is the ideology behind multiculturalism while the issue is the lack of any real implementation of multiculturalism. (It is possible that some of its inherent paradoxes might make that impossible but that is a different debate.) The social arrangements in Britain (and the Western world in general) are not those of multicultural cooperation but multicultural cohabitation and toleration.

This illustrates the problem rather nicely. The assumption is that multiculturalism means that there will be lots of people like us (white middle classes) who will just eat some slightly different food and put on different garb on special occasion to make our ‘living space’ more ‘colorful and interesting’, as long as we are in no way inconvenienced. Whereas, it is the Islamists who have it right. All matters of group identity are political and Muslim youths have no other outlet for their political expression but radicalism. Every time “Muslim leaders” condemn violence in general before they say anything else, they are denying their young generation’s hope to identity. They would be much more effective if they were brining radical politics to the negotiating table and letting the white middle classes know that they must be willing to be much more challenged by the differences than being denied a pot roast on a Sunday. There’s a good chance that more radical talk would lead to less radical action.

iTWire - A new ‘iBook’ from Google?: be afraid, be very afraid
Google is plotting to do for books what the iPod has done for music: make them purchasable by download to a portable access device. Could civilisation as we know it be under threat? … The news immediately lead Sunday Times commentator, Bryan Appleyard to bemoan the fact that: “We are, it seems, about to lose physical contact with books, the primary experience and foundation of civilisation for the last 500 years.”

Civilizations (or rather discourse participants negotiating the conceptual frames that define them) put great stock by the dual story of innovation and continuity. And few things are as central to the foundations of our civilization as construed by elites than books. The topos that there is something special to books that stimulates all the senses (haptic, kinesthetic, visual and olfactory stimuli all play a role) is ubiquitous and this is held to give books the edge over eBooks. It is assumed (and often stated) that there is something primeval about turning a page, sniffing the old book mustiness or the new book glue and becoming engrossed in the book’s world. Of course, in the past, as now, most people engaged with books by having them read to them, often in public places. So the ‘racial’ memory of bookworms is likely a constructed image.

But so is its opposite of ebooks revolutionizing the world of information as we know it. While there is nothing natural about printed books, there is a lot of power in constructed images. So books will have a lot of staying power. But even if they don’t, which I hope is likely, the impact on the world is likely to be fairly minimal. As Cory Doctorow pointed out somewhere, for quite a few of the new elites (although as an elite he said everyone), the majority of the text they interact with every day is already on the screen. And as a lot of the ‘new literacy’ people correctly remind us, even in the literate population, literacy is not always (and maybe not even most of the time) used to interact with large chunks of cohesive text.

And finally, there is a limit to the capacity of consumption of information. The elites, who really matter when it comes to information dissemination, already have almost all they can handle. So the information can be made available to larger population. Which is great because that will mean infusion of new blood into the elites and formation of informed localized elites (not democratization). But hardly a revolution.

So while I be the first in line to buy an eBook reader, once someone makes one I can a) afford, b) search text, c) underline and excerpt text. I doubt it will have an impact on our civilization beyond the realignment of some of its foundational imagery. It will take a while to renegotiate the frames, but that’s just how it goes.

PS: It turns out that having written the above, there are two more pages to the article that also take issue with Appleyard’s bellyaching very much on similar ground:

So what? We have also lost contact with the primary experience of hunting killing, dismembering and cooking large beasts in order to eat, and that of being hunted, killed and dismembered by other wild beasts in the process: to name but one unpleasant experience that civilisation has deprived us of.

But rather than annoyed at having wasted my time, I’m gratified that one of my predictions, viz the impending renegotiating of frames, is upon us already. Lot of ‘frame negotiation’ is happening through subtle unconscious processes but much of it comes through trenchant analysis and metaphor hypostasis. Like this:

“An index is the work of a mind with knowledge, search engine results are the product of an algorithm with information. …”

… I would suggest that the indexes of most reference books today are complied largely by algorithms, not human indexers.

And it’s not just the renegotiation of the present but also of the past:

Come off it, This might be true if the population were comprised largely of ‘wisdom seeking’ individuals who collectively advance knowledge and civilisation. This is not the case, and never has been. Not of academic wisdom at any rate. For generations primitive peoples without any written languages thrived and prospered through intimate knowledge, and wisdom of their natural environment. The wisdom that has advanced civilisation to what it is today has always been the province of select minority of gifted individuals who have pushed the boundaries of human knowledge and our ability to exploit the natural world.

Hawking says climate change poses greater threat to humanity than terrorism - International Herald Tribune
LONDON: Scientist Stephen Hawking described climate change Wednesday as a greater threat to the planet than terrorism.

The interesting thing here is not so much that this clearly illogical comparison is being given any credence but that none of the reports mention that Hawking isn’t the first English scientist to say this (first, to my knowledge, was the UK government’s science advisor).

To describe climate change as  “a greater threat to the planet than terrorism” is about the same  as saying that anteaters are a greater threat to ants than to nuclear submarines.  While it is possible  to  come up with conceivable scenarios such as an anteater getting stuck in a submarine’s engine or a terrorist getting their hands on enough explosives to blow the planet to kingdom come, neither is  likely, nor a primary function of  terrorism or anteaterism. The argument holds even if we concede that  neither climate change nor terrorism pose  any threat to the planet at all - merely to the  existence of humans on the planet (geocohesively an entirely contingent  actor).  Terrorists pose no threat at all while climate change poses  a potentially (depending on the accuracy of models) significant  threat to  humans in current population densities and  with current industrially-conditioned social structures.  (In fact,  both pale into insignificance  when compared with asteroids or nuclear holocausts.)

Two features of our cognitive / conceptual system were necessary for this widely reported quote to make it into general consciousness.

1. Conceptual frames of danger that are evoked when a comparison is necessary. The currently socially salient frame of danger to larger groupings of people is centered around scenarios and folk-theories of terrorism that are daily being negotiated in the media and other platforms of public discourse. These then get conceptually integrated with similarly negotiated scenarios of global warming into an interestingly indeterminate blend.

2. Socially cognitive structures of information credibility. Here Stephen Hawking (being the new Einstein) fulfills  the role of ‘paragon’ - somebody whose judgment is implicitly trusted. (Of course, his understanding of complicated physics in no way makes him a better judge of climate change, which depends on completely different kind of modeling, than anyone else.) He plays the role of the high priest, the ultimate interpreter of science. If he takes a position on an issue, he should be taken seriously. (His recent embarrassingly trite question on Yahoo Answers notwithstanding.)

Thus we can see how a simple sentence uttered in a complicated context can be dependent on an even more complicated (if straightforward in principle) conceptual pattern.

‘Hold Your Wee for a Wii’ Death Shuts Down Show - Gameworld Network news story Ten employees have lost their jobs over the incident, and the radio show is permanently off the air. ….

28 year old Jennifer Strange was found dead in her Rancho Cordova home on Friday. A preliminary coroner’s report indicated the death “was consistent with water intoxication”.

Strange was competing in the “Hold Your Wee for a Nintendo Wii” contest when she died.

“Metaphors can kill.” This is how George Lakoff began his famous article on Metaphor and War about the language surrounding the first Gulf War. However, the world of the tropes is powerful at even deeper levels than mappings between well-structured conceptual domains. There is nothing that links the Nintendo game console and drinking water than the sound resemblance of Wii with a euphemism for urination, the result of drinking water. This in itself is an example of metonymic chaining (as in ‘you can fin these ideas in the library’) but the metonymy is driven by sound connection rather then any ‘real world’ contiguity. However, this auditory contiguity is not purely subconscious (although the polysemic/plurisemic nature of the sound makes oscillations inevitable) but is negotiated. From the moment the new name for a product codenamed Nintendo Revolution was announced, a lively debate was held over the advisability of the new name and how its various sound resemblances (urine, small, exclamation of excitement, we) would make it less appealing. All those predictions proved inaccurate and in the gaming community are only infrequently remarked upon, anymore. However, the non-expert public has only started its process of negotiating the assimilation of the polysemic construction. And this contest is one example of such negotiation.

It is also an example of the importance of symbolic structures in social interaction. There are many ways the Wiis could have been given out but the one with most symbolic connections was chosen - and it is the one that has gained most attention and resulted in this death (which in itself has unleashed a whole slew of ritual symbolic behavior). In short, people are willing to go a long way for symbolic cohesive harmony.

I got an A in Phallus 101 - Los Angeles Times
The problem that the Young America’s Foundation list, first issued in 1995, highlights isn’t simply the hollowing-out of the traditional humanities and social sciences disciplines at colleges and their replacement by crude indoctrination sessions in whatever is ideologically fashionable — although that’s a serious issue. At Occidental, for instance, it seems nearly impossible to study any field, save for the hard sciences, that doesn’t include “race, class and gender” among its topics. Even the Shakespeare course at Occidental this semester focuses on “cultural anxieties over authority, race, colonialism and religion” during the age of the Bard.

The bigger problem is that too much of American higher education has lost any notion of what its students ought to know about the ideas and people and movements that created the civilization in which they live: Who Plato was or what happened at Appomattox.

Instead of the carefully crafted core programs that once guided students through the basics of literature, philosophy, history and the social sciences, most colleges now offer smorgasbords of unrelated classes for their students to sample in order to fulfill requirements. And the professors stock the smorgasbords with whatever the theorists they idolize tells them is the new new thing.

Why not take a course in “The Phallus”?

You can get the same credit for it as for a course in Greek tragedy.

This is as much about education as about the very definition of knowledge and social cohesion. It underscores one of the issues that progressive educators often neglect, viz the images of education, the schooling process, and educatedness, prevalent in a given culture. The assumption that the result of education is knowledge (and skill and attitude and acceptable behavior and all that) is missing one important element. What education provides is above all primary socialization. That, however, is thought to be rather limited in scope because it refers to only basic communities. However, students need to be ‘primarily’ socialized into a number of groupings (secondary socialization would just be primary socialization into a non-immediate group - the process is similar). It could be described as learning to acquire ways of signaling membership. And one of the ways of signaling membership in a group/category of college graduates is knowing a little about Shakespeare. By little, I mean enough to have a mundane conversation. This may seem like a trivial matter but this signaling is absolutely crucial in the academic world (and at its intersection with the real world). The problem is that we need to affirm credibility of our sources of information. We basically have no way of verifying more than a tiny fraction of information that we need to base many decisions on. These signals our pretty much our only way of doing that (along with social connectivity). These new college courses (while often based on solid scholarship - no more woollyheaded than most tripe spouted about Shakespeare) neglect this aspect of education and run into trouble. The requirements for this social acceptability are fairly modest, though, as the highlighted section about shows. The author’s own knowledge of Plate would probably be shown woefully inadequate by any closer examination but a few mentions of the Republic of the cave in a conversation will establish her credentials as an educated person and therefore her credibility in certain kinds of social exchanges. (That is not to say that the same processes don’t operate within these ‘new’ kinds of courses, only they socialize their graduates into smaller more ‘exclusive’ groups.) The convener of Phalus 101 need not worry, though. Should the subject prove viable it will become part of the academic establishment. Many worthy disciplines (probably most) from mathematics to psychology have at some point or other been subjected to similar abuse and many are still fighting to gain acceptance.

The other questions, namely, what about the more general cognitive and affective outcomes of education. I suspect that they will be on average the same no matter what subject matter is the focus. The only thing that curricula and materials have any lasting effect on is encyclopedic (factual) knowledge. So if we start telling students that Pluto is not a planet and the capital of Kazakhstan is Astana, that’s what most of them will know (percentages of retention depending on how salient the need for the piece of information is and social and psychologically relevant it is). However, if we start telling them that drugs are bad, they will know that that’s what they were told but may or may not believe it or may or may not act on their knowledge and/or belief. Equally many students will remember that Plato had something to say about a cave with shadows in it but in relatively few will it lead to an ability to integrate it into their view of the world beyond the most trite late night musings. So, in short, despite being in favor of a lot of radical curriculum reform, I tend not to get too excited about these things any more.

digg - The Digg Comment Algorithm
Everything in this world can be shown as a flowchart algorithm. This, of course, applies to the complex and not well researched field of “Digg comments“. Here’s my humble attempt to define an algorithm which should encompass all of the many possibilities of comment development on Digg.

There are two ways to look at this statement. One is to take it as evidence of ‘folk theory’ of the nature of the world. If Penrose and others are right, there is an infinity of phenomena that cannot be described adequately by an algorithm of the type that can be represented by a flowchart.

However, it is also possible to take this statement at face value and speculate that in fact there is a level of magnification at which everything (although we’ll need to be caution about what a thing is in the everything) can be actually shown through an algorithm. But that algorithm may not be very useful for most of the ways that ‘thing’ is relevant to us. A good example would be language and communication. At some level they are easy ‘to flowchart’ but these flowcharts are not easy to ‘zoom in’ on or if we can magnify them we find them not being accurate anymore or even resemble the data. Level of magnification, then, is the key (taken from fractal theory). Now, the really interesting question is how can we make the different levels of magnification interact and does the fact that a certain kind of description/perspective/looking glass produces ‘bad’/irrelevant/incorrect data/results/stuff when magnified (positively or negatively) mean that we must reject that perspective in its entirety? If not, and my vote would be for not, how can we marry two useful but incompatible perspectives that each produce results at only one or just a few levels of magnification? (Such as generative and cognitive grammar? or quantum mechanics and Einsteinian physics?) My favorite example is the flat earth theory. Which is great (indispensable) for walking and traveling to Australia but breaks down once we zoom out (or go sailing or build tall buildings). Round-Earth theory is useless to us in 99.999% of our daily activities (although we might benefit from its consequences with radio, satellites, weather and such) but it is an inescapable fact (and we would consider anyone suggesting a flat Earth backward and simply wrong). In that same way, for instance, typical generative grammar doesn’t sustain the behavior of language in almost any normal communicative situation but at a certain magnification it may be just as real and relevant as other approaches to grammar (although, here I personally believe its sphere of relevance to be negligible). This certainly bears exploring further.

Limp language leaves kids with an awesome paucity of speech
[Teenagers on which the author eavesdrops] They’ve got one all-purpose word — “awesome” — to cover everything from mild approval to exhilaration. When they’re indignant or angry, they have to fall back on clichés — including a few tired four-letter words.
…
Today, teens aren’t the only ones who have lost the ability to speak and write with vigor and eloquence. Folks of all ages are reading less — especially the classics, whose authors wielded our language most powerfully. As a result, our ability to express ourselves is diminishing, because we can’t draw on their example for inspiration.
…
“Today, our common cultural reference points come from the visual culture: Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez,” [Diane] Ravitch [who just compiled a collection of important English texts] told me last week. … Our schools could help remedy the problem, but often don’t, she says. That’s because “‘relevance” is now the watchword in education.

In textbooks, teens tend to find countless stories about young people much like themselves, according to Ravitch.
…
Norman Fruman, an emeritus English professor at the University of Minnesota, agrees. “Good literature deals with ideas, as well as emotions and the psychology of human behavior,” he says. “It records our greatest tragedies and our highest aspirations.”

Aside from being more or less predictable nonsense this article and views reported in it raise several reasonably interesting questions.

On language (and its variability): Language here is presented as reflecting complexity of thought and emotion. However, the language discussed is written or formal spoken language and contrasted with informal spoken language. This is a very typical feature of mavenry (I use the term language maven from Pinker’s Language Instinct) and it shows that these people really know very little about language if a bit more (though not a lot) about grammar. However, there are some underlying issues here that should be discussed, however. Is there such a thing as complexity of language? It is already accepted by linguists that individual languages all have the same level of grammatical complexity This is an issue that may need revisiting as the lines between grammar and vocabulary blur, but it is clear that all languages (from creoles up) can roughly express what is expressed in all other languages (connotations and misaligned categories being the most difficult to make into an equivalent). But what about the ’systems’ contained in individuals’ brains? There is certainly a great deal of variation in how well individuals deal with the subtlety of linguistic expression. What is the nature of this difference? None knows or is even, as far as I know, researching this. Let’s accept for now that there is such a thing as a lower complexity language speaker (I suspect that there will be - and it will have something to do with ability to do certain kinds of conceptual blends). What would happen (the author of this screed implies) if all the individuals in a group had this hypothetical lower complexity (such as a pigin)? Would the language of the entire group deteriorate and cease to be a language? Most possibly but this would have to be a result of an evolutionary biological process rather than poor educational standards. Not knowing what Shakespeare said does not mean not being able to express oneself. Of course, the new language will have different means of expression and variability that may be erased in one place will appear elsewhere. This is amply demonstrated in the relatively well-understood process of creolization. Of course, there is also the issue of language decay and language death but those are always associate with a decrease of prestige of a language as a whole and a reduction of the number of native speakers (leading to reverse creolization - e.g. decrease in number of categories, etc.). English or no other language with a million or more of native speakers is in any immediate danger. Unless we mean English as spoken in 2007. That of course is in imminent danger and there is a good chance that English as spoken in 2207 will be significantly different to the degree that mutual intelligibility will be impaired or a refragmentation will occur (of course, like with Latin, academic English may prove to have remarkable staying power and its prevalence may still be in its ascendancy).
On historical perspectives and anachronism: Part of this problem is the tendency of all historians to ignore the level of magnification they are dealing with when making these comparisons. The author contrasts giants from the history of verbal expression with randomly (and anecdotally) chosen subjects speaking in an informal context. Had she done such random eavesdropping two hundred years ago should would have heard exactly the same issues (I’m sure that there are a number of texts out there bemoaning the decreasing standards of education and expression). Conversely, if she looked today’s world of English expression from far enough she would see about the same (if not greater) proportion of luminaries read by about the same number (proportionately) of people. This goes for almost all ‘it used to be better’ rants.

On modality of perception and social cognition: The author makes another assumption that might bear investigating. Namely, that there is a fundamental difference in the modes in which we perceive language (and that written is the superior one). Of necessity, there are important differences in how we process written and spoken word cognitively at the moment of perception. However, are there also enough differences in the cumulative learning of language and improving the ability of self-expression? Homeric and Vedic poetry would beg to differ (the ahistoricism again). Reading in general is a relatively new thing and silent reading by the population at large is barely a century old. So we can hardly expect the educational system to have much to do with the complexity of language otherwise there would never have been any. Furthermore, the supposedly ‘visual’ symbols of culture such as Britney Spears come with a significant linguistic baggage much of which is written (just look at fan sites and fan fiction).

Then, there is the fact that reading and language are not merely matters of encoding and decoding emotions or information. They have a significant social component to them so we can hardly expect a group of socializing teens to be articulate beyond the standards of their community. Simply because it would be disruptive to that community.

On literature: Connected to that is the assumption that there is only one thing called literature and that there is a standard for good literature, particularly for the purposes of public edification. For some reason, the author chose to forget that Shakespeare wrote plays and those were put on in extremely visual ways including lewdness frowned upon by the makers of American Pie. I already pointed out that much of the great classics were not in fact written or transmitted in written form (or not in the form we know them today - e.g. serializations of Dostoyevsky or Dickens). So having problematized the notion of literature, we need to cast our net a little wider. And what do we find: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gilmore Girls, Sopranos, Veronica Mars, West Wing or even Friends or My Name is Earl. All of these are exhibit the highest levels of narrative and linguistic sophistication that easily measure up to the best in Shakespeare (we must not forget that while good, Shakespeare’s reputation as the greatest is mostly due to nationalistic propaganda of the 1700s). And if somebody thinks they don’t deal “with ideas, as well as emotions and the psychology of human behavior” or don’t record “our greatest tragedies and our highest aspirations” they just plain don’t know what they are talking about.

On cognition again; and literacy: However, there is a potentially valid point hidden in here. While it is impossible that humans would lose the complexity of language as we know it. It is not inconceivable that they would give up writing and reading, particularly, as technologies such as speech recognition and AI develop beyond what presently seems possible. It is impossible to live without some system of graphical representation of language but the complex and powerful alphabetic systems may fall into disuse if certain conditions are fulfilled (I vaguely recall a sci-fi story that suggested it). I am not suggesting that it is likely or that it would happen due to a poor educational system but it may certainly happen over many generations. One possible way I can imagine is if technological solutions designed to deal with illiteracy or ‘analphabetacy’ in most of the world today became so successful and the developing world became socially prestigious enough to make this ‘getting information without reading’ a popular thing. There undoubted advantages the written text has over spoken text as a transmissive device but I can envision these to ignored once the key need for textual representation has been met by other means.

On learning, the effects of education (and a bit of cognition again): It is interesting to see the assumption that the effects of education are so straightforwardly causal. When the author claims that less reading of classics results in that “our ability to express ourselves is diminishing, because we can’t draw on their example for inspiration.” She assumes that language is learned purely by mimesis (or some other principle such as Chomsky’s LAD). This brings us back to the question of how different individuals process text. Some may benefit from extensive reading to increase their own expressivity and others won’t. What principle is involved here is anybody’s guess but it most certainly doesn’t bode well for the assumption that schools “could help remedy the problem” (assuming, of course, that there is a problem). And furthermore, that the cumulative effect of thus helpful schools would be the changing of levels of expressivity in the population at large. As it stands, we don’t have anything exceeding a folk theory about how this would happen. (We do have a lot of data suggesting that it almost never does, though.)

On relevance and motivation in education: Finally, not to simply disagree, Diane Ravitch makes a point which is very important for contemporary debates about education. It has been a trend for some time (or at least an aspiration that goes back to Comenius and further) to try to make learning materials “relevant” to the students to engage them in and motivate them for better learning. The problem with this is twofold. First, it assumes that cumulative effect of and within education I mentioned above. More importantly, though, it rests on our confidence that curriculum developers and textbook authors can determine what is relevant to students and preserve that relevance. Instrumental relevance, in particular, is of little use. Two diggers of holes or two trains going in opposite directions make the solution of mathematical equations no more appealing and probably not much easier. They are certainly of no relevance to most learners. It is also not certain that instrumental relevance will lead to the kind of motivation that enhances learning (even if we knew what learning really was and how to tell if it is enhanced). We know a little more about motivation that improves results of test taking (much easier to measure and much less necessary to motivate for). So Ravitch is broadly right to imply that the attempts to make everything be exactly the same to what the students already know, it is more likely to impoverish rather than enrich their learning (although, I suspect that the overall effect is less pronounced than she seems to assume). She also relies on the probably incorrect assumption, as we established earlier, that all students use these texts in the same way. But she is right to raise the question of relevance as a basically blind alley in the pursuit of motivation.
The problem with motivation is that we know that it is probably the most reliable predictor of success in learning (baring mental disabilities and differences in learning styles, and lots of other things). However, we have know idea how to produce it (certainly not uniformly across populations) and we don’t even know what kind of motivation works when. Ultimately, all we can say with any confidence about motivation in learning is the tautology that the kind of motivation that produces successful learning is the motivation that has produced successful learning. (It’s usually even hard to describe the complex interplay of different kinds of motivations and dismotivations.) We don’t have much in the way of predictive tools to look at somebody who appears motivated and say how well they will learn but we can usually say that someone who was a successful learner was motivated in one way or another.

End. (Who would have thought that such innocuous article can encapsulate all that there is about language, cognition and education.)

On The Media: Transcript of “God No!” (December 15, 2006)
In response to the global challenge posted by religious extremism, a small group of impassioned atheists has taken a new approach. They target the tolerant with both reason and ridicule. “The New Atheists”, as they were dubbed by Gary Wolf in a recent article in Wired magazine, condemn, quote, “not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is not only wrong, it’s evil.”

Let’s be clear on one thing! There is no chance that there is a god of the sort any of the world’s major or minor religions envision. There is not even a universal spirit or anthropic principle that the uncertain or pathologically polite like to claim. There is no need to be agnostic about this, no ‘wait-and-see’ approach is necessary! There is no God! Might as well be atheist. However, there is also no evolution, individual potential or basic humanism (see Rousseau to Arendt) that secular humanists profess a faith (rational certainty) in. All of these are social constructs, that is, they don’t exist like cars and trees exist (well, even cars and trees are social constructs in a way but they are more closely tied to tangible objects as you discover when one falls on you).

Sidenote: Now, there are a few things that might be worth being agnostic about. For me the foundation of agnosticism about the transcendental rests on a quote from St Agustin about time: “God created the universe with time, not in time.” That, by analogy, defines the boundaries of agnosticism or that is how I would choose to interpret the anthropic principle. We are limited by our humanness in how we see the world. If something “exists” outside these limits (such as 4 dimensional beings - see sci fi) there is no way it can ever enter into our sphere of relevance in its essence. In fact, even the very concept of existence may only apply within our own conceptual world as do all notions of causality, so to assume that for instance this hypothetical 4-dimensional world will have any impact on or relevance to our own world with paltry 3 dimensions, is to say too much. This is my reading of Wittgensteins “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” (Although he probably meant something else by it. So I would replace the second part by ‘thereof one is inevitably silent’ and ’speak’ in the first part by ‘conceive’.) Also, where Parmedides sings of the totality of existence he probably means something similar. All that we can do about the truly transcendent is refer to it as something that is completely beyond our grasp. However, there is nothing mystical or wondrous about this as some postmodernist seem to be inclined to suggest. Neither does it mean that we should consciously avoid exploring certain areas that are presented to us by the inclinations that limit our world. However, when something gets within our grasp that previously appeared beyond it, we cannot conclude that we’re slowly ‘bit by byte’ eating away at the unknowable until there is nothing left. It just means that our own conceptual inclination isn’t very good at exploring its own boundaries and unequivocally point outside them.

The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof condemned the New Atheists as obnoxious and militant and in your face. And he wrote that this, quote, “charge of the atheist brigade” in its treatment of conservative Christians is, quote, “often just as intolerant and mean.”
…
SAM HARRIS: If you think the creator of the universe is letting people fly planes into our buildings because we are tolerating gay marriage, or he’s whipping up hurricanes in the Gulf because we’re tolerating gay marriage, you have to try to legislate against gay marriage.
…
PAT ROBERTSON: What we’ve got to recognize just there in this case is that the evolutionists worship atheism. I mean, that’s their religion. So this is an establishment of religion contrary to the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.

This is a debate that might be worth investigating in some detail (although it is not nearly as crucial as it might appear). Is atheism a form of religion? Equating religion and atheism may seem oxymoronic by definition (although in languages Czech it is also oxymoronic in vocabulary, náboženství - lit. ingoddiness) but the Latin-English etymology of binding suggests otherwise. In fact, religion has much less to do with God than with social and political consideration. Religion is a strong determinant of social identity and although some intellectual and faith baggage does come with it that might fall within the purview of clinical and/or cognitive psychology, it is much more profitable to study its social aspects at the group level. While there must have been many individuals who converted as a result of private revelation (cognitive dissonance or licking the wrong/right kind of mushroom) the majority of conversions of populations in history happened for political or economic reasons. On some level, belonging to a religion is not psychologically and socially that different from supporting a football club. The God thing really only muddles the waters. So once we dispense with the ecstatic bit of religion, atheism in the form presented below (and most of the expressions in faith of science) qualify as religious.

ELLEN JOHNSON: It’s demeaning to atheists. It’s saying that under very dire circumstances or frightening situations, atheists will stop being atheists. They will start believing. And this is really just a wish on the part of the religious, because it’s not based in fact.

JOHN BURNETT: I thought it was a good line for the tape.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: NPR’s John Burnett.

JOHN BURNETT: And I didn’t realize that it was so offensive to atheists. And I learned that in spades after this story came out. They spammed me for weeks with e-mail, saying, we’re outraged. So now I know.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And did you sort of see their point?

JOHN BURNETT: I do see their point. I literally hadn’t thought about it before. And, frankly, I will think twice about using the phrase again.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What’s an atheist to do? American Atheist President Ellen Johnson, says they have to organize.

ELLEN JOHNSON: Until the atheists start voting their atheism and be identified as a voting block in America, the politicians aren’t going to listen to us. We’re not going to have any influence in the public schools. We’re not going to have any influence in the media or anywhere else.

If things can be demeaning to atheists, if they can organize and vote in blocs, and all of this to opposition to religion, how different are they from religion? Not very. There are two arguments against atheism as religion position that might be worth taking into account. First, atheism is not an organized institution with a guide to personal behavior. In this it is more useful to look at it in opposition to monotheism or religiosity. Second, by blithely reducing religion to not much more than a tupperware party with the occasional crusade, we need to deal with the fact that now almost everything can be a religion. Why should we then even bother pointing out its religious aspects when we don’t do it for the Women’s institute?

The first argument is only valid in so far as we think of atheism as an independent position. However, atheism is strongly associated with scientific rationalism and secular humanism, which provide the religious part of its ideology (institutionalization, rituals and holy texts). That’s where we find liturgies and rituals (many overlapping with religious ones). Citizenship classes are a great example of a religious-like indoctrination and there are many rituals that many people perform to signify their ‘devotion’. They are mostly enacted through popular culture (any TV series - which is why the claims of a liberal bias in media are not so far-fetched although looking in the wrong place) and modern story-telling is full of them. There are even pilgrimages (eco-tourism), holy places (museum of natural history) and clergy (Richard Dawkins, TV personalities) of secular humanism and rational scientism. Art, universities and scholarship that once used to support religion (let’s not forget that origin of mathematics both in Greece and India were in service of religion) now fully support rational scientism and humanism. There are no places that are full equivalents of cathedrals but there are certainly many monuments build to science (Millenium dome in London). In short, an scientific atheist can lead as fully a devotional life as a religious person, in which no aspects of the religious experience are missing, although they are not concentrated in one place. Anti-religionists, or those who only go to church infrequently, often forget that the ‘religious’ - i.e. connected - life is and always has been much more varied and less monolithic than is often portrayed. And neither do they realize the varied and often surprising role science plays in social and devotional life of atheists (as well as religious people). A long time ago, I noted this short passage from Agatha Christi which I think described the state of modern rational scientism very accurately over half a century ago:

Agatha Christie, A Pocket Full of Rye, 1953 p. 102: Describing the room of a young servant girl: “There were cuttings about flying sauycers about secret weapons, about truth drugs used by Russians, and claims for fantastic drugs discovered by American doctors. All the witchcraft, so Neele thought, of our twentieth century.� p. 221: Miss Marple: “It’s interesting, you know, and very instructive–the things these girls cut out of papers and keep. It’s always been the same, you know, all through the ages. Recipes for beauty, for attracting the man you love. And witchcraft and charms and marvelous happenings. Nowadays, they’re mostly lumped under the heading of Science. Nobody believes in magicians anymore, nobody believes that anyone can come along and wave a wand and turn you into a frog. But if you read in a paper that by injecting certain glands, scientists can alter your vital tissues and you’ll develop frog-like characteristics, well, everybody would believe that.�

The second argument (i.e. one why not call a kitting club a religion) is fair in so far as we could associate other social group with religious-like nature on their surface. What sets atheism apart, however, is the fact that it deals with the very ‘foundational’ issues of human existence that religion has heretofore dealt with and it does so in explicit opposition to religion. So it not only invites a comparison with what it attacks, its attempts to supplant it and its proselytizing aspects only make it more similar to religion. If it is true, then, that religion is an inevitable condition of human existence (both personally and socially) atheism, if it wishes to do away with it, must become more like. Rather like the cult of the Virgin Mary and Catholic Saints was introduced to provide an equivalent to pagan spirit and the Goddess. (Islam, being distributed by sword rather than political alliance, was a little more fortunate and remained less influenced in its doctrine, although Sharia law is an example of its blending with local cultural patterns.)

No religion and an end to war: how thinkers see the future | Science | Guardian Unlimited People’s fascination for religion and superstition will disappear within a few decades as television and the internet make it easier to get information, and scientists get closer to discovering a final theory of everything, leading thinkers argue today.

This is a good example of religious zeal in the atheist community, although, not necessarily completely incorrect. There is apparently only one good faith and that faith will be revealed to the world and the true and righteous will know it and only the low and wicked will turn away from it. (Presumably they will then be saved by science when the big disaster strikes and taken to new science-built colonies on the moon in a rapture like event.)

Wired 14.11: The Church of the Non-Believers
The New Atheists will not let us off the hook simply because we are not doctrinaire believers. They condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is not only wrong; it’s evil. Now that the battle has been joined, there’s no excuse for shirking.

…Bad ideas foisted on children are moral wrongs. We should think harder about how to stop them…Dawkins: “the big war is not between evolution and creationism, but between naturalism and supernaturalism.” … Harris argues that, unless we renounce faith, religious violence will soon bring civilization to an end. Between 2004 and 2006, his book sold more than a quarter million copies.

…We discuss what it might look like, this world without God. “There would be a religion of reason,” Harris says. “We would have realized the rational means to maximize human happiness. We may all agree that we want to have a Sabbath that we take really seriously – a lot more seriously than most religious people take it. But it would be a rational decision, and it would not be just because it’s in the Bible. We would be able to invoke the power of poetry and ritual and silent contemplation and all the variables of happiness so that we could exploit them. Call it prayer, but we would have prayer without bullshit.”

What better way to conclude than with a quotation that proves the point. It seems almost too easy. And the author of the Wired article takes the bait (his bias evident from the title):

…People see a contradiction in its tone of certainty. Contemptuous of the faith of others, its proponents never doubt their own belief. They are fundamentalists….The New Atheists care mainly about correct belief. This makes them hopeless, politically.

He is certainly right about the fundamentalism of certain atheists but political hopelessness is much more open to question. In many ways, the new religion of secular humanism and rationalistic scientism (with its dogmas of individuality, democratism, rationalism, scientism and Kantian ethics) has already supplanted the old in many areas (education, mainstream culture, historiography) and it may not be too long before it prevails completely. We can then expect it to develop some features of major religions such as organized ritual that are still partially missing.

To summarize: All arguments for the existence of God are idiotic but most arguments against the existence of God are not much better. The only worthwhile attitude towards the idea of God is indifference. However, given that religion (or something like it) governs all aspects of our life - personal and social (we need those bindings), it is difficult to reject it as something from all daily life. In other words, while God or Science are irrelevant, many of the rituals associated with our belief in them are structurally essential to our life and we would ignore them at our peril. Those are worth subscribing to or fighting against, and, in fact, we have no choice but to engage with them in one way or another if we want to remain recognizably human.