Hermeneutic Heretic

When Languages Die: Science and Sentiment :
In his book When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge K. David Harrison illustrates the individual face of language loss, as well as its global scale. He shows that the disappearance of a language is a loss not only for the community of speakers itself but also for our common human knowledge of mathematics, biology, philosophy etc… (from OUPblog)

This extinction of languages, and the knowledge therein, has no parallel in human history. K. David Harrison’s book is the first to focus on the essential question, what is lost when a language dies? What forms of knowledge are embedded in a language’s structure and vocabulary? And how harmful is it to humanity that such knowledge is lost forever? (from Amazon description)

There is an interesting evolutionary scenario often proposed by linguists studying the decline of languages. Language preserves cultural knowledge, it is kind of like a cultural DNA. And just like with our crop species we need to preserve as much diversity as possible and should therefore try to keep smaller languages from disappearing. And similar arguments are posed by proponents of multiculturalism. We need as many perspectives of the world as possible to help us survive. And, frequently, the metaphor holds up. Jarred Diamond makes a very convincing case in ‘Collapse’ for the diversity of perspective as being vital to the survival of social groups under changing environmental (and other conditions). A local categorization can easily be used to uncover something about the flora and fauna. However, a disappearing tense system (while a tragic loss for linguists) or a morphological complexity is unlikely to make much of a difference (no matter what Whorf’s misinterpreters try to claim).

And there is an even deeper paradox hidden in this claim. One part of a ny language is a system of prejudice and discrimination. Should we try to preserve that as well. How about the disappearance of ‘diachronic dialects’? Should we try to preserve the teenage language of the 1980s? Or should we try to preserve the old language of racism and sexism that has been slowly transforming into a new language of racism and sexism more palatable to current mores? Is keeping Huckleberry Finn in the libraries enough? Should we try to support enclaves of racist and homophobic speech? This becomes even more invidious when applied to culture? Should we keep some cultures that subjugate women and practice female genital mutilation just on the off chance that their practices might come in handy one day when the climate changes and we need a new social order?

The problem is that this mourning of the death of languages (and as a linguist I say keep as many as possible) is based on an imperialistically romantic notion of the noble savage and finding “beauty” and “wonderment” in forgotten places. But from a purely investigative perspective there’s no huge need for that. Here’s an idea for a project: “English as an exotic language and Anglos as an exotic peoples” - somebody get on with it.

Hitchens vs Hitchens | the Daily Mail
If we are weak and poor, we can all summon up self-interested decency, behaving in a kind way, in public, towards those from whom we hope for decency in return.

But as soon as we have the power to do evil, we generally do. What is to stop us, unobserved, doing and planning acts of selfish unkindness against others, as so many of us do – for example – in office politics?

What is to stop us, in the privacy of the home, taking advantage of the goodness of others more generous than ourselves? Who will ever know?

Who would have thunk it that the person to get closest to this whole New Atheism would be the right-winger Peter Hitchens of all people, writing in the Hitler-supporting Daily Mail of all rags. He skirts the issue of ‘Atheism is just another kind of faith’ rather artfully, perhaps thanks to the privileged access he has to the other Hitchens’ background, but he gets it right about the constant debate what is a greater source of ‘evil’ faith in God or no God. (It, of course, is ‘faith’ in general. It is rather hard to commit evil without faith in one absolute or another, the occasional psychopath notwithstanding. One of the more deadly absolutes seems to be the faith in the sanctity of human life, probably because of the definitional indeterminacy of both ‘human’ and ‘life’ (and ’sanctity’ too when it comes to it).

But P. Hitchens even hints at the much more interesting source of faith and religious action, viz social cohesion (more but not that much more than peer pressure). All religion has a social dimension, and, as Milgram has shown so incisively (also see Bauman on the holocaust), it is with reference to social authority that unpleasant acts find their most inventive representations.

Not to be too nice about Hitchens, he does resort to the annoying kind of middle-class agnosticism that declares uncertainty about the less palatable sections of the scripture while spouting the sickeningly sweet belief in something greater and better out there.

For all I know, Christopher is absolutely right – my prayers are pointless and a meaningless oblivion awaits. But if he is right, what a dispiriting, lowering truth it is.

This kind of polite agnosticism is no good to anyone. Personally, I am a complete atheist with respect to any possible God so far or yet to be conceived by the religious mind. There is no faith or reason involved in this, the possibility of faith in the flying spaghetti monster simply displaces the possibility of any seriously revered deity (the only good argument Dawkins and his buddies bandy about). I am, however, agnostic when it comes to science. I am pretty sure that 2+2 is indeed 4, but I wouldn’t stake anyone to the cross over saying that it is really 6. The mathematical regularities (’laws’) of the universe are too neat for my taste and I know too much about the processes of scientific discovery to sacrifice at its altar. I am even more agnostic about what I see with my own four eyes or conceive of with my brain. If somebody wants to find a circularly defined God(dess) in this space of doubt, be my guest.

And finally, my world coming slowly to the upside up state I prefer it in, Hithens cannot help but descend into the nasty Daily Mailism that makes me instinctively recoil from the gentle elderly couples I see sharing pages of this rag on trains hurtling through this sceptered countryside.

They [inner city thugs, termed practical atheists] would never behave like that, surrounded as they are by the invisible web of ten centuries of Christian law and morality, which still protects the nicer parts of our country.But it is the application of what they preach, the worship of self and power.

Faith and belief can be and often are restraints on this arrogance of power. They offer the possibility of justice where human society fails to provide it – as it almost always does fail.

It is almost as if he hadn’t read himself. Faith is no good as a restraint of action (didn’t he say the same thing only a few paragraphs before). With respect to evil, the only safe inner conviction I know of is utter moral relativism. Proper moral relativists have no time for evil on a grand scale because they are too busy working out all the variables of difference. It is when they glimpse shimmering fata morganas of certainty that the world is in real danger. (As to the interesting small evil of petty self-interest, moral relativists are probably no better than anyone).

What he speaks of nicer parts of this country he is referring to the savagery of conformity that places everyone in their place (foreigners with tans preferably on the outside of it) defined by the social propaganda of fiction found in Wodehouse, Dad’s Army and other faded reminders of post-Edwardian aesthetic.

If you do not worship God, you end up worshipping power, whether it is Kim Jong Il, Leon Trotsky or the military might of George W. Bush. In which case, God help you.

This ‘faith-vacuum’ cliché is a fitting conclusion to this journey of near self-discovery Hitchens undertakes.  It is not, on its own, an uninteresting hypothesis. Is there something in the human make up that requires certain mental, bodily and social configurations typically described as faith? If so, what do they look like, what is there purpose and are some faiths better than others in fulfilling that purpose? But even if we postulate some sort of ‘faith universal’, it is still not a good argument for the existence of God. It is merely an instance of Voltairian hypocrisy: “I don’t need to believe in God but I like it that my servants do lest they steal from me.” A world built on this premise may lend itself better to idyllic depiction but seems of no deeper virtue than the “pre-medieval savagery” dispensed in the “harsher parts of our great cities” by the “strong, violent people” whose darker complexion and difference is so instinctively afeared by many of Hitchens’ readers (if not by himself).

The problem, to repeat myself, is the reliance on virtue, goodness, and life as transcendent absolutes (of God or upbringing) rather than a considered choice. It may not result in much real-world difference and possibly in no difference at all but I would prefer that those who matter make a conscious decision to consider others less human as a matter of practical expedience rather than spend time justifying that denying someone’s humanity (in the sense of equal rights to those one expects of herself; in the same sense that armies justify killing) as part of an absolute truth. If for no other reasons than that the parameters of expedience are more easily changed than faiths on which individuals and nations have staked their sense of self-worth.

From the Wikipedia entry: Accepted is a 2006 comedy motion picture about a group of high school seniors who, after being rejected from all colleges to which they had applied, create their own college.
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At one point Bartleby [the main character] wants to end the charade before it begins, but is overcome with pity after realizing that everyone in the college is in the exact same position he is in having been rejected from every other college. Thus begins the first year of classes, founded on the revolutionary notion of students choosing what they want to learn and teaching the very same courses.
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Bartleby successfully argues his way to a one-year temporary accreditation. The students return to the new college and begin a full year of ad-hoc classes and partying.

It is amazing to see so many “progressive” educational ideas in what is a fairly plodding genre film. I say plodding because the educational theorizing is carried on the back of a fairly formulaic narrative framework of teenage comedy (with not much of the inventiveness of American Pie). That is not to say that it is not an enjoyable film - it’s 36% rating on RottenTomatoes probably underating it - IMDB is much closer with 6.2. What makes it particularly interesting is this strange blend of Dewey and Montessori applied to higher education. The idea of students learning what they want when they are ready for it being straight out of Montessori (which, of course, is never applied beyond primary school). The school as a laboratory preparing students for real life by engaging with practice would be Dewey. (Rousseau would probably find justification for some of its cooky ideas in Emile in it, too.)

Where it is educationally fairly radical is the point where students truly choose classes they want: doing nothing, mixing drinks, staring at girls, but also doing art. This is where many reform projects typically fall apart when taken mainstream. Students are encouraged to choose but only certain choices are accepted which takes away the motivating element of freedom. But the reform usually relies just on such motivation to work and without it, fails. In other words, if we give students a choice, we must be prepared to live with the choice they make (I have made this mistake many times in adult education). Where the film is inaccurate is the assumption that all of these free motivating choices (which it makes its best not to judge) also result in happy liberal middle-class learning (also the main characters are reliable middleclass, and their approach to their charges is in part missionary). This relies on a typical enlightenment idea of ennobling knowledge. Here the film is prohibited by the narrative structure to discuss the idea of undesirable (in that they are unexpected) consequences of the free choice offered to students.

It would be interesting, but beyond my commitment to this topic at the moment, to investigate how the images (frames) activated by this narrative are integrated by its audience.

ANTI- Album - Orphans
What’s Orphans? I don’t know. Orphans is a dead end kid driving a coffin with big tires across the Ohio River wearing welding goggles and a wife beater with a lit firecracker in his ear.

Just like true mythopoeic narrative is returning to its roots through TV series after a brief intermezzo of the novel. Poetry is coming home to song through popular music - Eminem, The Dressden Dolls, Randy Newman. Standing head and shoulders above these is Tom Waits. But there’s more. I’ve been thinking for several years now, inspired by Michael Hoey, about oeuvres as units. And listening to the extremely powerful Road to Peace available for free to download through Pitchforkmedia, eMusic or Anti.com, I was reminded how powerful an oeuvre can be as cohesive and conceptual interpretative framework. This song is a simple retelling of newspaper stories from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with concluding commentary - almost like a New York Times op-ed piece mixed with Sting’s Russian’s Lover Their Children Too - but it gains its power from two very simple devices. 1. Breaking of the rhyme structure on the resolution of each verse. 2. The refusal to offer any linguistic/surface level tropes. While the former is nothing new in Tom Waits, the latter is very surprising. With every line I expect to hear a psychedelic Waitsian image (such as the one above), really hoping for one to distract from the concrete images presented in the song. The constantly breaking expectation of style and structure (poetic frame) is a common poetic and general narrative device (and also commonly used to bolster an argument through tropic resonance where other evidence is missing - see Team America). But in this song, it is intensified because we have a textual space of Tom Waits’ song activated when listening to him. The reaction might be less acute for somebody who has never heard another song by Tom Waits. I suspect that the other devices would still be sufficient to convey the effect (particularly given that the absence of tropes breaks the general expectation of any poetic unit). It would be interesting to study this with some control groups but my guess is that some effect could be discerned.

YouTube - Team America Finale Speech

PhatGun (3 months ago) HAHAHAHAHHAHAHA SO TRUE!!!
Tomster22 (19 hours ago) Neo-Cons = Dicks, Peacenicks = Pussies, Islamo-Fascists = Assholes
AerisRocks (2 months ago) lol! Thats a great metaphor they used…assholes want us to shit on everything and dicks fuck assholes lmfao, great scene.

This post has been brewing in me ever since I first saw Team America when it came out in 2004. Thanks to you, tube, it is now ready to be poured into the pint glass of this blog. Every time I see the final speech, I find it extremely funny but even the very first time I realized that it is a perfect showcase for the power of conceptual blending in larger narratives. Here’s the YouTube clip followed by transcript:

We’re reckless arrogant stupid dicks. And the Film Actors Guild are pussies. And Kim Jong Il is an asshole. Pussies don’t like dicks because pussies get fucked by dicks, but dicks also fuck assholes. Assholes who just wanna shit on everything. Pussies may think that they can deal with assholes their way, but the only thing that can fuck an asshole is a dick, with some balls. The problem with dicks is that sometimes they fuck too much, or fuck when it isn’t appropriate, and it takes a pussy to show ‘em that. But sometimes pussies get so full of shit that they become assholes themselves. Because pussies are only an inch and a half away from assholes. I don’t know much in this crazy crazy world. But I do know that if you don’t let us fuck this asshole, we’re gonna have our dicks and our pussies all covered in shit. http://www.teamamerica.craptv.com/

This is an amazing progression of imagery: from purely idiomatic/’metaphorical’/schematic to visual/’literal’/rich image imagery. While all the time aware of its metaphorical nature the aptness of the metaphor is buttressed by the anatomical accuracy of the rich image. Some time ago, I actually searched for more reactions to this speech online and the results confirmed that audiences integrated this “construction” in a variety of ways consistent with its complex conceptual structure. The complexity, however, also predictably, led to partial integration explicitly (and it would interesting to ask to what extent there was a subconscious full integration). Personally, to engage in a bit of 19th century introspective psychology, I can wallow in rich integrated constructions (I’m vaguely referring to construction grammar here) for hours and hours replaying them in my head - kind of like the Necker cube mentioned in my previous blog posts - viewing all its possible permutations that can never be in my consciousness all at once. And that gives me an immense satisfaction - similar to playing Tetris for a long time and then closing your eyes. It also reminds of when I was in primary school and my friends and I would go see a movie which we would then replay scenes from on our way home. I believe that some of the comments on Your Tube (and the very existence of YouTube, really) suggest that my introspection reflects a more common trait of human cognition and narrative.
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Revenge of the Nerds (1984)
They’ve been laughed at, picked on and put down. But now it’s time for the odd to get even!

I decided it’s time to start keeping track of my frequent encounters with popular culture - in other words, I’m adding a new category: Reviews. I’m going to try to reflect briefly on films and books I read, as they come my way (or as I’m reminded of them). Although, I’m calling the category reviews, they will mostly be brief reflections from the point of view of my interests rather than summaries of content - we have IMDB, Amazon and Wikipedia for that.

And what better way to start this enterprise than with a look at Revenge of the Nerds.

There are two things that this film brought up for me (as many others do, as well). First, it is interesting to observe the intersection (blending) of several genres. Bildungs roman, freedom narrative, teenage comedy, cult classic. Looking at this from the perspective the conceptual blending theory would be beneficial for both fields. The question that blending allows us to ask is to what extent are the different genre spaces integrated and are there any obstacles to this integration. This film (BTW: more cult than good) treads a not very fine line between a freedom narrative and lewd farce but seems to borrow elements from both genres to further the other. For instance, nerds are portrayed as the oppressed pseudo-minority but at the same time their oppression is defined as sexual deprivation.

Which leads me to my second point. Something I’ve been noticing a lot lately (I even wrote a short article in Czech on this topic) is the extent to which many scenarios that seemed commonplace only twenty years ago would be considered completely unacceptable today. The film contains two scenes - one where the ‘nerds’ install hidden cameras in the girls’ dorms and the other where one pretends to be someone else to have sex with a woman. (A similar film in this respect is Porky’s). Both of these things might be considered borderline rape, yet they are included as part of the positive characterization of characters in question. This is just another reminder that if we look closely at the behavior of any “oppressed” group, we will find another group that is being trod on in the name of liberation of the first group (strangely enough it reminds me of a BBC Radio 4 reading from a memoir of a female judge during the Iranian revolution).