Carlos' essay is worth reading, as always, and his point goes on to something different than what I'd like to say here. For one thing, although not explicit, I'd like us to keep in mind the renewed demand to make English the "official language" of the US (and Sprite can be the official drink). I'd like to riff onto another tune here from the idea that confronting linguistic obstacles in one's experience builds intellectual habits that facilitate mastery of both one's native language and other languages. Can't we say that experience with broader cultural, linguistic, and social obstacles can point a person in a number of directions (greater engagement and facility or disengagement)? And that nurturing the engagement aspect is a good thing?There is a phenomenon wherein minorities (linguistic, ethnic, cultural, or otherwise) find it useful or necessary to prove themselves by exemplifying a hyper-correct mastery of the dominant language or culture. We see this, for instance, in the virtuosic use of language by such “minority” authors as Nabokov and the Malaysian-Chinese Li Yongping 李永平 (who take pride in their mastery of English and Chinese, respectively, which far exceeds that of most “native” speakers of the languages).
Part of this is clearly cultural—the need overcome prejudicial assumptions by demonstrating that you are not only as good as, but even more orthodox than the putative hegemonic norm. There is, however, empirical evidence indicating that, in certain circumstances, these sorts of marginal figures actually have an advantage in mastering a dominant language. For instance, a few years ago Nonie Lesaux published an interesting study demonstrating that, under appropriate pedagogical conditions, young children who are not native speakers of English can actually learn to read faster and better than their native-speaking counterparts. As Lesaux explains, these ESL students are
much more tuned into language than the other kids. In many ways, they were doing a lot more work around language than the monolinguals, for whom language is much more unconscious.
At least a little disruption of one's unconscious habits and norms, and probably great disruptions, are important for developing good intellectual habits at all. "Good" here means simply a facility with interpreting and understanding novel ideas, problems, and other situations. One understands the rules of engagement, but one also comes to understand where the limits of those rules and norms lie, and where they're often in need of reconstruction or creation. This understanding is never perfect, but when a person has such habits he/she is better able to engage richer forms of experience, and to take on experience as both one's own and another's, to paraphrase Ricoeur.
Disruption is disorienting. Human experience is fraught with tensions between predictable and readily explanable rules and norms of behavior that give comfort and stability to life, and those moments of disruption that often yield new configurations or the demand to rebuild and recreate newer habits that hang together better with lived experience. Emerson thought that "the one thing we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory and to do something new without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle." (Circles, 1841). Emerson is suggesting that the disruption is, in fact, a human good.
Immigration, travel, and other forms of mobility often force the drawing of new "circles," while disrupting others. We need to be cautious about extoling the merits of disruption for disruption's sake. Mass deportations of kulaks or of the poor in Colombia or political exile or the disorienting forced mobility required in order to fit into capitalist economies (sometimes called, disingenuously, "creative destruction") are all human tragedies precisely because they are forced. Fear-mongering is similar - a disruption of stability and concrete understandings in the name of unseen forces conspiring against us, all in the name of requiring a state or father figure to save us from these evil mysterious ("inscrutable"?) forces. Stability or "home" is as important as disorientation or disruption.
There is, however, pretty good evidence to suggest that intelligence is not simply locked into pre-given rules or habits of thought or "rationality," although this is obviously not to exclude them, but is rather both a product of evolution and an evolving function itself. If intelligence is evolutionary, this means that it is adaptive, creative, and critical. It means that quantified measurements of intelligence are a kind of snapshot in time at best. And it means that attempts to institutionalize disengagement or rules that have no correlation with the human capacity to adapt and critique elements of experience may simply run counter to the growth of an intelligent society.
6 comments:
I find it natural to think that intelligence evolves when I think of intelligence, as I naturally do, as a mixture of interacting cognitive capacities. But I also believe in critical periods. Language learning, including learning to discriminate the elemental sounds of a language, has a critical period. Many aspects of personality also seem to have critical periods. Meanwhile I also believe that specific mental capacities atrophy. People do great math and great physics when they are young, the common wisdom says, and I think that reflects biology in large part. I expect there are brute force, sheer endurance "events" of the intellect in which all the records forever will be held by young people, just as in the Olympics. But I expect there are also complicated events in which different mental capacities collaborate in a way that typically isn't learned until you are older. It may be that with age our minds also become expert in an increasing number of events as well. The mind is versatile, but the time and effort to overcome a critical period is going to be socioeconomically impractical to an overwhelming majority of the population, at least unless we enter a much more prosperous and socially supportive era than any until now (possibly excepting Sweden, which I imagine soon will be sinking into the sea to join Atlantis or else become ever more like the States).
The same phenomenon can be seen in religious conversion. Converts are seen as more orthodox than those born into the church, likely because of the greater engagement required of the convert. It applies to attitudes as well as skills, in other words.
A construction I find intriguing in Estonian is "sadama vihma (lund)." It means "it is raining (snowing), but sadama is the verb, and vihma and lund are nouns (in the partitive case, which is a whole nother intriguing part of Estonian, but I won't go into that).
So we have a verb that means "whatever snow and rain do" that takes "snow" and "rain" as its object. Something like "It precipitates rain."
It's kind of neat to have a verb that applies to things falling from the sky. Would you say "sajab kivi" to describe a meteorite? I'll have to ask my Estonian friends.
Sajab vihma. That's what it's doing now. I've had sun most of this trip, but the rain that Estonia needs is coming now. (And sajama doesn't mean "come." That's tulema. Sajab tuleb.)
Neat to think about why language would develop this construction, or, alternatively, why English has made those nouns into verbs.
BTW, Hungarian is structurally extremely similar to Estonian. Hope this helps.
CKR
Ick - that "Sajab tuleb" should be "Vihma tuleb." At least I got the word order right.
CKR
I suppose there's a fine line between being able to derive value from "disruption" and being simply lost, and I would imagine a child who is expected to adapt and readapt constantly to new cultures and languages can end up overwhelmed and unable to discern basic things like the fundamentals of language, basic notions of good and bad behavior, and so on. Maybe what I'm saying applies to adults. But then this creates the further tension that, since adults are more fixed in their habits, they're also less likely to engage in adap[tation, readaptation, criticism, etc. So, It seems like I'm simply calling for people to be philosophers or something like that.
But, on the other hand, I think of this in terms of the actual contours of globalization too. In one way, globalization disrupts community and so on to the detriment of people who prefer that community (but what else would they prefer if they're embedded in the community?). In another sense, however, don't we have to engage at a fairly daily level with rather foreign ideas, languages, cultures, etc? That's what I suppose I'm curious about. Is there a sense in which we're empirically challenged by this very thing to which Emerson ascribes value? Is there a sense in which we're becoming de facto cosmopolitans (of course, in spite of the salience of various fundamentalisms - the opposite of my point)?
Cheryl - although the Eskimo words-for -snow story is apparenbtly apocryphal, there do exist various words in Japanese for rain. Words that express things like "rain while the sun is shining," "rain in the trees," etc. English has a very instrumentalist notion of rain. Rain causes wetness. Wetness is bad when you're going to work or want to play - you ruin your clothes or you have to stay inside and do something else rather than tennis. Rain is usually good if you're a farmer. But the English language doesn't express the same curiosity about rain as Japanese does. It would take a curiosity about the intrinsic properties of rain or nature more generally - a kind of aesthetic curiosity - to have a word that expresses rain falling through sunshine.
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