Are you and I predisposed to think the way we do because of the language we speak, or are we so disposed because our brains dictate how we think? It’s not an easy question to answer, but its answer might reveal something about our political and ethical perspectives. Yes, answering the question also means addressing whether or not we are the products of Nature or Nurture. Is it cart before horse or horse before cart?
Horse and Cart
Does your thinking depend on your language? That’s not an easy question to answer. When I read Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher, * I was convinced he was onto something. But now I’m not so sure that language is primary and brain is secondary. And the reason for my doubt lies in the nature of constructed languages, that is, in languages formed through conscious efforts of an individual or group and not through an organic growth of a culture. I’ll get to that later. My doubts about the veracity of Deutscher’s premise arose in St. Lucia, where I heard locals speak Creole to one another and English (mostly) or French (a little) to tourists as well as to one another without exhibiting from my perspective thinking that varied from my own on the way the world works and on the way people interact.
Why should any of us be concerned about the relationship between language and thought? Well, for starters, there’s that censorship thing. And the brainwashing stuff: You know it in the 1984 form “think this way and no other way” (Orwell’s Newspeak). There are negative ramifications for variance from the societal norm. Don’t counter the politically correct crowd lest they ostracize you. So, we now have a growing list of banned words and phrases, a list that can get people fired simply because those who hear what they don’t want to hear choose to be offended and to make much of their fragility. (Ah! Where are the realities of war, famine, and natural disaster when you need them for perspective? Which offends more, a pronoun or a bullet? Who in a foxhole or trench worries more about pronouns than about bullets and bombs?)
Consider that controlling language entails controlling behavior. And controlling language includes the entire context of an organization, such as the military, where DEI has become a driver of advancement, stagnation, and demotion. When an organization includes positions for overseeing compliance to acceptable terms and phrases, it loses its perspective on its primary function. The military’s chief purpose is to break things and kill people with malicious intentions and behaviors, not coddle the fragile minds in its ranks. (That sounds like something Patton would say, but consider that assigning one soldier of a unit to language propriety means having one less soldier focused on thwarting an actual enemy intent on doing harm)
Language and Thought Control
Speaking of the military, I should note that the current Pentagon appears to be committed to constructing social language as much as it has long been committed to constructing military language (which is replete with acronyms like AWACS, AAFS, and DAWIA—don’t ask, the list seems interminable). Thus, the military has a CDIO, that is, a Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer, a DET, Defense Equity Team, and LGBTQIA+, which it officially defines as “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, and all of the other gender identities and sexual orientations that are not specifically covered by the other seven identities [?] and orientations.” Yep, that the US military personnel have to keep all that in mind probably makes its enemies shake in their boots. “Look, Yakov, they have more acronyms than we have; they have political correctness, too. We’re doomed. Run away! Run away!”
How organic is language? How contrived?
We know, with regard to the second question, that people in charge of political movements coin words and phrases, such as “MAGA,” “opportunity economy,” and various catchphrases designed to win votes. In contrast some words, phrases, and sentences, in regard to the first question, are organic, such as "Let’s go Brandon," which developed from a reporter’s misunderstanding what a crowd was saying in unison.” One can never predict what organic words or phrases will affix to common speak, nor can one predict the durability of such linguistic units.
Every generation of teenagers adopts a set of organically evolved terms. And nowadays, with the proliferation of social media, new terms arise yearly, if not monthly or even daily. It’s hard to keep up LOL. Clickbait. But we also recognize that the core of every language can persist for centuries. Twenty-first-century students, given a level of maturation that frees their minds, can still read and understand Shakespeare, Milton, and other writers now long dead. Even Chaucer is not beyond the reach of the modern mind when one overcomes his spelling.
“Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
When April with its sweet-smelling showers
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
Has pierced the drought of March to the root,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
And bathed every vein (of the plants) in such liquid
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
By which power the flower is created…
But with regard to language cores, we are in the midst of a conscious, or contrived, alteration of pronouns with the accompanying grammatical number disagreement (John—they). In our Orwellian times, there are language fascists who insist on restructuring language to meet their personal feelings while disdaining centuries of organically formed English. Fascists? Consider that though Canada did not enact a law against using “faulty” pronouns, some Canadian legislators did consider writing it into their legislation. In a compromise, the legislators said that the misuse of pronouns “borders” on hate speech, but does not in itself rise to ethnic, religious, or race hate.
That movement in Canada, mirroring the movement in the US, begs a question I asked above: Are we predisposed to think the way we do because of the language we speak, or are we so disposed because our brains dictate how we think and use the most familiar language? Will politically correct language reshape our thinking, our perspective, our very understanding of the world? Changing how we think is the goal of language fascists.
Lessons from That Little Island
Located among the Lesser Antilles, St. Lucia is a small high island, a dormant volcanic tropical island with a rainforest interrupted by banana plantations, some towns, and resorts. The volcanoes are currently only temporarily asleep if the 1995 eruption of nearby Montserrat’s Soufrière Hills is an indicator of potential awakening. In the 17th century, the French and English laid claim, exchanging control more than a dozen times in back-and-forth conquests to the detriment of Arawaks and Caribs, the precolonial inhabitants. To this mix of Native Americans, the Europeans added African slaves, resulting in the mix of English and French in the islanders’ own form of Creole, called Kwéyòl [kwejɔl]). The organic rise of Kwéyòl derived from cultural necessity, a language that separated slaves from owners, allowing the former to communicate in secrecy. Although I can only conjecture, that language probably had no one specific linguist artificially designing its words and syntax. Derived from many French words (Latin origin) but now including English derivatives, Kwéyòl has evolved under the dominance of schools in which English was the language of Educators. It’s Greek to me and maybe to you unless you know, for example, that “Lapli ka tonbé an chay an livènaj “ means “It rains a lot during the rainy season” and that “Sé timanmay-la ka jwé an savann-an” means “The children are playing in the field.”
I can imagine the early days of European colonization and its occupation by the French pirate François le Clerc (known as Jambe de Bois). That would have been the earliest start to the French influence on the development of Kwéyòl because French words dominate. After the incursion by the English and the rise of the slave trade, the transported Africans on St. Lucia and other islands in the Antilles developed their “secret” language. And just as Swedish and Danish derived from a similar root under the Vikings and in relatively close proximity, so the islanders carried their forms of Creole throughout the Antilles (both Lesser and Greater) over several centuries. Islanders in the Antilles can understand the various forms of Creole even when they do not speak another island’s Creole—much like a Swede and Dane understanding each other’s language while speaking their native Swedish and Danish.
Is Deutscher correct? Same language, same kind of thinking, same view of the world?
AARGH, ’Tis them Cuss Words That Unite Us: Universal “Effing”
Pirates like Jambe de Bois, AKA Peg Leg, probably had their slang and colloquialisms, and no doubt had as a matter of proving their manhood a language peppered with epithets, possibly one of them a predecessor to today’s seemingly universal “eff-word,” “universal” because it seems to be popping up in podcasts, movies, TV series, and videos made round the world. So, yes, “cuss words” are persistent hangers-on from century to century, with the mass of the language undergoing changes while the cuss words stay relatively the same. But does cuss word durability arise because cuss words embody basic human emotions? Do cuss words arise from the structure of the brain, neurotransmitters, and hormones? Do they embody simple, pared down emotions that are part of the human psyche regardless of culture?
Is it the emotion that produces perspective that comes out in language? Or, rather, the language that controls how emotions are expressed? Is this just another version of which comes first, chicken or egg?
What I noticed in a couple of stays on the island is that much of how I viewed the world was reflected in the St. Lucians’ view—and vise versa. How did that occur? How did the people of St. Lucia and I become so intertwined in our perspectives?
Yes, we have a common language in English, but I speak no Creole, the vernacular on the island.
And there are other differences between me and a St. Lucian that might influence how I think as well as how I express my thoughts.
.
I was reared in an affluent country on a massive continent and have lived about 300 miles from the ocean. I’m used to a seemingly endless land lying in different climates, from the forested land of my home to the treeless deserts of Nevada; my brain is used to the expanse, and it knows it from car and plane trips. St. Lucians can’t drive far and everywhere they drive is tropical. Everywhere is mountainous and volcanic on St. Lucia.
The relatively less affluent people of St. Lucia, dependent upon agriculture mostly and on bananas particularly, and now on tourism, also, see the sea everywhere they look, and except for luxurious resorts, see the entropy of decay under the tropical sun and little modern revitalizing industry. In contrast, even in the Rust Belt where I live, I see renewal and signs of revitalization, and if I wish, I can drive or fly to thriving hubs of growth and newness in both frigid and subtropical climes.
What could we have in common other than our basic humanity? Those cuss words?How could we possibly see the world in relatively the same way? And how is it that we actually think similarly when the expressions of our thinking differ?
Unifiers
There are uniting forces other than our being human as you might surmise. St. Lucians are dominantly Christian, half of them Catholic. So, the 2,000-year evolution of Judeo-Christianity plays a unifying role on island as well as on the continent. Both on the continent and on the island a common ethical system prevails—even among non Christians. Mores are similar. Right that is right on St. Lucia is right that is right on the continent, and wrong that is wrong is largely identical in both locations because both have adopted English and European judicial systems, such as English common law.
I suppose I could argue that in addition to the ethical commonality, the influence of European culture in general meant that St. Lucians were destined to develop a culture not unlike the culture of an American citizen of European descent. So, there’s that underlying European influence that ties our brains and shapes our minds—that’s the “nurturing influence.” The influence of eastern African cultures, left over from the days of slave trade, is probably no more important on St. Lucia than it is in most of the United States though Kwéyòl underlies the culture. As Keith B. Richburg (2009) points out in Out Of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa, a person of African descent living in America * (and by extension, on St. Lucia) has little in common with, say, an African living in Rwanda. So, I doubt that a modern St. Lucian has much in common with slave ancestors save that Creole language—a language that developed outside Africa. But then that circles us back to the question: Does language control perspective?
Modern Media as Homogenizers
Was unification of perspective between those on islands and those on continents acquired through broadcast entertainment and modern electronic communication since early in the twentieth century? From early AM radio to movies to modern social media, we’ve all been thrown into a cultural melting pot, the various media acting as mixers, as homogenizers. Are there people on the planet who don’t know Mickey Mouse? Probably, but they have to have been isolated. I’ve seen Sky News Australia and its commentary on American politics; across the world the same political arguments prevail in English. The civilized world, with the exception of totalitarian regimes, is intertwined. But, heck, isn’t Kim Jong Un a fan of Dennis Rodman? Didn’t Rodman visit him? What perspective on the nature of the world differed between them save the politics of freedom vs. the politics of totalitarianism? That worldwide homogenization of humanity produced by entertainment and sports broadcasts has enhanced common experiences and those biological imperatives that have always united members of our species.
The world exchange of cultures, once largely driven by that age of exploration, exploitation, slave-exchange, and mass migrations has been magnified by media of various kinds. Unifying perspectives have migrated through those media. I remember being on another island, Bermuda, in the 1990s and seeing among that highly literate society a woman reading a thick novel on a bus and a teenager shouldering a boombox as he walked in Hamilton. And on the TV in Bermuda? The news emanated from a Chicago station, so Bermudans living on an island where guns were banned saw nightly reports of gun violence in a big city. Bermudans, highly formal in their daily lives of ladies in dresses and male store clerks in Bermuda shorts but wearing white shirts, ties, and sport coats were exposed to a place where formality was reserved for special occasions and circumstances and daily life was decidedly informal and often crude. Bermudan restaurant dress codes were largely ignored by American tourists in casual wear. Show informality and crudity over a period of two decades, and all Bermudans aged 20 and living on an island with pastel-colored houses with white roofs, will have been exposed to life in a crime-wracked inner city with graffiti and entropic neighborhoods.
Is Language Irrelevant Here?
What did we humans do before language?
Silly question? Maybe not, but this is more about our relationship to language than to the origins of language.
Human emotions appear to be both limited in number and universal in nature. There are angry people in every culture, for example, and anger intensity from mildly miffed to outraged spreads across the human spectrum of ages, races, and creeds. Do angry people get angry in different ways in different languages? Deutscher might argue in the affirmative.
There was a survey of drunks many years ago, one whose source I cannot remember. Seems that drunks act drunk according to culture. Do we express ourselves differently because of our language? Obviously, each language contains idiomatic expressions that defy exact translation: “About to go down,” “ballpark figure,” “cold turkey,” all express ideas that don’t have literal translations in other languages. But we can surmise that people in other cultures understand that there’s an anticipation of criminal activity or a surprise party, a financial estimate, and a cessation of an addiction that can occur abruptly. I do not expect, however, a member of an Amazonian tribe to understand “ballpark figure” without a lengthy description and an explanation of the analogy.
Did Volapük Alter Thinking?
In the second half of the nineteenth century German priest Martin Schleyer invented a language he called Volapük, a name meaning “world’s speech” he derived, according to Merriam-Webster, from vola “of the world” (genitive of vol world, modification of English world) + pük speech, modification of English speak. By 1889, at the end of its first decade, an estimated 200,000 people spoke Volapük, mostly because academicians in Germany and France pushed it through 300 societies and clubs and 24 publications. *
Think about it: Someone invented a language and within 10 years it spread through Europe and America behind advocates so enamored of it they held international conferences—at least three of them. But organizers of the third conference insisted on conducting affairs exclusively in the new language, and that insistence exposed its inherent flaws. Then it rapidly died except for those diehard academicians, whom Frederick Bodmer calls “the last refuge of lost causes” (463). In its death throes, Volapük even became the subject of lawsuits, as Schleyer defended his invention as proprietary, meaning that only he could make changes. And that just ain’t the way languages work. Necessities born of technology, current events, foreign influences, and even fashion require languages to adapt to changing times and speakers. To put one man in control defies the development of every language family, including Indo-European (454 languages), Austronesian (1,256 languages), and Sino-Tibetan (458 languages). Migrations, which take on a life of their own even if an individual causes them, have produced variations in languages and spawned new languages. The failure of Volapük led some of its one-time adherents to attempt other linguistic inventions, all such artificially constructed languages leading to the famous invention of Esperanto. But organic growth depends on continued use. That’s why there are “dead” languages.
But in all these invented languages, no new perspective on the nature of the world or the nature of humanity appears to have been born. The speakers still viewed the world as, say, you view it in your native tongue. Volapük was a mishmash of German and English imposed on a worldview already long in place.
What about Political Speak? Three Guys Make an Astounding Assertion
Although much of what those on the Right or Left say seems to point to different ways of viewing the world, all of us share a common biochemistry in brain functions. So, predispositions belonging to one group might merely be versions of a two-sided coin: Same fundamental structure (coin) with sides termed heads and tails. This is reflected in the thesis statement in Predisposition: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences by Hibbing, Smith, and Alford (2014):
The central thesis of this book is that many people have broad predispositions relevant to their behaviors and inclinations in the realm of politics. These predispositions can be measured with psychologically oriented survey items, with cognitive tests that do not rely on self-reports, with brain imaging, or with traditional physiological and endocrinological indicators. Due to perceptual, psychological, processing, and physiological differences, liberals and conservatives, for all intents and purposes, perceive and thus experience different worlds. Given this, it is not surprising to find they approach politics as though they were somewhat distinct species.***
But…BUT…BUT…
The authors go on to make this assertion:
Though traditional wisdom asserts that politics varies and human nature is universal, in truth politics is universal and human nature varies. Failing to appreciate these two points renders it impossible to grasp the true source of political conflict. Accordingly, before we present empirical evidence documenting the deep-seated psychological, cognitive, physiological, and genetic correlates of political variation, we first need to make the case that politics is universal and human nature is variable.
Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! WHAT?
If they are correct, then I am wrong. St. Lucians and I might only coincidentally see the world the same way. Far Leftists and Far Rightists might both be human, but that’s their only connection. They see the world differently regardless of language and geography. Americans speaking the same language and living on the same continent—even in the same community—might see the world differently as framed in the expression of their political views. So, a book paralleling Deutscher’s might be entitled Why the World Looks Different in Other Political Philosophies. Neighbors on the same street might have yard signs for opposing candidates.
And yet, language is still, I believe with Deutscher, at the heart of worldviews and political views. Take the issue of abortion. Many on the Left are pro-choice; many on the Right, pro-life. Their arguments depend on definitions. Is that organism in the womb a fetus, a parasite, a baby, a being different from or part of the pregnant woman, or a nonentity best described as just tissue? The language frames the view. Leftists refuse to say “baby.” Rightists freely use the term. And what of these following terms? In both groups we might see a linguistic consistency but a difference between both Leftists and Rightists.
Capital punishment
Imprisonment
Immigrant/Illegal immigrant
Terrorist/Freedom fighter
Free speech/Subversive speech
You might think of other terms that frame worldviews or that derive from perspectives. Then with each you have to ask the chicken-egg questions: Brain or language? Language or mind?
Sorry for running this so long, but in truth it still falls short of resolving my initial questions. But as I have said elsewhere in these essays, my purpose is to stimulate your own insights that in humility I acknowledge are probably greater and wiser than mine.
*August 31, 2010 by Metropolitan Books
**Frederick Bodmer. 1944. The Loom of Language: An Approach to the Mystery of Many Languages. New York. W. W. Norton and Company. Pp 460 ff.
***New York. Routledge. See also Scientific American Oct. 26, 2020.
“Conservative and Liberal Brains Might Have Some Real Differences”
Horse and Cart
Does your thinking depend on your language? That’s not an easy question to answer. When I read Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher, * I was convinced he was onto something. But now I’m not so sure that language is primary and brain is secondary. And the reason for my doubt lies in the nature of constructed languages, that is, in languages formed through conscious efforts of an individual or group and not through an organic growth of a culture. I’ll get to that later. My doubts about the veracity of Deutscher’s premise arose in St. Lucia, where I heard locals speak Creole to one another and English (mostly) or French (a little) to tourists as well as to one another without exhibiting from my perspective thinking that varied from my own on the way the world works and on the way people interact.
Why should any of us be concerned about the relationship between language and thought? Well, for starters, there’s that censorship thing. And the brainwashing stuff: You know it in the 1984 form “think this way and no other way” (Orwell’s Newspeak). There are negative ramifications for variance from the societal norm. Don’t counter the politically correct crowd lest they ostracize you. So, we now have a growing list of banned words and phrases, a list that can get people fired simply because those who hear what they don’t want to hear choose to be offended and to make much of their fragility. (Ah! Where are the realities of war, famine, and natural disaster when you need them for perspective? Which offends more, a pronoun or a bullet? Who in a foxhole or trench worries more about pronouns than about bullets and bombs?)
Consider that controlling language entails controlling behavior. And controlling language includes the entire context of an organization, such as the military, where DEI has become a driver of advancement, stagnation, and demotion. When an organization includes positions for overseeing compliance to acceptable terms and phrases, it loses its perspective on its primary function. The military’s chief purpose is to break things and kill people with malicious intentions and behaviors, not coddle the fragile minds in its ranks. (That sounds like something Patton would say, but consider that assigning one soldier of a unit to language propriety means having one less soldier focused on thwarting an actual enemy intent on doing harm)
Language and Thought Control
Speaking of the military, I should note that the current Pentagon appears to be committed to constructing social language as much as it has long been committed to constructing military language (which is replete with acronyms like AWACS, AAFS, and DAWIA—don’t ask, the list seems interminable). Thus, the military has a CDIO, that is, a Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer, a DET, Defense Equity Team, and LGBTQIA+, which it officially defines as “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, and all of the other gender identities and sexual orientations that are not specifically covered by the other seven identities [?] and orientations.” Yep, that the US military personnel have to keep all that in mind probably makes its enemies shake in their boots. “Look, Yakov, they have more acronyms than we have; they have political correctness, too. We’re doomed. Run away! Run away!”
How organic is language? How contrived?
We know, with regard to the second question, that people in charge of political movements coin words and phrases, such as “MAGA,” “opportunity economy,” and various catchphrases designed to win votes. In contrast some words, phrases, and sentences, in regard to the first question, are organic, such as "Let’s go Brandon," which developed from a reporter’s misunderstanding what a crowd was saying in unison.” One can never predict what organic words or phrases will affix to common speak, nor can one predict the durability of such linguistic units.
Every generation of teenagers adopts a set of organically evolved terms. And nowadays, with the proliferation of social media, new terms arise yearly, if not monthly or even daily. It’s hard to keep up LOL. Clickbait. But we also recognize that the core of every language can persist for centuries. Twenty-first-century students, given a level of maturation that frees their minds, can still read and understand Shakespeare, Milton, and other writers now long dead. Even Chaucer is not beyond the reach of the modern mind when one overcomes his spelling.
“Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
When April with its sweet-smelling showers
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
Has pierced the drought of March to the root,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
And bathed every vein (of the plants) in such liquid
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
By which power the flower is created…
But with regard to language cores, we are in the midst of a conscious, or contrived, alteration of pronouns with the accompanying grammatical number disagreement (John—they). In our Orwellian times, there are language fascists who insist on restructuring language to meet their personal feelings while disdaining centuries of organically formed English. Fascists? Consider that though Canada did not enact a law against using “faulty” pronouns, some Canadian legislators did consider writing it into their legislation. In a compromise, the legislators said that the misuse of pronouns “borders” on hate speech, but does not in itself rise to ethnic, religious, or race hate.
That movement in Canada, mirroring the movement in the US, begs a question I asked above: Are we predisposed to think the way we do because of the language we speak, or are we so disposed because our brains dictate how we think and use the most familiar language? Will politically correct language reshape our thinking, our perspective, our very understanding of the world? Changing how we think is the goal of language fascists.
Lessons from That Little Island
Located among the Lesser Antilles, St. Lucia is a small high island, a dormant volcanic tropical island with a rainforest interrupted by banana plantations, some towns, and resorts. The volcanoes are currently only temporarily asleep if the 1995 eruption of nearby Montserrat’s Soufrière Hills is an indicator of potential awakening. In the 17th century, the French and English laid claim, exchanging control more than a dozen times in back-and-forth conquests to the detriment of Arawaks and Caribs, the precolonial inhabitants. To this mix of Native Americans, the Europeans added African slaves, resulting in the mix of English and French in the islanders’ own form of Creole, called Kwéyòl [kwejɔl]). The organic rise of Kwéyòl derived from cultural necessity, a language that separated slaves from owners, allowing the former to communicate in secrecy. Although I can only conjecture, that language probably had no one specific linguist artificially designing its words and syntax. Derived from many French words (Latin origin) but now including English derivatives, Kwéyòl has evolved under the dominance of schools in which English was the language of Educators. It’s Greek to me and maybe to you unless you know, for example, that “Lapli ka tonbé an chay an livènaj “ means “It rains a lot during the rainy season” and that “Sé timanmay-la ka jwé an savann-an” means “The children are playing in the field.”
I can imagine the early days of European colonization and its occupation by the French pirate François le Clerc (known as Jambe de Bois). That would have been the earliest start to the French influence on the development of Kwéyòl because French words dominate. After the incursion by the English and the rise of the slave trade, the transported Africans on St. Lucia and other islands in the Antilles developed their “secret” language. And just as Swedish and Danish derived from a similar root under the Vikings and in relatively close proximity, so the islanders carried their forms of Creole throughout the Antilles (both Lesser and Greater) over several centuries. Islanders in the Antilles can understand the various forms of Creole even when they do not speak another island’s Creole—much like a Swede and Dane understanding each other’s language while speaking their native Swedish and Danish.
Is Deutscher correct? Same language, same kind of thinking, same view of the world?
AARGH, ’Tis them Cuss Words That Unite Us: Universal “Effing”
Pirates like Jambe de Bois, AKA Peg Leg, probably had their slang and colloquialisms, and no doubt had as a matter of proving their manhood a language peppered with epithets, possibly one of them a predecessor to today’s seemingly universal “eff-word,” “universal” because it seems to be popping up in podcasts, movies, TV series, and videos made round the world. So, yes, “cuss words” are persistent hangers-on from century to century, with the mass of the language undergoing changes while the cuss words stay relatively the same. But does cuss word durability arise because cuss words embody basic human emotions? Do cuss words arise from the structure of the brain, neurotransmitters, and hormones? Do they embody simple, pared down emotions that are part of the human psyche regardless of culture?
Is it the emotion that produces perspective that comes out in language? Or, rather, the language that controls how emotions are expressed? Is this just another version of which comes first, chicken or egg?
What I noticed in a couple of stays on the island is that much of how I viewed the world was reflected in the St. Lucians’ view—and vise versa. How did that occur? How did the people of St. Lucia and I become so intertwined in our perspectives?
Yes, we have a common language in English, but I speak no Creole, the vernacular on the island.
- Where is the bathroom? – Kote pwevit-la ya? (Coh-TAY pweh-VIT la YAH)
- Do you speak English? – Es ou ka pale Anngle? (ess OO kah pahl ohn-GLAY)
And there are other differences between me and a St. Lucian that might influence how I think as well as how I express my thoughts.
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I was reared in an affluent country on a massive continent and have lived about 300 miles from the ocean. I’m used to a seemingly endless land lying in different climates, from the forested land of my home to the treeless deserts of Nevada; my brain is used to the expanse, and it knows it from car and plane trips. St. Lucians can’t drive far and everywhere they drive is tropical. Everywhere is mountainous and volcanic on St. Lucia.
The relatively less affluent people of St. Lucia, dependent upon agriculture mostly and on bananas particularly, and now on tourism, also, see the sea everywhere they look, and except for luxurious resorts, see the entropy of decay under the tropical sun and little modern revitalizing industry. In contrast, even in the Rust Belt where I live, I see renewal and signs of revitalization, and if I wish, I can drive or fly to thriving hubs of growth and newness in both frigid and subtropical climes.
What could we have in common other than our basic humanity? Those cuss words?How could we possibly see the world in relatively the same way? And how is it that we actually think similarly when the expressions of our thinking differ?
Unifiers
There are uniting forces other than our being human as you might surmise. St. Lucians are dominantly Christian, half of them Catholic. So, the 2,000-year evolution of Judeo-Christianity plays a unifying role on island as well as on the continent. Both on the continent and on the island a common ethical system prevails—even among non Christians. Mores are similar. Right that is right on St. Lucia is right that is right on the continent, and wrong that is wrong is largely identical in both locations because both have adopted English and European judicial systems, such as English common law.
I suppose I could argue that in addition to the ethical commonality, the influence of European culture in general meant that St. Lucians were destined to develop a culture not unlike the culture of an American citizen of European descent. So, there’s that underlying European influence that ties our brains and shapes our minds—that’s the “nurturing influence.” The influence of eastern African cultures, left over from the days of slave trade, is probably no more important on St. Lucia than it is in most of the United States though Kwéyòl underlies the culture. As Keith B. Richburg (2009) points out in Out Of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa, a person of African descent living in America * (and by extension, on St. Lucia) has little in common with, say, an African living in Rwanda. So, I doubt that a modern St. Lucian has much in common with slave ancestors save that Creole language—a language that developed outside Africa. But then that circles us back to the question: Does language control perspective?
Modern Media as Homogenizers
Was unification of perspective between those on islands and those on continents acquired through broadcast entertainment and modern electronic communication since early in the twentieth century? From early AM radio to movies to modern social media, we’ve all been thrown into a cultural melting pot, the various media acting as mixers, as homogenizers. Are there people on the planet who don’t know Mickey Mouse? Probably, but they have to have been isolated. I’ve seen Sky News Australia and its commentary on American politics; across the world the same political arguments prevail in English. The civilized world, with the exception of totalitarian regimes, is intertwined. But, heck, isn’t Kim Jong Un a fan of Dennis Rodman? Didn’t Rodman visit him? What perspective on the nature of the world differed between them save the politics of freedom vs. the politics of totalitarianism? That worldwide homogenization of humanity produced by entertainment and sports broadcasts has enhanced common experiences and those biological imperatives that have always united members of our species.
The world exchange of cultures, once largely driven by that age of exploration, exploitation, slave-exchange, and mass migrations has been magnified by media of various kinds. Unifying perspectives have migrated through those media. I remember being on another island, Bermuda, in the 1990s and seeing among that highly literate society a woman reading a thick novel on a bus and a teenager shouldering a boombox as he walked in Hamilton. And on the TV in Bermuda? The news emanated from a Chicago station, so Bermudans living on an island where guns were banned saw nightly reports of gun violence in a big city. Bermudans, highly formal in their daily lives of ladies in dresses and male store clerks in Bermuda shorts but wearing white shirts, ties, and sport coats were exposed to a place where formality was reserved for special occasions and circumstances and daily life was decidedly informal and often crude. Bermudan restaurant dress codes were largely ignored by American tourists in casual wear. Show informality and crudity over a period of two decades, and all Bermudans aged 20 and living on an island with pastel-colored houses with white roofs, will have been exposed to life in a crime-wracked inner city with graffiti and entropic neighborhoods.
Is Language Irrelevant Here?
What did we humans do before language?
Silly question? Maybe not, but this is more about our relationship to language than to the origins of language.
Human emotions appear to be both limited in number and universal in nature. There are angry people in every culture, for example, and anger intensity from mildly miffed to outraged spreads across the human spectrum of ages, races, and creeds. Do angry people get angry in different ways in different languages? Deutscher might argue in the affirmative.
There was a survey of drunks many years ago, one whose source I cannot remember. Seems that drunks act drunk according to culture. Do we express ourselves differently because of our language? Obviously, each language contains idiomatic expressions that defy exact translation: “About to go down,” “ballpark figure,” “cold turkey,” all express ideas that don’t have literal translations in other languages. But we can surmise that people in other cultures understand that there’s an anticipation of criminal activity or a surprise party, a financial estimate, and a cessation of an addiction that can occur abruptly. I do not expect, however, a member of an Amazonian tribe to understand “ballpark figure” without a lengthy description and an explanation of the analogy.
Did Volapük Alter Thinking?
In the second half of the nineteenth century German priest Martin Schleyer invented a language he called Volapük, a name meaning “world’s speech” he derived, according to Merriam-Webster, from vola “of the world” (genitive of vol world, modification of English world) + pük speech, modification of English speak. By 1889, at the end of its first decade, an estimated 200,000 people spoke Volapük, mostly because academicians in Germany and France pushed it through 300 societies and clubs and 24 publications. *
Think about it: Someone invented a language and within 10 years it spread through Europe and America behind advocates so enamored of it they held international conferences—at least three of them. But organizers of the third conference insisted on conducting affairs exclusively in the new language, and that insistence exposed its inherent flaws. Then it rapidly died except for those diehard academicians, whom Frederick Bodmer calls “the last refuge of lost causes” (463). In its death throes, Volapük even became the subject of lawsuits, as Schleyer defended his invention as proprietary, meaning that only he could make changes. And that just ain’t the way languages work. Necessities born of technology, current events, foreign influences, and even fashion require languages to adapt to changing times and speakers. To put one man in control defies the development of every language family, including Indo-European (454 languages), Austronesian (1,256 languages), and Sino-Tibetan (458 languages). Migrations, which take on a life of their own even if an individual causes them, have produced variations in languages and spawned new languages. The failure of Volapük led some of its one-time adherents to attempt other linguistic inventions, all such artificially constructed languages leading to the famous invention of Esperanto. But organic growth depends on continued use. That’s why there are “dead” languages.
But in all these invented languages, no new perspective on the nature of the world or the nature of humanity appears to have been born. The speakers still viewed the world as, say, you view it in your native tongue. Volapük was a mishmash of German and English imposed on a worldview already long in place.
What about Political Speak? Three Guys Make an Astounding Assertion
Although much of what those on the Right or Left say seems to point to different ways of viewing the world, all of us share a common biochemistry in brain functions. So, predispositions belonging to one group might merely be versions of a two-sided coin: Same fundamental structure (coin) with sides termed heads and tails. This is reflected in the thesis statement in Predisposition: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences by Hibbing, Smith, and Alford (2014):
The central thesis of this book is that many people have broad predispositions relevant to their behaviors and inclinations in the realm of politics. These predispositions can be measured with psychologically oriented survey items, with cognitive tests that do not rely on self-reports, with brain imaging, or with traditional physiological and endocrinological indicators. Due to perceptual, psychological, processing, and physiological differences, liberals and conservatives, for all intents and purposes, perceive and thus experience different worlds. Given this, it is not surprising to find they approach politics as though they were somewhat distinct species.***
But…BUT…BUT…
The authors go on to make this assertion:
Though traditional wisdom asserts that politics varies and human nature is universal, in truth politics is universal and human nature varies. Failing to appreciate these two points renders it impossible to grasp the true source of political conflict. Accordingly, before we present empirical evidence documenting the deep-seated psychological, cognitive, physiological, and genetic correlates of political variation, we first need to make the case that politics is universal and human nature is variable.
Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! WHAT?
If they are correct, then I am wrong. St. Lucians and I might only coincidentally see the world the same way. Far Leftists and Far Rightists might both be human, but that’s their only connection. They see the world differently regardless of language and geography. Americans speaking the same language and living on the same continent—even in the same community—might see the world differently as framed in the expression of their political views. So, a book paralleling Deutscher’s might be entitled Why the World Looks Different in Other Political Philosophies. Neighbors on the same street might have yard signs for opposing candidates.
And yet, language is still, I believe with Deutscher, at the heart of worldviews and political views. Take the issue of abortion. Many on the Left are pro-choice; many on the Right, pro-life. Their arguments depend on definitions. Is that organism in the womb a fetus, a parasite, a baby, a being different from or part of the pregnant woman, or a nonentity best described as just tissue? The language frames the view. Leftists refuse to say “baby.” Rightists freely use the term. And what of these following terms? In both groups we might see a linguistic consistency but a difference between both Leftists and Rightists.
Capital punishment
Imprisonment
Immigrant/Illegal immigrant
Terrorist/Freedom fighter
Free speech/Subversive speech
You might think of other terms that frame worldviews or that derive from perspectives. Then with each you have to ask the chicken-egg questions: Brain or language? Language or mind?
Sorry for running this so long, but in truth it still falls short of resolving my initial questions. But as I have said elsewhere in these essays, my purpose is to stimulate your own insights that in humility I acknowledge are probably greater and wiser than mine.
*August 31, 2010 by Metropolitan Books
**Frederick Bodmer. 1944. The Loom of Language: An Approach to the Mystery of Many Languages. New York. W. W. Norton and Company. Pp 460 ff.
***New York. Routledge. See also Scientific American Oct. 26, 2020.
“Conservative and Liberal Brains Might Have Some Real Differences”
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