Transcription
Hey, just a quick disclaimer before starting. This video is sort of connected to the last one, the one on missionaries and linguistics. It's a standalone video and you won't miss anything if you haven't seen the other one, but just figured I'd mention it in case you want the full context.
Basically, in the last one, we talked about how missionaries had contributed to linguistics. And I was a little bit worried that I made it seem the two things were maybe more aligned than they actually are. So here I wanted to look at how those two things, religious belief and the language sciences can sometimes be more openly in conflict just to balance things out a bit. Anyway, with that out of the way, let's get started.
In Ursa the Liguin's Earth Sea, everything from rocks and stones to kings and dragons, everything has a true name. To know the true name of something or someone is to know its true nature. And to know its true nature is to hold power over it. That's what wizards do. By calling on the true name of a wind current, a wizard can control the wind and help a boat make it to harbor. And more terrifyingly, by calling on the true name of a person, a wizard can control that person and make them do their bidding. In the world of Earth Sea, true names aren't just social conventions. They're words that are directly connected to the essence of things. They're words that hold power.
The idea Luin was building on that some words hold power is both incredibly widespread and incredibly old. For example, the goddess Isis gains power equal to raw when she tricks him into revealing his name. Odysius nearly dies when in a moment of hubris he reveals his name to the Cyclops Polyphimis. Polyphimis immediately prays to his father Poseidon and asks him to curse Odysius. Our folktales are full of fantastical creatures that can only be controlled if we know their name or conversely creatures that can control us if they know our name.
To varying degrees, the same idea pops up in religious language. From the ritualized uses of amen or Allahu Akbar to mantras like um there's a sense that certain words are special, that they have a kind of power other words don't. Sometimes it's not just a few words, but an entire language that gets elevated to the status of something sacred. In Judaism, biblical Hebrew, sometimes extended to the Mishnik Hebrew used in the Talmud, is a language of holiness. For some, it's quite literally the language of God. It's a language of creation, the language God used when he spoke the world into existence. In Islam, some believe Arabic is a language of Adam and of paradise. And more famously, since the Quran is a direct revelation of God, the kind of Arabic it uses is argued to be pure Arabic. Some argue that the Quran is eloquent in a way that nobody can imitate and even less surpass. In Buddhism, the fifth century philosopher Buddha Gossa argued that the language the Buddha spoke, Magatti, or what we now know as Pali, was the quote inherently existing language. In the Vibanga Atakata, he writes, quote, "Someone who is born in an uninhabited great wilderness where no one speaks to him will on his own naturally speak nothing but the language of Magada."
Those are just a few examples among many others. But here's the question. When you elevate a language in that way, what does it mean for all the other languages? If one language is greater than the rest, then doesn't that mean that the other languages are lesser than? This is where linguistics and religion can sometimes collide. Linguistics doesn't issue value judgments or rank languages as worse or better than one another. This is usually what people mean when they say linguistics is descriptive. It just describes and seeks to explain what's there objectively and without any value judgment.
That wasn't always the case, though. In the European Middle Ages, the idea emerged of a great chain of being, which ranked everything hierarchically, from pebbles and plants all the way up to angels and God, from least to greatest. This pens towards hierarchy was later reflected in scientific discourse in the 18th and 19th centuries, albeit sometimes indirectly. For example, it's probably not a coincidence that in Lamar's early version of evolution, evolution is teological and moves towards ever more complexity and ever more perfection. Starting with the French philosopher Turggo, social evolution also started to be viewed through the lens of increasing complexity. For example, there was the four stage theory of human progress. The idea was that humans went from a hunter gatherer stage to a pastoral stage, then to an agricultural stage, and finally a last stage corresponding to the kind of society Europe had at the time. As you advance through these stages, your society became more complex, and it also achieved greater cultural and technological heights.
Languages got caught up in the mix with some scholars arguing that European culture and philosophy had reached such high levels only thanks to the complexity of their languages. The racist implications are pretty obvious. It's around that time that we got infamous lines like Artur De Goon's quote the hierarchy of languages rigorously matches the hierarchy of races. Yikes. But while trying to uphold that kind of narrative, they ran into a problem. By the metrics they were using, some of the languages spoken by people they thought were inferior to Europeans turned out to be orders of magnitude more complex than the languages they were speaking in Europe. This was especially true of the languages of North America. If it was true that we evolved and that we evolved towards ever more complexity, then it shouldn't be the case that these quote unquote primitive people speak languages more complex than are so the thinking went. They could have used this as an opportunity to acknowledge how racism was skewing their own thinking. But of course, that's not what they did. Instead, some of them started to argue that this was proof that we didn't in fact evolve and that we were created by God. Basically, I refused to question my own racism, therefore God, which has to be one of the worst arguments for God I've ever heard. But here we are.
In the mid-9th century, Darwin himself addressed this in the descent of man in what is sometimes called the krinoid argument. Quote, "With respect to perfection, the following illustration will best show how easily we may errid sometimes consist of no less than 150,000 pieces of shell, all arranged with perfect symmetry in radiating lines. But a naturalist does not consider an animal of this kind as more perfect than a bilateral one with comparatively few parts and with none of these alike accepting on the opposite sides of the body. He justly considers the differentiation and specialization of organs as the test of perfection. So with languages, the most symmetrical and complex ought not to be ranked above irregular, abbreviated, and bastardized languages, which have borrowed expressive words and useful forms of construction from various conquering or conquered or immigrant races. From these few and imperfect remarks, I conclude that the extremely complex and regular construction of many barbarous languages is no proof that they owe their origin to a special act of creation."
So the kind of hierarchical reasoning and value judgments that used to be common place were now excluded from the scope of the language sciences. You couldn't argue scientifically that a language was better than others, just as it would be silly for a biologist to claim that a giraffe is superior to a bat. It would be silly for a linguist to claim that one language is superior to another. This didn't happen overnight, of course. It took a while, but for example, by the 1920s, you had someone like Edward Spir, the student of anthropologist France Boaz, writing, quote, "All attempts to connect particular types of linguistic morphology with certain correlated stages of cultural development are vain, rightly understood. Such correlations are rubbish. Both simple and complex types of languages of an indefinite number of varieties may be found spoken at any desired level of cultural advance. When it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks with the Macedonian swine herd and Confucious with the head-hunting savage of Assam." Meaning that all of those attempts to argue that your particular social group, religion, or country was better than the others because of something to do with the language they use, all of that was out. A stance that would further solidify over the course of the 20th century.
But this clashed with some of the narratives religious groups were telling themselves. From a scientific perspective, there's no such thing as a language of holiness, an ineitable pure Arabic or an inherently existing Matti. From a scientific perspective, these are all just languages like any other that evolved and adapted to the purposes they served at the time they were spoken.
To better understand the social dynamics at play, we could try using the concept of schismogenesis. In the 1930s, anthropologist Gregory Bateson coined the term schismogenesis to describe how divisions or differences emerge among social groups. He described two types. The first is what he calls symmetrical schismogenesis. Think of an arms race. Country A starts making more weapons. Country B starts doing the same thing in order to keep up. And since country B is making more weapons, country A makes even more weapons. and so on between social groups. It could be something like say boasting. Say two groups of football fans who support different teams. Group A starts boasting. Group B reacts by boasting even more which in turn spurs group A to boast even more than before and so on.
But there's another type of schismogenesis where instead of spurring each other to do the same thing, each group decides to go in the opposite direction of what the other group is doing. This is what Bateson calls complimentary schismogenesis. For example, if group A starts behaving in an assertive manner, group B might find it appropriate to behave in a more submissive manner. The more assertive group A gets, the more submissive group B gets and vice versa. What's important for us here is that each group is defining themselves in opposition to the other group. To be a member of group A is to be whatever group B is not. Think of traditional gender norms where what it means to be a man is contrasted with what it means to be a woman. To be a man is to be whatever a woman is not and vice versa, thereby exacerbating whatever differences, if any, might have already been there between the two groups.
We could use this concept of complimentary schismogenesis to try and make sense of what sometimes happens when there's a disconnect between science and religious narratives. If the science is perceived as a threat to the religious narrative, some groups might double down on their narrative and start defining themselves in opposition to science. What it means to be religious is whatever science is not. The more the scientific community displays openness to new evidence and a willingness to overturn existing models, the more the religious community will cling to authority and orthodoxy.
One notorious example of this is the King Jameson movement among certain US evangelicals. It starts with just a personal preference for the King James version of the Bible or KJV for short. But over the course of the 20th century, it started to move beyond a mere preference into something more. Some evangelical groups started to define themselves in opposition to modernism, to science, and to critical scholarship. When newer, more accurate versions of the Bible were published, taking into account new findings like the Dead Sea Scrolls and whatnot, they decided to reject all of that and they doubled down on the KJV. Instead of just accepting that it was a matter of preference, as in, I just like the KJV better, they started to argue that the authors of the KJV were divinely inspired, that the KJV was God's word in a way that any other English translation just isn't. The more they double down, the further they distance themselves from science and critical scholarship.
And you can see something similar happening with a number of religious groups. If they perceive that there's a conflict between linguistics as a science and their own religious narrative, imagine if say you're a particular religious group believes Hebrew is the original language that was spoken before the fall of the Tower of Babel and that all other languages are derived from it. Or maybe your group believes that Sanskrit is the eternal language of the gods and that all other languages are derived from. If then linguistics comes along and says, "Well, actually there's good evidence that Hebrew and Sanskrit follow the same path of evolution as any other language, that they themselves were derived from other older languages," then that conflicts with your religious belief, and you might end up going down that path of complimentary schismogenesis and defining yourself in opposition to science.
To be fair, these mechanics aren't unique to religion. They can pop up around any kind of social group. Often you see them at work in the kind of national myths that arise in the process of nation building. For example, the French language plays an important role in the national mythos of France. In that mythos, the language is elevated above others. French is conceived of as a force for unity, bringing everyone together. And by contrast, if French is a force for unity, then the various regional and minority languages in the country are conceived of as forces of division. Just last year, President Mccron gave a speech to the French Academy where he explicitly called these regional languages instruments of division and he referred to them by the derogatory term PTA. The standard version of the language spoken by the cultural elites is also elevated above other dialects which are looked down on as flawed incorrect versions of the pure better standard. At around that myth, there are a bunch of other stories and arguments that pop up and that run a foul of the science.
In reaction to some of the more harmful narratives that were being promoted by institutions like the French Academy, but also by political leaders and the media, a group of French linguists got together a few years ago and published a tract. Roughly translated, the title was, "The French language is doing just fine. Thank you very much." You get the idea. They were trying to combat some of the more alarmist myths around language that are used to back up certain political narratives. In scientific terms, what their track contained was uncontroversial. Honestly, it was pretty milktoast. They're things you would learn in any linguistics 101 course or things you could read in any popularization book meant to introduce linguistics to the broadest possible audiences. And yet, because they're in this cultural and political environment where the national mythos doesn't align with the science, their track became controversial.
There's now a dangerous trend towards complimentary schismogenesis. Those who don't want to question the national mythos are now defining themselves in opposition to science. Instead of trying to reconcile the two, they're now trying to discredit science, arguing that linguists are captured by a woke agenda or whatever. From the outside, linguists in France look a bit like physicists in a country run by flatearthers. In the worst case scenario, this kind of mythos, whether religious, nationalistic, or otherwise, can pose a very real threat to science, including linguistics. Just as an administration that wants to minimize the consequences of climate change might cut funding to universities doing research in that area, so too with language. As far as I can tell, linguistics hasn't yet been targeted in the same way as say climate science or certain areas of the social sciences. But the way things are going, it wouldn't be all that surprising if linguistics got caught up in the mix since some of the things it has to say contradict the stories we like to tell ourselves.
It'd be nice if we could avoid that conflict altogether. But to do so, we'd have to be a bit more flexible with the stories we tell ourselves. And we'd have to find ways to define ourselves that don't require belittling others, ways to express our attachment to certain religious or cultural expressions that don't imply that others are lesser than. If we can't figure out a way to do that, then I'm afraid we'll be in for a rough ride. If it's unavoidable and we go the route of complimentary schismogenesis and we end up in a situation where the religious, cultural or political narratives can only be endorsed at the expense of science, then well, narratives will be damned. I'll be siding with the science.