Lonesome Languages

In the title sequence to the movie Babel, Brad Pitt, in voice over, recounts a version of the eleventh chapter of Genesis: "In the beginning, all the Lord's people, from all over the world, spoke one language. Nothing they proposed was impossible for them. But fearing what the spirit of man could accomplish, the Lord said, 'Let Us go down and confuse their language so that they may not understand each other's speech.'"


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This afternoon, I was at the bookstore, browsing the fiction/literature section and I came across a novel entitled, The God of Small Things. The book takes place in Kerala, India. I decided to sit down and leaf through a couple of pages to see if anything about the novel caught my interest. It didn’t. However, I was reminded of a peculiar feature belonging to the language spoken in Kerala - Malayalam. The names given to people in Malayalam are often times not names in the Western sense. You will not find them on birth certificates, nor can they be labeled nicknames in the proper sense. Rather, labels are given to people based on their relation to other people.

For instance, one female character in the novel was named Kochamma, which roughly translates, ‘little mother.’ Of course, she wasn’t known as ‘little mother’ all her life. One could only imagine the plight of a young girl going through middle school with such a name! Instead, she came to assume the name later in life when her younger sister had a child. The child, then, had a mother, a ‘little mother’ in the form of her mother’s sister, and a ‘big mother’ in the form of her mother’s mother.

While it might make some sense for the child itself to apply the title of ‘little mother’ to her mother’s sister, as much as one would apply the name ‘aunt’ in the West, this is not how it happens. It appears that everyone except the child refers to the aunt as little mother. The title of little mother, then, seems to supplant the aunt’s actual proper name. The rules that determine the name the child will use in reference to its aunt is far more complex and takes into account whether the sister-relation is by blood or by marriage, whether the sister is older or younger, and whether the aunt is maternal or paternal. Such naming rituals presumably served as verbal scorecards in houses that might contain extended families, two or three generations deep. (Also, on a side note, if you are the wife of a priest, everyone calls you ‘little mother,’ whether or not you have a niece or nephew, or even a sister, for that matter.)

In the West, first names are individualistic and surnames are growing to be, the latter often retained through marriage. It’s hard for us to fathom such a relational naming scheme. Indeed, one has to wonder if having things defined by their relation to other things has an effect on one’s world view. Conversely, in the West, does the appearance of individuality by way of naming schemes also color one’s approach to the outside world and to the self? That is to say, does the East have a multitude of words for relationships, because their world-view is relational to begin with? Or is their world-view relational, because their language defines relationships in an ever-present and exact manner? A related question is: how much of one’s world-view is lost, when one loses one’s language?

I recently came across this statistic: of the 6,000 languages spoken in the world today, one-half are not spoken by this generation’s children. I’m reminded of a certain Giant Galapagos Tortoise. I think I mentioned an NPR story awhile back about a tortoise that was believed to be the last member of his species. People who are in charge of such designations deem a species to be extinct when there is only one member of that species still living. Thus, this 80 year old tortoise will live his last 120 years, belonging to a species that is already extinct. He was accordingly dubbed Lonesome George. By that same standard, some 3,000 languages are already extinct, uttered among the living like voices of the dead. 3,000 Lonesome Tongues. 3,000 Lonesome Worldviews.

Of course, every language I’ve ever heard of, either dead of alive, would likely number in the dozens, rather than thousands. So why should I give pause over the fate of these obscure, and soon to be forgotten, dialects? For me, the significant lies in the fact that language is not merely a means of communication, but a rich tapestry of human life experiences. Just as sedimentary rock preserves fossil records, so too does language faithfully record a people’s history, their culture, and their philosophy.

Take English, for example. The very fact that Americans speak English tells the story of the British colonization of the New World. The presence of many French cognates, in turn, harkens back to the Norman conquest of England in 1066. A grocery list of items arrived along ancient trade routes, including the word tea from China, the Arabic words saffron, caraway, coffee, and cotton, as well as the Malayalam words mango and teak, which arrived by boat. Our court system’s preservation of verbatim Latin points to the foundational tenets borrowed from Roman Law. That the word philosophy itself comes from Greek tells a story unto itself. Point being, even without understanding the meaning of a single English word, one could tell a great deal about a people from the structure and characteristic of a language itself. A death of a language, then, is also the loss of all of the life experiences and insights that helped shape a language, that which breathes life into this spiritless typeface.

Suppose an ancient civilization held wisdom that would relieve some of our modern problems, or, suppose further, that they held some beauty that would appeal to our modern sensibilities. “I dream of lost vocabularies that might express that which we no longer can,” writes Jack Gilbert in "The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart." Perhaps, then, the homogenization of language, is also the homogenization of wisdom. But who, if any, among us would boast that theirs should be the chosen tongue, that theirs is the only one to get it all right, that theirs is the Almighty Language? Maybe it is better to equate the loss of language to a loss of wisdom, rather than a return to it. Maybe we are experiencing a flattening of the Earth and a return to a blander, more two-dimensional understanding of the world.

I'm also concerned about this topic, because I fear that our language, this very language in which I'm writing, will be forgotten in time. I wonder whether men of the future can live richly without words such as ‘renaissance’? ‘Passion’ or ‘butterfly’? And what would they call that great beast we so aptly named ‘hippopotamus’? And, if on the eve of the renouncement of such words, I am able, I will hurriedly scribble down my favorites on scraps of paper and bury them in a locked chest in my backyard, even if never to be found, then at least to have been left with some dignity. Still, I cannot help but imagine an archaeologist in some great distant future unearthing this treasure chest and lifting its top. Can you see the expression on his face when he first encounters 'serendipity' and ‘gossamer,’ along with my detailed instructions on how they may be put to use?

Lasagna for an Old Man's Soul

Awhile back, I read Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal and I’ve since been trying to write about it. I’ve tried repeatedly to present it in a relevant manner, but to no avail. However, yesterday, I came across an old video blog by Ze Frank, entitled How To Make Lasagna, which is more about the work of psychologist Robert Trivers than it is about layered pasta. Ze’s vlog (is that the word?) made it all click. I hope.

The main thrust of The Moral Animal, based in large part on the research of Robert Trivers, is to suggest that there is constant wrestling between men and women to gain an economic advantage in the reproductive act. Parallel wrangling exists between all people in all social situations, but reproductive interaction is the most important, at least as far as evolutionary psychologists are concerned. As all but the staunchest feminist extremist will admit, men and women do not start with the same equipment. It is very costly for a woman to reproduce – she has a limited supply of eggs, once impregnated she cannot again get pregnant for almost a year, and in almost all animal species, the female has more responsibilities in child rearing, which for humans, lasts some 18 years. It is very inexpensive for a man to reproduce – sperm is in endless supply, and absentee fathering is quite prevalent in the animal kingdom, including humans – just watch Ricki Lake or Maury. Also, a man could conceivably impregnate numerous women at the same time (just watch Springer), his conquests to be limited only by the extent of his charm and the number of hours in a day. Of equal import is the fact that a male’s window for fertility is far larger than that of a woman. Evolutionary psychologists argue that these facts have shaped the way that men and women interact on a daily basis.

To the extent that the value of thing is to be determined by its rarity, it can be said that a woman’s egg is far more valuable than a man’s sperm, a fact reflected in the disparate rates at which sperm and egg banks compensate men and women, respectively. This is to say that a woman has far more to lose to the same reproductive misstep compared to a man, even though both of them stand to gain the exact same thing – one half-copy of their genes. Society (and not just human society) has tried to correct for this imbalance by ingraining traditions that require the man to pay a price for mating, which is presumably commensurate to the difference in value between male and female gametes. So, for instance, the male will generally expend the energy necessary to pursue and woo the woman, he will hunt for her and fend off saber-tooth tigers on their way back to the cave. In modern times, he will buy her a nice steak dinner, flowers, and in time, a wedding ring with three months of his salary to make her an honest woman. Some monkeys, too, by the way, can be seen bringing a female a large piece of meat just prior to copulation. Some argue that the tradition of literally 'bringing home the bacon' is social compensation for the biological relationship between menstrual blood loss and the resultant iron-deficiency in women. Interesting. With humans, but not monkeys, there is the matter of alimony, should anyone change their mind, a tradition thought to have originated as compensation for the loss of reproductive years during a failed courtship. In short, argue the evolutionary psychologists, our very definition of romance is itself wedded to biological-economics. Of course, with men as with monkeys, if one can get a mate for cheaper, one would jump at the chance, just as a woman would appreciate a man who gave more than was necessary. Both parties are, understandably, trying to get more than what they paid for, or so the theory goes.

Contrary to public perception, the women’s sexual liberation movement of the 1970’s which roughly coincided with the introduction of female-based methods of contraception did nothing to change this paradigm. The “cost” of a woman’s egg or one of her reproductive years is still far higher than a man’s sperm or one of his reproductive years. Liberated women mistakenly associated the price that men were willing to pay for a mate with the imbalance in how much money each party made at the workplace. As women started to earn more money and this disparity narrowed, these traditional “romantic” gestures grew less important. At the same time, as readily-available sex flooded the market, the price men were willing to pay for access to eggs has seen a marked decline. Couples will now often “go dutch” on dates, marriage itself has been redefined to where expensive weddings rings are no longer necessary, and alimony awards are dwindling. What the women’s liberations movement had wrong was that men weren’t correcting for the economic imbalance at the workplace, strictly speaking, but correcting for the inherent biological differences that still exists today. Namely, an egg is more valuable than sperm, a relationship which is unaffected by a woman's increased control over her own fertility and only marginally affected by the option of early termination of pregnancy. It is for this reason that many evolutionary biologists/psychologists conclude that the women’s liberations movement was far more liberating for men and even to the detriment of women as far as biological-economics goes.

On one level, discussed above, you have the inherent value differences among male and female gametes, but on another level, you have differences in value among the gametes of particular men and women. Assume that there was some way to take all of the genetic characteristics of a man or women and reduce it to a simple number value. Fred is a good looking guy, smart, athletic, but he has a bad back and halitosis, so we’ll give him a 205. Daphne is attractive and brilliant but she’s a poor athlete and has an inherited predisposition to heart disease and bipolar disorder, so let’s give her a 185. In a ‘perfect system,’ from an evolutionary perspective, Fred would find another 205 to mate with and Daphne would find another 185. Fred would do his genes a disservice by reproducing with Daphne, because his progeny would average 195 with her, versus 205, if he were able to land a fellow 205-er with whom to mate. Conversely, Daphne would love to get with Fred, because her progeny would enjoy a +10 boost over the value expected with a baby-daddy of 185. While Daphne cannot change her actual number value, she does have some control over how Fred might assess her value. To the extent that a 185 can appear to be a 205, he or she stands to gain a +10 windfall. Therein lies the evolutionary benefit of deceit.

Robert Trivers argues that the very reason that humans rose to consciousness was in order to become better at lying. The process went something like this. One day, a man lent another man some money or a comparable good. The debtor never paid him back. The next time, the creditor wised up and, before the loan was given, the creditor required an earnest promise that the money would be repaid promptly. Some debtors returned the money, while the dishonest ones did not. The creditor again wised up and developed a method of distinguishing between the truth-tellers and the liars. Then something strange happened. Some men gained the ability to convince themselves that they would return the debt, even though, in reality, they would not. These men, unlike the simple liars, were indistinguishable from the truth-tellers, because they genuinely believed their lie. These men were level-two liars: they not only lied to others but they lied to themselves about the very fact that they were lying. Phew. It doesn’t matter what goods are being exchanged – beads, spearheads, gametes, paper money, love, seemingly altruistic gifts. The same principles apply generally to all social interaction - people who lie to themselves about a particular fact will find it easier to lie to others about it. The illustration above is only a metaphor for the change that occured over tens of thousands of years to the actual hardware in our brains. As Ze puts it, we are the result of and are even currently undergoing "an evolutionary arms race." The vehicle for this social deception, Trivers argues, was the conscious ego, which evolved to serve as the nice-guy-third-party, set up as a front for the general public, while the seedy inner-workings of the genes seek to gain small economic advantages from social interaction. The Teflon ego would only appear genuine to the degree he could disassociate the shady dealings below from his sense of self – hence, the division of the mind and the rise of consciousness as we know it. Indeed, we find that all conceptions of evil - the little devil on your shoulder, Original Sin, Satan himself, the Id, or 'the other' - have one thing in common: they each, to varying degrees, are disassociated from any notion of self.

Assuming that people themselves cannot tell when they’re lying and when they are being honest, how should a creditor proceed? If the root of modern dishonesty is self-deception, then it would follow that those who are most likely to be dishonest are those that have the greatest penchant for self-deception. Avoid people that are overly self-deceptive – they are capable of forgiving (or disassociating from) themselves of anything, it seems. The ancient Greeks believed that the greatest truth was self-knowledge, hence the proclamation on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: Know Yourself. The message is clear. Outward honesty begins with inward honesty. Indeed, Polonius says as much in Shakespeare’s adaptation of the Greek paradigm found in Hamlet: "To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man."

But remember, deceit appears to have an economic advantage and we may be careful in wanting to rid ourselves of it entirely. Perhaps, Shakespeare, elsewhere, offers some middle-ground in Sonnet 138, where he discusses the difficulties of complete self-knowledge and, perhaps more importantly, the advantages of mutual self-deception. One character lies about his age while allowing his lover to lie about her beauty.

O! love's best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love, loves not to have years told:
Therefore I lie with her, and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flattered be.

Perhaps this is the best we can hope for: to find someone who lies as we do – with the same frequently and about things of equal gravity. Maybe with enough self-knowledge we can find the right lover or business partner to whisper only the lies that we need to hear and no more, and for whom we can return the favor. At least this way, the number of lies we tell will roughly equal the number of lies we are told, and thus, we are both the better for it, with neither one being more so than the other. But before any such arrangements can be made, it is true, one must know thyself.