Cactus Juice

Does multilingualism start with me?

As the New Year's Resolution deadline looms, I find myself once again taking stock of my language situation.  Nothing about my American education provided me with languages skills in any meaningful sense of the word.  My native English would be barely passable for business use if I had left it to the minimum requirements of my university education, and university requirements for a second language are a joke.  I judge my English to be more than acceptable, so I'm left looking to the pitiful scaffolding of that second language education.

Over the years, I've persistently given myself a bit of time to study French.  Today I can solve basic face-to-face problems ("Where is the elevator to the basement laboratory?") with very poor grammar, or so exasperate a Paris subway help-desk attendant that he gave me a free ticket in order to be rid of me (true story).  I can read current events relatively easily, but the more expansive vocabulary of a novel is beyond me.  I can walk into a French-speaking milieu without feeling lost or terrified, but not really access a world of ideas and interactions outside of the English speaking sphere.  When it comes to the moralistic, "I really should 'have' a second language!", I always turn to French, though there's also one semester of Latin, a workbook of Greek (I was a philosophy student), an introduction to German (my ancestral language along with English), a few words of Hindi (I married an Indian), and a study of Spanish vocabulary (hey, that would be useful) rattling around in my head too.

So, what to do about this New Year's Resolution?  Should I have a second language?  Should it be French?  I just finished reading The Story of French by Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow, which amongst other things addresses both questions.

The English-speaking world has been selling English as the only international language for about 100 years now and, even with no official bureau making the argument, it is a sale that has worked very well.  People coming from other languages are hasty to drop their mother tongue in exchange for English and, as a consequence, people who migrate to English speaking centers such as the USA generally lose additional languages within one generation, while people in other language centers neglect their own language so that it does not develop the vocabulary to deal with the modern world.  This latter problem has had to be addressed by official agencies keeping the French and the Hebrew language usable in modern times, but many other languages have given up the race.

In America, speaking a second language is seen as an esoteric accomplishment similar to being able to play the flute.  This is part of the reason I don't speak French.  After leaving a small liberal arts college for a large state-funded university, I found the quality and focus of the French education to be very different.  Unaware of the hornets' nest I was walking into, I commented on the differences in emphasis to the head of the department, prompting her to belittle me until I burst into tears.  I was unaware that foreign language was barely hanging on, only justified by the idea that it perhaps could provide useful to business.  Since 9/11, the idea of language as also being important to cultural understanding has resurged, but still fundamentally in a commercial & militaristic sense.  The intention is to suck at the target culture, not to interact or exchange.  Thus the most acceptable languages to be learning today are Arabic (for the military), Chinese (for business, but really the expectation is that they will learn English), Spanish (though there really is something wrong with them for not learning English) and French (because as much as Americans hate to admit it, Canada is right there and someone had to do business with them too).  We may be willing to learn a second language because we have to, but gosh darn it we are not going to like it!  Even in the EU, multilingualism is about commerce and economic development, not about culture.

As a person with a degree in philosophy, I'm not opposed to esoteric accomplishment.  It just so happens that I do business in Canada.  But there is something more:

In the extreme push to sell English, language has been portrayed as a zero-sum game.  Either you speak English, or you speak some other language.  A consequence of this thinking is the absolute terror that the public use of the Spanish language creates in the USA.  In contrast, my Grandfather was a third-generation German speaker while also being a very successful English-speaking businessman, and his wife's mother (Scottish ancestry) studied German, perhaps in politeness to her new son-in-law.  Closer to the present day, my Mother's German language skills were of the esoteric sort, since by then an English speaker would expect to only interact with English speakers.  Also World War II had an impact on the acceptability of the German language.  My mother also spoke French, but no language skills were passed to me in the family setting.  Nadeau and Barlow discuss similar factors of family history and national politics that shaped the decline of French in America.  In particular, French became unacceptable following the Civil War and the eradication of French in America was specifically targeted in the school system.  The ultimate goal seems to be to overwhelm the globe with English as the pinnacle accomplishment for commercial and military convenience.

But language is not a zero-sum game.  My multilingual ancestors were able to participate fully in American culture and business, and remain fully integrated into their Swiss extended family.  And though I am not expert enough to argue for this idea well, language is about more than convenience, it is a means of communicating nuances of culture which provide a broader perspective.  Being monolingual is to confine yourself to a province of the globalized world; a world which ultimately is not globalized in English.  Given that so many Americans are multilingual, the obsession with monolingualism is peculiar.  It isn't just that it is possible to use more than one language without reducing either language, the expanded territory of influence created where the languages intersect expands the value of each language.

Nadeau and Barlow make one more argument for the use of languages other than English, as argument that they borrow from the Francophonie.  The Francophonie started out as an organization of French-speaking countries, but the benefits of membership have encouraged other countries to increase their French-speaking citizenry to the level to qualify, and yet other countries to join as observers.  These observers also have a few French-speaking citizens, but the main point is that there must be a center of linguistic power other than English.  In supporting French they support the cause of those who wish to advance French as the primary bulwark against English domination, but they also support the broader cause of the value of multilingualism in general.  Because of the Francophonie and similar institutions supporting the growth of French, not just for it's own sake but as an alternative to English, the number of French speakers has been increasing alongside English.  Rather than English being the VHS to French as Betamax, French is Apple to English's Microsoft.  The growth of each as a global language reinforces the need for the other.

I have to admit that none of this is a very good reason for me to continue to study French, specifically.  Learning an additional language is an enormous sunk cost of time and effort the benefits of which, to an English speaker in particular, are uncertain.  Yes, a language may provide an economic benefit, but it may well be a different language that would be more beneficial.  Language provides a new sphere of art and culture, but there are expert translators who can give me a pretty good experience in English.  Most people who already own a Mac or a PC don't find that they also need one of the other kind.  On the other hand, absolutely no one needs to be able to play the flute.  So at the moment I'm after esoteric accomplishment, and all the hopes of multilingualism will just have to ride on that.

P.S.

In their book, Nadeau and Barlow reference The Story of English.  The authors also wrote a very enjoyable explanation of the culture of the nation of France, Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong.

If you google "multilingualism resistance," aside from the occasional white-supremacist site, the majority of the listings return resistance to English as a second language.  These returns are only from the English language portion of the internet, and the message is that resistance to multilingualism is only something that can occur in non-English speaking population.  In the English-speaking work, multilingualism means "thou shall speak English," followed by a pat on the head and a suggestion that other languages may serve as markers of cultural heritage, but have no purpose.  It's almost enough to make a person want to learn French!

Pollyanna Twitter: Friends at Starbucks

Sat at Starbuck's next to a group of friends reuniting over the winter break.  All in different graduate school programs around the U.S.  All very enthusiastic and supportive about each other's accomplishments.  I just wanted to hug them for being so kind and nice to each other.

Sullivan on Obama, History and Hope for the Future

I would blog about the entire December issue of the Atlantic Monthly if I could, but circling around that for the last few days has kept me away from the topic of this most excellent article "Good bye to All That" by Andrew Sullivan (with an online only interview with Sullivan), and the companion article "Teacher and Apprentice" by Marc Ambinder.

A couple of weeks before reading this article I had come across an enthusiastic young Obama supporter.  Unfortunately enthusiasm and youth equated to ignorance and he wasn't able to tell me anything about his candidate.  His enthusiasm did have me picking up one of Obama's books, but then I put it down, deciding that my alloted time for reading candidates' books was if and when that particular candidate reached my decision point as a voter.  Until then, I decided, Obama was just so much noise.  Sullivan points out that I'm not the only one with a ho-hum attitude toward this election:

We are fighting over something, to be sure.  But it is more a fight over how we define ourselves and over long-term goals than over what is practically to be done on the ground.... Even on issues that are seen as integral to the polarization, the practical stakes in this election are minor.

Americans are closer than ever on a huge list of topics.  Even the two sides of the abortion debate are, in a practical sense, closer together than they ever have been.  So why is there still so much strife, and why can a candidate as uninteresting as Obama stir up so much excitement?

Listening to my young friend, I recalled my own days of excitement over politics.  As a college student and first-time voter, I was attracted to Ross Perot.  Not because I knew anything about him, but because he was different.  Ultimately he showed himself to be different and, as a politician, psycho, and I was left disappointed in the prospect of anyone being different at all.  As I've come to appreciate the stability of our political system, being different is no longer in itself appealing.

Sullivan explains why the national politicians I've been exposed to thus far in my life (here in my early 30s) are all basically the same and why as a member of Generation X I would have been seeking something different.  He shows how American politics is a house that was set up before I was born, with oddly placed furniture that I tripped over in my youthful ignorance.  In revealing the set up, he creates best kind of perspective- perspective that isn't just the other side of the same way of seeing things, but is a whole new way of seeing things.  Ultimately, I have a different view of Obama (Sullivan has become a supporter), but the historical perspective Sullivan offers is nonetheless important.

Sullivan's central argument is not that interesting:

Given this quiet, evolving consensus on policy, how do we account for the bitter, brutal tone of American politics?  The answer lies mainly with the biggest and most influential generation in America: the Baby boomers.  The divide is still--amazingly--between those who fought in Vietnam and those who didn't, and between those who fought and dissented and those who fought and never dissented at all.  By defining the contours of the Boomer generation, it lasted decades.  And with time came a strange intensity.

Sullivan's nuanced explanation of exactly what this means is where the brilliance comes in.  In Sullivan's view, this election is important because is either the place to move on, or the place where the Boomer generation, through the divisions of the occupation of Iraq, will cement their divisions into the next generation.

I'm not certain the direct link to the Iraq war would do that; it would take a draft to build that kind of cement.  In our current climate, the cement seems to be more about those issues of self-definition, and in that way the more disconnected youth culture is, the more likely it is to break free of the past.  The hope would be that those youth will reform themselves into a new adult culture.  However, I didn't have that much hope in youth when I was one and I certainly don't now.  I'm curious to see what Generation Y and beyond turn into, and I expect that they will create an adult culture that is more free of history than X and prior, but I don't expect them to create any significant new virtue out of that freedom.  Placing hope in what is ultimately a form of ignorance seems a dubious bet.

The hope being placed in Obama is more about his cleanness than about ignorance; he has received a top-rate education and he knows his potential place in history.  But his experience of history is about education rather than personal experience.  Ultimately, for Sullivan and for many others, it is Obama's new face is most important.  Physically, his face is a sign of an American that is something aside from those divisions that the entire world has watched play out.  Sullivan writes, "It [Obama's face] proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can."  (I would add that it proves us wrong as well.)  However, it is not just his physical face that is important, but his fresh face.  Sullivan explains that for those whose feet is caught in the previous generation, there is no escape.  Much of what so many hate about Hillary is inherent in the division that can never be removed from her mind.  But Obama's mother is only a few years younger than Hillary.  Obama himself, therefore, is something new:

He is among the first Democrats in a generation not be afraid or ashamed of what they actually believe, which also gives them more freedom to move pragmatically to the right, if necessary.  He does not smell, as [Hillary] Clinton does, of political fear.

Sullivan then goes on with a few pages of specific discussion of Obama, which are informative and I recommend reading them, but not of any interest here.  He closes with an evaluation of what an Obama race would mean, versus some of the other options, explaining his opinion that choosing Obama is choosing to take seriously the need to break through the cement of the Boomer generation into something different, something that more closely reflects what America and the world are about right now.  In the companion interview, he reiterates a point made in the article:

...if you believe the world's okay, then the case for Obama is actually rather weak.  Why would we listen to this rather young, untested figure?  Let's go to security mom, Hillary, or big daddy Rudy.  If you believe, as I do, that the world seems to be hurtling toward something quite catastrophic, then the requirement of the United States to actually evolve itself to resist that trend--as opposed to accelerating it-- is quite high.  And Obama in fact puts the brakes on what I think is our accelerating path towards global warfare and possible constitutional crisis.

Sullivan's argument hinges on the need for something different, and the expectation of an unhinging crisis, while I actually have some faith in the cement of our institutions compared to the ephemeral nature of crisis.  Yes, the impetuous of 9/11 allowed Bush to move quickly and perhaps calamitously into the Middle East, and the cement will made the withdrawal move that much more slowly, which is costly in lives, in world opinion, in "the war on terror."  But it also now in our cement that we wouldn't move so quickly in response to another attack.  Yes, there have been some dramatic institutional failures during the Bush years, most disturbingly the disastrous and inhumane response to hurricane Katrina, which was in so many different ways a failure of the values our national institutions are meant to uphold.  Painfully and inelegantly, our institutions are responding to those failures as well.

I'm not certain that there would be anything wrong with Obama for President, but I'm not sold that there would be anything particularly correct about him either.  Presidential politics are seductive because they offer up the idea that some great change, some very moral change, could be just around the corner.  There is no reason to believe that great change is likely, or that it would be good. Different is not enough to make Obama the right choice, and even if his individual psychology has escaped certain aspects of history he would nonetheless take his place a chain of history that no one can escape from.

Hope for Truth: The Failures of Romney

To lie is vile. To demonstrate the varieties of half-truths, and non-sense that can vortex out and send friends and enemies alike off kilter in their relationship with the truth is to be Mitt Romney as reported in the media. This week, CNN published a puzzling interaction between presidential hopefuls Romney and Huckabee. Almost nothing in the article made sense.

This is going to run a bit long, so a roadmap: first, a Discussion of the CNN Article, then a Review of Other Failures, finally a Discussion of Hope for the Truth.

Discussion of the CNN Article

Huckabee, who has a degree in theology, on the one hand states that Mormonism is a religion rather than a cult, but on the other hand states that he "doesn't know much about it."  Uh huh.  But next is where the Romney-level weirdness begins: "Don't Mormon's believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?"  Huckabee surely knows the answer to that one already.  Romney too.  The spokespeople of the LDS (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the actual name of the largest of the religions commonly known as "Mormon") also.  (By the way, the answer is "yes."  If Huckabee really wanted to open a can of worms he should have just gone for the Mormon version of the problem of the Trinity.)

But Huckabee asks his question.  And then makes a non-sense apology which Romney furthers the non-sense by accepting.  And then the LDS spokespeople stamp on some further nonsense.  Here is the LDS media-release nonsense (the comments of another spokesperson are similar):

Like other Christians, we believe Jesus is the divine Son of God.  Satan is a fallen angel.  As the Apostle Paul wrote, God is the Father of all.  That means that all beings were created by God and are his spirit children.  Christ, however, was the only begotten in the flesh, and we worship Him as the Son of God and the Savior of mankind.

Here the LDS definition of Satan:

Satan, also called the adversary or the devil, is the enemy of all righteousness of those who seek to follow God.  He is a spirit son of God who was once an angel "in authority in the presence of God".  But in the premortal Council in Heaven, Lucifer, as Satan was then called, rebelled against God...

That the LDS definition doesn't directly address the question is forgivable, since it was not meant to.  That the LDS media-release is wishy-washy and unclear is surely an embarrassment to those Mormons who stand by their faith.  The anti-LDS group Mormonism Research Ministry charitably calls this explanation "less than lucid."  There is no reason for officials of the LDS church to purposefully stride onto ground where then may be called deceivers from the truth.

For anyone interested in a clear overview of the LDS concept of Satan, Mormon Wiki does very well.  An intellectual deconstruction of the LDS base texts on Satan can be found here.  In contrast to the official non-sense, All About Mormons clearly addresses the question in an essay titled Is Satan the Brother of Jesus?, which closes:

So it can be said that Jesus and Lucifer were brothers, in the sense of both being spiritually begotten by the Father, but it is a misrepresentation to say so without giving the contextual background [which the article provides].  Whatever similarities in background exist between Jesus and Satan pale compared to the differences.  Jesus is the Beloved and Chosen, who is the Only Begotten Son of God in the flesh.

Going back to the CNN, article, it is Romney spokesman Kevin Madden who continues with the non-sense:

The governor accepted the apology... it is out of bounds for one candidate to question another's personal faith.

This right on the heels of Romney giving an entire speech about the importance of his faith.  It is only Huckabee, in the closing paragraph of the CNN article, who finally demonstrates any courage:

I get all of the God questions at the debates, so you know when people say, "Oh, he [Romney] had to make a speech," I'm thinking, "Hey, you know what?  If you'll give me national television time, I'll make you a God speech, and I'll tell you what I'll do, I'll throw in an offering and an altar call to throw in with it."

And this draws the attention back to the creators of the intrigue- the media.  A set of journalists who have enlarged the original question, accepted Romney's speech and his acceptance of the meaningless apology without question, and published the media-release LDS nonsense.  Courage and hope for the truth are not found there.

Review of Other Failures

Romney didn't start with these problems this week.  In mid-October, speaking to a Jewish group, he was"startled" by a question about baptisms for the dead and then stated the meaningless, "I have in my life, but I haven't recently."  He has also distanced himself from his own polygamous ancestry and been evasive on a fundamental belief about where Christ will return to the earth, as explained in an article in The New Republic.  Author Josh Patashnik writes, "It is one thing to flip-flop on your politics, and quite another to flip-flop on your faith."

It may be that politics is all about lies, it may be that the public can be expected to ask questions of a Mormon candidate, but Romney's lack of integrity goes beyond politics to how he expresses his personal faith.  Perhaps this was inevitable whenever it was that he first decided to mingle the two.  His address on faith shows that at some point he forgot they were separate.  Rather than faith corrupting politics (a popular worry, probably rooted in dishonesty, that Romney was addressing), politics have corrupted faith.

The feminist blogger Hugo Schwyzer very effectively takes on the bizarre missteps of the speech, contrasting the "symphony of faith" with his own response "In Praise of Cacophony."  Schwyzer writes, "Real diversity is not harmonious."  This is a truth about religious diversity that is fundamentally at odds with Romney's desire to idealize the presidency as a seat of harmony, and to sell himself as the proper person to place in that seat.  Dick Ostling (who knows, some writer that CNN quotes someone else quoting):

Better to candidly admit there are differences [between Mormons and other Christians] but these should not affect voting decisions. The more effective plea is tolerance, asking voters to follow the spirit of the Constitution's ban on any "religious test" to hold public office.

This requires the faith in America and fundamental courage for truth that made Kennedy one of the most respected presidents in history.  Romney lacks that courage.  (I'd say "Where is Lloyd Bentson when you need him, but the blogosphere is already all over that.") As posted on the liberal-leaning political blog Avenging Angel:

A Kennedy biographer said of JFK's 1960 address to the Southern Baptists, "he knocked religion out of the campaign as an intellectually respectable issue."  By making religion a centerpiece of his campaign, Mitt Romney simply doesn't have that option.  And for that, he has no one to blame but himself.

To which I can only say, indeed.

Discussion of Hope for the Truth

There is breadth and depth to the truth.  Lies and departures from the truth, which seem so complicated, are perhaps fundamentally simpler.  At best, they can only form a thin veneer over the truth.  Most everyday lies can only lightly shade the truth slightly.  All the things that hold up the lie are actually the same truths that hold up integrity.   Many Mormons, including certain LDS spokespeople and Mitt Romney, are uncomfortable explaining their religion.  That is true and remains true.

Interestingly, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy does not have an entry for "lie" or "honest."  It does have an entry for "truth" written by E.J. Lowe which covers the more recent history of evaluation of the truth, which concludes with a statement again pragmatists and sophists saying,

fortunately! --it seems unlikely that philosophers will ever entirely give up asking "What is truth?" and assuming that the answer is something of importance.

"Fortunately," indeed!  Wikipedia has a very nice entry on lying, which suggests that the two main reasons for lying are avoidance of punishment and predation.  Seeking political office is a form of predation.  Everyone knows how hard it is to maintain an ethical and truthful center while selling a part of yourself in employment or selling a product; it is difficult to imagine how one sells one's entire being as required in politics while maintaining any ethics at all.

Conflating avoidance of punishment with avoidance of the truth is pretending at innocence.  Romney isn't a child; he knows perfectly well that his Mormonism may cost him the presidency.  It is a punishment, a denial of a goal, that he wishes to avoid.  Unfortunately, in pretending that he doesn't know the truth, he makes himself ineligible for the trust of the nation on the more fundamental issue of integrity.  As the pretending plays out amongst the actors on the national stage (friends, foes, competitors, media) the non-sense it generates will continue to grow and probably sink him (he is likely already sunk).  Only hope for the truth, and the strength and courage required to withstand the vortex of non-sense, could have limited, boundaried, and ultimately subdued the other kinds of questions about his religion.

P.S.: Elsewhere on the Web

There was more good stuff on the internet than I could fit into my many links.  The NPR news blog has a little fun with an election debating Jesus and Satan.  Aside from the fun, the article is also a well written overview of the issue with a little more emphasis on taking a second look at Huckabee and his religious statements lately.

Breakfast With Pandora took a kinder, gentler approach as compared to my schoolmarm finger-wagging, evaluating the differences between Mormonism as explained by moi (yup, I'm quoted) and his own Protestant-based beliefs, ended with:

As for Mitt Romney, I think he should be proud of the story that his faith puts forth.  None of us know for sure what the absolute truth of the universe is.  It would be nice if we could be both proud of what we believe, and yet not arrogant about it, either.

It would be nice indeed.

Enchanted (spoilers)

So, off to see the new Disney pic, Enchanted.  Hody-hum, check that off the list of things to do.  At first I didn't see the movie as having anything to do with hope, because I hadn't been thinking of romantic love as something meaningful to desire.  This only reveals the extent of my stoic mistakes; of course everyone would wish to fall in love, and not just fall in love but a deep, trusting, (proper) enmeshment of love.

Nonetheless, I still see romantic hopefulness as at best an ethical distraction.  At worst, a lie: If you are good, very good, your prize will be not just the love of your life, but a love from a human which surpasses all human love.  And there is another lie, an old lie but one which is becoming ever more popular in the youth culture of despair, which is that nothing else about the quality of your life or yourself matters, if only you fall in love.  You may be a 15-year-old strung out on crack living under a bridge, but if you fall in love, there's the ticket!

This fuels a push to be willing to give up anything, even your life to the dangers of incautious sex, to chase after that idea of love.  Or, the opposite, the young woman who sits in her apartment doing absolutely nothing (or singing to the forest creatures, oy), waiting for a romance that will make her life meaningful.  All of this would make a woman like Jane Addams, who didn't wait for romance to solve anything and is one of my all-time heroes, roll over in her grave for sure.

What is the right answer?  Mulling this over, I keep coming back to an idea introduced in Eric Fromm's The Art of Loving.  He gives, I think (I don't have the book in front of me) three things that are essential to love and one of them is knowledge.  Love requires knowledge.  So part of the right answer is the answer the movie arrives at: dating.  At the end of the movie, the fairy-tale woman come to reality isn't in happily ever after, she is dating.  Perhaps she'll even get a job and find some other meaningful activities in her spare time.  The real-life woman who has jumped into the fairy-tale is not only walking down the isle, at the altar she throws away her Blackberry- a sign of the complexity, but also of the information and knowledge, of her real life.

In writing this I read the musings of a couple of other folks on the net:
John's Movie Blog
Breakfast with Pandora

Looking Back

Despair is a luxury I gave up early in life, and with it went backwards-looking hope.  I hadn't realized that hope for the past was something that a person could be missing.  The past is signed, sealed and delivered.  No crying over spilt milk.  Move forward.

Recently a friend insisted on expressing sadness for those sad things that periodically crop up in my life history, and the danger of the insistence signaled the absence of hope.  It isn't the first time a person has insisted there has been sadness in my history, an obvious fact.  However, the danger can usually be written off as a reaction to the over-enmeshment of a person who insists that I express the sadness they are feeling about my life.  Catch the tennis match?  I - they - me.  It's easy to get confused.

Taking out the emotional tennis game, the sadness itself is dangerous.  Sadness is not despair, but it is leaning a bit over the cliff that borders the requirements for daily functioning and sanity.  One very well could fall in.  Stoicism, as always, is the chain-link fence erected by the appropriate safety authorities.  Up go the cautionary signs: "Stay away from the edge!"  There is no crying permitted here!

One could say that hope is the safety line a prudent person should use, if they wish to go near the edge of the cliff.  But there is no safety; you could fall in.  You will fall in.  Hope is the safety net that you cannot see until you think it is too late.  Not even a net, but just a puffy white cloud that seems too insubstantial to handle such a crisis.  Sadness is not enough to bring one of the great Christian virtues to bear; it takes the grave existential danger that is despair.  It is not just that hope is not safe; hope cannot be safe.