On coming home, I found the essay and read it over. I’ll admit, its conclusions are not earth-shattering—basically “it’s complicated”—or inarguable, but it was enough to spark and fuel some pretty interesting discussion. So, I’ve reproduced it here. If you agree or disagree, take offense or whatever, feel free to post a comment. Please keep in mind that I’m no historical linguist or essayist, the citations are patchy, I like commas, the sun was shining in my eyes, etc.

Language and thought control

In his most popular work, 1984, George Orwell introduces the language of Newspeak: “a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc [the totalitarian governing power]” that will “make all other modes of thought impossible… literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.”¹ The language is based on English, but with significant changes, including a more regular system reliant on prefixes and affixes, an emphasis on shorter, easily pronounceable words, and a drastic reduction of vocabulary. Orwell seems to think this last feature most important in controlling speakers’ thought, “each reduction [is] a gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the smaller the temptation to take thought.” By shrinking the choice of words and simplifying their construction, Newspeak aims to shift the locus of control over language from the higher brain sectors to the larynx, away from any unorthodox or seditious thought, making them inexpressible. By 2050, Newspeak is to be the one and only spoken language in the lands ruled by Ingsoc.

Despite being a work of fiction, the threat that language can be co-opted or replaced by those in power is considered as real outside of 1984 as in. Mamet insists that “names are powerful,” that “the assignment of nicknames, the application of jargon is an understood tool for the manipulation of behaviour.”² Noting the increase of unnatural, government-made terminology in the United States since late 2001—weapons of mass destruction: “overlong, clunky, and obviously confected”—he warns against a shift “from the conscious into the automatic,” worried of a linguistic take-over very much like the one in Orwell’s dystopic England.

Are fears of Newspeak justified?

The fear of political control through language is based on the implicit assumption that “the language spoken by the individual determines the way in which that person thinks”³, a concept known as linguistic determinism. If true, this concept, distilled from the work of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, would certainly be cause for alarm; Newspeak, once adopted fully, would limit thought and expression eternally.

However, linguistic determinism does not stand up to scrutiny. If thoughts were determined by language, how is it that new words come about? How could “nigger” (“nigga”) and “queer,” both potent derogative words, have changed over the past few decades into friendly terms of address or exclamations of pride? In truth, the relationship between language and thought is not unidirectional, but two-way, social reality both shaping and being shaped by its language. “Sociolinguistic conventions have a dual relation to power: on the one hand they incorporate differences of power, on the other hand they arise out of—and give rise to—particular relations of power”⁴.

The examples of “nigger,” “queer,” and “sexist”⁵, are doubly important: they are shifts in language use introduced by minorities, groups deprived of much political influence, often working against established powers. While examples such as these do not eliminate language as an influence on thought (and, indeed, many of the same social causes that gave rise to sexist aim, wrongly or rightly, to reform language and, in doing so, common conceptions of gender⁶), they do diminish it. Constraining language does not necessarily constrain thought, thus fears or fantasies of absolute control and stagnation of ideology by means of language alone are less likely than Mamet or Orwell propose.

Language and empire

Language alone may not determine thought, but it is a vehicle for and a body of ideology, a way of exercising power⁷. Those in positions of control—over nation-states, corporations, armies—as well as many of those over whom they hold sway, act accordingly: idioms are imposed, language changed through coercion, use warped on the fulcrum of political power. Phillipson quotes a Spanish report written for the Queen in 1492 that proposes the use of language as “a tool for conquest abroad,” noting that “language has always been the consort of empire, and forever shall remain its mate”⁸. The difficulty (likely, impossibility) of engineering thought through the manipulation of signifiers (words) may not be overcome, but spreading a whole system of signs—a language—as a means to indoctrinate or undermine another group of people has been attempted time and time again. Could Newspeak ever become the only language in a large empire? Is political power effective in enacting and maintaining a language? Just how great a factor is power in language change?

Japanese occupation

Consider Miyawaki’s study⁹ of the harsh Japanese colonial language policies in Taiwan, Korea, Micronesia, and occupied territories in China and in Southeast-Asia during the first half of the twentieth century. These policies were rigid and explicitly aimed at eradicating non-Japanese cultural and linguistic influences, as well as impressing Japanese values on the colonized people. In Taiwan, this began in the mid-1890’s by legally

stating that the fundamental objectives of common school education be the provision of moral education and practical skills to Taiwanese children, thereby cultivating in them attitudes of Japanese nationalism and also leading them to be well versed in ‘Kokugo’ [the national language i.e. Japanese]…

More drastic revisions such as the abolition of the native language (Chinese) teaching and the integration of the educational system and curriculum with those of homeland Japan were made in 1937 and in 1942 respectively.

The intent of such policies was stated more forcefully during the Pacific War. Japan pressed for the use of Japanese not only in schools, but at home; they hoped to “diffuse Japanese, gradually limit the use of European languages and eventually abolish them” in Southeast-Asia, “to stamp out European/American thoughts, and establish an Oriental-minded culture.” Positive assimilation, policies that were to nurture Japanese culture in the colonies, quickly became negative, punitive and brutal. Miyawaki finds that many native-born students under Japanese rule recall being publicly humiliated, sometimes beaten, for speaking any tongue other than Japanese.

Yet, for all the influence and coercion, both positive and negative, exercised by the Japanese colonizers, the proportion of Japanese speakers to non- in the former colonies today is small to none. Miyawaki notes a variety of small linguistic changes, notably borrowing, pidginization, and a bilingual minority, present to this day. These effects, however, are shallower and more localized than what one would have imagined a large, modern empire would be capable of over fifty years. Miyawaki concludes that colonial power is only one among many influences that can affect “language ecology.” Much as with language and thought, the relationship between power and language is less direct than anticipated (in Japanese policies). Although the Japanese policies did alter “the society, culture and psychology of the ruled,” they did not determine it, and did not succeed in imposing a foreign language on a conquered people over the long term.

Linguists urge readers to consider a myriad of factors and constraints that may cause language change. In their introduction to Language and Power, Kramarae, Schulz, and O’Barr present a variety of opinions on how language and power may interrelate, so many different avenues of study and interpretation that they seem to through their hands in the air, claiming that an “adequate understanding… may be several sociolinguistic years away.”¹⁰

Ancient Akkadian

Ostler gives much weight to the influences outside of direct political control in his historical analysis of language change.¹¹ He is quick to dismantle J. R. Firth’s assertion that “world powers make world languages,” pointing out that the Germanic rulers of Europe that succeeded the Romans were only a slight influence on the Romance languages still in use to this day, and further, that the Romans themselves were incapable of imposing Latin on their subjects in the east, where Greek remained the common tongue through the hundreds of years of Roman rule. Ostler finds explanations for lasting language change reliant primarily on political power, “based on military conquest or commercial dominance,” lacking; even “total conquest, military and spiritual, is not always enough to effect a language change.”

Ostler gives the example of Akkadian, the primary language of the impressive Assyro-Babylonian empire. Akkadian was “preeminently a language of power and influence,” a literary standard, the single language of an empire lasting almost two thousand years. The influence of the empire helped spread its language, the uptake of the Akkadian in lands outside of Babylonian control carried largely by prestige (and others’ eagerness for the relatively new technology of writing), until it became a well-established lingua franca among the many people and powers of the time. Yet, the language was overwhelmed by Aramaic, a language spoken “mainly by nomads,” a community radically different from, and hostile to, the Babylonians, with “no cultural advantage… highly unlikely to set up a rival civilization.”

Stranger still, this change in language came at the zenith of the empire’s power. Having conquered much of the area after decades of successful war, a policy of separating conquered people was instated, intending to unify the populations by “cutting them off from their traditions” while acculturating them to Assyro-Babylonian culture—importantly, its language. This policy of division and assimilation eventually displaced some 4.5 million people over three centuries, an act of immense power. Unfortunately, this policy did not have the intended effect. It backfired, encouraging the spread of Aramaic and undermining Akkadian as a common language.

Since the Aramaeans were the largest group being scattered in this way, when other western Semites, such as Israelites or Phoenicians, found themselves transplanted, they could tend to find themselves speaking more and more like their new neighbours.¹²

Aramaic quickly became the dominant language, and remained so, during the following centuries of the empire and long after its collapse. Both Assyro-Babylonian and Japanese policies (some 2500 years apart) shared similar goals and failures despite being backed by powerful, long-established cultures and military forces. The triumph of Aramaic over Akkadian is an extreme demonstration of the weakness of political influence on language.

Determined not by power alone

The wealth and might of a political power does not determine the spread and stay of the language it speaks, and may well, as in the case of Aramaic and Akkadian, exist separately from it. Through means insidious, duplicitous, or explicit, political powers may mean to affect language and, through it, how people think. However common the belief that language molds thought, it does not appear to, certainly not the the degree feared by paranoiacs or wished for by propagandists. The influences of language on thought, of power on language, are complicated, two-way, and subject to many other forces. Political power alone cannot guarantee the abolition or spread of a language, nor can it always succeed in altering it.

(If you’ve not already seen WALL·E, you may not want to continue reading this post: it may spoil certain surprises, and won’t make much sense.)

The two robots in Pixar’s WALL·E represent, roughly, two kinds of personal computers: the PC (in the old sense: a desktop computer running Windows or maybe, GNU/Linux) and the Apple Macintosh (running Mac OS).

EVE has a glossy white shell that resembles an iPod or MacBook. As Sancho has mentioned, EVE was designed in part by a designer at Apple. While the superficial similarities are easy to find, you can find others if you’re willing to stretch a little.

Much like an Apple computer, EVE looks elegant and packs more power than you’d first expect. EVE is quite dedicated at performing the task she is designed to do. She goes to an expensive maintenance area, all white walls and frosted glass, to be repaired by experts. It’s really obvious when EVE gets scratched or smudged, and it takes effort to keep her looking clean (MO, the cleaning bot).

WALL·E, the PC, is made of worn and noisy machine parts. He works with what’s laying around, upgrading his eyes and treads, as well as adding non-standard enhancements—a lunchbox. WALL·E is not easy to repair, his boot-up sequence is slow, and data recovery can be an suspenseful ordeal, as EVE discovers late in the film. He seems even to invite bugs to crawl around him.

While WALL·E is not as modern and shiny as EVE, he’s more flexible and the only one capable of playing video games.

Alright, perhaps I’ve stretched the analogy too far. Nonetheless, it does seem difficult to deny that there is some unusually tight cross-branding going on in WALL·E. There are a number of nods to Apple in the film, some more conspicuous—WALL·E watches movies on a video iPod—than others. (This may excuse one of the failings of my analogy: that WALL·E plays the Mac start-up sound when he has charged his solar battery.)

I don’t find this kind of product placement particularly cute. Yes, EVE is a more sympathetic and business-friendly spokesperson for Apple than the smug Mac dude, but it’s odd to see this kind of marketing in a movie that uses the ubiquity of a corporate brand as a sign of decadence and ruin.

I do choose to interpret the love between the two bots as a hopeful message for nerds and platform-zealots everywhere. Like EVE and WALL·E, Mac and PC users can learn to get along.

Update: Seems I’m not the first to see the PC/Mac parallels.

The pressure to read canonical or acclaimed books is something I believe many of us feel, those of us educated enough to feel poorly educated. It pushes us to pursue books that may be dull and difficult to get through. We have been convinced that these books are worth the effort, if not for the ideas or experiences they give us, then for the illuminated company in which we’ll be once we finish the book.

It is hard to admit to yourself (more so to others) that this is bullshit. Slogging through the Aeneid or The Wealth of Nations will not make you a better or more authentic person. You’re likely to get as much out of the Cliff’s Notes. Your patience, schedule, and personal habits won’t allow you to become as ridiculously erudite and well read as you’d like to be. If you don’t enjoy it, don’t read it (unless it’s for a course or some such).

I’m working at this myself, trying to accept the limits of my own attention, to be realistic, to pursue books that I am interested in—and capable of finishing. So long Complete Stories of Franz Kafka. Hello Neal Stephenson.

If only it were so simple. I’ve just finished reading Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene and feel a little disappointed. It’s well written, but not exciting: I had heard and agreed with much of what he writes about well before I read it. This is something I’ve felt after reading many of the books I’ve chosen for myself lately. The characters, phrases, and ideas are already reasonably well known to me; drained of novelty, I only really enjoy the small refinements and differences that haven’t managed to escape their original source. I finish these books, but slowly and for the satisfaction of knowing—later, bragging—that, yes, I’ve read that book.

It’s this reading-to-have-read-it that I was trying to move away from in the first place. I’m still a victim of my own self-conscious book selections, though now not because of a self-hating drive to become well read, but because my selections are too familiar. To some extent, I already know much of what I’m reading, and this takes a lot of the fun out of reading it. Sure, Here Comes Everybody and Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions had some neat ideas, but they were only refinements of ideas I’d already seen or gleaned from other essays and books. I got even less from The Prestige (I’d seen the movie several times) and re-reading Ender’s Game.

The interest that motivated me to obtain and start these books faded quickly, and somewhere between the front and back cover, reading them began to feel like a chore. I did not enjoy them as I thought I would due to spoilers or redundancy. This isn’t because I’m all-knowing, but because I’ve over-applied my new standard.

(I wonder if Brottman covers this in The Solitary Vice. Her insights on reading are quite keen.)

I sound whiny and pompous, don’t I? I do. This frustration is not as bad as I make it out to be; I think that choosing for myself is still better than following some literary consensus against my own patience and curiosity. The Selfish Gene was not nearly as arduous as was my World War I-like struggle to completing The Brothers Karamazov. There were many ideas of interest in Dawkins’ book, though they seemed to have been packed in at the end. (I should have read The Extended Phenotype instead.)

I need some non-Lucas noise to throw-off my book selection methods just enough to keep me interested. Perhaps I should try reading books recommended to me by others, a compromise of my own tastes, as they perceive them, and theirs (a received opinion, a should read).

Traffic is moving well. I’m in a car with Dr. Sandro Rizoli, somewhere between Toronto and Hamilton, Ontario. There are coolers full of blood in the back seats and trunk. “If someone rear-ends us right now,” Dr. Rizoli says, “they’re going to feel really bad: there’ll be blood everywhere.”

He jokes, but he takes car accidents very seriously in his work as a surgeon. Car accidents are one of the leading causes of life-threatening injuries, what doctors call trauma. Of all the Canadians admitted for trauma each year, 6500 die. It is the leading cause of death for people under the age of 45 in Canada and worldwide.

“Trauma patients die from two things: head injuries or bleeding,” says Dr. Rizoli. Head injuries and brain damage are tough, but “patients that don’t stop bleeding are worse. No matter how well we stitch them up, if they keep bleeding, they won’t get better.”

Dr. Rizoli is the director of trauma research at the Sunnybrook Institute and an assistant professor at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on bleeding and trauma. He is also my dad, which is why I am in the car with him. He needs someone to carry the coolers.

Read the whole story at Inkling. Thanks to Alf, Anne, and, of course, my pops for helping me out with it.

On the white board he sketched a rough plot: two curves, with amps along the x axis and voltage along the y. “Which of these would you say has the greatest power, the green or the orange?”

Green because it’s taller. Duh. Next question.

If you know what you’re doing, you’re not going to fall for that. You know that power can be found by taking the area under the curve. From the look of it, the broader orange curve will have a greater area, so you put orange down as your answer.

Now, if you’re really paying attention, you’ll notice that the scale along the y axis isn’t linear, but logarithmic. This means that, while the green curve doesn’t seem to be any more than two times taller than the orange one on paper, it’s actually representative of a much greater difference between the two. Since the green curve reaches far higher than the orange one, it covers a greater area. You answer green.

Green is the correct answer. If you’re dumb or lazy you get it and if you’re smart you get it, but if you’re in between, you know just enough to get it wrong.

Kelly’s punchline: “But I think that’s what they were going for. They wanted to get people who were smart enough to trust with guns, but dumb enough to go to Vietnam.”

We could call this kind a porridge filter: it selects those that are not too ignorant, not too knowledgeable, but just right.

How common are porridge filters in the real world? Are they more often products of design (as Kelly suspects of the above case) or accidents? What other cases could they be useful?

By the way, if I’ve messed up my physics, let me know.

Update: I came across the following in Neal Stephenson’s The Confusion.

“What is the Intelligence Test?” he demanded to know, and swept the curtain aside.

“A private joke,” said the annoyed Padraig.

But Jack saw good reasons to explain it, and so he said, “Cast your memory back to when Fortune had set us ashore in Surat—”

“I remember it every day,” said Surendranath.

“You stayed there to pursue your career. We fled inland to get away from the diverse European assassins who infested that town, and who were all looking for us. Soon enough, we came upon a Mogul road-block. Hindoos and Mohametans were allowed to pass through with only minor harassment and taking of baksheesh, but when it became known that we were Franks, they took us aside and made us sit in a tent together. One by one, each of us was taken out alone and conducted to a field nearby, and handed a musket—which was unloaded—and a powder-horn, and a pouch of balls.”

“What did you do?” Surendranath demanded.

“Gaped at it like a farmer.”

“I likewise,” said Padraig.

“So you failed the Intelligence Test?”

“I would rather say we passed it. Van Hoek did the same as we. Mr. Foot tried to load the musket, but got the procedure backwards—put the ball in first, then the powder. But Vrej Esphahnian and Monsieur Arlanc loaded the weapon and discharged it in the general direction of a Hindoo idol that the Moguls had been using for target practice.”

“They were inducted,” said Surendranath.

“As far as we know, they have been serving in the armed forces of the local king ever since that day,” Jack said.

…re-purposing scientific material to literary purposes without ever speaking that kind of spavined pop science-ese. The kind of lame language that says something like [holds up digital camera]: “You know, if you could see the tiny grooves that have been carved on the chip of this digital camera, why they would stretch to the moon and back three-and-a-half times!” Which is an attempt to invest wonder in a dry, industrial process. It’s the Carl Sagan school of trying to pump mystic scientism into the dryness of physics. There’s just something phoney-baloney about it because it’s taking an intellectual process that’s very much about methodically stripping the mystery out of natural phenomena and then trying to re-mystify it by approaching it from some more friendly sensibility. And there’s just something bogus about that. It has the bogusness of an adult telling a pre-pubertal child about the birds and the bees without talking about the burning needs of sexuality.

He slid back. How did it get there? How long had it been there? He hadn’t made the bed in days and had been sleeping in it for days. A pairing knife hidden under his pillow.

When I see There Will Be Blood, I feel like I’ve watched a fantastic film. P.T. Anderson’s film is so rich in so many ways. I embarrass myself with the strength and number of adjectives I use when describing it to friends. Yet there is a strange feeling that, as much as I’m keen to shout my love for There Will Be Blood from the rooftops, I’m wrong; that I’ll find it tapped and drained.

The third act? When I first saw it, I enjoyed it. I went to see the film a second time largely to confirm that I did. I read reviews damning it, giving good reasons why it did not work with the rest of the film. I came in the second time with a long list of poor choices made by Anderson, of reasons why it crippled an otherwise outstanding masterwork. Daniel becomes a ridiculous caricature of himself. His way of dealing with his son, and with Eli are not in keeping with who he was. The dialogue is full of holes; it feels like Anderson speaking through the characters. The film ends abruptly, unfairly. And so on. I had read up. I was set to take the final act apart.

I didn’t. I couldn’t. I fell into the movie, immersed until the credits. The consistency of character, the radical shift in visual and emotional tone—my awareness of these things dissolved. Whatever seemed a failure on paper, worked wonderfully on screen. I did not leave the theatre feeling cheated or confused. I left smiling. “That was one goddamn helluva show.”

But I’m still not as confident of the film’s greatness as I should be. Perhaps its shocking third act overwhelms me; a magnet spinning my critical compass. Perhaps it’s the way the film squirms around, making it difficult to fit it into some interpretive harness. Perhaps I feel guilty for having liked it so much more than every other film I’ve seen recently. Perhaps I lack enough confidence in my own tastes, or am too aware of how they change.

I don’t know what it is that makes me hesitate. As much as I have enjoyed There Will Be Blood, I have a nagging feeling that I may, after future viewings, come to regret thinking so highly of it. As Vern says (via Rumsey Taylor):

Anderson’s There Will Be Blood has the feeling of greatness. It has the smell of greatness, the texture of it. It flirts with greatness. I’m pretty sure it even left the club with greatness last night but there is no way yet for us to know if it got lucky with greatness. We can only catch up with it later and ask it. If it turns out later that it was only faking it I’ll have to admit it had me fooled.

The language used on that wiki page (when I read it, at least) is quite deferential and polite. The overtly zealous or militant remarks many people seem to expect from evangelists aren’t present. This may be because it’s a wiki, edited by a large number of people, evangelists or not.

Beyond this, I’ll leave the ethics and etiquette of evangelism aside. What interested me was how I was able to see Cialdini’s “weapons of influence” in the article. I’ve paraphrased the article’s key strategies below, with short bits from Influence in parentheses (many of which I clipped from Wikipedia):

• Be a likable, good friend.
  (Liking: People are easily persuaded by other people that they like.)

• Be sure to reinforce your Christianity constantly and in a positive manner.
  (Association: People conflate things that occur together.)

• Give help and advice. “Don’t forget to show them the scripture, that way he or she can get the idea that it’s not your own thinking but God’s.”
  (Reciprocation: People tend to return a favor; Authority: People will tend to obey authority figures.)

• Show that Christianity is normal, that other intelligent, friendly people participate in it.
  (Social Proof: People will do things that they see other people are doing.)

• “You may ask them to attend church with you, however, if would be best if they come along partly on their own.”
  (Commitment and Consistency: If people commit to something, they are more likely to honour that commitment—even if the original incentive or motivation is removed after they have agreed.)

• Do not falter. Stay on message; don’t go off-brand or risk driving customers away.

While it may seem damning that these are the same techniques people use to sell cars, I do not mean to say that what’s being sold here is bad, only that the techniques being recommended by the article have been shown to be effective. The approaches it describes are not naïve or overconfident, but practical, proven methods of gaining compliance. Evangelists aren’t so self-righteous that they (all) become asshole literalists. They have practical concerns and methods too, like all other salesmen.

(Does this in any way relate to the ignorance and confidence I sense when reading things written a long time ago? Did the medieval and modern pre-Freudian worlds feel just as capable and cheated when came the Renaissance and the theory of the unconscious?)

I was not conscious of my “inability to grasp… any very large portion of human knowledge.” This I admitted to myself only when I became a teenager. That until I was fifteen I felt excluded from the adult world—of driving and long division—rather than feeling simply unready or uninterested seems, in retrospect, a little odd. At what point should I feel cheated of my childhood naïveté, my lack of responsibility and bills?

Being an adult child (as a child—whatever) was a confusing thing.