Category Archives: Philology

A Personal Note from Correspondence About Language and Conflict

27 Thursday Dec 2012

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In my school life, S., I have been enthused about “English language and literature” — actually, creative writing — from the day I learned to sound out words (phonetics) and raise my reading skills well above grade.

That launch, of course, was a long time ago.

Today in the post-9/11 environment, I’m positioned to narrow down into relationships in which language and language behaviors promote or inaugurate conflict by way of mind. Fields relevant: anthropology, linguistics, psychology.

We’re a wild species, also gregarious and aggressive, both gifted and cursed with intelligence, imagination, and language: we need to know how some things work or are working to improve the odds of our own survival and the concommitant appreciation of the qualities of it.

I should revisit my resume / timeline for the purposes of contracting, consulting, or grant getting because this area in “conflict studies” needs an approach by a mind oriented toward aesthetics and poetry rather than a clinician looking primarily at social science statistics. There has to be a feel for the human, even the fearsome human, to find the channels away from destruction and humiliation and enslavement.

It is within the power of language to grant license to horror, and with a world made small by many technologies — in communications, manufacturing, shipping — language, a God-given ability developed around mouth, ears, and mind, becomes a cultural and social technology of the greatest interest.

We don’t need to “control language” the way we do, say, a shipping schedule — and woe to propagandists of all kinds — but we may need to get into the evolution a little bit and work away from some behaviors and ideas.

Reference: “Accusation in a Mirror”

12 Wednesday Dec 2012

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Philology, Politics, Psychology

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“One of the most astonishing discoveries in the history of genocide studies was the Note Relative à la Propagande d’Expansion et de Recrutement (the “Note”), a mimeographed document found in Butare prefecture in the wake of the Rwandan genocide. The Note, which draws from Goebbels, Lenin, and others, is a manual of the rhetorical methods that could be used to inflame ordinary people to attack their countrymen.”

Marcus, Kenneth L.  “Accusation in a Mirror.”  Loyola University Chicago Law Journal, 43 (2012): 357-393.  PDF published via Loyola Law eCommons.

In practice, the technique has become visible and easy to spot in peace / hate-peace group chatyping.

As awful as the consequences intended by “Accusation in a Mirror” (AiM) may be, the technique fits well with other forms of disingenuous speech, hate speech, and sophistry.  Put it one the same page as “blood libel” and common slander.

Motivation?

Somebody thinks they’re going to get something by way of the sheer beauty and force of their will.

Such lose their conscience, their humanity, their restraints, and while they and their people may pay for it, disingenuous speech, motivated, so I suspect, by the want of self-aggrandizement powered by hate, leads always to great suffering.  When the practitioners are stopped in their tracks, related suffering abate, but it takes a while to understand this.

Related Reference

Truman Web Design.  “Kangura magazine.”  I believe I found this one the web at least as far back as 2006.  The home page starts this way: 

“Foreign invaders, plundering the rich earth of Rwanda.  Bloodthirsty parasites, who prefer exploitation to honest labor. An elite minority, enjoying influence out of all proportion to their numbers—ferreting their way into the highest-paying jobs, monopolizing the banking system, the educational system, even the very government to ensure the soft life for themselves and their kin.  Scheming, shrewd and crafty.  Without scruples. Without conscience.  Fearsome, loathsome, cunning as a cockroach.  Intent on the destruction of every hard-working member of the native people to whom the country rightfully belongs. If they were in your country, wouldn’t you want to be warned? Wouldn’t you read the newspaper each morning,wouldn’t you keep all the radios on?”

 The Truman Web Design-prefaced site (the subset is a “~” extended location) on the use of propaganda in the Rwandan Genocide also discusses, in addition to Kangura Magazine, RTLM Radio and media coverage of the event.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) maintains a similar report online: “Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda.” Similar sub-section: “Propaganda and Practice”.

Leets, Laura.  “Experiencing Hate Speech: Perceptions and Responses to Anti-Semitism and Antigay Speech.”  Journal of Social Issues, 58:2 (pp. 341-361), The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, 2002.  The abstract notes (this is a partial quotation), “A content analysis of the accounts produced the following patterns: (a) short- and long-term consequences mirrored a three-stage sequence found within other traumatic experiences; (b) respondents described motives as enduring, not situational, states; (c) the most common response strategies were passive; and (d) participants often sought support. The discussion focuses on implications for interventions that may mitigate negative consequences of hate speech.”

FTAC: Conflict, Language, and Pricks

07 Friday Dec 2012

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A Facebooker said, “Conscience does not work in vacuum. Impact of incidents do occur over our reasoning and may even our truthfulness get shattered.” [STET].

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We may be more organized and programmed by the possession of language than we know.

The behavior itself is transparent (unless deliberately observed); the arrangement of associations between symbols may be taken for granted (“Everyone knows that . . . .”) until interrupted by a work of art, poetry, or war; the social grammar — what is good to say, what is not, and when or under what circumstances — of a language (language culture) has also a transparency to it as the earliest embedded thoughts, positions (attitudes), and behaviors (from how to greet to when to lie) have a “low level” or essentially subconscious life in the mind.

Those who study or work with acknowledged or well accepted as existing psychopathology (DSM present and approved, one might say) frequently apply a term to whether a person afflicted (e.g., by bipolar disorder; schizophrenia; narcissistic personality disorder, and so on) recognizes the presence of his problem. If he does, we say he “exhibits insight” and that’s helpful; if not, “he hasn’t a clue” — and others may be invited or obligated to intervene for the health of (now) the patient and for the defense of everyone in his path.

As psychology takes an interest in the life of the mind of the person, the field enjoys a convenient restriction: the concern is with the person. However, the person may turn out a leader of others, one well enough to charm and seduce, and then demonic, wicked, or wild enough to make a mess. The smaller figures — e.g., Charles Manson — are easily the subject of conversation; the larger ones — e.g., Constantine — become a little less touchable.

We have to find our way.

I feel the species will tend toward health and survival on a cooperative basis elicited by, no better word than this one, pricks.

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A smaller world with more potent weapons bodes ill, but the challenges may be met by a rapidly globalizing consciousness — in large numbers, we’re working with one another across innumerable barriers and miles, and that’s going to have an effect on normative behaviors and on the invention (through language) of a global culture sufficient to rein in or shape what in earlier days would have been more isolated events with equally isolated cultural antecedents.

FTAC – Culture and Language – On the Power of a Fairy Tale

27 Tuesday Nov 2012

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I had mentioned the fairy tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes”* as a favorite template in talking about conflict and power, and the person responding wondered about how quickly young minds were manipulated even by the design of children’s literature.  One might call that a power-centered view, i.e., that adult authors have set out to subjugate the next generation of children (God willing), albeit perhaps to best suit the dictates, whims, and sadism of an autocrat (God forbid it).

🙂

I don’t think that’s how language works through our species — my inclination is to view language universally as a natural and naturally evolving behavior fit to essential ecological and larger environmental conditions.

In regard to that, I cannot say it emphatically enough: read Dan Everett!

Here’s the post from The Awesome Conversation:

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I would dismiss “manipulation” out of hand as regards language uptake. In the way of words, or what I refer to as “language metonymy” (I feel awfully alone Out Here, lol), it calls up unnecessary associations, e.g., paranoia, victimization, dominance. Basically, the term may collide with a more instinctual tendency toward autonomy and confidence in human’s sense of “locus of control”. 

In that one may regard, and should, human language as part of the natural expression of the species, I happen to believe that “uptake” — the learning of a system of sounds — starts when the ears become active in the womb. We’re that smart! 🙂:) Sounds in that experience may not have association with objects, much less complex ideas, but the important repeated ones may be remembered (eh, mama? papa?) and further associated with their emotional affect. I’m suggesting, not telling, I don’t think anyone knows how it feels to be minus three months old. Nonetheless, it seems reasonable that our common, species-wide, language experience starts with the onset of hearing.

Let’s skip a lot of ground and go to those first legends. In that every culture is first and foremost a language culture (there’s something to argue right there, but stay with me a moment), each has a way of composing its existence and in both practical and teleological realms and through its language, by which I refer to all human symbolic expression, the culture passes itself through to its children. I believe that’s as simple as it gets and partially sustained in “uncontacted peoples” and the most isolated of the world’s remote tribal peoples (who have used their mouths and ears to make themselves more comfortable — or to survive — in their own world invented partially in mind in the carving out of their own way compatible with their environment and pleasing or sensible to themselves).

About “The Emperor’s New Clothes”: “Andersen’s tale is based on a story from the Libro de los ejemplos (or El Conde Lucanor, 1335),[2] a medieval Spanish collection of fifty-one cautionary tales with various sources such as Aesop and other classical writers and Persian folktales, by Juan Manuel, Prince of Villena (1282–1348). Andersen did not know the Spanish original but read the tale in a German translation titled “So ist der Lauf der Welt”.[3] In the source tale, a king is hoodwinked by weavers who claim to make a suit of clothes invisible to any man not the son of his presumed father; whereas Andersen altered the source tale to direct the focus on courtly pride and intellectual vanity rather than adulterous paternity.”

(Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor’s_New_Clothes)

1335!

A European writer, probably familiar, doubtlessly, with Aristotle’s dictum to “educate, entertain, and delight” pulls from an older Spanish tale some components to create a little entertainment, so says the author of the Wikipedia piece, about “courtly pride and intellectual vanity”, which is not far from themes involving narcissism and “malignant narcissism” associated with autocracy and conflict. I would chance that the magical element — invisible clothes — goes farther back in the Spanish experience and may have an interface with the “Golden Age”, but I would need more library, lol, and possibly Spanish to get that trace.

Long answer: it’s not “manipulation” with fairy tales, so much as the practical demands of extant realities and related aesthetic and intellectual conclusions and preferences. Working within Hans Christian Anderson’s talent and love was some transmuting process accessing, in essence, a literary base larger than the one with which he was born. By way of his experience and inspiration, we have a long-loved, long-lived story about power and vanity, and it has wide and continuing and natural resonance in those it reaches.

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How may conversations about language affect language?

Heisenberg’s principle has been well acknowledged.  With language in particular and its relationship to three fundamental elements of mind in conflict psychology — consciousness, self-consciousness, and conscience — it has special significance: observations about language and language behavior, much including criticisms as well as the most clinical, objective, and theoretical ideas, needs must be entertained in language by minds engaged in conflict and processing what they hear through their own arrangements of symbols.

An illness that starts with a microbe at least recapitulates itself for a while, generally long enough for research to tackle with fair predictability the behavior and pathways taken on the way toward weakening and destroying in whole or part a living system.

By contrast, a conflict planted and generated within the mind and both nourished and sustained by language culture through its arrangement of nouns, legends, tales, stories, reports, poems, plays, songs, dances, paintings, etc. — package it up and call it “language metonymy” — stays a moving target with many ways of responding to challenges posted by new information.  In perhaps an evolutionary way, some changes may be entertained and embraced while others remain  favored and either functioning or pleasing by way of the symbolic arrangements and constructs so maintained.

Perhaps language is the music of the mind, founded on repeated sounds memorized, parroted, reinvented, and endlessly expressed.

We employ language functionally, of course, but perhaps we enjoy it most, I think, for how it works on the heart, colors our lives, and lends or shares with each a little bit of what is great and legendary within and within potential.

Related Internal Reference

*“FTAC – A Great Mission”.  Conflict Backchannels, November 26, 2012: “The fairy tale I’ve played up in relation to contemporary conflict has been “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” which gets at the essential components involving corruption, power, and speech. http://deoxy.org/emperors.htm Those who follow my themes will recognize in it the “malignant narcissist” and the related and fearful pandering and toadying involved as well as the innocent bravery of the child who says what is plain.”

FTAC – A Great Mission

26 Monday Nov 2012

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Philology

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The fairy tale I’ve played up in relation to contemporary conflict has been “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” which gets at the essential components involving corruption, power, and speech. http://deoxy.org/emperors.htm Those who follow my themes will recognize in it the “malignant narcissist” and the related and fearful pandering and toadying involves as well as the innocent bravery of the child who says what is plain.

I’ve remarked this to “M” with reference to development: with age (plus Facebook and blogging), I’ve become both more aware of geospatial variables in improving qualities of living anywhere as well as culture-wide variables that either abet or impede the creation of more survivable societies.

In tactics, that comes down to looking over a neighborhood, town, or region plus population, assessing its suffering and asking what can be ameliorated, improved, or introduced toward a greater and benign general good.

In the values components, integrity counts as may a benign will to include more people in more good things, and then added emphasis on apportioned responsibility, so that neglect or willful blindness are not allowed to remain contributors to greater sorrows.

Regarding the life of the mind in literature: the discussion is more important than the illustration that promotes it, but it’s the illustration in the head — play, poem, story, legend, myth, instruction, song, painting, dance — that transmits cultures across generations.

Uncontacted peoples and those “contacted” but remaining within state protection essentially live with less challenged (uncontacted) or softly defended (because they are welcome to leave when they are ready) language.

A primitive Amazonian tribe of fewer than 150 souls (reference: linguist Daniel Everett) may go many generations — even for something like forever — left alone in the modern world. Nations involving millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions haven’t so cozy an option — and there we are back with a geospatial or area-wide approach to change (in the direction of a higher level of integration of many systems, both by way of physical infrastructure and of the underlying structure of the mind that finds expression through art and language).

FTAC – A Note on Losing Friends Over “Politics”

16 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Philology

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A friend of mine lost an old friend today over the surfacing of anti-Semitic expression and obsession.

The malignant poison the ears of their subjects to align them, create dependence in them, and to use them, eventually, for their own limitless aggrandizement.  It’s a form well known and one becoming better known, understood, and resisted  worldwide.

Herewith my response to my friend:

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In a secular society in which people mix freely for years and enjoy company, bigotry within people has a kind of latency. Subjects don’t come up; on occasion, someone makes an off-color remark or joke, and we politely gloss over it. When nationalism, European style, asserts itself in response to political discomfort and drift, then politicians may play on latent prejudice to develop social energy for themselves. The fascist/socialist impulse within a leader may find the Roma (gypsies) or Tutsis (Rwandans) handy for the projection of grandiose and violent delusions, which, if he garners support, he may make real.

Demographic and succession pressures within the monotheist evolution maintain tension between Christians, Jews, and Muslims, and through the mouths of malignant leaders, each may be made foil to the other. If Israel were gone, Jihad (as defined by the violently strident) would still have (and would hear repeatedly about) the “crusader west”.

In any case, as conflict makes the news, these things come out, and I hear the same complaint from Jewish acquaintance about losing old friends in relation to discussion of events of the day. My answer, eternally the response of good parents worldwide: “were they really YOUR friends?”

A common complaint that makes its way to my ears involves the social enforcement (or leverage) of in-group norms. I phrase it that way because with an independent Muslim friend telling the tale or an independent Jew moaning about practices on the Far Left, the pattern is the same: the group providing social integration — camaraderie, business, good vibes — to a member may lean on the same to go along with bad ideas and plans. Some leave confronted with that kind of enforced conformism and exploitation; some, perhaps because of how they’re built or where they live or the arrangement of their dependencies, stay to go along with crimes, some no more than disingenuous ranting and sophistry, some more recognizably criminal in scope and murderous intents.

This is tough territory. We enjoy friends for many reasons, and we forgive friends many differences in relation to ourselves, but we need also good friends and reliable friends and, post-adolescence, friends more inclined to involve us in good things.

It’s those friends who will be with us far down the many roads.

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My friends on the Right, and this intuitively speaking, would place the evil within the neighbor.  All that’s needed is the Great Leader to bring that evil out in them.  I feel differently, as perhaps a writer (wannabe) should: I think we carry around a great many signals or “signal potential” in our minds, and in certain conditions, well known and commented on after WWII, a particularly manipulative personality — the Pharaoh reincarnate of the day — can develop this potential fascist language and related drive in the hearts of some listeners who may then grow the enterprise into an ugly piece of large political machinery.  To forestall, the targets of “malignant narcissists” may need some armoring among the target constituents sharing the same geopolitical space, i.e., apprehension of how they’re about to be used.  The social machinery capable of delivering that insight where it’s needed doesn’t yet exist.

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A Little Wisdom Having To Do with Language Uptake

14 Wednesday Nov 2012

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“When a mother nourishes an infant, she imparts language too and with it, possibly, the earliest and most deeply embedded attitudes, beliefs, and corresponding speech behaviors and related manners.”

The statement chatyped in passing earlier today may be more easily stated (done) than proven, and yet if “war begins in the heart” as some say, then it begins the arrangement of symbols in language metonymy, i.e., the poetry of the culture and its methods of encoding and decoding speech.

Says I.

🙂

FTAC – A Note on Anti-Semitic Bigotry and Sophistry

06 Tuesday Nov 2012

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11/6/2012/1212H

J. — wade into academe and you wade into a flood tide of anti-Semitic ranting.

What do you want to do about it?

Report it to CAMERA, Honest Reporting?

Kick it around in the peace groups?

For any close reader, the sophistry shows up in the first paragraph: “Just recall the final TV debate as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney competed to prove who could pander more to the pro-Israel side while treating Palestinians as if they didn’t exist.”

This is well-recognized false witness and slander, but because it targets a people and a state — the Jewish People and Israel — there are no legal remedies. The cultural remedy is to make ourselves honestly known through ourselves around the world.

More we cannot do.

God, although I know you don’t believe, or Nature, and that should suffice, inspired in us a great mission in a world much larger than ourselves, and we have been on it for 5,000 years — perhaps I should say only 5,000 years — and we have eased, fully, close to 3 billion people to monotheism, not that 2.85 billion give a rip about thanking us for their better tracks.

That, of course, is their problem.

I may publish this on BackChannels, it makes me so angry and, as the Jew-baiting writer might calculate, a little bit helpless as to how to approach the repair of this form of bigotry and hate.  Such behavior in language stems from a deeply embedded social grammar — it is not a reasoning behavior but one rigidly set in attitudes and emotions — acquired by children in their earliest years, including probably some weeks in the womb with their ears turned on.