Fifty points for whomever gets the reference.
I actually want to talk about censorship, though I am hungry.
Now, my preferred method for approach censorship would be to write down, in very large capital letters, a certain four letter word. I'm not going to do that, however. If I do, I'd probably offend some people, damage my reputation (and more importantly, the school's) and so forth. I'm not looking to hurt anyone's feelings, which is certainly possible with the usage of words like, well...that particular one. In some ways I'm out to offend people, but that's another story.
However, just think about it, whichever four letter word sprung to mind. Look left and right, and then say it very quietly to yourself. See if the world ends. Take a few seconds, I'll wait.
Back? Good.
Well, I'm still here, which leads me to conclude the world in fact did not end. I even went onto BBC's website and haven't seen any disasters pop up in the last thirty seconds. So I think we call all agree that speaking such a word did not, in fact, hurt anyone. Those playing along at home will be quick to point out that I said strong language could hurt someone's feelings. The word 'hurt' is right in there, after all. Maybe it does, but it certainly shouldn't, and like most things, change starts in the individual.
Think of something that really offends you. Maybe it's people who talk in the theatre, or gay marriage. Maybe it's people who get offended by gay marriage. Just turn it around in your mind, get really worked up about it. Now, stop thinking about it. Think about chocolate cake, and if that's what offends you, think about ice cream. You're anger has probably disappeared already. Point is, if you're offended by something, there is no imperative for you to sit around and be offended by it all day. If you're watching tv and you see something that you feel is inappropriate, turn it off. Problem solved. If you're in a situation where you can't ignore it, then put into practice one of the lessons of kung fu: tough it out, and realize what's important.
Life is far too short, and people whose hobby is outrage are making this mortal coil less appealing. Language, like I said, can either work for us or be used as an agent of control, which makes censorship an incredibly dangerous thing. It is, of any kind, very subtle brainwashing, as the standards of 'decency' direct society in a very meaningful way. I'm sick of strong language or a breast on television being the end of the world, because it isn't--especially when there are several other ends of the world to choose from. Landmines and lack of food distribution are indecent. The use of torture also is. Words aren't if we choose to control them for ourselves.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Monday, January 7, 2008
chattering away the world
"[The general public] react to waves of expert truth which continue to wash over them with a sort of mute indifference. An uninvolved outsider might interpret this as the first stages of a purification rite. Indifference is often the manner behind which humans consider change. Given our history, it should be possible to decipher our intent. We are trying to think our way out of a linguistic prison. This means we need to create new language and new interpretations, which can only be accomplished by re-establishing the equilibrium between the oral and the written. This is a situation in which dictionaries should again be filled with doubt, questioning and considerations. They can then be used as practical weapons of change."
-John Ralston Saul, The Doubter's Companion
The power of language is one of my chief obsessions. Granted, one of many, but still. Language has been used as both a tool of oppression and revolution. In England after the Norman conquest of 1066, whether you spoke French or not determined your social prospects. What counts as a word can have drastic consequences. 'Bling' being included in the Oxford English Dictionary a few years back caused quite a lot of controversy, but it did help legitimize what's known now as African American Standard Vernacular. Thanks to actions like the bling inclusion, what's heard in a place like Harlem is now a recognized dialect of English, and I believe this was a huge step forward for racial equality. Some even argue that what language we use controls how we think; language preceding thought, so to speak.
So why should we care? Well...we speak it. We also write it, read it, and listen to it. Pretty obvious, I know, but stop all those activities for a day and see how far you get. We need language and we need it to be working for us as opposed to an agent of control. The above quote mentions the balance between oral and written language, and how important it is to maintain that. Oral is flexible and fluid, phrases and constantly invented and dialects spring up like...springs...in a faulty mattress...faulty mattress springs. Nevermind.
The written, by contrast, is static. It defines the language, attempts to control it. Now, you can speak the written and write the oral, it's more a method of approach. The written, in short, is boring. Dan Rather is the written. He doesn't speak, he communicates--he conveys information and nothing more. How we approach language determines, again, whether we can use it or if others can use it to control us. We're cut off from each other by specialist language, each profession having such a highly evolved dialect and a slavish devotion to it that it's become impossible to actually talk to each other.
It goes back to my previous post, with having all the answers. If you seek to define language in an exact way, become an agent of the written, you have all the answers, and we're up the creek. Take delight in how words are used, I say. Keep language flexible and surprising. Free how we speak, and let it be interesting.
Oh yes, and leave comments. I have doubts whether anyone actually reads this, and even less confidence that I'm making any sense, so I wouldn't mind a bit of validation at least on the former.
-John Ralston Saul, The Doubter's Companion
The power of language is one of my chief obsessions. Granted, one of many, but still. Language has been used as both a tool of oppression and revolution. In England after the Norman conquest of 1066, whether you spoke French or not determined your social prospects. What counts as a word can have drastic consequences. 'Bling' being included in the Oxford English Dictionary a few years back caused quite a lot of controversy, but it did help legitimize what's known now as African American Standard Vernacular. Thanks to actions like the bling inclusion, what's heard in a place like Harlem is now a recognized dialect of English, and I believe this was a huge step forward for racial equality. Some even argue that what language we use controls how we think; language preceding thought, so to speak.
So why should we care? Well...we speak it. We also write it, read it, and listen to it. Pretty obvious, I know, but stop all those activities for a day and see how far you get. We need language and we need it to be working for us as opposed to an agent of control. The above quote mentions the balance between oral and written language, and how important it is to maintain that. Oral is flexible and fluid, phrases and constantly invented and dialects spring up like...springs...in a faulty mattress...faulty mattress springs. Nevermind.
The written, by contrast, is static. It defines the language, attempts to control it. Now, you can speak the written and write the oral, it's more a method of approach. The written, in short, is boring. Dan Rather is the written. He doesn't speak, he communicates--he conveys information and nothing more. How we approach language determines, again, whether we can use it or if others can use it to control us. We're cut off from each other by specialist language, each profession having such a highly evolved dialect and a slavish devotion to it that it's become impossible to actually talk to each other.
It goes back to my previous post, with having all the answers. If you seek to define language in an exact way, become an agent of the written, you have all the answers, and we're up the creek. Take delight in how words are used, I say. Keep language flexible and surprising. Free how we speak, and let it be interesting.
Oh yes, and leave comments. I have doubts whether anyone actually reads this, and even less confidence that I'm making any sense, so I wouldn't mind a bit of validation at least on the former.
Sunday, January 6, 2008
it's all been done before
Most of you have heard of Aristotle. A great guy, by most accounts. Greek, born around 384 BCE. He was a philosopher, literary critic, scientist, doctor, and a host of other things. Even today his theories continue to inform and challenge scholars. I'm not going to talk about how great he was, instead I'm going to discuss what his most dubious and unacknowledged achievement: the European dark ages. Now, it's hard to pin nearly a thousand years of thought on a single person, and he obviously isn't solely responsible, but he had more to do with it than any other person.
Let me begin by pointing out that, while he was right about a lot of things, he was wrong just as often. Take, for example, his insistence that the heart was the centre of thought and that the brain was simply used to cool the blood. Before you get up all in arms about how everyone was wildly guessing about science back then, I'd like to point out that by this time both atoms and evolution had been proposed and largely accepted in that very same society, among others. He had seen the insides of corpses and how the nerves functioned, but went with his heart theory anyway. There are many other instances of things like this.
The Roman Empire fell in 476 CE, an event hard to imagine nowadays. Picture the Federal Government just stopping over the period of a few years, leaving the provinces to fend for themselves. It is more extensive than that, as the Roman Empire at that point was all there was to the West. Around five or six major civilizations were flourishing at this point, but contact was limited, so the Empire was it. It didn't happen overnight, of course. The decline began to snowball around a hundred years earlier. At that point there was a massive social upheaval with the transition to Christianity (made official by Constantine in 300 CE). As with any movement on such a large scale, there is the need to reject the old. The French Republic guillotined Louis XVI, and a large Christian mob burned the Library of Alexandria. The knowledge was seen as blasphemous, and much of it was pagan, but the fact of the matter is that by 476, a vast majority of Classical knowledge had been lost. If it were not for the Arabic empire in North Africa we wouldn't have any of it today. I'm not blaming Christianty, or Romans, or whomever. This is just what happened.
Individual states sprung up in the power vacuum, but a significant portion of it was filled by the Vatican. It held significant political sway and culturally speaking, it was the absolute word. However, the Church was, obviously, more concerned with spiritual matters and not fit to govern many aspects of day to day life. The fall of Rome, along with the general rejection of Classical knowledge, meant that the Vatican needed a new approach to day to day life, a new philosophy of earth, so to speak. Instead, they just went with an old one. Scholasticism is the term for this: Aristotelian philosophy and science mixed in with Christian metaphysics.
So yes, Aristotle was brilliant, but both he and those around him made the mistake of assuming he had all the answers. What followed was a millennia of "keep your head down, go about your work, don't worry about anything because we know everything". The investigative force, the will to question, all but disappeared. There was certainly a lot going on, but in terms of scholarship, it all but dried up in Europe. It took until the 16th and 17th century for things to pick up again. Galileo (the telescope guy), in a letter to a friend, recounted a public autopsy (performing any action on a corpse besides burial, especially cutting into it, was illegal during the middle ages). The man performing the demonstration discussed how the nervous system worked and drew attention to the large bundle of nerves going from the brain, and the one nerve thread going from the heart. Another man, quite learned, stood up during the demonstration and said something to the effect of: "What a fine demonstration, and if I weren't an Aristotelian, I would wholeheartedly agree with you".
So, when you have all the answers, what happens? Everyone goes to sleep, lulled by the false sense of security. So don't listen to Aristotle, don't listen to the guy who claims to know everything. Listen to Socrates instead. He lived a century before Aristotle, and was an extremely rude man who went around annoying people. He did it by asking questions, and always claiming ignorance. He knew nothing, he would constantly point out, but asked questions to those who said they did. He usually demonstrated they didn't know what they were talking about it.
So let's not have another dark ages, which is what I fear we are in right now. We're fed bright, shiny, entertaining answers from 24 hours a day news networks. We're saturated with information that has no use, bombarded with hidden agendas and opinions that are handed to us. We've forgotten what it's like to look someone in the eye and tell them they're wrong. So let's do that, let's listen to Socrates and have the questions instead.
Let me begin by pointing out that, while he was right about a lot of things, he was wrong just as often. Take, for example, his insistence that the heart was the centre of thought and that the brain was simply used to cool the blood. Before you get up all in arms about how everyone was wildly guessing about science back then, I'd like to point out that by this time both atoms and evolution had been proposed and largely accepted in that very same society, among others. He had seen the insides of corpses and how the nerves functioned, but went with his heart theory anyway. There are many other instances of things like this.
The Roman Empire fell in 476 CE, an event hard to imagine nowadays. Picture the Federal Government just stopping over the period of a few years, leaving the provinces to fend for themselves. It is more extensive than that, as the Roman Empire at that point was all there was to the West. Around five or six major civilizations were flourishing at this point, but contact was limited, so the Empire was it. It didn't happen overnight, of course. The decline began to snowball around a hundred years earlier. At that point there was a massive social upheaval with the transition to Christianity (made official by Constantine in 300 CE). As with any movement on such a large scale, there is the need to reject the old. The French Republic guillotined Louis XVI, and a large Christian mob burned the Library of Alexandria. The knowledge was seen as blasphemous, and much of it was pagan, but the fact of the matter is that by 476, a vast majority of Classical knowledge had been lost. If it were not for the Arabic empire in North Africa we wouldn't have any of it today. I'm not blaming Christianty, or Romans, or whomever. This is just what happened.
Individual states sprung up in the power vacuum, but a significant portion of it was filled by the Vatican. It held significant political sway and culturally speaking, it was the absolute word. However, the Church was, obviously, more concerned with spiritual matters and not fit to govern many aspects of day to day life. The fall of Rome, along with the general rejection of Classical knowledge, meant that the Vatican needed a new approach to day to day life, a new philosophy of earth, so to speak. Instead, they just went with an old one. Scholasticism is the term for this: Aristotelian philosophy and science mixed in with Christian metaphysics.
So yes, Aristotle was brilliant, but both he and those around him made the mistake of assuming he had all the answers. What followed was a millennia of "keep your head down, go about your work, don't worry about anything because we know everything". The investigative force, the will to question, all but disappeared. There was certainly a lot going on, but in terms of scholarship, it all but dried up in Europe. It took until the 16th and 17th century for things to pick up again. Galileo (the telescope guy), in a letter to a friend, recounted a public autopsy (performing any action on a corpse besides burial, especially cutting into it, was illegal during the middle ages). The man performing the demonstration discussed how the nervous system worked and drew attention to the large bundle of nerves going from the brain, and the one nerve thread going from the heart. Another man, quite learned, stood up during the demonstration and said something to the effect of: "What a fine demonstration, and if I weren't an Aristotelian, I would wholeheartedly agree with you".
So, when you have all the answers, what happens? Everyone goes to sleep, lulled by the false sense of security. So don't listen to Aristotle, don't listen to the guy who claims to know everything. Listen to Socrates instead. He lived a century before Aristotle, and was an extremely rude man who went around annoying people. He did it by asking questions, and always claiming ignorance. He knew nothing, he would constantly point out, but asked questions to those who said they did. He usually demonstrated they didn't know what they were talking about it.
So let's not have another dark ages, which is what I fear we are in right now. We're fed bright, shiny, entertaining answers from 24 hours a day news networks. We're saturated with information that has no use, bombarded with hidden agendas and opinions that are handed to us. We've forgotten what it's like to look someone in the eye and tell them they're wrong. So let's do that, let's listen to Socrates and have the questions instead.
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