I was just reading a pretty good essay at Aeon on the idea that language shapes thought, so that the speakers of very different languages think, at a deep level, in different ways. In the modern discourse this is called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Here is Sapir himself, writing in 1929:
The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group … The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached … We see and hear and otherwise experience largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.
I consider this undeniably true, to some extent. What that extent might be I do not know, and I think this is one of the biggest and most interesting questions about human society. And while the older theorists mostly focused on languages in the big sense – English vs. Chinese vs. Nahuatl – I am fascinated by the ways political and social movements rely on cultish vocabularies, leveraging new expressions like "death tax" or "microaggressions" to focus their supporters' minds.
But that is an ancient question that goes back at least to Plato and I am not likely to contribute anything new on this blog.
I want to write about something else that interests me: the extent to which my thinking has been shaped by my understanding of time. In the modern world our chronological sciences – astrophysics, geology, archaeology, history – equip us with a past vastly deeper and richer than what any humans ever had before, and I wonder what this does to us. One reason this interests me is that while just about everyone I interact with speaks English, I do not have the impression that most Americans have thought very much about deep time what it might imply about us and our world.
Various anthropologists, notably Vine Deloria, have argued that pre-literate peoples live with a short, simple model of the past: there is the remembered past, stretching to their great-grandparents' time, and beyond that there is only myth. This is not strictly true; for example the Haudenosaunee Iroquois had a detailed oral history that reached back about 300 years to the founding of their league, and the Aztec had an oral history of similar depth. But three centuries is still a paltry thing compared to the chronicles at my disposal, and it does seem to me that oral chronologies all very quickly reach the vague time of the gods and the first people. To me, many of my contemporaries are like this.
For example, even many well-educated Americans think that diamond engagement rings are "traditional," when they did not become common until the 1950s: the time of the great-grandparents, again. I was baffled by the common sentiment that 2016 was "the worst year ever": anybody remember 1942? 1917? 1864? 1348? Ok, so maybe people who said that weren't really making any historical claim. But I still think this matters. I think it is highly consequential that so many Americans think we live in uniquely bad times, and I think it is obvious that you can only believe this by completely ignoring the past.
We have an extended argument in the US about whether living standards or wages have fallen since 1970. To that I say, I remember 1970. Few houses had air conditioning, and air-conditioned cars were a rare luxury. Millions of the working people who appear in this comparison had little black and white televisions that showed three channels, and everyone had one rotary phone. I am not convinced that a comparison of current lifestyles to those of 1970 has any meaning. Which is not to say that our lives are better, just that the economies and societies are too different for a comparison of this or that detail to tell us much.
But let's look farther back. It is common to imagine that we live in a decadent age when change is blocked by deadening bureaucracy and nobody is doing anything exciting and new. But I personally find reading about the supposedly dynamic era of nineteenth-century America depressing. We were a nation of speculators and get-rich quick schemers and almost all of those schemes failed. Read through American property records and you will come across one failed development scheme after another: towns that there platted for two hundred homes but never grew beyond five, factories that ran for only a few years before going bankrupt, mines that bottomed out, railroads that never carried any freight and soon reverted to grass and trees. The American west is full of ghost towns, places that prospered for a few years because of a mine or a trail junction but then vanished. When some new place did thrive –Chicago, say – it was often because industries used up working men by the thousands to enrich the capitalists who owned it all.
Meanwhile in the South the end of slavery led to new regimes of segregation and oppression and hundreds of thousands of black people ended up as sharecroppers who were materially worse off than they had been as slaves.
So whenever I read that things used to be better, I roll my eyes.
I feel like I am constantly encountering sentiments like "these days having a child is a real economic burden" or "these days it's really hard for people to create political change", and I struggle to keep from laughing. You don't think babies were a burden to peasants or hunter-gathers? Imagine you were part of a highly mobile band that spent six months a yeard roaming your territory in search of food, and now imagining it with a hungry baby strapped to your body. And as for political change, many, many human societies went for centuries without having any at all. So if your reform plan has a one percent chance of reaching fruition, you are miles ahead of almost everyone who lived before 1800.
I also come across, from time to time, the sentiment that this or that problem "can't go on." This makes me think of medieval Europe, which went on for about a thousand years without ever solving any of its big problems, and was for all of that very creative of new institutions and amazing works of art. Problems can, in fact, go on for centuries, and when they really can't go on any more they will stop.
Keep going farther back. Yes, our world is violent, but paleogenetics is making it ever more clear that our ancient history consists mainly of conquest and genocide.
People want to claim that their tribes or nations are "native" to wherever they happen to live, but 1) there are no pure "peoples", just mixtures with different degrees of time depth, and 2) nobody has lived anywhere for very long in geological time. The Japanese mostly came from Korea about 2500 years ago, driving the previous inhabitants out of the nice parts of the islands, then decided they were autochthonous. Nobody is autochthonous; nobody belongs to a pure race. In the long view, everyone is an immigrant mongrel.
People are upset about climate change, but the changes we have seen, and are likely to see over the next century, are paltry compared to the comings and goings of the Ice Ages, which our kind survived. Keep going farther back and you see even greater catastrophes: asteroid impacts, titanic volcanism, the constant recycling of the earth's surface. There is no solid land.
Again, all of this matters to how I see the world. I refuse to lose sleep over climate change that is certain to be less consequential than changes that humans dealt with just fine; I can't take seriously arguments about preserving cultures or nations that are recent, short-lived islands of (relative) stability in a vast ocean of mixing and change.
I believe that the evolutionary history of humanity refutes the Abrahamic religions in a decisive way: we are animals, and there is no step you can point to in our history when we obviously acquired souls. I think the fundamentalists are right to think that imagining an earth only a few thousand years old is essential to maintaining their faith intact. As John Ruskin put it, the "dreamful hammers" of the geologists have chipped away at Christianity. The billion-year time scale of geology renders our story a recent and small thing in the earth's history, not its central point.
Looking out into the cosmos, we see the 14-billion-year story of trillions of galaxies, each with millions of stars. So far as we can tell, life is rare, intelligent life extremely rare, but with two trillion galaxies over 14 billion years those things can be vanishingly rare yet still exist in millions of examples.
If I have any religion, it is on the cosmic scale; if there is a divine being, it is running a very, very big experiment of which we are a tiny, tiny part.
Many people, I know, find this sad, or alarming, or empty. I don't. I find it amazing to be here at all, I feel blessed to live in a time with so much knowledge and understanding. I revel in knowing all this history, from the formation of galaxies to the movements of the continents to human migrations to small changes in the details of human life. I do not think I inhabit a world impoverished by the decline of faith, the loss of myth, the collapse of tribal communities; I think I live in a time of wonder. And I am certain that I live in the healthiest and safest human era, with a better chance to live to 80, and to see all my children outlive me, than anyone ever had before.
For me, seeing in the long run changes how I feel about almost everything.
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