SUMMARY
OF LEARNERS INTRO & VOCAB
“The close relationship between language and religious belief pervades cultural history. Often, a divine being is said to have invented speech, or writing, and given it as a gift to mankind. One of the first things Adam has to do, according to the Book of Genesis, is name the acts of creation:
‘And the Lord God having formed out of the ground all the beasts of the earth, and all the fowls of the air, brought them to Adam to see what he would call them: for whatsoever Adam called any living creature, the same is its name …’
“Many other cultures
have a similar story. In Egyptian
mythology, the god Toth is the creator of speech and writing. It is Brahma who gives the knowledge of
writing to the Hindu people. Odin
is the inventor of runic script, according to the Icelandic sagas. A heaven-sent water turtle, with marks on its
back, brings writing to the Chinese.
[Author’s note: Actually, the
father of Chinese writing is Fu Hsi, a legendary Emperor who ruled 5,000 years
ago. He found the eight key trigrams
that make up the supernatural I Ching, Book of Changes, based on markings he found on a tortoise
shell.] All over the world, the
supernatural provides a powerful set of beliefs about the origins of
language.
“Religious
associations are particularly strong in relation to written language, because
writing is an effective means of guarding and transmitting sacred
knowledge. Literacy was available only
to an elite, in which priests figured prominently. Echoes of this link reverberate in English
vocabulary still, through such connections as scripture and script, or the
reference to scripture as Holy Writ. And
there are widespread sanctions for human action expressed authoritatively in
phrases of form: ‘for it is written’.”
David Crystal,
Editor, Cambridge Encyclopedia of
Linguistics, Second Edition, Press Syndicate of the University of
Cambridge, Cambridge, England, 1997, p. 388.
[There follows a very succinct
literary history of the major world religions].
“… The name of the Sanskrit alphabet is Devanagari, which means ‘pertaining to the city of the gods.’ Hieroglyphic, used by the ancient Egyptians for their formal documents, carved in stone, means ‘sacred stone writing’ (the Egyptians also had the hieratic and demotic scripts more generally used on papyrus). They believed that writing had been devised by Toth, the god of wisdom, and the Egyptian name for writing was ndw-ntr (‘the speech of the gods’). The Assyrians had a legend to the effect that the cuneiform characters were given to man by the god Nebo, who held sway over human destiny. Cuneiform was produced by pressing wedges into wet clay tablets (the name means ‘wedge-shaped’); it was used by the Sumerians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, and other peoples of the Mesopotamian region from about 4000 B.C. to the time of Christ. The Mayas attributed writing to their most important deity, Itzamna [god of wisdom]. The lost prehistoric writings of Japan was styled kami no moji, or ‘divine characters.’ As late as Christian Middle Ages, Constantine the Philosopher (another name for Cyril, apostle of the Slavs) is described as having had Slavic writing revealed to him by God.” Mario Pei, The Story of Language, The New American Library, New York and Toronto, 1965, p. 96.
We might conclude
(despite the Bible or because of it?) that human intellect began with the word
spoken to the world. In this word spoken
face to face, in its righteousness and wisdom lay our merit and honor. It would take much more effort to maintain
its original brilliance, once tarnished with lies.
Whereas human
corruption must have worsened in the written word, which subtracts us
from the world and whose lies and stupidities are just empty scribbles across a
piece of paper or pixels across a computer screen, indistinguishable from our
truthfulness and wisdom except by their long term effects.
There may have
been pre-deluge city dwellers, imitated by later Cretans and perhaps the
first transmitters of the Hindu Vedas, their last cultural survivors on
Earth? Their cultures of origin may have
restricted the written word to accounting functions: inventories, astronomy,
astrology and calendars, and only allowed sacred stories to be memorized in a
spoken format. Might this have been a form of cultural Darwinism, culling the dross
and preserving the inspirational? “Learn
it by heart if it is beautiful, truthful and elegant enough to inspire the hard
work of memorization and recitation; forget the rest.”
Now that we have
not only speech and writing but also recordings and transmissions of them in
almost unlimited quantities, what mode of expression, supplementing both, would
place us before our deepest merit and truth, lend us the goodness of
sheep like that found in a wolf pack?
We use an
ordinary expression for a tool that kills, “a weapon.” Take the phrase “learning tool.” What a clumsy turn of phrase. And, of course, it lacks a popular
contraction.
Besides, picture
a weapon. See it clearly? Now picture a learning tool.
“A what?” You might ask, “There is no such thing. Did you mean a book?”
Does this
mind-exercise tell you anything about our culture bias? In a sensible world, we would call guns ‘fire
harms, side harms and long harms.’
Regular soldiers would belong to the ‘Harm Forces.’ All this would be quasi-obscene weapon-talk;
and superior Learning tools would be familiar to everyone.
Info elites
regulate the form and content of language. George Orwell concluded that this was the
info elite’s (my term) first priority task: regulating the info proletariat’s
communications. Money, news, sports, food, war, education, crime: all these are
alternate forms of communication―info symphonies, choruses, dances
and solos that each culture orchestrates.
National
sovereignty is the control that info elites exert over their host proletariat
both inside and outside the national membrane.
Such communications may range from a free mingling of info
proletarians under minimal control, to the totalitarian simplification of
chaos, during which popular discourse is reduced to the grumble and crash of
cannon.
In Gaia: The Human
Journey from Chaos to Cosmos, Pocket Books, New York, 1989, p. 64, author
Elisabet Sahtouris quotes Ivanovitch Vernadsky, a Russian geologist who called
life “ … ‘a disperse of rock,’ … a chemical process transforming rock into
highly active living matter and back, breaking it up and moving it about in an
endless, cyclical process.” If life is nothing but a ‘disperse of rock,’
then our civilization is just another chemical dispersal.
In peacetime, the
political membrane that rings each society lets information (people, money,
data and goods) flow through it more or less freely. In
wartime, that membrane becomes inflamed with fire, blast, flying debris and
radio static—or the latest, most lethal equivalents. No signal but murderous propaganda can
penetrate it. Get caught consorting
openly across this membrane in wartime and get punished. All cosmopolitanism is strangled.
Learners will
dissolve these membranes, once and for all, by providing diverse peoples with a
common planetary language.
Esperanto, Ido,
Volapuk and a succession of verbal patchworks have been developed, which
give undue advantage to dominant language groups. Glossa is a recent linguistic artifact, about
which I know little beyond the name.
We needn’t study one of a half-dozen languages spoken by a handful of travelers, (Chinese, Spanish, Arabic or English: it matters little). Instead, everyone should learn one language supplemental to their native tongue. Ideally, this language should be different from current languages: linguistically neutral. Dominant language groups should gain no unfair advantage using it.
Its grammar
should incorporate the best rules of every known language. Each language group develops its own
idiosyncratic solutions to grammatical problems: some elegant, others unnecessarily
complicated. This complication is a
compound of accent and grammar with many exceptions and irregularities to
memorize. The tortured pronunciation and
spelling of English, the arbitrary spelling and gender-differences of French
and other languages, the varied intonation and endless written characters of
Chinese: these difficult-to-learn features make good examples.
Those idiosyncrasies
are essentially defensive language barriers, shibboleths: linguistic placentas
drawn around an embryonic proletariat to protect it from alien contamination. If we speak with an accent, or write with too
many of spelling or syntax errors, we betray ourselves to the locals as a
foreigner and potential enemy.
Academic dogma
compels people to learn the trendiest foreign language. The latest one is English―soon
to be followed by Chinese. Hapless
students are hammered into absorbing foreign languages, even after their window
of linguistic adaptation has slammed shut.
Few language students practice
often enough (very often) the foreign language skills they need in the real
world. Instead, they forget those
valuable lessons because they were taught them after they had grown too old to
retain them. Thus precious Learning time gets wasted: a major goal of weapon
education.
We can work around such wasteful circumlocutions. We could teach language skills to children when they were younger and more receptive.
In the future,
preschoolers will learn an international
manual sign language that may spread to every corner of the globe. Students will practice it on a daily basis in
their own communities inside and outside the classroom. Foreign travelers will find fluent signers at
every stop along their way.
I have learned,
since, that there are major variations between American Sign Language (ASL) and
British Sign Language (BSL), much less between them and Chinese Sign
Language (CSL), as well as others. These
are fully mature languages, capable of transmitting very complicated, abstract
information. I had in mind a simpler form of communication, one that would allow
international guests and hosts to put each other at ease with a simple,
non-threatening code.
According to the Cambridge Encyclopedia
of Linguistics, Second Edition (David Crystal, Editor, Press
Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England, 1997, p. 227),
such a language already exists. It is
called Amer-Ind, developed by Madge Skelly for use by the orally
handicapped from a system of gesture codes common among American Indians.
They used it to
overcome language barriers. The
brightest young Learners – setting out on journey quests, as the best
have always done – had to make their way across five hundred nations, each with
its own language, (2,000 nations and languages if you include South and Central
America).
Modern Learners
could adopt Amer-Ind as a basic traveler’s language. Everyone could learn this language relatively
easily since almost half its gestures are understandable without training. It could evolve in its own good time into
something much more subtle and refined.
Young children pick up new languages with surprising ease during their window of linguistic adaptation. Normally it remains open from birth until around their third birthday. It doesn’t matter how many languages children learn during that period or how difficult they are. It’s amazing to watch most infants pick up proper grammar, extensive vocabularies and complex social conventions without apparent effort.
Not only does an overwhelming majority of children learn
all the exceptions and irregularities contained in these languages but also the
deliberate errors of their local dialect, almost faultlessly after a
while. A performance that cannot be
duplicated by most of those instructed in foreign languages and native grammar
later on in school.
When it comes to
learning new languages, small children with an IQ of eighty points or less can
outperform the most advanced theoretical black box that our best linguists can
come up with. This finding should
inspire Learners’ conviction in human genius—at least once we discard
humanity’s worst and most cherished habits… like not teaching children
languages when they are most receptive. This is a typical failing of weapons
education. We don’t send children to
language school when they’re young enough to profit from it.
At the earliest
age, Learner children will appreciate many more interesting and pertinent
things. Adult Learners will enrich
their young minds to healthy saturation.
We will accelerate every child’s flight from misery, promote greater
affection and distribute survival necessities more evenhandedly. In so
doing, we will raise a generation of prodigies the likes of which we
have never seen. They will unlock many
powerful mysteries for us.
A new written
language should complement the hand-signaled one. If possible, the time taken to learn it
should be reduced and its transcription speed, accelerated. Its calligraphy should be as beautiful
as Sanskrit, Hebrew, Arabic and Khmer.
Every page of it should be a stunning work of art. We
should eliminate paper and ink, and replace them with a direct manipulation of
light, a natural chemical transformation (for example, fingertip salts
on a treated surface) or some superior (therefore easier to use) recording
medium. Our devastation of forests for
paper is horrific and should be stopped.
A strange idea keeps
recurring to me. We must bring the media
back to the message, and not the other way around. Whatever that means …
Perhaps we'll
revert to what may have been the writing method of prehistory. I speculate that broad leaves, fresh-picked
off trees planted along broad boulevards, were scribed with a fingernails or a
sharp spine, again off the tree.
Take a moment to imagine
those ancient towns, stretching out along riverbanks long since gone beneath
the waves: their magnificent avenues, divine and historical statuary, lavish
bazaars, fountains gushing sweet water without limit, parks so magnificent you
would not have believed, fat fish from seas spilling over with them, and their
whole pedestrian landscape as well laid-out as the best of ours today.
The more
sophisticated a written culture, the more ephemeral its written medium. Look at us, with our pixie pixel
sparkle. Not much ancient
literature remains, because really ancient documents were written on
tissue-thin stationary. All except the
mud-clay tablets of bloody empires, upon which our military cultures fixate,
baked into ceramic when their imperial capitals and libraries were overrun by
war-honed enemies, and burnt to the ground, unread.
Imagine those
broadleaf trees growing huge along street-sides and parks. Pick a leaf and write your message by
scratching words onto it with your fingernail.
Might it have been tree bark, peeled from the trunk like
fine-crust pastry? Especially cared-for leaves could have been
dried and pressed into pages of legible text.
After deep time,
this medium would have turned into illegible dust; its scribes and their secret
wisdom, ‘prehistoric.’
They may
perhaps have grafted engraved leaves back onto smart trees and made
copies. Transmitted them to other plantations? Draw me the limits of their accomplishment,
once they had fully understood how living species grow.
Our churches
mass-organized were prototype corporations, peddling organized religion by
eliminating religious diversity in favor of their preferred norm. Nowadays, international corporations wipe out
cultural diversity in order to market across diverse cultures their products
essentially worthless within that diversity.
In the future, user demand for high quality, custom crafted artifacts will dictate their production, and the obvious need for the benefits of religion will justify mass piety. Human culture will become as diverse and varied as we can make it; and everyone will pursue their topics of passion within that culture.
A new Golden Age
of Learning will emerge, in which every language group will share its depths of
meaning and mystery. An army of expert
translators will stand on-call from its networks. Employing them, other Learners will relish
the finer nuances (new-awnss,
subtle gradations) of their mother tongue.
The gross cultural conformity
our corporations foster will come to a screeching halt. Diversity will become a Learner imperative,
and cultural mediocrity will cease to be the passkey to every consumer’s purse.
Adolph Hitler, Mein
Kampf, Vol. II,
Chapter10.
“It is certain that
in the future the importance of the individual states will be transferred to
the sphere of our cultural policy. The
monarch who did most to make Bavaria an important center was not an obstinate
particularist with anti-German tendencies, but Ludwig I who was as much devoted
to the ideal of German greatness as he was to that of art. His first consideration was to use the
powers of the state to develop the cultural position of Bavaria and not its
political power.”
[Author’s note: If
this Hitler quote troubles you, my deepest apologies. Please consult Quoting Hitler out
of Context].
Peter
Hall, Cities in Civilization,
Pantheon Books, New York, 1998, pp. 7-8.
“Indeed, in this process of constant change,
the most advanced nations may eventually enter, may indeed already be entering,
that blissful state imagined in 1930 by John Maynard Keynes: a condition where
we no longer need care about the basic economic problem of survival that has
plagued the human race since its beginning, but are able at last to do only the
things we find agreeable and pleasurable.
“Keynes
unforgettably wrote: ‘Thus for the first time since his creation man
will be faced with his real, permanent problem – how to use his freedom from
pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure which science and compound
interest have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well’. ‘But,’ Keynes warned, ‘none of us can look
forward to this new and permanent golden age with any equanimity. For,’ he pointed out, ‘we have been trained
too long to work, not to enjoy. It would
be a huge problem for the ordinary person with no special talents, to occupy
him or herself without work; if one needed evidence, one could merely look at
the melancholy record of the rich minority anywhere.’
“We would need, as
so few of us can, to ‘take least thought for the morrow.’ We shall once more value ends above
means and prefer the good to the useful.
We shall honour (sic) those who can teach us to pluck the hour and the
day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct
enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they
spin.”
[Author’s note:
Could this wool weaving and these sheep be the emergency lifelines of a
literate civilization: its fail-safes against disaster in the long run?]
“But with this interesting
corollary that even Keynes could never have guessed at: these agreeable
activities may themselves become sources of income and of economic growth, may
generate new industries of a kind never known to earlier, simpler eras. Rich, affluent, cultivated nations and cities
can sell their virtue, beauty, philosophy, their art and their theatre to the
rest of the world. From a manufacturing
economy we pass to an informational economy and from an informational economy
to a cultural economy. During the 1980s
and 1990s, cities across Europe – Montpellier, Nimes, Grenoble, Rennes,
Hamburg, Cologne, Glasgow, Birmingham, Barcelona and Bologna – have become more
and more preoccupied by the notion that cultural industries (a term no longer
thought anomalous or offensive) may provide the basis for economic
regeneration, filling the gap left by vanished factories and warehouses, and
creating a new urban image that would make them more attractive to mobile
capital and mobile professional workers.”
Except that there
would no longer be ‘advanced cities’ or, by implication, ‘retarded’
ones. The Earth would transform
itself—from Planet Mogadishu on a Bad Day, where every city is just another sinister,
unpleasant and miserable stopover, except for minuscule ghettos of privilege;
into Planet (name your favorite city) where those same districts would shine,
each in its own way, like the best neighborhood of your favorite city.
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld