Language, Experts, and Hierarchical Ritualistic Killings

This is part one of a two-part essay. The next will try to tie language as a tool and the concept created by Rene Girard on cultural scapegoating

The sign of a truly totalitarian culture is that important truths simply lack cognitive meaning and are interpretable only at the level of ‘F.… You’, so they can then elicit a perfectly predictable torrent of abuse in response.    

Noam Chomsky

The last four years ordered us to march lockstep with an administrative/technological spiderweb we did not understand existed. That is, until our rights were taken away, and we were vilified for complaining. Like a soft rain, every pronouncement, every closure, every expert opinion that could not be challenged made this invisible web translucent, though not opaque. The intellectuals and politicians we believed would lead the charge in freeing us, willfully embraced their place in the web. Were deals made so they would not be devoured if they lured others into complacency and submission? Or perhaps those who believed their ‘intellect’ or status set them apart and above the rest of us revealed they were just as gullible - if not more so. Was Noam Chomsky’s call to intern dissenters merely gullible that this time, government officials were telling the truth? Or did he find it a convenient way to rid society of deplorables who responded with an “F…. You” to edicts they knew were wrong though they may have lacked words articulating why. 

For the next health/climate/military crisis, how do we ensure we follow our inner compass when bombarded by intellectuals, experts and celebrities telling us to march along for the good of the whole? How do we avoid being, in the parlance of Neo-Marxist commentator Professor James Lindsay, being mystified with calls to disorient us towards deadly rocks like the calls of the sirens? I do not and cannot propose ready-made solutions. I only propose a way of looking at things that may provide tools to respond with strength instead of confusion, defensiveness, or submission. For some, this essay may seem to pull together such random material that is nothing more than nonsense. To that, I say, be glad you don’t suffer a weekly happy hour with me where I ponder these concepts with a kind-hearted friend who is willing to help make sense of what I believe. With that said, perhaps this is best read with a cocktail in one’s hand rather than a coffee. In fact, grab the bottle. 

Man: The Animal that has Words  (the following material is drawn from Tom Wolf’s profound, profane, and funny book The Kingdom of Speech)

For much of the twentieth century, linguists followed Chomsky’s belief that language was anatomical. Somewhere hidden within the body was a language organ created by a chance mutation. So, like your heart or spleen, it developed along an evolutionary path. And just like every human heart beats in the same predictable rhythm, every newborn has a language organ with a pre-installed predictable universal grammar. Thus, Chomsky postulated that if a Martian schooled in linguistics came to Earth (or revealed themself if already here), they would find a universal grammar in the multitude of languages with only slight deviations among them. 

Challengers to Chomsky’s language organ and universal grammar hypothesis were few, presumably fearing the arrows his formidable rhetorical bow could launch. Like a superhero movie, the theory was undone, not by a famous academic, but by David Everett, a missionary turned linguist/anthropologist living with the Piraha tribe, a geographically isolated people in the Amazon basin. Before living with the Piraha, Everett trained in linguistics at the SIL Institute, a faith-based organization. The organization’s goal is not to teach a global language. It is the inverse seeking - to preserve an ethnolinguistic minority community’s capacity to build sustainable development of their own languages. You may remember Everett’s book “Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes" which became a bestseller. It is a two-for-one book detailing both his family’s experience with the Piraha people and the development of linguistic theories that created the firestorm. Everett realized the Piraha possessed a language so simplistic that it lacked a grammar structure for future or past events and only a word for “other day” and none for numbers. This meant they were always living in the present - a feat many of us spend inordinate time and money trying to achieve. So as jets flew thousands of miles above their heads with passengers contemplating planned future events, the Piraha planned each day in a continual present as their ancestors had for thousands of years. While some academics shoot arrows of Euro-centrism at Everett, they are misplaced. He has spoken of his great respect for their way of living. For him, Piraha people, and other people like them, do not have a sense of inadequacy living as they do; it is those with other languages who seem intent on creating it. 

It is worth stressing that the work of a man with a very big language was undone by people with a very small language. The Piraha accomplished this feat by doing nothing more than existing. Through them, Everett not only shattered the universal grammar theory, but he also “un-evolutionzed” that a language organ was hidden within our bodies, put there by random chance. It was culture that created Speech’s ability to describe past events (history), current events, and future events (planning), not a pre-existing template within the body. This meant Speech was a tool created by humans for their use, and what a powerful tool it is. As Tom Wolf writes, “Speech gave the human beast far more than an ingenious tool for communication. It also gave man the ability to create other tools, including the abstract world in which we live.”

By now, you are surely bewildered as to why the distinction between - tool versus anatomy - is relevant to the tyranny of the past four years. That is why I recommended a cocktail. Woozy theories are best understood when one is woozy—going back to the heart analogy. Your heart is a real organ in your body producing a real heartbeat. Both the cause and effect can be physically observed. Speech has been elevated beyond a tool to something with physical properties like a heart. A quote from 19th-century historian Thomas Carlyle reflects this elevation: 'In books lies the soul of the whole past time: the articulate audible voice of the past.' This is nonsense. The soul of history existed well before our ancestors were sketching pictures on cave walls much less writing with abstractions. Chomsky himself notes that there is always something behind words. That something is a truth eliciting the F&*% Y$@ that something is wrong when tyranny is present. While Chomsky uses a vulgar description, philosopher, mathematician, and logician Ludwig Wittgenstein states it in a more genteel fashion. For him, there are aspects of human existence that are so deeply personal or profoundly intuitive that they transcend the boundaries of linguistic expression. In other words, sometimes, there are no words to describe what the human condition knows to be true. This is why you may have recoiled at lockdown commands when others told you it was the 'moral' thing to do. You may not have had words to understand your why, but some aspects of your human existence did. It is also why you recoil at demands that we accept that someone can change biological reality or historical events by mere words. It is wrong even if you do not have the words to express it.

This is not to say the words have no effect. They surely do. During the past four years of madness, it was not a mute brute locking you in your home or deplatforming your views. It was those who possessed a mastery of the language tool that, in turn, bestowed upon them a belief of an inherent right to rule. As Tom Wolf noted, language is a veritable nuclear bomb, and it was a bomb unleashed upon us, the fallout of which we are still trying to clean up. See these people for what they are. Chomsky and intellectuals may believe they are better than you, but his pet theory was unraveled by a people who had no words for numbers or colors.

Concluding Thoughts

Shamefully, before the lockdowns, I gave little thought to the beauty of the Constitution. I took for granted the freedom of speech. I believed that though the ACLU had thorns, those thorns helped protect the beautiful rose that was free speech. Then, the lockdowns and mandates burst forth. The rose petals fell, and we were left with the remnants of a beauty that once was. But this is a good thing. We outsourced the protection of our freedoms. Now, new growth has emerged where the average sane person understands the importance of the Constitution. But more than free speech is at stake. We have also put our jury system into jeopardy by allowing the administrative agencies to swallow up this role. A right to a Jury is an essential societal function. It is a check on the system that reflects the collective reasonable person against the tyranny of the state or a powerful opponent. This notion of a reasonable person is represented by judicial doctrines that experts may testify at trial but only to matters outside the scope of common knowledge. Moreover, juries are free to disregard such testimony. Now instead of experts having to defer to the common sense expressed by the people, the common must give sway to the experts.

Next Essay

For some years, we have heard the chant that we need to de-Westernize society. An easy response is to agree and offer that we start with Karl Marx and Friedrich Hegel.

While I won’t be delving into either man, I will be writing on a curious path I have taken, starting with a medical ethics paper on transhumanism written in the early 2000s. Somehow, that paper led to a short academic paper on Ritualistic Killings and Hierarchies, which led me to the work of Rene Girard and his concept of scapegoat cultural killings. I often think the connections are silly, but then I will stumble upon a piece by James Lindsay or an interview with Rene Girard and see that they make similar claims. (So I may be silly, but at least I am in good company.) My analysis is not to persuade you that I am correct. You could conclude I am totally off, and if that is the case, that is good. It means I made you think, and we need everyone on board thinking.