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, 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’.”
Crystal, David, 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).
We might conclude
(despite the Bible or because of it?) that human intelligence began with the
word we had to speak to the world. In
this word spoken face to face, in its righteousness and wisdom lay our merit
and honor. Untold additional effort
would be required to make it shine with its original brilliance once we had
tarnished it 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, co-equals to our
truthfulness and wisdom.
There may have
been pre-deluge city dwellers imitated by later Cretans and the first
transmitters of the Hindu Vedas: their last cultural survivors on Earth? Their culture may have restricted the written
word to accounting functions: inventories, astronomy, astrology and calendars;
and only allowed sacred stories to be learned by heart 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’s beautiful, truthful and elegant enough to motivate the hard work of
memorization and recitation; forget all the rest.”
Now that we have
not only speech and writing but also recordings and transmissions of them in
virtually unlimited quantities, what mode of expression, supplementing both,
would place us before our deepest merit and truth, would lend us the
goodness of sheep, like that found in a wolf pack?
We use a common
expression for tools that kill, “a weapon.”
Take the phrase “learning tool.”
What a clumsy turn of phrase.
And, of course, it has no 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 suggest 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) primary task: to regulate the info proletariat’s
communications. Money, news, sports, food, war, education, crime: all these are
alternate forms of communication―information symphonies, choruses,
dances and solos that each culture orchestrates.
International
sovereignty is the control that info elites exert over their host proletariat,
both inside and outside the national membrane.
Such communications may range from free intermixing of info
proletarians under minimal control, to a totalitarian simplification of chaos
where 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 but a ‘disperse of rock,’ then our civilization is just another
chemical dispersal.
In peacetime, the
political membrane that surrounds 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 during wartime and get punished. All cosmopolitanism is strangled.
Learners will
dissolve these membranes for the last time.
They’ll provide diverse peoples with a common planetary language.
Esperanto, Ido,
Volapuk, and a succession of verbal patchworks have been developed. They 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, English: it matters little). Instead, everyone should learn one supplemental language along with their native tongue. Ideally, this language should be totally alien from current languages. It should be 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 are elegant, others unnecessarily
complicated. This complication is a
compound of accent and grammar with many exceptions and irregularities to memorize. Tortured English pronunciation and spelling,
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. They’re 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 errors of spelling or
syntax, we betray ourselves to the locals as foreigners and potential enemies.
Academic dogma
forces people to learn the trendiest foreign language. The latest one is English. Hapless students are hammered into absorbing
foreign languages after their linguistic window has shut down. 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 once they had grown too old to retain them. Thus
precious Learning time is wasted: a major goal of weapon education.
We can get around
such wasteful circumlocutions. We could
teach language skills to children when they were much younger and more
receptive. In the future, preschoolers will learn an international manual sign language that will 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 native 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 that can transmit very complicated and 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. It was 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.
Their brightest young Learners – launching out on journey quests, as the
best have always done – had to travel and talk 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
easily. Almost half its gestures are
understandable without training.
Thereafter, it could evolve into something much more subtle and refined
in its own good time.
Young children pick up new languages with surprising ease during their window of linguistic adaptation. Normally, it remains open from birth until 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 much effort.
Not only does an overwhelming majority of children learn
the totality of exceptions and irregularities contained in these languages, but
also all the deliberate errors of their local dialect, almost faultlessly after
a little while. A performance that
cannot be duplicated by a majority of those instructed in foreign languages and
local grammar later on in school.
When it comes to
learning new languages, small children with an IQ of 80 or less can outperform
the most advanced theoretical black boxes our best linguists can come up
with. This finding should fire Learners’
hope for human genius—at least once we discard humanity’s worst and most
cherished habits… like not teaching children languages when they're most
receptive.
This reveals a
typical failing of weapons education. We
don’t send our 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 relevant
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 much more openhandedly. 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. Its transcription
speed should be accelerated. Its
calligraphy should be as beautiful as ancient 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 some direct manipulation of light, a natural chemical transformation
(for example, fingertip salts on a treated surface) or some superior
(and therefore easier to use) recording medium.
Our devastation of forests for paper is horrific and should be
stopped.
A weird idea
keeps recurring in my mind. We must bring
the media back to the message and not the other way around. Whatever that means …
Perhaps we'll
revert to prehistoric writing methods. I
speculate that leaves, fresh-picked off street-side broadleaf trees, were
scribed with fingernails or sharp spines.
Take a moment to imagine
those ancient towns stretching out along riverbanks long since vanished beneath
the waves: their magnificent boulevards, divine and historic statuary, abundant
bazaars, fountains gushing copious, sweet water, parks you would not have
believed, fish trawled from seas spilling over with them, their entire
pedestrian landscape as well-proportioned as the best of ours today.
The more
sophisticated a written culture, the more ephemeral its written medium. Look at us, with our pixie sparkle
pixels. Not much ancient
literature remains because really ancient documents were written on tissue-thin
stationary. All except the mud-clay
tablets of bloody empires our military cultures obsess over, baked into ceramic
when imperial capitals and their libraries were overrun by conflict-sharpened
enemies and burnt to the ground.
Imagine these
broad-leaf trees growing prodigiously along street borders and parks. Pick a leaf and write your message by scratching
words onto it with your fingernail.
Perhaps it’d be bark peeled from tree trunks, like fine crust
pastry? Cared-for leaves could be dried into legible pages of text. Over long periods of time, this medium would
have turned into illegible loam. Its
scribes and their secret wisdom would have become ‘prehistoric.’
They might
have grafted engraved leaves back onto smart trees and made copies. Transmitted them to other plantations? Draw me the limits of what they could have
accomplished once they fully understood how living species grew.
Our first
organized churches were prototype corporations peddling mass
religion. Today, international
corporations wipe out cultural diversity in order to market across diverse
cultures, products that are 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 benign religions will justify mass piety. Human culture will become as diverse and varied as we can make it. 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. Armies of expert
translators will be on-call from their networks. Using them, other Learners will relish the
finer nuances (NEW-AUNSS,
subtle gradations) of every mother tongue.
The gross cultural conformity
our corporations foster will come to a 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 bothers you, my 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 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
wouldn’t be any more ‘advanced cities’ and by implication ‘retarded
cities.’ The Earth would transform
itself—from Planet Mogadishu on a Bad Day where every city is just another
unsafe, grim and miserable stopover, into Planet (name your favorite city)
where every town and region would shine in its own manner, like the best
neighborhood of your favorite city.
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
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