E-Prime and the Imperialist Razor, Part II
Now we have a paradox to wrestle. The mindset that sees a verb ‘to be’-based reality, itself sees simply removing ‘to be’ as the course of action. In the ‘to be’-based mind, if I cut out ‘to be’, then it will no longer ‘be’. Problem solved, right?
I think Albert Einstein called this trying to “solve the problem at the level of thinking in which it was created”.
Recently I discovered something that made me see these issues in a whole new light. But we’ll have to tackle this from a couple different angles.
I found a new voice articulating these same issues in Calvin Luther Martin’s The Way of the Human Being. He refreshes the fundamental point:
The reality of non-locality: the physicists discovered the truth of this only within my lifetime; the Yup’ik Eskimos and other Native Americans have known its truth for millennia. When I lectured on quantum theory at the seminary, Sarah Owens confided afterward that her grandparents had told her as much.
And then proceeds to articulate another aspect of that point:
I am reminded of eastern woodland Indians in colonial times, blaming Europeans for their drunkenness, since it was they who furnished it after all. Or even blaming the beverage itself.
Oscar illustrated with a curious analogy. He said that when a man fires up his steamhouse (which is like a sauna) and invites the other men over, and they arrive and he begins pouring buckets of water on the fire, they accuse him of “throwing them out.” No! Oscar protested. “He’s not grabbing them and tossing them out! It’s not his fault! Think about it.” His voice is earnest. “It’s not that man’s fault they’re running out of the steam; it’s the steam’s fault! The steam is sending them running out the door.”…With alcohol, the western mind fingers the imbiber, Yupiit blame the vendor (or the drink).
So, the Yupiit, inheritors of animist language and logical systems, a non-’to be’ verb culture, observing the world in that quintessential animist way; focusing on animating relationships, on clear observation, on active verbs.
For a long time I’ve seen in the Gypsy Roma a still somewhat intact, relatively animist culture. They speak Romani, a language related to Sanskrit, and thus one of the family of modern, Indo-European languages, the classic (though not sole) perpetrators of Aristotelian errors of “isness”. Their language possesses the verb ‘to be’, the linguistic tool that aids the conceptions of these errors making them easier to say and think, thus easier to embody and spread.
However!
Animist cultures clearly exist on a continuum. You don’t wake up one day, as a people, and discover you’ve all started following the teachings of Aristotle. Even for indigenous communities that have adopted Christianity, they can continue to see that faith through an animist lens; this almost surely fades over time.
So I offer up the Gypsy Roma as a culture of people who, though possessing the ‘to be’ verb (which made participation in the caste-based and highly stratified society of India possible), still continue to keep animating thought alive, in the form of their cultural idiom, even if not in the structure of their language itself. From Gypsy Law, edited by Walter Weyrauch, Ronald Lee writes:
While the Rom accept the dangers of drug abuse and forbid the use of illegal drugs, they generally do not consider alcoholism to be a problem. This results in situations where alcoholic Rom get into fights and other situations at group gatherings where acts are committed or words said which lead to problems that must be settled at the kris. If the guilty party committed the offense during a blackout, he then cannot remember what offense he committed or is accused of committing. His defense is then to admit his guilt and say Lya ma e rakiya — “The whiskey took me.” This will be acceptable as a defense since the Rom believe that visible or invisible forces can act on their own to influence actions of people. The action is not described in the passive, as it is in English. For example, if a Rom falls into the river and drowns, they will say: Mudardya les o pani — “The water killed him.” If he is accidently electrocuted, Mudardya les o ilektriko — “The electricity killed him.” Thus a Rom does not get drunk; the whiskey takes control of him and compels him to commit some act he would not commit if he were sober…thus the force, not the subject, is guilty. This can be seen in the following: If a Rom is killed in an automobile accident but the vehicle is still in good shape, it will immediately be sold to a non-Gypsy. The car, in the eyes of the Rom, has become a mudarimasko mobili (killer car) and has become bi-baxtaló (a bringer of bad karma). It was thus not the Rom’s careless driving or the fact that he had been drinking before the accident that caused the accident, but the car which has killed him.
The challenge for a modern mind lies in seeing that the Roma, the Yup’ik, and all intact indigenous peoples, as animist systems-thinkers who exist because of their ability to think ecologically, have identified relationships as the priority. Whereas the modern mind sees this as ignorant and childish, prioritizing a truly naive cause and effect paradigm, arguing over ‘facts’ (that even scientists, the faithkeepers of this modern world, know as a fallible notion - modern scientific exploration and thought, from statistics to quantum theory, continues to reveal this).
I think, if you’ve made it this far, you can handle the next idea. Martín Prechtel, author and speaker on intact indigenous cultures (having grown up with a foot in both worlds himself), asked an audience recently what they considered the opposite of the verb ‘to be’. The lack of the verb ‘to be’ doesn’t really count as its opposite, so he had pointed at some deeper truth there. “‘Description’,” I suggested to him, opposed ‘to be’.
“Sure,” he replied. “To de-scribe, to bring writing to life, rehydrate language and take it away from the page. Sure. But what, even more than that?”
Silence in the room…
“Story?” I offered.
“Yes. I believe Story is the opposite of the verb ‘to be’,” he said, grinning.
If Story opposes the verb ‘to be’, as Martín proposes, and not the simple and linear-minded excision of the offending verb itself, how does that change our attitudes toward English, and modern languages? What lies next for someone who, with informed consent, wants to speak a language that creates life and liveliness, that frees their natural identity, that allows them to walk away from hierarchical and civilized modes of enslaving thought, into the embrace of Village, Family, Land?
I don’t know. Let’s figure it out together - perhaps we’ll start by jamming Story, and see where it takes us. What do you think?
February 26th, 2009 at 6:33 pm
Brilliant! Wow. See, I knew good things would happen when you met Calvin Luther Martin. Tangentially, I just speculated on my Twitter stream this evening whether tweets, in the mode of Ong’s notion of “secondary orality,” might train us to form multi-word verbs. If you assume the username before a tweet (Facebook style), then very commonly, you see tweets like, “suchandusch watching a movie.” It has a certain verb-like quality. It reminds me of Ong’s concept of the internet & such creating a “secondary orality.” Your discussion of verby-ness reminded me of that. But you’ve got something much more profound than that idle speculation here.
February 26th, 2009 at 7:01 pm
Yes, thanks for recommending his book. I couldn’t quite fit plenipotentiality in this particular article, but I expect it’ll find a home here somewhere.
The tweets do have a fun long name-ish quality. That reminds me-did you check out the link in my tumblr sidebar, What is the name that is big enough to hold your life?. Some more examples about this way of thinking…
March 1st, 2009 at 11:23 pm
[…] Idiom can impact this too. You don’t always need words, sometimes you just need idiom to keep an idea alive. Our replacement idiom for frith, however, pales in comparision: “blood is thicker than water”. I don’t entirely know what that means, actually. However, think of the Gypsy Roma and their animate idiom towards killer cars, water, and electricity. […]
March 5th, 2009 at 11:29 am
This may be my cultural conditioning asking this. If we accept “the drink made me do it” when someone hurts another person, where does personal responsibilty come in?
There have been and still are many rape cases and manslaughter cases that have heard this used as a defence. “I was drunk and didn’t know what I was doing” was accepted and the person got off.
If this is just one aspect of the picture of what happened I can accept that but to let a person out from under the responsibilty for hurting or killing based on that is hard for me to go along with. I can see it as one part of the story that must be included, as long as responsibilty for that is embraced.
March 5th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
For me, this whole series of articles focus on changing cultural context.
You, as a person inheriting a culture of disassociation (as have I), have a sincere concern about remedying this denial. So you say, “personal responsibility”. In the context of this culture, your solution makes tremendous sense, and has the power to change someone’s life.
But this doesn’t change the culture of disassociation; it just teaches you how to cope with the madness of it.
I want to change the culture of disassociation itself. Not by blaming the drink for my problems, but by piece by piece beginning to relate to other human and non-human people in a life-affirming way. Whatever that means for me, I’ll discover; for others, they’ll need to figure it out themselves.
And if we disagree, then we have to work that out between us, as fellow in-group members, or as different peoples who have the very real option of starting a war between them. This we want to avoid if at all possible. But for that reason alone we work things out, I think. If from different peoples, the carrot, or the stick? And if identifying as belonging to the same in-group, adapting our identity to include each other, or facing expulsion from the group (just as abominable as the option of war!).
Does that makes sense?
March 5th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
Yes. Could we say that if we include “the drink” in our family or community then we must deal with the fact that this member of our community repeatedly causes problems for those who have intimate relations with it, and also for the bigger family. So if “the drink” continues to play this kind of destructive role then we will have to address that?
March 5th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
You just made my head explode.
I shake your hand, sir.