The contrast between a felt and lived reality—in this case, Pinker’s need to speak and write standard English because of its superior ability to express complex ideas—and the denial of it, perhaps in order to assert something original and striking, is characteristic of an intellectual climate in which the destruction of moral and social distinctions is proof of the very best intentions....The Gift of Language, Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal, Fall issue
A problem with contemporary science, especially in areas such as linguistics, in which Stephen Pinker is considered a leading light, is the inversion of method, where, in a manner similar to a medeaval alchemist, a researcher will posit a thesis, then seek out supporting evidence at the exclusion of anything that might disprove his or her idea. Pinker has pitched the notion for years, as has his mentor-in-science Noam Chomsky, that language is solely an internal matter with human beings, a genetically driven tool that requires no education. Frankly, only an Ivy League chieftan could come up with an idea like this, someone who has had no exposure to the impact of ignorance on language and thought. Smiling at colleagues in a faculty lounge, such a person is in the perfect environment to ignore the possibility that such a notion, that language needs no teacher or mentor, is as fabulous as an alchemist's presumption that gold can be transmuted from lead. Dalrymple, for decades in the field as a psychologist in areas of Britain where ignorance, violence, and official corruption (not to mention official delusion) are rampant, is more akin to a real scientist. His thesis, that language, while a genetically-driven tool, requires teachers and mentors, not to mention diverse and intense reading and writing, is built on data, not on political assumptions (see Chomsky).
With a very limited vocabulary, it is impossible to make, or at least to express, important distinctions and to examine any question with conceptual care. My patients often had no words to describe what they were feeling, except in the crudest possible way, with expostulations, exclamations, and physical displays of emotion. Often, by guesswork and my experience of other patients, I could put things into words for them, words that they grasped at eagerly. Everything was on the tip of their tongue, rarely or never reaching the stage of expression out loud. They struggled even to describe in a consecutive and logical fashion what had happened to them, at least without a great deal of prompting. Complex narrative and most abstractions were closed to them....(Gift of Language, continued....)
In fact, Dalrymple notes, the evidence suggests that the lax pedagogy today regarding writing, speaking and thinking skills is nothing less than an acceptance of rigid classifications of people, i.e., into groups such as those who are capable of writing, speaking and thinking clearly and those who are not. This immediately calls to mind a similar approach in 19th century Mexico by President Puerifoy Diaz.
Diaz, frustrated by the incapacity of his government to deal with poor and angry peasants, and especially with those of Mayan, Toltec and Inca stock, was encouraged to bring in a group of experts, which were called cientificos. They were an early generation of sociologist and urban planners. Their overall prescription for the problem was not very different from that chosen by Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s regarding black Americans. The cientificos, enlightened by the acquisition of Ph.D.'s in a variety of areas, opined as follows: these people aren't capable of dealing with complex ideas, motivations and actions. The best, the most humane, solution for their condition of poverty and violence is to bribe them with welfare payments. Trouble is, Dalrymple notes, even that reduced state is not served by a lack of trained facility in language.
In their dealings with authority, they were at a huge disadvantage—a disaster, since so many of them depended upon various public bureaucracies for so many of their needs, from their housing and health care to their income and the education of their children. I would find myself dealing on their behalf with those bureaucracies, which were often simultaneously bullying and incompetent; and what officialdom had claimed for months or even years to be impossible suddenly, on my intervention, became possible within a week. Of course, it was not my mastery of language alone that produced this result; rather, my mastery of language signaled my capacity to make serious trouble for the bureaucrats if they did not do as I asked. I do not think it is a coincidence that the offices of all those bureaucracies were increasingly installing security barriers against the physical attacks on the staff by enraged but inarticulate dependents....(The Gift of Language, continued...)
It is true that Pinker's thesis about language is something of an antidote to the notion favored on the Left that everything in human life is determined by nurture. This is patent idiocy of course. One cannot nurture a blob of mud and expect it to become a human being, though there are many on the Left who believe so. But it is also patent idiocy to say that we are born with everything we will ever need to cope with and flourish in a complicated world. As such, Dalrymple suggests, Pinker's antidote is no better than the disease it is intended to attack. How he suggests this is a fine example of how trained usage in a language can devastate fallacy.
I need hardly point out that Pinker doesn’t really believe anything of what he writes, at least if example is stronger evidence of belief than precept. Though artfully sown here and there with a demotic expression to prove that he is himself of the people, his own book is written, not surprisingly, in the kind of English that would please schoolmarms. I doubt very much whether it would have reached its 25th printing had he chosen to write it in the dialect of rural Louisiana, for example, or of the slums of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Even had he chosen to do so, he might have found the writing rather difficult. I should like to see him try to translate a sentence from his book that I have taken at random, “The point that the argument misses is that although natural selection involves incremental steps that enhance functioning, the enhancements do not have to be an existing module,” into the language of the Glasgow or Detroit slums....(The Gift Of Language, continued....)
We live in a time when, thanks as much to educators as to our own laziness, fallacies are a staple of even educated opinion. There's only one way to overcome that, to take our undeniably natural language abilities and, by training, example, and trial, turn them into skills. When one is skilled in language, that implies familiarity with logic, the principal tool of reason, and with the capacity to express temporal change, which is the basis of narrative. Combining those encourages a beautiful and emergent order, well-expressed thought. With faith, competent thought is one of the few tools available to keep us from plunging into the abyss.
Luther
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