On to the second point, concerning the sophistication,
reflection, and self-conscious deliberation concerning social, economic, and
political arrangements engaged in by the various peoples discussed by Graeber
and Wengrow. This is a subject to which
I devoted a good deal of time in 6 of the 10 lectures I gave for YouTube on
Ideological Critique.
Let me begin with something the authors do not talk about
but which is essential to keep in mind in thinking about this subject. So far
as we know, Homo sapiens is the only species with language (what about the
Neanderthal? Who knows?). In their 2016
book, Berwick and Chomsky speculate that the human linguistic ability must be
the result of a very simple genetic mutation, probably taking place in some
human person 80,000 or 100,000 years ago. If Chomsky’s analysis of language is
correct, and I am simply going to assume that it is, then all human languages
have fundamentally the same deep structure, however different they may seem to
be on the surface. From this it follows that whatever cognitive capacities the
possession of language confers upon some human beings, it must in the same way confer
those capacities on all human beings. What is more, in some fundamental way
anything that can be said in some language can be said in any other language.
There are no such things as primitive languages and sophisticated languages.
Hence, logical argumentation, inferences from observation, ironic discourse,
comedy, religious speculation, political argumentation – all must be possible
in any language that any human being has ever spoken or ever will speak. If this seems implausible, reflect on the
fact that missionary Christians have successfully translated the Bible into every language
they have encountered in their proselytizing efforts.
The implication of this is staggering when you think about
it but at the same time trivially obvious. Hunter gatherers sitting around the
fire making stone tools, or cutting up a tasty piece of Eland with a sharp
edged flint knife, would be chatting, gossiping, joking, arguing about where
the best place was to look for pinenuts or fruit, worrying about the children,
looking after the old folks, and debating the best way to make collective
decisions for their community. Some of them would be quickwitted, some slow to
get a point. They would speak in
complete sentences with subordinate clauses and with adverbial phrases, they
would make logical inferences and of course they would make logical mistakes.
In short, they would be people. (I am
reminded of the achingly beautiful sentence with which W. E. B. Du Bois concludes
the preface to his greatest work, Black Reconstruction in America 1860 – 1880: “I
am going to tell this story as though Negroes were ordinary human beings,
realizing that this attitude will from the first seriously curtail my audience.”)
Most of the time, this is not the way we think or talk about
so-called “primitive” people. It is however very often the way in which
anthropologists who have learned the languages of “primitive” people and have
spent time living with them talk about them.
Graeber and Wengrow spend hundreds of pages giving us the most detailed
accounts of the doings of large numbers of people living in preindustrial
societies in order to show us that they have a sophisticated self understanding
of their social, cultural, religious, and political situation and therefore
engage, or surely must have engaged, in deliberations and discussions of their
situation, not merely mindlessly going through routines of their lives and
having the structure of their social gatherings formulated, as it were, behind
their backs.
Those of us who spend our lives in university settings reading (and writing) books have a fatal tendency to imagine that those who have not read the books cannot possibly have as reflective or self-aware an understanding of their situation as we who have. But of course that is nonsense. Simply to say it is to reveal its absurdity. If 19th-century British workers who left what school they had at the age of eight or ten to work in the mines or mills could nevertheless spend time in workers’clubs debating the finer points of socialism, as in fact they did, then why could not hunter gatherers 50,000 years ago engage in similar debates about their economic and political situation (without, of course, the benefit of Marx?)
I think this is the most attractive feature of this lively and challenging book. I was constantly brought up short by the realization of my own ingrained prejudicial presuppositions, despite having given those YouTube lectures and thought much about this subject.
10 comments:
"Why could not hunter gatherers 50,000 years ago engage in similar debates about their economic and political situation?"
In the first chapter of Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington talks about how African-Americans were always anxious to find out about national politics and how it affected them during slavery & post-slavery years in the early morning hours of each day. I'm sure many Egyptian slaves tried to think of ways to get out or escape from building the pyramids during the era of ancient Egypt--which I believe led to those slaves wanting to know about the politics of what was going on around them.
I apprehend that wherever there are people there are two things going on concerning realpolitik: anxiety and a seeking to avert that anxiety.
Did the hunter gatherers sitting around the fire discussing the fine points of political theory include the women or were they washing the dishes?
"Why could not hunter gatherers 50,000 years ago engage in similar debates about their economic and political situation?"
I think one point Chomsky has often made about language and the language faculty can add something else here. There is a distinction to be had, Chomsky says, between the capacity for language, which is universal and thus shared by every member of the human species, and this includes the humans of 50,000 years ago, and the particular realisations of this capacity - that is, the particular languages that arise in specific places and at specific times in history. This point has come up quite often in the last 10-15 years in relation to the Pirahã language, which is claimed to lack some features that are present in almost every other language (e.g., a number system, subordinate sentences, etc.) - whether this claim is correct or not has been contested extensively, but the point of Chomsky's reply to the presented evidence has been that even if some properties have not been realised in this language, that doesn't mean they are not part of the language faculty of Pirahã speakers too. No-one, after all, has ever claimed that every feature the language faculty allows for will be present in every language (not every language is a tonal language, for instance); whether a particular feature is realised or not is often a matter of circumstance or even chance.
And likewise, perhaps, regarding the capacity to engage in debates about one's economic and political situation. Such a reasoning capacity may be a universal feature of homo sapiens as much as language is, but how the capacity has been realised in human history would plausibly depend on the actual circumstances at each time and it is not a given (in fact, it might be very unlikely) that the concerns people had 50,000 years ago would bear any resemblance to the concerns of less distant societies.
(By the way, and not that it matters much, but I'm not sure the Bible has successfully been translated into about just any language; Pirahã may be an exception).
"Most of the time, this is not the way we think or talk about so-called “primitive” people."
I've long assumed that early groups of humans were, on the whole, sharper then the larger groups agriculture allowed. The small groups that invaded the Americas from Asia managed to discover and develop new food sources including ones we still use (e.g. wild maize is nothing like what we grow today and some staples like acorns require relatively sophisticated processing). They drove way dangerous mega-fauna into extinction and worked out often complicated social arrangements and obligations. Figuring out and transmitting various technologies like horticulture, basketry and pottery from scratch took some chops. The Plains Indians went from having never seen a horse to accomplished horsemanship in a relatively short time.
This may be of interest:
http://flintknappinghalloffame.blogspot.com/2013/01/ishi-hall-of-fame-flintknapper-1.html
Prof. Wolff wrote,
In their 2016 book, Berwick and Chomsky speculate that the human linguistic ability must be the result of a very simple genetic mutation, probably taking place in some human person 80,000 or 100,000 years ago. If Chomsky’s analysis of language is correct, and I am simply going to assume that it is, then all human languages have fundamentally the same deep structure, however different they may seem to be on the surface.
Berwick and Chomsky may have argued that to their readers’ satisfaction, but the point isn’t obvious to me.
But there is more. Prof. Wolff’s unstated assumption seems to be that the “simple genetic mutation” occurred once when there was a single, unique H. sapiens population. Later H. sapiens colonizing other territories carried that mutation with them. Say a single H. sapiens population in Southern Africa started speaking and eventually spread over the rest of the continent and then to Asia, Europe and eventually Oceania and the Americas.
I can’t see, however, why several independent populations already spread over the world could not have experienced the same or similar mutations or why different mutations should have conferred language the same basic deep structure.
Moreover, H. sapiens is not the only animal species capable of verbal communication. All other apes (and I’ll allow myself remind readers that humans are apes) are capable of some form of vocalization, which they use to communicate with other members of the same species. And I believe nobody, however, has ever gone as far as to suggest that that capability makes chimps reason in any way like humans.
Have dolphins developed formal logic?
Personally, I think there is a fair bit of genetic determinism implicit in all that.
- The AnonyMouse
AnonyMouse,
Here's Daniel Dennett, circa 1994. (I don't necessarily agree with him though. It depends on how you define "intelligent" and "language," of course.)
We human beings may not be the most admirable species on the planet, or the most likely to survive for another millennium, but we are without any doubt at all the most intelligent. We are also the only species with language. What is the relation between these two obvious facts?
Before going on to consider that question, I must pause briefly to defend my second premise. Don't whales and dolphins, vervet monkeys and honey bees (the list goes on) have languages of sorts? Haven't chimpanzees in laboratories been taught rudimentary languages of sorts? Yes, and body language is a sort of language, and music is the international language (sort of) and politics is a sort of language, and the complex world of odor and olfaction is another, highly emotionally charged language, and so on. It sometimes seems that the highest praise we can bestow on a phenomenon we are studying is the claim that its complexities entitle it to be called a language--of sorts. This admiration for language--real language, the sort only we human beings use--is well-founded. The expressive, information-encoding properties of real language are practically limitless (in at least some dimensions), and the powers that other species acquire in virtue of their use of proto-languages, hemi-semi-demi-languages, are indeed similar to the powers we acquire thanks to our use of real language. These other species do climb a few steps up the mountain on whose summit we reside, thanks to language. Looking at the vast differences between their gains and ours is one way of approaching the question I want to address:
How does language contribute to intelligence?
RPW: "... it follows that whatever cognitive capacities the possession of language confers upon some human beings, it must in the same way confer those capacities on all human beings. What is more, in some fundamental way anything that can be said in some language can be said in any other language. There are no such things as primitive languages and sophisticated languages."
Wow, those are bold statements. I guess I would accept the general gist of them, if we allow for rhetorical overstatement. But I can't help thinking about the marvelous variability there is among individual humans (as opposed to among present-day populations of humans). Our brains, and our neurologic systems more generally, aren't all wired the same way. We all know this from everyday life, in thinking about traits such as colorblindness or different perceptions of hot peppers or of the flavors of cilantro. More dramatic examples might be cases of synethesia, which reportedly is more common among artists, musicians, and other creative types. (Hélène Grimaud, Itzhak Perlman, and Duke Ellington are a few prominent synesthete musicians.) Another example might be some cases of dyslexia. So why should we doubt that some of us, as a species, may have access to ways to use language in cognition that are not available (or not as readily accessible) to the rest of us?
And wrt "primitive" vs "sophisticated" languages, consider the case of a community of congenitally deaf people in Nicaragua who created a new sign language from scratch, as described by Ann Senghas. Observers have characterized the language in its earliest stages as blunt, clunky—in a word, primitive—compared to the more mature language as it is used today. (There is a wonderful recounting of this and related stories in an episode of Radiolab from about a decade ago. You can read a transcript here, but you would do yourself a disservice if you didn't listen to the piece instead.) I would think that creole languages in their early stages are similarly likely to be relatively rudimentary or primitive by comparison to the long-established languages from which they derive.
Berwick and Chomsky may have argued that to their readers' satisfaction, but the point isn't obvious to me.
I'm not 100% sure which of these propositions the "that" refers to, but I think it's the second rather than the first:
(1) "[T]he human linguistic ability must be the result of a very simple genetic mutation, probably taking place in some human person 80,000 or 100,000 years ago."
(2) "[A]ll human languages have fundamentally the same deep structure, however different they may seem to be on the surface."
I wouldn't call (1) obvious, either, if this is what's meant. But should (2) be considered obvious? I think there's a good case for thinking so, depending on how strongly "obvious" is intended: Think "plausible upon initial reflection" rather than "immediately self-evident." Consider this proposition from the same paragraph in Prof. Wolff's post:
(3) "[I]n some fundamental way anything that can be said in some language can be said in any other language."
If I'm not misreading Prof. Wolff, (3) is presented as one of the logical consequences of (2). And although he doesn't explicitly say this, it seems to me that you can very naturally reason in the other direction from (3) to (2) as well.
Now, (3) seems very compelling to me, because I am at a loss to think of anything approaching the status of an exception to (3). The claim, I take it, is not that some languages have words that can't be translated into other, equivalent words (in the sense of translating "gato" to "cat"); the claim is that no language has any word or expression whose meaning can in principle be comprehended only by users of that language. "Weltschmerz" may not have a simple English equivalent, but it still seems available to the English user to understand it by paraphrase (per Wiki, "a mood of weariness or sadness about life arising from the acute awareness of evil and suffering").
What would it imply about the basic cognitive equipment (by means of which, people experience stable, individually determinate objects, which change in certain respects over time, effect corresponding changes in neighboring objects, and so forth), of this or that language-user, if they could say something which no user of a different language could possibly understand (even by paraphrase)? I think of a certain preposterous claim made by the movie What the Bleep Do We Know? (an assignment for school, that's my excuse), that the natives of a certain island, lacking a word for "ship," saw pretty much nothing (just empty space) when the English-speaking visitors tried gesturing toward their ship.
(Sorry if this is badly unclear, BTW. I'm sleepy and having a harder time with this stuff than usual.)
A short note to observe that some languages, or at least the way they're used, seem to be more open to doubles entendres than others. A glance, for ex., at the opening chapter of Marshall Sahlins's Islands of History, with its references to the Hawaiian language (I'm not stopping to look up the correct name), might suggest that, at any rate.
I agree with Prof Wolff that the myth of the stupid savage or civilized discounting of primitive peoples discussed in The Dawn of Everything is extraordinarily enlightening to the professional philosopher used to ignoring it. I have finished reading The Dawn of Everything, and it is stunning in its details, new words and places buried in time. But now I am working through The Utopia of Rules, Bullshit Jobs, Debt, Revolutions in Reverse, and On Kings (best known of Graeber's books).
I cannot believe that I missed Graeber's work. Many videos on YouTube are very useful introductions to his research, such as "Graeber and Wengrow on the Myth of the Stupid Savage" (video clip) from Dec. 2019 Amsterdam conference. See this link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvUzdJSK4x8&ab_channel=RedPlateaus
It is wrong to associate Graeber with Michel Foucault style massaging of history to fit your politics. Graeber is a polymath and funny raconteur of anthropological tales that give you dreams of being back in early contact America, when the egalitarian "hippie" aboriginals who rejected the empire of Cahokia met the European expansionists with their Greco-Roman laws developed to serve a slave state, and the aboriginal critique of European hierarchy helped inspire democratic movements.
Reading bones and layers of garbage in ancient settlements is probably even harder than reading Heideggerese. Wengrow and Graeber identify a very philosophical Wendat (Huron) ambassador called Kandiaronk (lived 1649-1701) who was renowned for his PARRHESIA, or oratory in the salons of New France and visited Europe. Their reading of Lahontan's New Voyages to North America (DE, p 48-9) is very sober and careful consideration of sources which is not slick/greasy or stretching the truth until it matters no more like Foucault when dramatizing parts of history of sexuality or disciplinary society (opening scenes of Discipline and Punish). These forgotten voices of aboriginal activists that Graeber and Wengrow dig up help to identify many of the realities behind the abstractions of Enlightenment idealism. These include the three most cherished freedoms: "(1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one's surroundings; (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others; and (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones" (DE, p 503). I am astounded at the truthfulness of these expertly excavated aboriginals in contrast to the bronzed statues of very important Europeans/Americans and their phony revolutions
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