#3 Misconceptions
My relationship with science fiction is that I don’t care about it but once or twice a year I read a scifi book just to check that I still don’t care. What can I say? To be this ambivalent requires a little upkeep. I’ve been doing this for years so I feel qualified to come out as someone who thinks Dune is literally so fucking boring. That has nothing to do with anything, I just want to make it clear that this newsletter is a safe space for anyone else who thinks Dune is boring and has felt silenced by the hype around the new movie. I’ll probably never watch it, although I would watch a porn parody where people who look like Timothee Chalamet and Zendaya go down on the worm from Freaky Stories in a desert. That sounds fab. Also, the David Lynch version was fun.
Anyway, scifi isn’t really my cup of tea BUT I do genuinely love one scifi book called Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delaney. It takes place during an interstellar war and follows poet, linguist, starship captain and gorgeous woman, Rydra Strong, as she pilots a ship full of misfit creatures in pursuit of decoding a powerful language called Babel-17. The language is used as a weapon because learning it causes the speaker to think and communicate in superhuman ways. Simply knowing the language turns you into a forcible war machine. Here’s how it’s first described in the book:
"It was not only a language, she understood now, but a flexible matrix of analytical possibilities where the same 'word' defined the stresses in a webbing of medical bandage, or a defensive grid of spaceships. What would it do with the tensions of yearnings in a human face? Perhaps the flicker of eyelids and fingers would become mathematics, without meaning. Or perhaps— While she thought, her mind changed gears into the headlong compactness of Babel-17. And she swept her eyes around the— voices” (122-123)
It’s later discovered that truly understanding Babel-17— the most exact and analytical language in the world— causes the mind to work too hard, leading to total brain/body burnout. Its real danger, however, is not the burnout but the fact that inherent to the language are preset programs that can be used to make speakers run in specific settings. Babel-17 allows you to program a person like a computer and eliminate the context clues that a non-programmed person would use to inform their speech/worldview. So while Rydra was destroying her body by attempting to understand the language as a whole, other characters were running these Babel-17 presets and acting as robots with a singular evil mission.
When writing the book, Delaney was inspired by the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which, according to Wikipedia, “is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language affects its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to their spoken language.” Basically, it posits that your mother tongue significantly influences how you see the world. It is more accurately called Linguistic Relativity, but I’m going to keep calling it the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis because I think those three words sound marvelous together.
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is the kind of thing that people so badly want to be true because, on the surface, it seems like it would simplify so much. How convenient would it be if we could blame who we are on our language? It’d be like astrology for pedants! It could explain away all sorts of cross-cultural mishaps, arbitrary borders and maybe even wars, because if everyone is so fundamentally different, why even bother trying to see eye to eye? Obviously, we know things are not quite that simple. While our communication styles might factor into the network of characteristics that make up our unique personalities, there is little to be said for your mother tongue significantly influencing how you see the world. Also, it opens the doors of possibility for linguistic determinism, which could be a real slippery ethical/legal/metaphysical slope. So all that to say, unlike Babel-17, the real world doesn’t have much evidence that a language can significantly alter the way we think, although there are some small ways that our mother tongue alters our perceptions of certain phenomena. For example, there are a few instances where the way a language is structured factors into its speakers’ spatial or temporal perceptions. This is super cool but way too complicated for me, a small baby who simply likes to read, to recap efficiently/accurately in a newsletter that’s ultimately just about an art project.
Instead, I’ll divert your attention to that rumour about how the Ancient Greeks couldn’t see the colour blue, based on the fact that Homer was addicted to describing the sea as “wine-coloured”. I think the reason why this theory is so fun is because if it were true, it would imply that being able to see blue is something we developed over time, further implying that perhaps we are still developing new and exciting colour-seeing abilities. As rad as that would be, there have been many, many tests done to disprove the idea that Ancient Greeks could not see blue. In fact, there are cultures around today that might also describe the sea as burgundy or a shade of black or green because having a separate word for blue would be essentially useless in their day-to-day lives. Think about it: what purpose would separating out blue from greens or reds serve in the life of somebody living completely off-grid in nature? Aside from giving the speaker a fun new way to talk about the sky, it wouldn’t accomplish much. On the flip side, being able to linguistically distinguish a verdant kelly green from a sickly chartreuse could have life-saving implications when discerning edible vs. poisonous plants. English, as you probably know, has names for all sorts of blues precisely because in most English-speaking areas its become necessary to have names for cerulean, cobalt, prussian, robin’s egg and so on (sorry to flex on you with my knowledge of colour names. Once a painter, always a little annoying about knowing names for colours, I guess). That said, this does not mean English speakers can physically see more blue than someone from a culture without blue in their vocab. All it means is that English speakers had more reasons to distinguish and name different blues and so we did. I’m pulling this anecdote and research from Guy Deutscher’s book, Through The Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different In Other Languages, wherein he quotes Linguist, Roman Jakobson to say: " ‘Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.’ The crucial differences between languages, in other words, are not in what each language allows its speakers to express— for, in theory, any language could express anything— but in what information each language obliges its speakers to express” (151).
This leads me to the last myth that’ll introduce and then promptly bust: the unfortunately common mindset that interprets the differences between the self and other as a sign of the other’s deficiencies, rather than merely a difference in cultural framing. Something similar is in play when it comes to the whole “ancient Greeks can’t see blue” thing. Implicit in scholars’ claims that the Ancient Greeks cannot see blue is the belief that they lack something. To reiterate the above Deutcher quote, “any thought can be expressed in any language,” meaning that in actuality, no culture is deficient in anything when it comes to expressing itself. So even if at this point, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis/linguistic relativity is mostly considered an overly simplistic and not totally accurate concept*, I still think it’s worth talking about in the context of acknowledging that there are no fundamental differences in the brains of different types of people. And if we cannot easily quantify our inherent difference, we may as well work towards unifying based on shared ideas of what it means to be human. We may not have an analytically exact language like Babel-17 (although some have tried), but just by virtue of being language-oriented humans, we surely have an abundant capacity for cross-cultural understanding and connection. Dune still sucks though, sorry.
See you next week!
nudges towards you at the movies and delicately places my hand atop yours
*I know enough to acknowledge that simply making this claim is in itself oversimplifying decades of interdisciplinary research, but not enough to accurately tell you why or how. There is lots and lots of info available online and I can also recommend the book, Language Shock: Understanding the Culture of Conversation by Michael Agar for a more nuanced analysis of how culture and mother tongue shape interaction.