The Toolkit of the Mind
Language is powerful. Our language shapes not only how we talk about the world, but how we perceive it. Language forms the boundaries of our thoughts. Words are tools.
An ocean of ink has been spilled trying to justify why History’s winners were who they were. Why, for example, it was America that got colonized by Europeans and not the other way round. Strange as the idea may seem to us today, in principle there is no reason why it should not have been the Cherokee sailing to Ireland and spreading diseases among the French, or the Bantu who were the first to invent the steam engine. Why is it that the Bahnar did not leave the world a trove of ancient artifacts and architecture? Why have the Sami left so small a historical footprint?
Answers to these questions vary and are full of controversy. Ranging from outright claims of racial supremacism to ad hoc justifications about the relative lack of domesticable animals, almost every conceivable theory has been put forward to explain the history of Eurasian dominance, and almost all of them unconvincing. There might not be a reason. How terrible would that be? Historians sometimes like to fancy themselves as scientists, able to deconstruct the past into a series of causes and effects. Maybe it doesn’t work like that. Maybe Life is a gamble. A roll of the dice.
Could be.
For my money though, if there is an answer to the above questions…
It’s language.
Not race, not religion, not geographic factors.
Language.
The Phoenicians (whoever they actually were) were not the first to invent writing but they were the first (or nearly so) to invent an alphabet. Prior to this genius, writing, as we still see today in, for example, traditional Chinese, consisted of mapping whole words onto pictograms, onto symbols. “Man” had a pictogram. “Tree” had a pictogram. “Sky” had a pictogram. And so on. Everything was more or less a different system of hieroglyphics and learning all the various pictograms of a given language extremely time consuming. High literacy rates in such a system were more or less impossible, and the Phoenicians required a simpler system to facilitate their vast and all-encompassing network of Mediterranean trade. They invented the idea of mapping mouth sounds, syllables, onto characters, instead of entire words. The list of phonemes in any given language is far fewer than the list of words, making the system simpler and faster to learn. Words could then be assembled, building block style, by the stringing together of the various mouth sound characters into larger units.
The ABCs.
The efficiency of this cannot be overstated. Today for example, the Japanese kanji system (which is logographic, a higher form than pictographic) has around 3,000 symbols in common use. Traditional Chinese, by some estimates, over 50,000. Comparing this to English and the measly 26 characters in its alphabet… it’s easy to see which system can be learned faster. Moreover, because characters are tied to mouth sounds instead of ideas or concepts, new words can be invented on the fly and instantly transmissible via written script. With the alphabetical system, speaking and writing the language became an almost one to one overlap. You simply had to be able to memorize the mouth sounds of a small set of characters, and then say those, in order, as they appear on the page. Ta-da! You’re literate.
The Alphabet (ALPHA, BETa, gamma… the ABCs) was the printing press before the printing press. A revolution in communications technology.
In my opinion, the Mediterranean world, especially that of the Greeks and Persians who were the direct inheritors of this linguistic revolution, received an advantage from this early advance in language that was, for many centuries, insurmountable. It “weighted” history to one small section of the world, drawing all the best minds and people into its orbit. Ideas could spread more easily and, perhaps more importantly, whereas pictograms and runes and sigils lend themselves to magical thinking, alphabetical languages, with their focus on sounds, rather lend themselves more to poetic thinking.
Please don’t misunderstand me.
I’m well aware that many cultures of the world have rich traditions of poetry (foremost, in my opinion, Arabic), and I’m not trying to diminish their work. But the literature which grew up in and around the eastern half of the Mediterranean, things like say, The Iliad, or The Epic of Gilgamesh, or large parts of The Bible, are incredible testaments to minds beginning to linguistically grapple with felt connections between apparently distinct and separate objects. Minds beginning to see the similarities between the tumultuous world of Man’s interior soul and the heat of a volcano, or the thundering sky. Their language was moving beyond being simply a tool for describing the world, and becoming a tool for prescribing it. Telling each other how it should be… not simply how it is.
Language matters. Any programmer will tell you that. And, just as some tasks are better done in C++ and some in Python and some in Perl, the right verbal language for the right job raises your functional IQ by at least 30 points. If the former citizens of the Roman Empire, Europe and the Near East, had any advantages over anyone else, in my opinion those advantages were almost entirely linguistic. Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Languages primed for taking over the world.
Power
All language confers power.
We’re so used to swimming in languages today that perhaps we’ve stopped noticing that but, comparing ourselves to others with “more primitive” languages rapidly brings the point home. In the Amazon for example, there are tribes who speak some variation of the Pirahã language. It’s anumeric. It’s a language that doesn’t have words for numbers. Imagine that. Imagine trying to build a house or a canoe and you can’t specify how many of something you need. You can’t do addition. You can’t do subtraction. “There are three pears over there…”, you can’t say that in Pirahã. It simply can’t be done. The best you can do is indicate that you’d like more or fewer pears. How much more, how many fewer? Can’t say.
How disempowering compared to what we speak.
Language confers power.
So much so that doctors, scientists, economists, priests, and almost every other “authority figure” uses it to preserve their rule.
Example.
The photo I included at the beginning of this article reads, in the middle, “…mean spherical equivalent fraction in oculus dexter…”
Do you know what “oculus dexter” means?
“Right eye.”
That’s all it means. “Oculus Dexter” is Latin for “right eye” and “oculus sinister” Latin for “left eye.” That’s it. (As an aside, this is why Sinister has come to mean bad. It’s most people’s “bad” side. It’s the same thing as the Hindu concept of “The Left had path”, etc.) There’s no reason for medicine to use such obscurant terms except for the fact that it creates a knowledge asymmetry between Doctor and Patient. It upholds The Doctor’s authority. It diminishes The Patient’s ability to think. The Doctor knows the magic words of medical speak and The Patient doesn’t, so The Patient has to sit there and be bombarded by an incomprehensible stream of jargon and try to understand what she’s consenting to. She can’t. She’s bowled over by acronyms and Greek and Latin. She is bullied into submission by big words. They say “Hematology” when “blood studies” would work just as well. They use “erythema” simply to mean “red skin.” Renal means “kidneys” and lumbar just means “lower back.” For every single medical term there is a corresponding, small, simple to understand alternative that exists in plain English and there is no reason whatsoever that those shouldn’t be used instead of the litany of medical incantations that get thrown in their place.
No reason, except, to maintain power.
To increase the knowledge gap between the professional and the layman so that The Patient might be convinced his condition is really quite incomprehensible to him and that he ought let the doctor do whatever he pleases, no matter how expensive, no matter how dangerous.
Please understand.
I don’t dislike doctors, nor am I blaming them.
It’s not your fault, individually. It’s just a simple fact of human nature that our systems tend towards those behaviors which solidify power and authority, and the medical system is no exception to those baser human desires. In exactly the same way that science uses the word “Ornithology” when it could simply say “Bird Lore” or that Law says “Habeas Corpus” instead of “show me the body”, Medicine and Theology and everything accursed Academia touches seems to use language primarily as a lever of power instead of as a tool to communicate. The Car Salesmen knows what MSRP and Blue Book Value mean. You don’t. That gives him the advantage in negotiations.
Same principle.
Words are tools. Tools can be weapons.
It gets darker.
For example, English rather hates syllables. It truly does. Think about it. Spanish people, yes? Spanish people have these wonderful, beautiful names. Francisco Domínguez. Isabella Rosario. Gorgeous. Rolls of the tongue.
But…
Long. Right? Sooooo long. Fran-cis-co. Three syllables. Domínguez. Another three? Who do you think you are?
From the English perspective, a man’s entire time should be pronounceable with two jaw movements. John Smith. Tom Jones. Jim Brown. In and out. Boom, boom. Quick. A man might get two syllables for a name, as in Thomas, but never three. For girls, again, one or two is the norm (Anna, Mary, Charlotte), but they’re allowed three if the parents want to get fancy (Julia, Savannah, Evelyn). Anything beyond that though? You’re asking too much. “Elizabeth?” What makes you so special Lizzy? You think you deserve four syllables? This is America honey. We’re here to make money. Ain’t nobody got time to recite your Shakespearian sonnet-ass name.
That’s English.
Short. Terse.
Almost all native Anglo words are like that and they are, therefore, the words we native speakers tend to learn first as children. Loanwords from Greek and Latin are simply not present until one hits about thirteen. You know, Bear. Head. Apple. Duck. Hurt. Sick. Love. In our childhoods we imprint upon short, simple words and emotionally connect them to the visceral rawness of childhood. We play Hide and Seek, not Conceal (Latin) and Locate (Latin). We play Chase, not Pursue. We cry and run to our mommies because we have Cuts, not Lacerations. We grow up asking for Food, not Sustenance. All these words are technically apart of Modern English, yes, but, because we learn one set as babies and another as adults the two do not carry the same emotional weight. It is therefore instructive to ask the question…
What kinds of words do people use when they want to get us to do things?
You’re being manipulated by language.
Every single day.
“Business Speak” is nothing but larger, more complex words that do not emotionally connect with you because you did not learn them as children. That’s all it is. This is very useful because, in the board room, when you want to get around pollution regulations or being fair to your employees, saying things like “expedite the waste removal process” doesn’t sound as evil as “throw the garbage in the river.” It allows people…
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