Few students are as frustrating to a teacher as those who are bright, literate, and interested—but who don’t utter a word in class. I was such a student myself.There are undoubtedly many reasons for muteness. For me, the major factor was background. I grew up in a semiheated trailer in rural southwest Virginia, not benefiting from niceties like dentistry. I was accepted into the University of Virginia no doubt as a gesture toward the rural poor, but I was wildly out of place. I couldn’t dress the way my classmates did, and my cracker accent was embarrassing. I put myself through college, helped by small scholarships but mostly by working construction jobs and (for one year) the 4 a.m. shift in an auto-parts factory.
I felt out of place. I was out of place. I hated people looking at me, and I was sensitive to ridicule. I don’t think fast on my feet, and I was determined not to make a fool of myself. So I didn’t talk in class.
My more conscientious teachers realized from papers and exams that I was in fact not a clueless dolt, and they dragged me into their offices. Some tried to reason with me; some berated me; some issued threats. “If you don’t talk in class, I’ll give you a B, no matter what you get on papers and exams” was the standard line. (Several made good on that threat.) Even the more sympathetic among them urged me to face the facts: Speaking up wasn’t optional.
Individuals don’t transfer values from one generation to the next. Individuals are biologically incapable of producing a next generation except in the crudest possible sense of the term. Socialization—the process through which a person internalizes what is good and bad, meaningful and meaningless—is shaped by one’s relatives, the friends and associates who surround a person, and typically a canon of texts that is revered and consulted for guidance. The values of expressive individualism guarantee that the values of future generations will be more or less up for grabs for the simple reason that expressive individualists have a difficult time replicating (the demographic data don’t lie) and an even more difficult time socializing a child.It’s true that expressive individualists do connect with one another for varying periods of time and do at least fairly often have children. But the deliberately atomistic quality of their value system makes it difficult for these children to understand, let alone continue, whatever moral traditions their parents may affirm and display. In this respect, today’s expressive individualists bear some comparison to a 19th-century millennial sect called the Harmony Society. Founded in Germany in 1785, the Harmonists were a Protestant community that flourished in Indiana between 1825 and 1850. At the time, its members were known for their social conscience and economic success. Yet these virtues weren’t enough to ensure the sect’s survival for one simple reason: It promoted celibacy. The Harmonists, like today’s expressive individualists, were ethical, hardworking, productive people, but their way of life proved unsustainable because their values failed to foster successor generations.
Kay Ryan’s poetry, and her public – if you can call it that – persona defy almost every stereotype that a reader outside the United States might bring to an American poem. Ryan’s poems are witty, reserved, unprepossessing, impersonal, small-scale, as well as short-lined, practical rather than spiritual, never boastful. Most fit inside the left half of a single page. First-person pronouns are rare, rhymes are dense, puns abound – “A bestiary catalogs / bests” – and each joke opens up to reveal something worrisome about our shared lot: in Bestiary, for example: “The mediocres / both higher and lower / are suppressed in favor / of the singularly savage / or clever”. A chapter of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, entitled Why Americans Writers and Orators are so often Bombastic, is devoted to Americans’ individualism, bordering on self-centredness, and to their religious fervour. By these standards Ryan does not seem very American at all.
Negative theology is not dressed up Buddhism. It is the necessary anesthesia of Christian theological work - quieting the mind so that God can get on with the surgery of the soul. What theologically inclined folk need most is not the next great book, but someone to tell them that compared to the spiritual life, mastering the most advanced theological concepts, including their Greek, Latin, Syriac or German nuances, is a piece of cake. “Those who have been most enlightened by the Holy Spirit,” writes Thomas Dubay, “are the least inclined to consider this enlightenment easy to come by.”
So let’s just suppose that Alan Turing is just the same personally: he’s a mathematician, an early computer scientist, a metaphysician, a war hero — but he’s German. He’s not British. Instead of being the Bletchley Park code breaker, he’s the German code maker. He’s Alan Turingstein, and he realizes the Enigma Machine has a flaw. So, he imagines, designs and builds a digital communication code system for the Nazis. He defeats the British code breakers. In fact, he’s so brilliant that he breaks some of the British codes instead. Therefore, the second World War lasts until the Americans drop their nuclear bomb on Europe.I think you’ll agree this counter-history is plausible, because so many of Turing’s science problems were German — the famous “ending problem” of computability was German. The Goedel incompleteness theorem was German, or at least Austrian. The world’s first functional Turing-complete computer, the Konrad Zuse Z3, was operational in May 1941 and was supported by the Nazi government.
So then imagine Alan Turingstein, mathematics genius, computer pioneer, and Nazi code expert. After the war, he messes around in the German electronics industry in some inconclusive way, and then he commits suicide in some obscure morals scandal. What would we think of Alan Turingstein today, on his centenary? I doubt we’d be celebrating him, and secretly telling ourselves that we’re just like him.
On the contrary, we’d consider him a sinister figure, somebody to be whispered about. He’d be a spooky, creepy villain, a weird eccentric with ragged fingernails and pants held up with twine. He would show up in World War II historical novels as a scary fringe character. As for the famous Turingstein Test, which I’m about to discuss at length, we wouldn’t see that as a fun metaphysical thought experiment. Those interesting ideas would also bear the taint of Nazi culture, and we’d probably consider the Turing Test some kind of torture chamber for intelligent machines.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiyMuHuCFo4?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=250&h=141]
It worries me a bit when I think about how many times I’ve watched this video.
The U. S. Air Force Academy in the foreground
The cataloging of vocabulary and pronunciation and syntax that field linguists do in remote outposts helps keep a language alive. But saving a language is not something linguists can accomplish, because salvation must come from within. The answer may lie in something Harrison and Anderson witnessed in Palizi [in northeastern india] one day, when a villager in his early 20s came with a friend to perform a song for them. Palizi is far removed from pervasive U.S. culture, so it was something of a surprise to the two linguists when the teenagers launched into a full-bore, L.A.-style rap song complete with gang hand gestures and head bobbing and attitude, a pitch-perfect rendition of an American street art, with one refinement: They were rapping in Aka.Were the linguists dismayed? I asked. To the contrary, Harrison said. “These kids were fluent in Hindi and English, but they chose to rap in a language they share with only a couple thousand people.” Linguistic co-optation and absorption can work both ways, with the small language sometimes acting as the imperialist. “The one thing that’s necessary for the revival of a language,” Father D’Souza told me one day, “is pride.”
Ochs and Izquierdo noted, in their paper on the differences between the family lives of the Matsigenka and the Angelenos, how early the Matsigenka begin encouraging their children to be useful. Toddlers routinely heat their own food over an open fire, they observed, while “three-year-olds frequently practice cutting wood and grass with machetes and knives.” Boys, when they are six or seven, start to accompany their fathers on fishing and hunting trips, and girls learn to help their mothers with the cooking. As a consequence, by the time they reach puberty Matsigenka kids have mastered most of the skills necessary for survival. Their competence encourages autonomy, which fosters further competence—a virtuous cycle that continues to adulthood.The cycle in American households seems mostly to run in the opposite direction. So little is expected of kids that even adolescents may not know how to operate the many labor-saving devices their homes are filled with. Their incompetence begets exasperation, which results in still less being asked of them (which leaves them more time for video games). Referring to the Los Angeles families, Ochs and Izquierdo wrote, “Many parents remarked that it takes more effort to get children to collaborate than to do the tasks themselves.”