The War On Words

Perhaps you've never really thought about this, but why is language so important?

There's a lot of noise lately about gender pronouns.  The Swedes added a new gender-less third-person singular pronoun a while back.  The German language has had three genders for centuries.  So has Russian.  Indonesian has a gender-less third-person singular that likely stems from Sanskrit roots.  So what's the big deal?

English has four third-person singular pronouns, two of which are gender-neutral: he, she, it and one.  He, she and one are primarily used for humans, while it can be used for just about anything.  Consider the couple who has just found out they are pregnant.  Folks commonly ask (these days), "Do you know what IT is yet?"

Gender is an exclusively linguistic construct.  Except for a tiny fraction of one percent of the global population, humans come in two sexes: male and female.  We are all genetically XX or XY, with a smattering of folks having XXY or XYY, and the latter two usually suffer medical issues all their lives.  Therefore, "he" and "she" accurately designate the sex of 99.99% of the world's population, and a million dollars' worth of surgery cannot change one's sex.

The stupid part of the whole pronoun argument is not that English (and many other languages) already have gender-neutral pronouns, it's that most humans do not address people in the third-person.  In English, we always address someone as "you", which is appropriate for both formal and informal, as well as male or female.  All of the plural pronouns are gender-neutral, so the point is moot in those cases.  Of course, "I" is the pronoun of self and is appropriate for any gender, sex, race, orientation, or whatever.

Apparently, in all the socio-political bullshit being spread over the pronoun argument, folks have forgotten about "one", which is a very old and gender-neutral pronoun in the English language that is often used in formal conditionals, but could easily be adopted for common language.  It doesn't have the baggage of "it" and even carries a certain formal connotation, thus offering a fine alternative to "he" or "she".  The Irish commonly use "your one" to refer to a singular third person.

So, what is this pronoun dust-up really all about?  Answer: cutting the culture off from its roots.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell made a point of noting the State's efforts to reduce the NewSpeak dictionary down to the most basic vocabulary.  The theory was that if people don't have a word for something, they can't think about it, nor can they convey it to others via speech or text.

This, in a nutshell, is what the pronoun war is all about.  It is one of several efforts to eradicate vocabulary from the language.  As the vocabulary contracts, it becomes harder and harder to access literature.  Within a generation or two, one is unable to make sense of books that are even a century old.  As the effort progresses, they are unable to understand books written even decades ago.

Take a look at this passage from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales:

      Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote

And bathed every veyne in swich licour,

Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

5 Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne...

I doubt many native speakers of English could read most of this, much less speak it accurately, and the language is just 600 years old.  The inability of modern English speakers to read the text is not part of a concerted effort by the Powers That Be to cut off our culture, it is just the natural evolution of language.

Now try Beowulf or Shakespeare in the original language.

Today, folks can barely understand the language of the US Constitution, which is only 200 and some years old, because the sentence structure is beyond the capabilities of most "schooled" readers (I purposely chose "schooled" over "educated").

Under a full onslaught of "language police", how long would it be before we could no longer read last year's New York Times?  How long before the vast majority of people could no longer access information reserved only for the highest levels of society?  Isn't that already happening?

Listen to "Man On The Street" interviews on any given outlet.  Decide for yourself if the vast majority of folks even know about Chaucer, much less have read or even less understood Chaucer, especially in the original texts.  These folks couldn't even compose a thought that included an idea from Canterbury Tales.

Orwell was right.

The effort to change and edit language is not about people's feelings.  Who really cares what a tranny in Berkeley wants to be called?  The point is to cut off access to the masses of vocabulary, grammar and ideas by making history and literature unintelligible to the hordes.

If you don't know something exists, you will likely never look for it.  And if you stumble upon it by accident, you would never be able to comprehend it.  You wouldn't have the tools to even begin to decipher the thoughts contained in the text.

The Catholic Church did this for millennia by printing the Bible in Latin and saying the mass in Latin.  Unless you were highly educated, you had no idea what was contained in those words.  Even more to the point, the church hierarchy could tell you it meant anything they wanted, and you would have no way of challenging them.

The "language police" are not about sparing the feelings of a few, they are about cutting off the many from the vast reservoirs of human experience.  Without literature, the past only exists for a lifetime, and then it dies.  Without language, the past will cease to exist and the State will be everything that is.

If you want to save your culture, and by extension humanity, the only things you need to teach your children and grandchildren are the Trivium and a love of literature.

They are the best and only true weapons we have against Authoritarianism and Totalitarianism.

A Modest Proposal, Part 1

Back in the day, one of my favorite columnists was William Safire.  His specialty was criticizing the use of language in the public sphere according to the classic skills of the old Trivium of the liberal arts.

To refresh our memories, the Trivium is defined by Wikipedia as:

"...a systematic method of critical thinking used to derive factual certainty from information perceived with the traditional five senses: sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell."

The Trivium was made up of three specific skills: grammar, logic and rhetoric.  Mastery of these skills allowed the student to understand ordered information, analyze its content and express an opinion in a coherent manner.  Thus, the foundation of clear and rational thought, and the ability to express it, required the precise use of language.

For centuries, Latin was the language of choice for educated people, if for no other reason than because it is a very precise one.  English has more or less supplanted Latin in the past two hundred years owing to its ability to absorb vocabulary and grammar from other languages, which unfortunately for those who teach the language, makes it rather complex and occasionally non-sensical.

The reason this has come up again is that, as George Orwell pointed out in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the control of language imparts control of the mind.  If one can effectively reduce the vocabulary and simplify the grammar of a language, one can control the thoughts - and the actions - of the masses.

Orwell postulated that IngSoc would use Newspeak to control thought over time by eliminating words and concepts that were offensive to the State.  Eventually, he said, the masses would be unable to form a rational thought on certain topics because there simply were no words to do so.  And even if an individual could host an offensive thought, he would be unable to clearly express it due to a lack of structure (grammar) and rhetorical ability.

Ultimately, the masses could not conceive of anything other than a string of slogans approved by the Central Party.  There would be no history, no books other than the Newspeak dictionary, and no reference in the public sphere to anything other than what the State wished the masses to have.

Every year we see this in action, as the general vocabulary and grammar of the mass media devolves to lower and lower levels.  Even now, if one learned everything from the media, one would be unable to express anything above an eighth grade level (being generous here).

When I was a child, my father bought a set of McGuffey Readers, that were the grade school standard of US education in the late 1800s and early 1900s.   Contemporary collage-level students would struggle with much of the sixth grade material in these books.

If you have experienced the language abilities of the average teenager on Facebook or other social media, then you know that IngSoc has triumphed.  The median language abilities of most young Americans and Europeans has devolved to near-incoherence.  Spelling and grammar are virtually non-existent and the relative importance of what these people find noteworthy is inane.  Basic things, such as knowing that data and bacteria are plurals, and being able to match cases and tenses accordingly are nearly gone.  In my own experience with students, even being able to identify subjects, verbs and objects is a skill all but lost.

Most of the problem I lay at the feet of Political Correctness.  This one effort has bombarded modern culture with the message that certain thoughts and vocabulary are off limits.  The arbiters of PC have spent decades modifying language and forbidding public discourse on certain topics, to the point that modern education has been reduced to sloganeering and jingoism in the service of the State's agenda.  Young people can no longer dissociate the message from the messenger, nor critically analyze an argument to glean the facts from opinion and speculation.  In short, they can't think.

In fact, it has finally come to the point where certain topics are so taboo that Ivy League college students are reduced to emotional blobs by the mere encounter with certain words or phrases.  Imagine the depth of the programming required to reduce a human being to sobs over a word.  Millennia of cultural development to produce a generation incapable of reason and slave to emotion.

The situation is well beyond critical.  The amount of remediation required to reverse this kind of indoctrination is staggering.  We must face the fact that our culture may be lost forever, because it is a chain that once broken, cannot be repaired.

The best that we remaining rational people can do at this point is to follow the example of the secret societies and go underground until the eventual complete destruction of the society that has built such a tragedy.  As in medieval Europe, we must protect knowledge and our progeny from this self-destructive society and work towards the New Renaissance in a couple of centuries.

Actions such as homeschooling, tossing out the TeeVee and spending hours teaching our children and grandchildren in the time-tested classical liberal arts.  There is little other choice.  The false culture is so all-pervasive and the techniques used so powerful that any contact with it will cause damage.

Even as I write, I am watching adult friends become consumed with Pokemon Go, to the point that even self-preservation is not enough to overcome the addiction.  I see young adults I have known since childhood become angry and defensive when certain ideas are brought up for debate, unwilling and unable to ideas on their own merit, and choosing instead to simply deny that the concepts exist.

For this reason, I am proposing a complete different take on prepping and survival, focusing not on food and shelter, but on knowledge and information.  Come back tomorrow for Part 2.

A Gift Unopened

Have you ever stopped to consider how much time, effort and wealth is squandered on leaders?  Or how utterly useless they are?

What is it about humans that make us go through so much toil and trouble to prop up people who are rarely better equipped to lead than anyone reading these words?  Most leaders in the world are no more capable of leading than any one of us, and yet we go through absurdly expensive selection rituals to find one person who can survive the process and then invest all our hopes and desires in them.

These leaders are no more intelligent or special than any one of us.  In many cases, they are far less so.  These leaders are little more than functionaries whose job it is to push papers and attend banquets.  So if the leaders are nothing special, then what is it about the rest of us that compels us to go through these rituals and then wait in vane for the leaders to fulfill the desires we have invested in them?

It's not for lack of trying that we haven't gotten rid of these useless figureheads.

The Enlightenment had a vision of the "sovereign individual."  All of the powers of the State were to be invested in each human being.  Through a social focus on education, the individual would be empowered to rule himself, and his home and property would be, in effect, his realm of supremacy.  In effect, every human of majority age would be a king or queen, a sovereign over their own lives and property, made benign and beneficent by access to learning never before made available to the masses.

Marx and Engels envisioned a system labelled Communism, where the State would ultimately be made irrelevant and the individual finally empowered to be their own supreme authority.  Few people realize this, since few have read The Communist Manifesto, but these men didn't want another system to replace something else, they wanted the ultimate demise of systems altogether, and created a roadmap to achieve it, if it were ever followed, which it has never been.

  Libertarianism is a sort of amalgam of these two, which is not difficult given the very similar goals.  The only difference between all sides is the means by which to achieve the target.

These three roadmaps were based on the Protestant Reformation and the idea that individuals were just as capable of reading the Bible and interpreting it for themselves, and didn't need a centralized power structure guarding the keys of wisdom and selecting compliant leaders to promulgate the system, rather than the common good.

What all of these concepts have in common is the empowerment of the individual over the collective and the need for leaders and authorities.  They are all predicated on a single event in history: the invention of movable type and Gutenberg's press.  By making books infinitely reproduceable, without the need for rooms full of scribes and caligraphers, prices plummeted and information became available to huge populations that were never able to access it before.

With one invention, the need for authorities and leaders was wiped out and the masses empowered with the same information as the elite.  This led to an explosion of creativity: the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution.  Every single person now had access to the same resources that were once the sole purview of the elite.

The internet is no less revolutionary.  Now cheaper and broader than at any time in history, individuals have access to vast libraries of information.  Books and data formerly only available to scholars and select elites is now just a click away, and most even downloadable to a personal library.  My own digital library probably contains a significant proportion of the library at Alexandria, and can be accessed without leaving my chair.

And yet...

People still turn to leaders and authorities.  We still prefer to have a perceived expert tell us what an author said, rather than going direct to the source.  We still think we are incapable of self-sovereignty and self-determination.  We still flock in annual rituals to select leaders who have spent inconceivable amounts of time and money to gain a position of power over us.

Are we so weak, so gullible that we can't see how much power we posses, and how little we require over us?  Has our educational system been so diluted that we don't see the power that is sitting right in front of us?  Are we so mis-led that we truly believe we cannot read and understand information for ourselves?

If so, then it is a sad commentary on both our leaders, and ourselves.  Our leaders have betrayed us by taking power away from us, rather than handing it out to us.  These leaders have destroyed our educational system, which is the key to personal empowerment.  They have made us more dependent on them, than on ourselves.  They have given us fish, rather than taught us how to fish.

The promise of such great movements as the Enlightenment is all but dead, even at the moment when we have been most empowered.  We would rather spend hours on YouTube watching empty content, than reading Plato and discussing it in online fora.

How sad.  How utterly wasted is this personal empowerment.

When authorities censor information, it is an admission of fear.  They are afraid that we will know what they know, and act on it.  If the history of the world for the past 500 years has taught us anything, it is that authorities will do anything to keep us ignorant and enslaved.

It is the greatest irony in history that at the very moment the power of the ages is at each of our fingertips, that we are the most controlled and enslaved people of all time.  And all because our leaders would rather we learn to put condoms on cucumbers, than to learn the basic skills of liberty and independence: grammar, logic and rhetoric.

In fact, if you search "trivium" on Google, the entire list of top references are for a pop band.

How we have squandered our birthright.

Minutae And Intersections

What is wrong with modern education systems?  Why can't we turn out smart people?  And what kind of system created the giants of history?

Modern education has become the domain of "educational theorists" who spend their time worrying about techniques and feel-good pablum that does nothing to educate.  Silly little trust exercises, group think workshops and rote jingoism are not education.  They are indoctrination.  Indoctrination does not teach one how to think, but what to think.

Students graduate with no framework on which to build a lifetime of learning.  In fact, most come out of school thinking they now know everything they will ever need to know.  This is a horrible and frightening fact that serves only those who need button-pushers and lever-pullers.  The biggest problem is that the corporate world is fast replacing the pushers and pullers with a far more (so they think) malleable and controllable workforce.  And even bigger problem is that these poor folks have no tools to think their way out of the coming wave of mass worker displacement.

It is a fact that many of the giants, on whose shoulders we stand, did not receive the standard 16-year education we consider necessary today.  People like Thomas Edison, Edgar Allan Poe and Albert Einstein had only the most cursory educations, by our current standards, yet they changed the world with little more than the ability to read, write and cipher, and a strong impulse towards autodidacticism (self-learning).

One thing notably missing in today's world of corporate education are schools of thought, even though the idiom still exists.  Once upon a time, different schools had different approaches to learning and the belief systems they espoused.  A quick look at art history shows that most of the great movements in art came out of specific schools with innovative approaches to the philosophy and techniques that creates art.  The Bauhaus, for instance, distinguished itself by merging handcrafts with fine art, and teaching a "form follows function" philosophy of art and architecture.  Aristotle, Plato and Euclid all created schools to promote their unique views and interpretations of the real world.

This approach had the advantage of allowing students to choose for themselves which philosophies best suited their own weltanschauungs and created a true marketplace of ideas.  Professors survived by having world views that were more actionable than another.  One chose a university, not by success on the football field, but by which one taught the most successful ideas and processes.

In the modern system, there is little difference in schools anywhere.  One is taught the Big Bang, Evolution, Electrical Theory and so on as if it is all set in stone, with no room for improvement or, especially new ideas.  Instead of reading the giants and discussing their propositions, and then arguing with the professors, one sits quietly in lectures, memorizes "facts" and vomits them onto bubble forms, never having learned why or whether there are competing ideas.

In Western education (Eastern followed a similar track), there were the Trivium and Quadrivium.  The Trivium we all know as Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric (input/processing/output).  The Quadrivium consists of Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy (observation of the Natural World).  Together, these are the seven Liberal Arts that every educated person was required to know in order to think critically and express their ideas coherently.  Only after mastering the Liberal Arts could one go on to specialize in the Practical Arts (law, medicine, etc.) or Trades (finance, manufacturing, etc.).

This is radically different from the namby-pamby Educational Theory approach.  Educational Theory seeks the simplest and most effective means to stuff information into a brain.  It does nothing to teach processing and expression (at least non-emotional kinds).  It is experiential rather than intelectual, and focuses on "approaching a child at their developmental level," rather than challenging the child to rise up to something greater.

No wonder the vast majority of kids today are deathly bored in school.  No challenges to learning and a future of drone living pulling one specific lever and pushing one specific button.

On top of these radically different approaches to learning and content, there are no options in schools of thought.  The information at Harvard is the same as the information as Cal Tech, with the only possible differences in the organization of the chapters of the "professor's" textbooks.

Even worse, there is no sense of connection between disciplines.  In other words, there is no philosophical connection between the arts and sciences.  Cosmology and Philosophy are just credits on the transcript, not a means of uniting diverse information into a coherent picture of the Universe.  Without the tools of critical thinking, kids can't take new information, analyze it and plug it into a resolved tapestry of understanding.  And without that ability, there can be no new ideas, processes or insights.

The current technique of education presents a finish picture to young minds.  When new information comes along, the mind tries to fit it into the finished picture.  If it doesn't fit, it is discarded without any attempt to modify or interpret the information with a basic set of tools.  Thus, radically new ideas are thrown out because no one can analyze the structure of the idea or express it with any kind of coherence.

I was lucky.  I had some very intelligent teachers, beginning with my parents.  My teachers spent a lot of time showing me that class work was only a taste of what is available.  I was taught how to be an autodidact, a self-teacher.  I was given the tools to analyze and express new ideas, and incorporate them into my weltanschauung.

People are amazed at how many languages I speak (17 with 4 fluent).  It's easy, actually.  Once you master grammar, the rest is plugging in vocabulary.  Grammar is more or less the same in every human form of communication.  There are subjects, verbs, objects, qualities, quantities, and time.  That's it!  The rest is just learning how to say "green" with different words.

Grammar teaches framework.  Logic teaches structure.  Rhetoric teaches expression.  Music teaches harmony.  Geometry teaches Nature.  Astronomy teaches place.  Arithmetic teaches quantification.  Together, they form a complete image of the Universe we call Philosophy, and Philosophy leads to Cosmology, which is speculation on how it all began and how it will all end.

What a sad, tiny little Universe today's students must inhabit.  They are presented with a complete story.  The walls are already built and they only need to run around touching up the plaster and paint.  Nothing to discover.  Nothing to invent.  No room for changing the world.  WYSIWYG.  And the only thing you are allowed to see is what "they" tell you to see.

Without the basic tools, these poor young minds have no way to teach themselves, and worse, no desire, because they believe everything is "settled science."  They resign themselves to a lifetime of pushing and pulling, never knowing how vast their potential truly is.  With a steady steam of cinematic history and "unreality" (a.k.a. Virtual Reality), they can't even distinguish between what is real and what is complete fantasy.  How can you evaluate a film "based on a true story" if you have never studied history and don't know what a book is.

Truly, the only answer is to become an autodidact first, then teach your children, as well.  We cannot depend on ANY schools in the modern system to actually educate anyone.  They are pusher-and-puller factories.  If you want children who will change the world and have any hope of becoming true leaders, then the process begins with your own habits.

Turn off the teevee.  Use your computer for research and reading in your spare time.  Write a blog to clarify your thoughts and challenge others to think about new things.  The place to start is HERE.  It's never too late to improve yourself.

The rest will follow.