It struck me that grammatical prescriptivism bears a very similar relationship to linguistics as does mysticism to science. This can be analyzed from a philosophical as well as a political perspective.
[Edit: It was pointed out to me that my use of the word "mysticism" here is inappropriate. By it I mean any sort of magical or supernatural thinking, rather than the more usual notion of special states of consciousness meant to put one in touch with the divine. Additionally, a few edits were made towards the end to make my main point clearer.]
Both mysticism and prescriptivism operate on the basis that there need to be certain well-defined rules for how the world works (even if that rule is just "because that's how God did it"). In each case, there is a very strong reluctance to let go the reigns of reality, as it were, for fear that utter chaos would result. The mystic needs their magical system to keep their crops growing, their cities plague-free, and their soul saved. Similarly, the prescriptivist needs strict usage rules to make sure their sentences are (what they consider to be) optimally readable, socially and politically correct, and up to some abstract standard, lest all semblance of readability and communication disappear. In each case the advocate of such rules fails to see that their rules are arbitrary and related to reality only through social convention and particular modes of thought. They miss the point that their devotion to the actual facts of the world is outweighed by their devotion to an already-given system of rules. The rules of both the mystic and the prescriptivist are arbitrary rules.
Now, there is certainly a place in society for arbitrary rules. In the United States, people drive on the right side of the road. If we don't all agree to do so, there will be a lot of head-on collisions. But we don't look at England or Australia and scream that they are doing things wrong and need to change which side of the road they drive on. There may be a bit of inconvenience in shifting from one to the other, but no one in their right mind would claim that there is a correct side of the road to drive on, and an incorrect one, and that America is correct and England incorrect. They are just arbitrary stylistic choices. (Well, maybe.)
Similarly, religious prescriptions are arbitrary rules insisted upon by people with
an interest in standardizing the behaviors of members of a given
community (including thoughts and utterances). And grammatical prescriptions ("no dangling modifiers", "no stranded prepositions") are arbitrary rules that have been historically insisted upon by people with an interest in standardizing the grammar of a given language.
Of course, I am assuming my reader agrees with both of these assertions. The first one is easy for many people to accept (or at least grant for the sake of argument), as opposition to mystical ideas has a long and proud history, in the form of rationality and science. The second one, though, has its basis in the very young and very much still growing field of linguistics, whose goals, methods, and justification few people have been exposed to, and fewer still understand. But prescriptivist accounts of language fly out the window the moment you actually look at human language as a natural phenomenon. Just as the thunderbolts of Zeus turned into electrical imbalances between the ground and atmosphere, dangling modifier and double negatives turn into simple sentences perfectly comprehensible to speakers of the relevant language. If one speaker says something and another understands the utterance, then grammatically correct linguistic exchange has transpired, regardless of whether any English Grammar Rule Book rules were violated. By way of example, I ended an above sentence with the phrase, "which side of the road they drive on." Nothing exploded. No hair-pulling confusion resulted. Yet I violated a rule of "proper English grammar". But this post isn't about convincing people that prescriptivism is wrong — only that it shares a certain key feature with mysticism.
I insist that in both the case of the mystic and the prescriptivist, there is either a lack of competence in understanding the rules by which nature operates or an emotional attachment to the social implications of the rule set. The mystic cannot grasp the science behind evolution, quantum mechanics, or cosmology, much as the prescriptivist cannot grasp the science behind linguistic universals, childhood language acquisition, or sociolinguistic discrimination. The mystic feels that they are saved and loved and special, much as the prescriptivist feels that they are proper, correct, and supremely literate. But both case are driven by either ignorance or contempt. In neither case is one able to recognize the elitism involved. Or, if the elitism is recognized, it's immediately defended as good and justified. One must be a speaker of "good English" much as one must be a "good Christian". And failing to be so means that you are inferior to the defender of this (dubious) Good.
But because linguistics is a young field which has not yet permeated the cultural fabric, we scoff at linguistic discrimination just as readily as we decry racial or religious discrimination. If you can't talk good, you must be stupid and inferior to all of us who can speak well. This, however, is just ignorance of the way in which people learn language and the way in which language changes, and an almost-mystical assumption about the existence of some Platonic True Form of a given language. It is ignorance of the fact that this Platonic language almost always coincides with the way the elite speak, be they London aristocracy (where "standard" British English comes from) or Muscovite czars (where "standard" Russian comes from).
As an aside, it must be pointed out that this ignorance costs people in very real ways. Being a speaker of a non-standard dialect cannot, on principle, relate in any way to intelligence or ability. There are astrophysicists in Memphis, Manchester and Mumbai alike, each speaking very different versions of English. Sounding Black on the phone is often a sure-fire way of not getting past a first interview. Having a Queens accent is just the same. Yet such linguistic variations have nothing to do with intelligence, training, education, personability. They are merely artifacts of our physicality, of our vulnerability to our social environments as children. We speak the way the people around us speak.
A final thought: there are good reasons to have arbitrary rules. And this applies to grammatical rules. Writing is a suboptimal translation of language, because it misses so many of the nuances essential to conveying understanding, such as tone, pace, volume, expression, etc. So in order to make writing understandable to others, it is important to have usage and spelling rules. In a written document, double negatives are recognized as negating each other, rather than the sentence as a whole (as is the case in, for example, Italian). Standardized spelling and punctuation are essential to the way English is written and read. But insisting that such rules be transferred from the page to the spoken word is ludicrous. Writing is the only place that needs the extra stringency of arbitrary grammatical rules. And it inherits this property from the already-natural-rule-governed richness of spoken language.
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Monday, August 6, 2012
Friday, April 27, 2012
Only Atheists Get to Grieve
I'm gonna write an angry post. I haven't slept well this week and can't get my thoughts together well enough to write something I'm not immediately invested in, so I'm gonna write this instead. If anyone is offended by it (and quite a few people ought to be) I can't apologize in all honesty. Five months ago I might have been able to, but not right now.
A few weeks ago I went to my great-grandmother's grave alone for the first time. I'd been there before with my family, but this was the first time I spent any great length of time there. It was a bizarrely warm March day, with a bright sun and green grass, rather than the usual Minnesota Spring blizzard. I sat by my grandma's grave for an hour that day. When I first got there, I was just looking around, making sure it was tidy. I thought about the prosaic aspects of being at a graveyard, of my bike ride from Minneapolis to Falcon Heights, of the previous times I'd been. Then I stopped avoiding my real purpose in being there, and I started trying to articulate my thoughts and feelings, for the first time, four months after she had passed away.
Up to that point, from the day she died December 4th, I hadn't cried. In fact, I hadn't really cried outside of watching movies in about a decade. And I hadn't cried at her funeral, or at my subsequent visits. And I didn't cry right then. But I sat down on the grass and started talking. I started saying mundane things about missing her, and finally coming to see her, and how strange it felt for her not to be around. And then the same part of my brain responsible for writing this blog kicked in, and I started drawing straight lines. Straight lines are what I do. I don't curve around inconvenient ideas (in as much as I can help it — we all have our biases). I try to think straight through all the relevant information I have in my head.
And a line of thought began to develop. My grandma was dead. Her body lay six feet beneath me in a coffin in the ground. This was a physical reality. Everything that had ever been her was in a box beneath the earth. I pictured her brain, as it was then, several months after her death. It certainly was not a pleasant image, but that was what everything referred to as "her" was now. All we are is a subset of the pattern of neuron firings in our heads. And that pattern had come to an end.
That pattern hadn't gone anywhere. It hadn't transcended matter. It wasn't part of a soul, or spirit, or chain of reincarnation. Everything that had been my great-grandma, that had experienced love and life and war and migration, all of that was now a pool of gray mush inside a very slowly crumbling skull. It had been sustained as part of a self-perpetuating chemical process for nearly a century, which had quickly degenerated and ceased to be. Now, for some people, that is an ugly and horrible thought, that that is all we are. But to me, it's heartbreakingly beautiful: this pile of gray mush pushing electrons around via sodium and potassium exchange wrote the Bible, built St. Peter's, painted the Sistine Chapel, and composed the Ave Maria. That is a miracle.
And then my mind took the next step forward: all of that ability and potential and memory and personality was gone for my grandma. It had gone out like a candle, with barely even a wisp of smoke to show for it. It was gone. She was gone. She was gone, and she was nowhere, and she never would or could come back. There's a physical law that says as much. The laws of physics literally dictated that my great-grandma had ceased to exist for eternity. Except a huge host of high deluded people thought that she wasn't.
Religious people believe in the eternal soul. They hold it that there is some essential, everlasting part of us that continues to exist before life and beyond death. They believe that we are never really gone, and some of them even believe that we will join our loved ones in eternal paradise after death (or judgement, or whatever fairy tale they wish). But they're wrong. And they know they're wrong. How do I know that they know they're wrong? Because they grieve.
If I had the slightest shred of belief that my great-grandma was not well and truly gone for all eternity, I would not have shed a single tear that day. But as I came upon the above line of reasoning, I started crying. Sobbing. Huge, painful dry heaves. I sat on the grass for forty-five minutes straight and cried into my hands. I cried because I knew my grandma was gone. I knew she was gone. I knew it right down to my bones. I knew it the way a baby zebra knows its mother is gone after finally finding her lion-eaten corpse. It was beyond thought, beyond culture or memory or ideology. It was chemical.
And in my grief came also anger. Outrage, in fact. Outrage at the fact that religious people would dare to grieve at a funeral. That they would dare to wail and moan about the supposed "loss" of a loved one. The hypocrisy of it galled me. Had I any hair, I would have been tempted to tear at it. To claim that there is an afterlife where your relatives wait for you before an eternity of bliss, and then to bemoan their passing struck me as obscene. And on clear-headed reflection, I can do nothing but stand by that line of thought.
If a religious person thinks that a deceased person is merely in another place, where they themselves will eventually go, then grief is not simply unnecessary, but nonsensical. We do not grieve when our loved ones move away. We do not grieve when the brother we're angry at leaves town and we know we likely won't speak to him again. We do not grieve when we leave a job, knowing we'll never again see our coworkers. We might be sad, or disappointed, or upset, but we do not grieve for separation. We grieve for death. Because we know right down to our DNA what death is, and all the religious platitudes in all the holy books read by all the priests and sages can't stop us knowing it. And I think that claiming that "it's God's plan" and "she's in a better place" is the absolute worst of sanctimonious, hypocritical delusion.
If you want to claim that you are religious, and believe in a God, or a Soul, or an afterlife, then you do not get to fucking grieve. You get to be sad and annoyed and impatient, because you won't get to see your loved ones for a little while. But what is the remainder of your life compared to eternity? Nothing. Literally, mathematically nothing. So just don't. However, if you accept your grief for what you know it to be, give up your childish insistence on magical thinking and ancient fairy tales. Accept that the universe is a system of particles interacting in infinitely complex ways, guided by blind, stupid natural laws which still somehow manage to produce the absolute miracles of thoughts and songs and love and life. If you insist on keeping your holy books and imaginary creatures, I won't judge you. But only atheists get to grieve.
A few weeks ago I went to my great-grandmother's grave alone for the first time. I'd been there before with my family, but this was the first time I spent any great length of time there. It was a bizarrely warm March day, with a bright sun and green grass, rather than the usual Minnesota Spring blizzard. I sat by my grandma's grave for an hour that day. When I first got there, I was just looking around, making sure it was tidy. I thought about the prosaic aspects of being at a graveyard, of my bike ride from Minneapolis to Falcon Heights, of the previous times I'd been. Then I stopped avoiding my real purpose in being there, and I started trying to articulate my thoughts and feelings, for the first time, four months after she had passed away.
Up to that point, from the day she died December 4th, I hadn't cried. In fact, I hadn't really cried outside of watching movies in about a decade. And I hadn't cried at her funeral, or at my subsequent visits. And I didn't cry right then. But I sat down on the grass and started talking. I started saying mundane things about missing her, and finally coming to see her, and how strange it felt for her not to be around. And then the same part of my brain responsible for writing this blog kicked in, and I started drawing straight lines. Straight lines are what I do. I don't curve around inconvenient ideas (in as much as I can help it — we all have our biases). I try to think straight through all the relevant information I have in my head.
And a line of thought began to develop. My grandma was dead. Her body lay six feet beneath me in a coffin in the ground. This was a physical reality. Everything that had ever been her was in a box beneath the earth. I pictured her brain, as it was then, several months after her death. It certainly was not a pleasant image, but that was what everything referred to as "her" was now. All we are is a subset of the pattern of neuron firings in our heads. And that pattern had come to an end.
That pattern hadn't gone anywhere. It hadn't transcended matter. It wasn't part of a soul, or spirit, or chain of reincarnation. Everything that had been my great-grandma, that had experienced love and life and war and migration, all of that was now a pool of gray mush inside a very slowly crumbling skull. It had been sustained as part of a self-perpetuating chemical process for nearly a century, which had quickly degenerated and ceased to be. Now, for some people, that is an ugly and horrible thought, that that is all we are. But to me, it's heartbreakingly beautiful: this pile of gray mush pushing electrons around via sodium and potassium exchange wrote the Bible, built St. Peter's, painted the Sistine Chapel, and composed the Ave Maria. That is a miracle.
And then my mind took the next step forward: all of that ability and potential and memory and personality was gone for my grandma. It had gone out like a candle, with barely even a wisp of smoke to show for it. It was gone. She was gone. She was gone, and she was nowhere, and she never would or could come back. There's a physical law that says as much. The laws of physics literally dictated that my great-grandma had ceased to exist for eternity. Except a huge host of high deluded people thought that she wasn't.
Religious people believe in the eternal soul. They hold it that there is some essential, everlasting part of us that continues to exist before life and beyond death. They believe that we are never really gone, and some of them even believe that we will join our loved ones in eternal paradise after death (or judgement, or whatever fairy tale they wish). But they're wrong. And they know they're wrong. How do I know that they know they're wrong? Because they grieve.
If I had the slightest shred of belief that my great-grandma was not well and truly gone for all eternity, I would not have shed a single tear that day. But as I came upon the above line of reasoning, I started crying. Sobbing. Huge, painful dry heaves. I sat on the grass for forty-five minutes straight and cried into my hands. I cried because I knew my grandma was gone. I knew she was gone. I knew it right down to my bones. I knew it the way a baby zebra knows its mother is gone after finally finding her lion-eaten corpse. It was beyond thought, beyond culture or memory or ideology. It was chemical.
And in my grief came also anger. Outrage, in fact. Outrage at the fact that religious people would dare to grieve at a funeral. That they would dare to wail and moan about the supposed "loss" of a loved one. The hypocrisy of it galled me. Had I any hair, I would have been tempted to tear at it. To claim that there is an afterlife where your relatives wait for you before an eternity of bliss, and then to bemoan their passing struck me as obscene. And on clear-headed reflection, I can do nothing but stand by that line of thought.
If a religious person thinks that a deceased person is merely in another place, where they themselves will eventually go, then grief is not simply unnecessary, but nonsensical. We do not grieve when our loved ones move away. We do not grieve when the brother we're angry at leaves town and we know we likely won't speak to him again. We do not grieve when we leave a job, knowing we'll never again see our coworkers. We might be sad, or disappointed, or upset, but we do not grieve for separation. We grieve for death. Because we know right down to our DNA what death is, and all the religious platitudes in all the holy books read by all the priests and sages can't stop us knowing it. And I think that claiming that "it's God's plan" and "she's in a better place" is the absolute worst of sanctimonious, hypocritical delusion.
If you want to claim that you are religious, and believe in a God, or a Soul, or an afterlife, then you do not get to fucking grieve. You get to be sad and annoyed and impatient, because you won't get to see your loved ones for a little while. But what is the remainder of your life compared to eternity? Nothing. Literally, mathematically nothing. So just don't. However, if you accept your grief for what you know it to be, give up your childish insistence on magical thinking and ancient fairy tales. Accept that the universe is a system of particles interacting in infinitely complex ways, guided by blind, stupid natural laws which still somehow manage to produce the absolute miracles of thoughts and songs and love and life. If you insist on keeping your holy books and imaginary creatures, I won't judge you. But only atheists get to grieve.
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