What are the evolutionary purposes of language? Most
people would, without further thought, assume that the principal purpose of
language is communication of information. That is, indeed, one of its purposes;
but, I believe, it is a secondary purpose. The primary purpose of language is
social interaction: to influence others to do what you want them to do, to
create a good (or bad) impression of yourself in the minds of others, to
identify yourself as a member of their particular group.
This is the principal reason that there are languages,
plural. Each “tribe” even today has its own language. These languages are much
more complex than they have to be, and the main reason is that if you cannot
master the complexities of the language and its pronunciation, you are probably
an outsider.
But even within a society, language is primarily a tool
of social interaction, and often of manipulation. We can see this in the
current eruption of white supremacist and neo-Nazi sentiments in the United
States. The use of these terms would prejudice a reader against them, and I
would avoid them, except that the right-wing extremists are proud of them. Some
of them carry Nazi flags, and the others allow them to.
1. When
a white supremacist rammed his car into a crowd of anti-Nazi protesters in
Charlottesville on August 12, 2017 [http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/18/us/charlottesville-james-alex-fields-charges/index.html],
President Trump vacillated between condemning neo-Nazi activities and
considering them to be merely part of the spectrum of political opinion. At no
point did he or any other member of his administration call this an act of
terrorism. But it fits all definitions of terrorism. The terrorist was not
targeting a particular individual with his car; he was attempting to create
terror among the people who were protesting against the white supremacists. And
he used deadly force. If he had been
Muslim, he would have been instantly branded as a terrorist. The selective
use of the word “terrorist” against Muslims but never using against white
Christian extremists is a clear use of manipulative language.
2. The
white supremacists call their cause and their rallies “free speech rallies”
rather than neo-Nazi or white supremacist rallies. By getting millions of
people to use this term for their activities, they project the message that,
“You can’t possibly be against free speech! So you have to allow us to shout
out our hatred against our fellow citizens.”
Technically, they have the legal right to say whatever
they want to, so long as they do not incite people to violent action. But they
are evil. We cannot allow them to depict their actions as mere defenses of free
speech. All of us who are not aspiring Nazis must keep calling these people,
and all who sympathize with them or speak out in their defense, what they are:
the modern defenders of Adolf Hitler.
Hitler himself was a master of language manipulation. (He
wasn’t a master of much else. His leadership was disastrously delusional and
destructive for his own German people, for example.) Most of us think of the
phrase “Deutschland über alles” (Germany over all) as being Hitler’s phrase for
world domination. But it was originally used to unite the German kingdoms (such
as Saxony and Bavaria) into a single country: Germany was more important than
its constituent kingdoms. Hitler stole the phrase and all the sympathy that
went with it. Also, if Hitler had publicly proclaimed that he planned to
slaughter millions of Jews, if he had called it an attempt at extermination, he
would have had much less support from the German people. But he called it a
“solution,” and who wouldn’t be in favor of this? A person is as likely to
support a “solution” as “free speech.”
Political conservatives hate, viscerally hate, our modern
language practices in which we attempt to counteract the racism of the past.
They call it “political correctness,” which implies that anyone who does not
use racist terms is doing so only for political influence. Our use of “black”
instead of “nigger” can only mean, to
conservatives, that we want political power; they think it cannot possibly be because we want to show respect and love to
people who people who have been oppressed and slaughtered in the recent past.
Conservatives want to refer to what happened in Tulsa in 1921 as a race riot, implying that black people were doing the killing and burning.
In reality, it was a white mob hunting down and shooting blacks. Prominent
Tulsan and KKK member W. Tate Brady was pleased to see a black man being
dragged behind a car with a noose around his neck. It is not “political
correctness” that makes us refer to the 1921 incident as a massacre or as an
act of terrorism rather than a riot. It is a desire for truth, and to try to
make up for the white massacre of blacks in the recent past.
To test the hypothesis of “language exists largely for
manipulation,” all we need to do is see the spectacular failure of invented
languages. Esperanto was invented to create world peace under the misguided
notion that a common language will prevent miscommunication. But liars can lie
in Esperanto. Charles Bliss created a system of symbolic communication that, he believed, would prevent
language from being manipulated. He printed up six thousand copies of his book
and sent them to government and other leaders all over the world, and got no
response whatever, until some nurses noticed that this system might help
children with cerebral palsy, who cannot communicate what they are thinking, to
connect with the world. Bliss’s system thereby escaped extinction. But soon it
was being used, not in place of other languages, but as a way of learning them,
leading right back to the manipulation that Bliss, an escapee from World War
Two, hated so much.
So when humans have created new languages for the express
purpose of avoiding social manipulation, the new languages become the venues of
social manipulation. This is an experimental confirmation of the hypothesis
that languages evolved for social interactions, one important component of
which is manipulation.
And there is nothing we can do about it, other than to
keep using language in such a way as to try to counteract evil people from
using their words to oppress others in their attempt to revive Nazi sentiments
and make them palatable.
I also posted this essay on my science blog.
After posting a video on this topic, I received a comment
saying that the white supremacist in the car was merely trying to get out of
the crowd, and that his car was being attacked by leftist protestors. Well, of
course this is what happened, AFTER he drove his car at high speed into the
crowd. Of course his car was attacked AFTER he committed his act of terrorism.
This is obvious to anyone who has seen the videos, such as this one.
The fact that there was someone even within my small circle of YouTube viewers
who believes that it is okay for a white supremacist to ram his car into
protestors, that killing someone is a form of free speech, is frightening. My
video, so far, has had only 18 views, and this comment came from one of this
small number of viewers. Extrapolating to the total adult population of
America, this means that there are approximately a half million right-wingers
in America who believe that such action is justified. There might be more, as
my videos tend to be viewed by progressives.
