Mini-Cast #15 - The Re-Arrival Part III

So let's finally talk a little bit about Arrival. Not so much about the movie but about how the theater presented it. There are extremely mild spoilers in this podcast, the next will have many more, but consider yourself warned.

When I got to the theater, there were multiple academic speakers before the movie: a linguist, a philosopher, and an astronomer. ...Sounds like the beginning of a joke... and in some ways it was. The linguist said that she had never seen the movie, but she'd read a few summaries and proceeded to tell a few spoilers. The philosopher said that he'd both seen the movie and read the short story it was based on, but he'd have rather a different movie get curated in this science fiction series, and proceeded to tell us still more spoilers.

After the movie, the linguist told us how incredibly much she hated the movie. She said that the movie was based on what's called the Whorfian theory of language, also known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis - which according to a website called 'Science Direct' is a kind of linguistic theory of relativity. The meaning behind it is that the particular language you speak affects your conception about reality. Old conceptions would posit ideas such as because German has so many compound words, Germans have become more adept at understanding elusive states of being. Whereas the French have an institution called the Academie Francaise, which exists to keep the French refinement of language in its famously refined state, and very slow to evolve. So, according to this theory, Germans would find it very easy to understand inner experiences, while the French are very good at understanding outward experiences, physical and sensual. Is there evidence for it? Well, perhaps in other eras when extensive education was not nearly so widespread, the inherent properties of the language helped thinkers like Voltaire and Rousseau develop very materialist, polemical conceptions of how to improve the world, while Kant and Hegel developed world-conceptions that were extremely metaphysical and speculative. But now that we've thought through all these theories for more than two-hundred years, now that so many educated philosophy students read French and German equally well, now that ideas and experiences of the French and Germans have cross-polinated so extensively, what difference really is there? Everything which Germans know, French know, and vice versa. And the EU is such that simply being French or German involves immersion in one another's worlds. So this is just one example of the strengths and, more obviously, weaknesses of Whorfian theory.

This professor said that the Whorfian hypothesis is thoroughly discredited, and in a purely linguistic sense, this makes perfect sense. Language literally serves a descriptive purpose, and therefore must always be extremely mutable. To embrace the Whorfian hypothesis seems to my extremely brief acquaintance with it a denial that the human brain is able to master new concepts. Maybe it's true that older generations will have a harder time understanding new ideas from foreign places and world-conceptions, but future generations will have assimilated these new concepts their languages and grappled with them their whole lives. Over enough time, any foreign concept can become familiar.

But even if the Whorfian theory has been discredited, theories which sound like it in other fields have not been discredited. Most obviously to me, the famous theory of Orientalism by Edward Said, which posits, among other things, that Westerners cannot possibly understand the inner experience of what it means to be from a part of the world which Westerners have exploited, and therefore when Western artists try to portray other parts of the world in art, it is necessarily a narcissistic, exploitative appropriation, however accomplished. Again, this is vastly oversimplifying an endlessly commented upon field of study. So we'll simply agree: no, no one will never apprehend the physical, real time, inner experience being from another part of the world. However, learning about other places and people and peoples in ways that are both immersive and respectful, imagining one's way into them, that is an undeniable part of the human experience and a necessary occurrence in peaceful co-existence. Even if Orientalism is entirely true, it would be in the self-interest of both the former colonizer and former colonized to disbelieve it.

One theory obviously has roots on the Right, the other roots on the Left. In spite of the fact that Edward Sapir was a Jew whose mother tongue was Yiddish, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - reached independently by both Sapir - the teacher, and Benjamin Lee Whorf, the student, the theory itself comes from around 1928, and like a lot of thought during this period, its fermentation clearly has some shared roots with some very objectionable nationalist ideas. Whether or not Sapir, or Whorf believed in any other objectionable ideas of that period, it's not hard to imagine that the Whorfian theory's most fervent believers could quite easily posit that some languages are intellectually inferior and therefore their speakers cannot properly understand concepts of superior languages - even though one of the theory's founders was a Jew whose mother tongue was Yiddish and obviously spoke German and English with native fluency.

So with regard to Orientalism, there are, of course, essential understandings of the human experience which are alien to one part of the human race and not another, so it's just one similar fall down the slippery slope of extremism to alleging that because one part of the human race has essential experiences another part doesn't have, then that part of the human race is by definition superior.

One could of course counter that given with all the notions of superiority which people of color had to contend with for the last two-and-change millennia, white people, the master racists, should be in no position to complain and still have all imaginable material advantages of structural imbalance to fight against the racism of other races.

But, of course, consider that unfathomably deep black hole in leftist syllogisms that was Communism. In the 20th century, it was not necessarily the rich or even the middle class who suffered worst at the hands of the Russia's Bolshevists or China's Kumchuntang. Occasionally the wealthy even learned how to parlay their privileges and connections to remunerated collaborators with the Communists. But while Communists made sure to liquidate the middle class and exile the upper class twice over, Communist liquidation ultimately knew no social class, and I guarantee that the poor constituted the vast majority who starved in the Great Leap Forward and Holodomor. So if many of Orientalism's nephews and stepchildren fail similarly when put into practice, do not suppose that people of color will be failed by them any less than white people.

Or, maybe, by some miracle, both theories will eventually be proven correct. If one does, why then not the other? But if both theories end up being correct, then do not expect that we have anything like the scientific or technological knowledge to prove them yet. We might even have that proof in a year or two, unlikely as that is, but what would prove them, as ever, is data, and the statistical sets and models coming from our computers and routers is quintillions of times more complex than anything we've yet seen in human endeavor. It becomes clearer every day that we stand at the beginning of a change to human life as sweeping as the Enlightenment and the Renaissance. It occurred to me that perhaps we should call it 'The Re-Arrival.' What has re-arrived? We will talk about that in the next, hopefully final, episode of this first multi-episode series of our new model.