From Despair To Where?

I'm dancing in the show tonight

I'm away with the Boognish

I'm away to the south coast of England to soak up the sun and the spirit of the Boognish and other things. I'm so excited I can't speak without going squeaky. Back on Tuesday.

I'm considerably more revolutionary than you

Back here, Darren linked to an anarchist/marxist polemic and asked me what I thought. I couldn't be arsed and shrugged my shoulders, unable to quite sum up why I can't stand that kind of polemic any more. I can't remember the last time I picked up anything about marxism or anarchism (oh, I can: Marshall Berman) and didn't chuck it away instantly. Chomsky, however, puts his finger on it:

"No one owns the term 'anarchism.' It is used for a wide range of different currents of thought and action, varying widely. There are many self-styled anarchists who insist, often with great passion, that theirs is the only right way, and that others do not merit the term (and maybe are criminals of one or another sort). A look at the contemporary anarchist literature, particularly in the West and in intellectual circles (they may not like the term), will quickly show that a large part of it is denunciation of others for their deviations, rather as in the Marxist-Leninist sectarian literature. The ratio of such material to constructive work is depressingly high.

"Personally, I have no confidence in my own views about the 'right way,' and am unimpressed with the confident pronouncements of others, including good friends. I feel that far too little is understood to be able to say very much with any confidence. We can try to formulate our long-term visions, our goals, our ideals; and we can (and should) dedicate ourselves to working on issues of human significance. But the gap between the two is often considerable, and I rarely see any way to bridge it except at a very vague and general level."

The rest here.

Possibilities

Brilliant review of anarchist anthropologist David Graeber's most recent book here.

Darren's book meme

Darren kindly tagged me and challenged me to answer this book meme. I had to cheat, but here it is. It involves going through the alphabet and picking, for each letter, a novelist and one of his or her novels that you've read.

Aickman, Robert: Cold Hand In Mine. (Read it when I was very young, and some of its strange images haunt me still.)
Bester, Alfred: The Demolished Man. (Sci fi at its best.)
Chesterton, GK: Father Brown. (I'm sure I did read some of these, but can remember nothing about them.)
Dick, Philip K.: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Sci fi at its best. Or did I say that already?)
Edmonson, Adrian: The Gobbler (This is the worst novel I've ever read. No really. Even worse than David Baddiel.)
Feynman, Richard: Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman! (OK, not a novel, let the cheating begin...)
Greene, Graham: A Burnt Out Case. (Brilliant.)
Hamilton, Patrick: Impromptu in Moribundia (Probably his worst novel, but I just wanted to show off that I've read it.)
Irving, John: A Prayer for Owen Meany (I used to love Irving so much, but I wonder whether I could be bothered with them now?)
Jeffrey Bernard: Reach For The Ground (Cheating again, but I loved Jeff's writing so much. Hilarious.)
Kafka, Franz: The Castle (The most strangely dream-like book I've ever read.)
Lawson, Nigella: Feast (Domestic goddess.)
Melville, Herman: Bartleby (I would comment on this book, but I'd prefer not to.)
Nabokov, Vladimir: Lolita (Too young to appreciate it. Must read it again.)
O'Brien, Flann: At Swim Two Birds (Read the same page over and over again, then threw it away in frustration. But maybe I was just too young to get it.)
Powys, John Cowper: A Glastonbury Romance (Still half-way through it. The only English novelist that can fairly be compared with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, says George Steiner. How right he was.)
Quo, Status: Err...
Rhinehart, Luke: The Diceman (I loved this book when I was a student. I think I must have read it ten times.)
Self, Will: Grey Area (Always thought he was better at shorts than novels, and this is one of his best. Not sure I could stomach him these days though.)
Toole, John Kennedy: A Confederacy of Dunces (Still my favourite.)
Ulyanov, Vladimir Illyich: Imperialism. (Another cheat.)
Vonnegut, Kurt: Galapagos (A hero. Read this one if all you've read is Slaughterhouse Five.)
Wodehouse, PG: Leave It To Psmith (‘You don’t analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour.’ Stephen Fry)
X – can't even think of a cheat for this one.
Y – nor this...
Zahavi, Amotz: The Handicap Principle. Not a novel, but a wonderful book. One of those brilliant scientific speculations that everyone scoffs at in the beginning, then wins universal acceptance.

The origin of language is inseparable from the origin of communism

This week I went to a lecture at the Radical Anthropology Group by Chris Knight. It was on the origins of language. Considering that Chris was on particularly good form, and I was particularly awake and paying attention, I made reasonably detailed notes. Here is the gist of the argument.

For many years now, researchers have been trying to solve the problem of the origin of language. Indeed, Chris Knight has edited many collected volumes arising from academic conferences, where the world’s leading specialists have put their heads together. We are no nearer a solution now than then. Consider the following intractable problems.

The continuity paradox: There is only one theory around with any credibility that is up to the job of explaining the origins of language: neo-Darwinism. But any attempt to explain the origins of language using this theory comes up against an immediate problem. Darwinism is based on descent with modification. The classic example of the giraffe’s long neck can only be explained on the basis that we started out with a short neck. Legs on the basis that they were once fins. And so on. In the case of language, however, there is nothing in the rest of the living world that is anything like it. Despite superficial resemblances to animal communication systems, bird song, bee dances and so on, language is really without parallel among any living creature. Everyone agrees with this, including the towering giant of the field, Noam Chomsky.

Why is language so utterly different to animal communication? For a start, it is digital. The difference between ‘cat’ and ‘hat’ is merely one of switching off the ‘c’ sound (switch to zero) and turning on the ‘h’ (switch to 1). A simple digital change in the message is enough to totally change its meaning. Consider, in contrast, a chimpanzee pant-hoot. Here, what is important is not a digital, on/off distinction, but precisely how loud, how angry, how aroused the chimpanzee is – it is an analogue signal. It is indexical – a measure of the chimpanzee’s emotional state, not an abstract symbol. It is concerned with the immediately perceptible world of the senses and of sex and of fighting – it is not used to refer, like human language is, to something that is not there.

The dating paradox: Human children have a ‘language instinct’. Again, this is not controversial. It seems obvious to everyone who has children, let alone those specialists who have studied the question, that children pick up and learn language as if they were born with it already in their heads. They don’t need to study hard to learn grammatical rules in the same way that they have to learn, say, algebra or writing. Equally, no other animal has anything like it. Chimps, and especially bonobos, can be taught some aspects of symbolic communication, but it never comes easily to them, and they never master it and use it creatively as comes naturally to any normal human child. Chimps just don’t ‘get it’.

It seems, then, that we are born with the complex grammatical rules of language already wired into our heads – what Chomsky called Universal Grammar. Chomsky and later theorists such as Pinker would agree that such a computational mechanism must be exquisitely complex. How when did such a complicated piece of kit evolve? There’s two options. Either it evolved gradually by natural selection over a long period of time. The trouble with that scenario is that there is no evidence that our ancestors, over the necessary length of time, were making any use of these evolving symbolic capacities – no art, no ochre, nothing very interesting at all until about 200,000 years ago. The second possibility is that language arose suddenly in a time period spanning 100,000 to 200,000 years ago (depending on the methodology used). The trouble with this scenario is that then the machinery for it would not have had the time to evolve.

The problem of meaning: As demonstrated above, the human ability to generate meaning depends on our ability to play around with strings of different sounds. By putting together an arbitrary series of different noises made with our mouths, tongues and throat, we can generate meaning; then, by changing the order of those noises, change the meaning. In animals, the exact opposite is the case. Where they do play around with sounds, no meaning is generated – at least, no change in meaning corresponds to the change in the sound. Bird song is an example of this. Where, on the contrary, a signal is meant to convey meaning – as, for example, when vervet monkeys signal that a leopard or a snake or an eagle is in the vicinity – the signal must always be the same.

Why? Imagine, for the sake of argument, a mutant vervet that did play around with these sounds. What would happen? Any monkeys that paid attention to the sounds could pay the cost with his life. Selection would favour monkeys that ignored signals they could not verify as truthful. The best way to ensure signals are truthful is to make them indexical – inextricably connected to the actual emotional state of the animal, and not under cognitive control. A cat that purrs is not saying that it is happy – the sound of a happy cat is a purr.

The problem of complexity: Large brains are extremely costly in energetic terms. They would not evolve unless they could pay for themselves in some way. A reasonable assumption might be that big brains make more complicated communication possible, increasing the possibilities for co-operation among animals in the struggle for existence and reproduction. Reasonable perhaps, but wrong. Big brains have of course evolved, but they are not at all correlated with the complexities of communication. Bees, for example, have very tiny brains, but an elaborate and highly complex system of communication. Chimps have comparatively massive brains, but still rely on a very simple communication system.

So what are those big brains for? Obviously for cognition – chimps are intelligent creatures. But their intelligence is entirely Machiavellian. There are some ingenious experiments that show how true this is. In one version, a human experimenter has two buckets, one of which has bananas in it. If the human tries to help the chimp, pointing to the correct bucket, the chimp doesn’t get it at all. If anything, it will pounce on the empty bucket. But if the human makes it clear to the chimp that they are trying to get to the bananas to eat them themselves, before the chimp can, they get it instantly and the fight is on. It is possible to teach a chimp to say “Give me a banana” in sign language or on a keyboard to a human. But if a chimp says that to another chimp, the result is a fight over the banana. Chimps are simply too clever for words.

Modality independence: Human language doesn’t rely on speech or the mechanisms for speech. This is relatively obvious – I’m not speaking right now, but I’m achieving a comparable effect by writing down what I want to say. Another example is children who are born deaf. As was proved in Nicaragua following the revolution there, deaf children who are brought up together in a human cultural environment spontaneously learn language. And if there’s no language to hand, they invent one from scratch – and one that is as rich in complexity and grammar as English or any other human language. Human language and meaning can easily be converted into smoke signals, Morse Code, you name it. Language, because it is a digital system, doesn’t care about the medium. It’s impossible to imagine that any animal communication system could have similar features. How would a chimp communicate a pant-hoot in Morse Code? How would a dog bare its fang to another dog using only its paws? With animals, the medium is the message.

The difference between capacity and usage: Chimps, as has been mentioned above and demonstrated in countless brilliant experiments, have the capacity for at least a limited language and symbol use. And yet, as we’ve also demonstrated above, there is no example at all of them ever using this capacity in the wild. This in itself is a puzzle from a Darwinian point of view. It would be like finding an animal with fully functional eyes that never used them.

Words are cheap: Another way of explaining all this is from the point of view of costly signalling theory. In the animal world, the costliness of a signal is the point of it. When a gazelle ‘stots’ in front of a lion, bouncing up and down in front of it rather than running away as fast as its legs will carry it, it is saying, “Look at me, look how fit and healthy I am. I’m so fit and healthy I can even afford to waste energy bouncing up and down in front of you instead of saving it for the chase! I wouldn’t bother mate. Save your own energy for a gazelle with a limp.” The same applies to a chimpanzee pant-hoot (try imitating one yourself and see how exhausting it is) or to the peacock’s tail. In the animal world, honest signals, in conflict situations, are costly.

Where interests are sufficiently shared, signals can take the form of what Dawkins called ‘conspiratorial whispering’. Where interests are shared, costs can be cut. But the interesting thing about language is that it is almost zero cost. In the case of language, it appears that costly signals have been replaced with a mere token. Which raises the question of why it was ever believed.

We are drawn to a strange conclusion: from a Darwinian point of view, language is a theoretical impossibility. Imagine you are an omnipresent evolutionary biologist, sitting in the forest for millennia, observing the Darwinian world evolving around you, and waiting for the evolutionary emergence of language. You would be waiting for ever. You may as well wait for the evolutionary emergence of credit cards.

The point is that credit cards are an internal feature of modern capitalism. Even if you could understand precisely how that magnetic strip on the back of them worked its magic, you could never understand why people can walk out of shops with arms full of goods on the basis of that magic without first understanding how groups of human beings developed sufficient trust for such a system to work, how that trust is enforced by the state and with a judiciary and prisons, how markets arose, then capitalism, how a mere symbol for value could carry any weight among people with conflicting interests, and so on. You can’t understand credit cards without understanding modern capitalism.

Similarly, language is an internal feature of modern communism. (By modern is meant modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens.) That is to say, that language is internal to symbolic culture. And the pertinent thing we have to understand about symbolic culture is that it does not exist. To get the point of this, we need to make use of the philosopher John Searle’s distinction between brute facts and institutional facts. Animals live and deal entirely in a world of brute facts: food, other animals, the physical world, sex. A brute fact is something you can touch, feel, taste – something you can stub your toe on. An institutional fact has no earthly existence – it exists only because we all agree it does. An example would be a promise, a football game, a marriage.

Take, for example, two ten pound notes and one twenty pound note. It is an institutional fact that the two tenners are worth the same as the twenty. The brute fact is that they are just three pieces of paper, equally worthless. The two tenners are only worth the same as the twenty because we all agree that they do – and when that agreement and trust breaks down, examples of which are proliferating in the present day economy, then what we are left with is in fact the opposite–two tenners, as a brute fact, are worth twice as much as the twenty, to the extent that the three pieces of paper have value at all.

Language is the same. Because it uses cheap tokens to refer to things that aren’t there, it relies on the collective creation of a shared counter-reality. The interesting thing is that institutional facts are also digital. It is never collectively agreed that a piece of paper is worth ‘about a tenner’. Or ‘a tenner, more or less’. It is worth a tenner, or it isn’t. The same applies to ritual, as Durkheim pointed out. Ritual splits the world into the profane (brute facts) and the sacred (institutional facts). A baby is not ‘nearly baptised’. It is or isn’t. When the Queen opens parliament, she doesn’t declare it a bit open. And so on. Institutional facts are digital because they depend on agreement: yes or no? Is parliament open or not? In a chess game, is the pawn allowed to go to that square or not? If there’s any doubt about the answer, then the whole game breaks down and the result is, or can be, a fight -- the point of civil war and revolutions is that they are fights in the real world over what the content of our shared counter-reality is to be. If we thought it was important enough, we could fight over the rules of chess until we settled on a new set of rules we could all live with. Only then can the game go on. And once we’re in the game, fighting and brute strength and brute facts no longer have any force. You don’t win a game of chess because you’re physically stronger than your opponent.

So, if all this is true, where does that leave us with the problem we set out with, the origins of language? Is there any precursor in the animal world that looks anything like this? Indeed there is: play. When animals play, what do they do? They fight. They play at fighting. A playful nip during a fight, perhaps made to the playmate’s throat, is a play-bite -– a playful death even. It is, we could say, a symbolic bite. The play can only go on in a situation of mutual trust. If that trust breaks down, if the nip is a bit too hard, then the play goes real. We’re back in the real world with a nasty bump, and the result could be a real fight. At the very least, the result is that the game is over. This is why we get so irritated when we hearing someone munching crisps in the cinema -– we are being brought back into the real world when we are trying to enter into an imaginary one.

In the animal world, play never lasts into adulthood. Why? Because the real world intervenes. In a Darwinian world, red in tooth and claw, the struggle for food and resources and sex is too important to be played with. In animals, play becomes real -– it becomes a matter of life and death.

Human symbolic culture is adult play. In the course of evolution, some solution was found to the dangerous competition between males for access to sex. How this was achieved is another story, but the obvious answer is that it must have been female solidarity and the social organisation of sex in some form. The result was the generation of sufficient trust for play to continue -– for the generation of a shared counter-reality that was for life, not just for playtime. The shorthand, the cheap tokens that stand in for the costly play of ritual, is language.

What does this tell us about human nature? That the most important instinct we have is indeed, as many Darwinians would agree, the language instinct. But the language instinct cannot be reduced to a piece of clever machinery in the brain ¬– it is our instinct for play. Humans are the playful animal.

And at this point, we all slope of to read this rather brilliant book.

Rise and fall of Mark E Smith

I think it's more important to be a man than it is to be an artist. Hat tip: Mark.

Be realistic: demand the impossible

"What's poetry got to do with taking sides? Poetry is an art."

"Oh, don't use that word, Ned! If you'd heard what I've heard–the talk–the affectations–the boredom––"

"But isn't it an art?"

Her reply was almost screamed at him.

"No! It isn't! It's Poetry. Poetry's something entirely different. Oh, I know I'm right, Ned. If you go and get hold of this horrible modern idea that poetry is an art, I don't know what––" She stopped and clasped her hands behind her back.

"Well, anyway, Lady Rachel," he said, "it's got nothing to do with this Glastonbury quarrel between Geard and Crow."

"It has. It has everything to do with it! Can't you feel, Ned, as we stand here that this place is magical? What's Poetry if it isn't something that has to fight for the unseen against the seen, for the dead against the living, for the mysterious against the obvious? Poetry always takes sides. It's the only Lost Cause we've got left! It fights for the... for the... for the Impossible!"

From 'A Glastonbury Romance' by John Cowper Powys

Peej's passions

Quick, catch it while it's still up: a wonderful interview and selection of music from PJ Harvey here.

Human nature revisited

Are we by nature freedom-loving egalitarians? Or dominating, wealth-grabbing bastards? Both. A very good article, I thought. I hope we don't have to accept the author's conclusions, but the problems he raises are real enough. Can a global, industrial society be organised on an egalitarian basis?