JAC Volume 14 Issue 2

English historian Edward Hallet Carr is remembered best for the voluminous account of Bolshevik revolution and statecraft which was his life's work, and for What Is History?, a lengthy essay familiar to readers in many fields; however, during the summer of 1939, Carr also produced a brief but useful primer on international relations, a book which he called The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939. Meanwhile, Europe prepared to leap once more into oceans of wreckage and blood. That war has ended now; Germany has won the peace, and renewed trade wars have come along with our old foes in Japan. Cold War continues, furthermore, sometimes hotly, against poor people in the Third (and largest) World, which goes on losing. World War III hasn't happened yet, but even at the end of history, with democracy triumphant and communists in retreat, the pile of human corpses grows.

In our own era of transition to a new version of the old order, Carr's little treatise does not seem entirely out of date; nor does its analysis of national power, distilled in part from one published a short year earlier by his illustrious compatriot, the philosopher and mathematician, Bertrand Russell. One of modern history's truly inspiring figures, Russell stubbornly practiced Marx's famous dictum, interpreting our world in order to improve it--in his later years, so Russell believed, merely to preserve it.

Age and history had already sobered Russell's hopes for politics by the time he wrote Power: A New Social Analysis. Yet his political works written during World War I and at the beginning of Carr's long crisis will still reward a careful reading. Cast in simple, luminous prose, which leftish agitators could usefully emulate today, they argued with subdued passion and uncommon sense for a deeply democratic form of guild socialist society, one strongly tinged with anarchism. "Communal ownership of land and capital" is "a necessary step," Russell wrote, "toward the removal of the evils from which the world suffers." But, he said, well before Red October, a socialism

in which the State is the employer, and all who work receive wages from it, involves dangers of tyranny and interference with progress which would make it, if possible, even worse than the present régime. . . . Anarchism, which avoids the dangers of State Socialism, has dangers and difficulties of its own. . . . It could not last long even if it were established. Nevertheless, it remains an ideal to which we should wish to approach. (Roads 211)

Russell goes on to say that we must seek a world

in which the creative spirit is alive, in which life is an adventure full of joy and hope, based rather upon the impulse to construct than upon the desire to retain what we possess or to seize what is possessed by others. It must be a world in which affection has free play, in which love is purged of the instinct for domination, in which cruelty and envy have been dispelled by happiness. . . . Such a world is possible; it waits only for men to wish to create it. (212)

However distant, Russell's goal must appear all the more sane and desirable now, after the unending catastrophes capitalism and statist revolution have inflicted upon humanity and its only planet during the rest of this bloody and dying century. But against the march of these disasters, it is important to reiterate, the strength in Russell's argument and the beauty in his words were equally unavailing.

Forms of Power

For modern power shows several faces, as both Carr and Russell knew, including power over means of production and coercion, over life and death, as well as over opinion. A nation without great industrial might, to take a case in point, can arm only limited forces to wage modern, industrialized war, while a demoralized army will rarely fight well and may not fight at all, as the American command was forced to rediscover not so long ago in Southeast Asia, where "our" Vietnamese exhibited a distressing aversion to serious combat and American boys took to fragging their own officers.

Putative control of the forces of nature was implicit in Carr's reduction of Russell's Power, and when studying events among nations rather than within them, Carr was less concerned with the organs of domestic rule: political parties, parliaments, police departments, bureaus of government, newspapers, school systems, and so on. The obvious point remains: power uses various means to pursue what it intends. To discuss or possess one form of power apart from the others is risky, hazards mounting from personal error to collective annihilation. Accordingly, we must disclaim any illusions about achieving or extending democracy through language alone. Words without deeds will never do, especially words that go unheeded because they cannot be heard. Between language and democracy, and behind the TV set, stand the dollar and the Patriot--together, three mighty pillars of our plutocratic structure that even PMLA could not shake.

Still, the role of language is pervasive in the play of power and essential to power over opinion. Nowadays, as prominent advocates of a national literate culture will not tell you, our foremost student of human language and of the manufacture of articulate American opinion is MIT's Noam Chomsky, brilliant philosopher of mind and forceful exponent of libertarian ideals similar to the great Lord Russell's. Yet it is possible to spend days at an academic conference on American language and culture and not hear Chomsky's name, while power forces the latest conservative guru (E.D. Hirsch or Allan Bloom, perhaps) upon the attention of conferees--and the country.

At the same time, cultural critics who wanna be radical spurn the old-fashioned Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, which retains much that is promising and constructive (see Kellner), while they flirt with the worst in recent continental theories, courting nihilism. Others claim that there is no truth, only beliefs to which we have somehow been persuaded. If little of what I want to say about the relationships of language to power sounds that trendy, still, whatever is commonsensical that we English teachers can manage to repeat on a topic so important and so often misconstrued is probably worth repeating.

First, we might say repeatedly, in an age of proliferating nuclear power, that everyone is living still through the last crises between global wars, unless people can finally be convinced to make true revolutions, ones which do not choose power instead of life. Perestroika, glasnost and their unsettling consequences in Eastern Europe gave brief hope that the revolution which took so false a turn in the Soviet Union might yet help to lead the United States out of Bush country, back along a road toward some truly civilized and democratic commonwealth. But the old imperatives of our Empire proved too insistent, and hope was soon engulfed in black Panamanian blood and blacker Kuwaiti oil.¹

Genocide, Slavery, Imperialism, and Other Cultural Diversities

It is forgotten as easily now as it was denied at the time (by John Quincy Adams, for instance, who was so vain about American respect for law [see Chomsky, Reader 122-23]), but our own once revolutionary nation was founded on the violent dispossession of native peoples. Their many languages and rich and varied cultures were considered merely damnable by early American thinkers like Cotton Mather, the noted Puritan divine (see Chomsky, Reader 128, 261), and had been decimated as living entities long before linguistic anthropologists discovered their relative worthiness and sought to preserve them as historical artifacts.

A national economy was then built largely on the forced labor of African slaves, whose diverse cultural heritage their English-speaking masters were again at pains to extirpate, again with considerable success. African survivals, most pronounced on the rice islands off South Carolina, were little appreciated until 1949(!), when an African-American scholar, Lorenzo Dow Turner, demonstrated the African roots of Gullah, the black creole still spoken then on remoter islands, though rapidly withering now.

Those we call "free" laborers, who also developed our nation's agriculture, mines, and industry, its systems of canals, railroads and highways, also spoke many languages at first. But German, Italian, Polish and so on have not resisted the power of English here any better than has Twi or Shoshone. Only New World Spanish, principal language of Europe's South American Empires, has held much ground, to the consternation of Dr. Hirsch, Senator Hayakawa, and others.

It is hard to square these facts, frankly stated, with the encircling mythology, Hirschian or not, about our long and moderate traditions of cultural toleration and diversity. Neither on the British Isles, as Scots could once have warned, nor in the distant reaches of colonial settlement, as remnants of the Mohawk or Maori might testify today, has Anglophonic power been notably dedicated to cultural or linguistic pluralism. At best, as in populous India, it has been content to insist that only collaborators in colonial rule and rapine should have to speak "respectable" English. Historical amnesiacs unburdened by elementary remembrance of the traditional forms and operation of Atlantic power may find a sudden faith that the settled hostility of our elites will now countenance democratic attitudes toward language and its democratic use and development; others will remain troubled and skeptical.

Language Low and Language High, Language Young and Old

But nobody who remembers the past should be surprised at the weird echoes lingering from the collision between early American linguistics, with its peculiar egalitarianism, and the late black rebellion, now renewing, against America's perennial racism. Thus, in introductory textbooks and readers, liberal scholarship has continued to resist linking crucial but unpleasant linguistic facts with the consequences of racism and exploitation. In 1979, to take one example from many, Akmajian and colleagues assured their beginning students that no one dialect "is any better . . . than any other . . . in that any idea . . . expressed in one dialect can be expressed just as easily in any other" (181).

A year before, Fromkin and Rodman had declared that a standard dialect is "neither more expressive, more logical, more complex nor more regular than any other dialect. Any judgments . . . as to the superiority or inferiority of a . . . dialect are social . . . not . . . scientific" (260). Furthermore, "The cultural-deprivation myth" is, in general, "as false as the idea that some dialects or languages are inferior" (261). A few pages later, Fromkin and Rodman absentmindedly abandoned science in favor of the social judgment--apparently accurate, even in the absence of an established simplicity measure--that a pidgin is a "rudimentary language of few lexical items" in which grammatical features such as "case, tense, mood, and voice are generally absent," so that "pidgins are not very good at expressing fine distinctions" (268-69). On their next page Fromkin and Rodman then explained how pidgins can become creoles, which "are more fully developed languages than pidgins," having more lexical items and a broader array of grammatical distinctions," so that "In time, they [may] become languages as complete in every way as other languages."

Meanwhile, Julia Falk did not display even a schizophrenic awareness of pidgins and creoles, asserting, simply, that "one dialect is as good as another" (290) since all "are equally systematic, expressive, complete" and, oddly, equally "capable of changing to meet future needs" (289). This last equation might cause the merely logical reader to deduce that some dialects may not be fully developed and, furthermore, that unless they are all meeting equivalent needs, they are not really equal either.

Pidgins and creoles reflect the narrowed circumstances they are born and adapt to. Approaching death, languages also decline in powers, as study of moribund Celtic and other threatened varieties has made plain. Struggles to modernize lively tongues offer further proof for ubiquitous inequalities in language, recalling fifteenth-to-sixteenth-century debate on the fitness of English itself for higher purposes. Indeed, any history of Anglo-Saxon, Latin and Norman French from the Conquest to Caxton would test professors' faith in the equivalence of languages. Even that tiresome scribbler, Anonymous, provided clear testimony that languages are not equal, not in scale or utility, when he observed simply, as printers began to crank out books in the vernacular, "There ys many wordes in Latyn that we have no propre Englysh accordynge thereto."

Still, languages can change, for the better as well as worse. Once conquered, for instance, English lost its native power freely to compound terms in order to express new abstractions, and its writers had to resort instead to centuries of theft (another Anglo habit), most often plundering Latin. Now the English word stock is hard to deal with not on account of penury, but by virtue of a wealth of synonyms, many acquired almost one-by-one over years of reading and study, not by learning naturally a few handy ways to create longer words out of short familiar ones. In spite of all the evidence, dogmatic denial of linguistic inequality and blindness to certain of its historical causes have persisted into the 1990s. Scholars can still read, of language in colonial India, for a final example, that

Persian was widely associated . . . with state power; Sanskrit . . . was reserved to Brahmins; in . . . the Tamil south, Marathi was . . . known only to . . . grasping revenue collectors, and Gujerati was a language of commerce and manufacture. . . . In Tamil . . . the inflections engendered by caste status went beyond mere . . . dialect to encompass differences in vocabulary and syntax. The Tamil spoken by Brahmins and that spoken by 'untouchables' even in the same village . . . was variegated in the extreme. (Washbrook 181)

Then they can write, as does Jeffrey P. Kaplan, under the heading of "A More Rational Approach," that standard English "is in no way intrinsically superior to Black English or any other dialect"; "it is just the dialect of the powerful," as "standard dialects always are." "There is nothing intrinsically more logical, beautiful, efficient, or systematic about it" (23). Of course, many speakers of a nonstandard English could not read Kaplan's English Grammar, partly because much of the vocabulary would be so alien and some of the syntax almost as strange. For them to write his book would be quite impossible.

It is simply not to be supposed that the powerful have done nothing more demanding or fruitful these last few centuries than practice lawn croquet. Still, it would be comforting to believe well-meaning linguists' vaguely equalitarian pronouncements. Were they true, we could worry less about social injustices compromising our species equality. Unfortunately, as Fromkin and Rodman almost realized, a scale of lexical richness and syntactic development, of functional versatility and expressive power, ranges downward from a great imperial language like Standard American English through lesser varieties, as they are written and spoken, to the structurally and functionally underdeveloped pidgins and creoles scattered about the periphery of the disintegrating Anglo-American empire. The high and mighty have freedom to elaborate their dialects for many situations and purposes, and power to limit the chances for aliens and the poor to expand and refine their native tongues or enrich an English idiom of their own.

To acknowledge this uncomfortable truth, it is not necessary to embrace Morsean delusions about the "shufflin' speech of slavery" or the haughtier Ongish claims about the absence of abstract thought among those who may delete the copula. Nor is admitting that I ain' got no money mortally sinful. Subordinate dialects live on because they serve some purposes better for some speakers than do dominant varieties. Dysfunctional tongues which cannot change atrophy--then die. And in their sub-systems, nonstandard grammars may express possibilities beyond the easy reach of their high-born counterparts. At the same time, stigmatized differences are often trivial: insignificant for communication among willing partners, inappropriate for wasteful drill and fruitless testing by enlightened teachers. We must insist that Standard English is more than a grab bag of privileged synonyms and should be taught for reasons better than pathetic snobbery or obsessive social climbing.

In black Chicago, where my students live and learn to speak, the language of the poor is rich in nuances of aspect and modality crudely duplicated in the English of white Chicagoans, affluent or not. Iterative modals (I might should do the dishes, He may must can sing), remote perfectives (Oh, I been knew that), habitual be (Reagan, he just be lyin') and perfective done (I done told you all about that) lend rare power to the black English auxiliary system. Because Chicago remains, in spite of Harold Washington, one of our most segregated cities, these terse and subtle auxiliaries baffle or amuse other citizens, annoying educators who shoulda been done learned about 'em all by now. Such novel constructions creatively pattern ancient resources from English grammar, sometimes, perhaps, on creole or African models (see Sledd). But whether we consider dialects as Chomskyan competences or Bernsteinian codes, as spoken performances or written texts, it is not only difference we confront; there is also deficiency. The realities of wealth and power, of oppression and poverty, are really mirrored in the shapes and uses and powers of language, as in the thwarted opportunities and stunted growth of suffering human beings.

Standardizing Standards

However fondly one may hope, again, for more democracy through language, he or she will find precious little in our language. Rather, after several centuries of standardizing, Standard English has become, has in part been made, easily the most powerful English, most fit for a broad range of human enterprise and circumstance. Its general superiority underscores the particular virtues of inferior varieties, which flourish in spite of stigma, affirming, to repeat, their special values for those who use them as instruments of communication and expressions of identity.

A written standard for English emerged in Chancery documents during the reign of Henry V as English displaced French and Latin for administrative functions (see Fisher; also Richardson). A spoken norm was recognized within a century. Based, in the conventional view, on the language of the court and upper classes in London, not à la E.D. Hirsch (105), on the argot of street corners and the marketplace, it considered itself superior even to the speech of the provincial gentry, north and west. As these middling orders changed and grew, the English to which they increasingly aspired was codified for study in Samuel Johnson's influential Dictionary and in the guides of prescriptive grammarians, works whose descendants befuddle and beleaguer school children, especially under-privileged ones, to this very day, here and around the world. Before the end of the eighteenth century, recognition of the standard had been forcefully imposed on the Celtic periphery and transported with colonial servility into a brave New World. Eventually, new lives in new lands did call forth new language, with local standards different from London's, rooted in local structures of power and touted as sources of local pride. Throughout their evolution, these new, regional norms have remained intelligible among their privileged speakers, from the Bahamas around the Cape of Good Hope to India and New Zealand.

By now the varieties of Standard English comprise a language of unparalleled administrative power, social status and literary tradition, a language encoding vast legal precedent and, better than any other language in the world, scientific understanding and technical know-how. It is also, on this cacophonous globe, still the loudest voice of money, as well as a soft and private tongue, one fit for friends and lovers, and a bright sword for enemies--a weapon, oddly, even for liberators from domination by other speakers of Standard English. Thus, if the new European community escapes domineering America and absorbs reluctant England, it will not avoid English, which island dialect economic causes may make the continental standard.

The relationships of the standard languages of modern Europe to accumulations of wealth and power are now amply documented and have long been understood, although they are sometimes denied in "conservative" scholarship and often reversed in conventional schoolteaching, which must act as if dialects create a class structure and poverty can be abolished by proscribing multiple negation. A principal culprit here is again our irrepressible Dr. Hirsch, whose regard for truth in these matters is matched only by his respect for the work of other scholars, including some he claims to be among his sources. In support of his insistence that Standard English is now a classless and unchanging vehicle all can ride to affluence, Hirsch unabashedly cites such distinguished authorities as Otto Jespersen and Henry Bradley, both men who believed the precise opposite of Hirsch's peculiar but best-selling claims (see Sledd and Sledd).

Of course, mass marketeers eagerly peddle all sorts of serviceable nostrums and can sell them far and wide. But dissent, however eloquent, is cornered in the margins, be its English vulgar or exceedingly refined. Intrinsic advantages in the language of power are amplified, selectively, by the enormous and growing machinery of media monopolies closed to popular entry by ideological taboo, legal requirements, financial expense, and technical deficit (see Bagdikian; Herman and Chomsky; Schiller). Propagandists for Pentagonia thus write and speak our world's most powerful language, their words broadcast by almost overpowering means of indoctrination. Literate Americans who do not concoct the necessary fictions rarely controvert them, often consume them greedily--and seem in no way sickened.

Democracy through Language?

A long alphabet of professional organizations subscribed to the chatter at Wye Plantation about Democracy Through Language. From this farcical subtitle through a ludicrous sixth appendix, the shape of the conference report resembles nothing so much as the proverbial camel that resulted when a committee was appointed to make a horse. The burden of the beast, invoiced in Appendix F, is a load of clichés: in our culturally diverse democracy exploding with information into the post-industrial age, all citizens must be able to communicate their views and listen intelligently to the views of others. On these sociological premises, most of which will bear no weight, and on others from research in miscellaneous learning theories, conferees founded the need for an "interactive" pedagogy exploring the "great variety of subject matter" in the humanities in a "multiplicity of ways." The range of opinion and analysis expressed in the report was not so diverse, however, as to include: the thoughts of linguists on language; deconstruction of accepted notions of democracy, such as Wayne Booth's neo-Madisonian one; or the explosive recognition that what is required to enable all citizens to communicate intelligently in the United States today would be a remarkable reformation in our government, society and cultural institutions.

Democracy through language, perhaps an edifying slogan or comforting popular fantasy, can also serve as a cunning diversion, one of the infinite variety spelled out in the crippling language of power. Another is cultural diversity, as in the many cuisines of Chicago's famous restaurants, bounty even the homeless under Michigan Avenue can enjoy, by scouring for scraps in alley dumpsters. They cannot, however, and we choose not to, challenge an agricultural system that maldistributes foodstuffs while destroying the world's best land, polluting its water, undernourishing millions, especially poor children, reducing farm workers to migratory peonage, and enriching the several lords of agribusiness. In America, corporate power sets the limits to cultural diversity.

Smaller, organic farms, which could produce more and destroy less, are not now a viable cultural form, no matter what anyone says in their favor or how well. The corporate state's alternative to chemo-mechanical agriculture is Faustian biotechnology. And I will not be so ill-mannered as to dwell on the consequences of the agricultural model our government helped to impose, for corporate and compradorial benefit, on Central America, where resistance by the local victims led to their gruesome murders in the tens and tens of thousands. One shudders to recall the flights of sadistic imagination through which our torturers have piloted the "fledgling democracies" as they tried their feathers. Is there a word more abused in the language of American power than democracy?

For us, democracy is a kind of spectator sport, participation being restricted to representatives of the elite. It untaxes itself; loots the banks and S&Ls; merges, speculates, and takes over; robs the utterly disenfranchised poor; seduces and squeezes the middle strata; and squanders the common wealth on waste and weaponry--we all pay to watch. Economic democracy remains as unthinkable among the public as it went unmentioned by the English Coalition, which managed only passing glances at hungry school children and materialistic lifestyles. Following collapse by the state socialist societies, information about democratic socialisms, always scarce, will surely implode, since it cannot be profitably commodified or marketed. Those whose alternative has never been attempted will hear only that it has already failed. The reality of capitalist democracy in the United States will not be sounded even by the standards of its own rhetoric.

Possible flaws in our two-party system as compared with a parliamentary one passed without comment in Democracy Through Language, as did: our retrograde system of voter registration; the growing resemblance between the parties; the decline of the party of the common man; the absence of a party for the common woman or the uncommon person of color; an odd slippage in voting by the lower classes; related scandals in campaign financing and incumbents' victories; erosion of Congressional authority and its drift into the executive branch; an unseemly number of wealthy, white men elected and appointed to the highest seats of political power; and so on ad nauseam. Neither will our clichémongers loudly advertise the puzzling failure of most of the world to advance steadily beside us into post-industrial paradise; nor will they often note the old troubles of workers' alienation and other occupational hazards creeping in unfamiliar guise into the heart of Silicon Valley (see Garson; Hayes; Reinecke). At a time when the seas of human misery are rising perhaps wider and deeper than ever before, professors of language and democracy properly call for power to our people to think and speak freely. Unfortunately, the professors' own professions have proven them unable even to detect the water.

Back to the Future

We must not allow popular intellectual energy to be spent in the enervating "discursive practices" of academia; rather, we must help it to construct in workplaces and communities a deliberately oppositional culture, one that recognizes the university and its professional associations as servants of established power, forces often better ignored, if not disassembled, than trusted or joined into. To this task, in our own time of crisis and epochal transition, words Bertrand Russell wrote during September of 1920 still eloquently summon all who care to attend. With these lines he concluded a far-sighted critique of Bolshevism:

Russian Communism may fail and go under, but socialism will not die. Even under present conditions . . . it is possible still to feel the inspiration of . . . creative hope, seeking to sweep away the incumbrances of injustice and tyranny and rapacity which obstruct the growth of the human spirit, to replace individual competition by collective action, the relation of master and slave by free co-operation. . . . The hope is not chimerical, but it can only be realized through a more patient labor, a more objective study of the facts, and above all a longer propaganda, to make the necessity of the transition obvious to the great majority. (Practice 124-25)

Let us set to the work at hand, without illusion, but with whatever power our language may possess and any greater means we can fairly seize or must yet devise.

Harold Washington College
Chicago, Illinois

NOTES

Works Cited