The Eloquence of Silence

I have been told many times that I have a certain eloquence, the reward of a lifetime of reading and observation of language and its uses. But words can get away and assume a life of their own. It is difficult to control words, once they are away from us; they can betray us and betray more and sometimes less than we intend them to. Sometimes they can say the opposite of what we mean, or, which is perhaps more perverse, they can take a course parallel to, but not quite identical with the thoughts in our mind.

Words are weapons, but they can also be a bulwark. Joseph Campbell, extending perhaps the line of thought from Max Weber on the linguistic origins of religion, argued that the poetic instinct in man has often been corrupted and the literalists among us have wrested the language until it has been broken of its original metaphoric meaning. Like any weapon, though, words can turn against their wielder and the seductive beauty of a well-wrought phrase can obscure any underlying incoherence. A graceful rhyme or alluring alliteration can bend us from rational discourse and lead us with their poetic sophistry down to error.

I went tonight to a gathering of young professionals who all share an interest in foreign relations and languages, particularly those of strategic importance to US foreign relations such as Arabic Chinese, Urdu, and so on. A co-worker, knowing my familiarity with Arabic, invited me. Though not without some small trepidation, I went. It was held at the Goethe Institut, a thoroughly Teutonic building of glass and steel and rectilinear forms where a pretty, blonde Fraulein ushered us up the stairs into a very modern lounge. The walls were covered with the most modern of art, an upside cross of florescent light and chrome where a man, presumably crucified on the cross of modernity, writhed in agony. Another was a photo of face so tightly zoomed in that only a wisp of hair and the suggestion of an eye could be seen.

But the attendees paid little attention to the decor. They were there to sell, see, and be seen. Each person wore a tag that listed name, area of interest and current occupation or studies. It was like speed dating for a leg up or a foot in. I met Pervez Sheikh of Pakistan, Maha Al-Sheikh of Sudan, Hsiang-Chiang of Taiwan, James from Maryland. Each had a story and 30 second sound bite well-prepared and breathlessly spoken. It generally ran something like this:

"Good evening, [fill in blank], how are you tonight? So, where are you working now? [Await response] That's fascinating, I was just listening to NPR the other day and they were mentioning [regale them with story marginally related to their field, await return question]. Me? I study [fill in blank]/work at [fill in blank]. I've study [insert language here] [x number] of years. I did my graduate work at [fill in blank] studying the relationship of the factors that contribute to the build-up of tensions following the end of the cold war and the rise of the unipolar world under the US and how that affects policy-making in an increasingly interconnected world characterized by the democratization of information access coupled with the increase of non-state actors on the international scene."

That works for just about everyone. I was stunned to silence by the vacuity of it all. And yet, it works, for those that know the system. I am not among them, for sadly my eloquence rarely extends to the spoken realm particularly in large crowds of predators. I mingled unobtrusively and eavesdropped on the selling of souls half envious and half disdainful of the golden-tongued in this arena. The sweat and acrid smell of the cheap wine and emptiness of the words left be swooning, so after forty-five minutes I left pondering what I had just seen.

I then walked down to the Chinatown Metro and got on the train bound for Fort Totten, remembering only after the train was pulling away from the station that I had driven that morning and so needed to take the Green line. However, I could still transfer and so at the next transfer station, I exited and went down to the Green line platform just in time to watch the train pull out leaving me with ten minutes and no free seats.

A man carrying a placard walked up, by the look on his face, a look that spoke of being lost, I knew he was an out-of-towner. He asked if this was the train to Glenmont, I replied that it was. Then turning back to my paper, I made the error of ever so slightly glancing toward the posters that were now resting angled against his leg. They were, based on their slogans, for a pro-life rally. He noticed my noticing and immediately began telling me about the rally set for Friday at the Supreme Court. I mentioned that over the years I had seen the rallies before, typically hundreds of Catholic school students and the most ardent of the pro-life protesters. Seeing my government ID badge, he told that every year, 54,000 potential taxpayers, potential Americans were murdered in the name of convenience.

I gave him little to work with and so he began to work the crowd. To the African-American gentlemen behind me, he began to speak about the history of pro-abortion movement and its early ties with eugenicists. Margaret Sanger, the near sainted founder of Planned Parenthood had, he told the crowd, wanted to use abortions and forced sterilizations to wipe out the Negro race. It was a silent genocide against Blacks, killing more young blacks every year than heart disease, AIDS, or guns.

"Bullshit," yelled a man from behind me. We all turned toward the diminutive, bearded curser. "I'm for a women's right to choose and I can't stand here listening to this shit."

"There are ladies present," replied the first.

"They're adults," the second man said, "And I say a thing like it is and this is bullshit. You stand there spreading this crap around trying to manipulate these people. I'm for a women's right to choose."

"Come over here and let me show some of the evidence I have: letters in Margaret Sanger's own handwriting where she states she wants to cleanse the slums of ill-bread Negroes and other minorities. Let me play for you a recording of the planned parenthood donation service that lets you donate money according to the race of the child to be killed. It is genocide against blacks."

"That has got nothing to do with anything. I could say Hitler was for abortion, but even if he was, it wouldn't matter, cause I'm for women's rights and a women has a right to choose. I don't need evidence to tell me how I feel about that!"

The conversation died down and a tense silence filled the void. I sat back and could only listen. It was a marvel to me. Two people, both so very right in their own minds. I have spoken before at length about logic and reason. I am an acolyte of logic and an adherent of reason, but I know that these are poor deities. They are merely shells for organizing information and relating it. I could believe that I were the Banana King of Elbonia and still be a logical person. So it seems a marvel to me that people ever communicate with one another -- taking it on faith that they do.

As I watched these combative interlocutors, I wondered about what was in their minds. I thought about the words they were using: murder, children, genocide, right, choice, freedom. They are all words filled with powerful and emotive meanings and all, in this case, used for the same real world referent. Would a rose, Juliet asked, still smell as sweet were it called by any other name? A rose is a rose unless it isn't. Were I all-powerful and could make rose mean cesspool and cesspool rose, what then would change? Would the rose still smell as sweet?

Humans so easily attach emotions to words. The scant dictionary definitions do little justice to the life of a word and the emotional link it has in the minds of its speakers. This link is so deep that it becomes difficult to change later in life. No matter what I learn about certain words that are offensive in German or Arabic, they have no impact for me, not like a good English curse word. So in my little drama, I was watching a battle of wills, seeing who could more successfully connect a word with an deed and thus effect the end they are after: to rally people to their cause. I realized, too, why it seems easier for the anti-crowd -- regardless of what they are against, Abortion, war, discrimination, etc. -- to label the deed. Negative emotions are powerful motivators, perhaps even more so than positive ones. I might not be willing to extend great effort to do something that will make me happy, but I'm much better at avoiding things that make me depressed, though this sometimes results in an existential paralysis but that should be saved for another blog.

Our train finally came and I rode to my end station with the other occupants of car 3. All in tense, but laden silence. I disembarked and drove home in the drizzle of rain and sleet and snow which splattered and clung to my car. What a perfect storm for such a moment. An in-between storm that cannot decide what precipitation it wants and so dumps it all. Man is a liminal creature, always between, rarely just being. Alexander Pope opined that we are rude creatures trapped in a middle state, more than the lowly beast, but lowlier than the Gods and so we are left to doubt and to fear and to hope ever at war with the beast and the angel that define our betweenness. We are eternally inchoate, always becoming. This contains, however, the seed of our hope for we can become tomorrow something better than we are today.

What an odd creature is man! Always after more, yet never satisfied by the owning, only by the acquiring; always searching but so rarely satisfied by an answer. A brute now and an angel here again. We make war, we build churches, we murder, we lie, we love, we sacrifice. We so want to connect with others and yet we so often become so wrapped up in what we are saying that we don't listen to what others are saying. We hear, but we don't listen -- though we are quick to note when others don't listen to us! All my experiences of this evening have reinforced this this impression in me. The ladder-climbing yuppies and the verbal combatants at the train station all heard one another, but I'm not sure they listened. They were so busy knowing that they could not understand.

On the Defining of Clouds: Life on the Spectrum, Part II

As I reread what I wrote last time, I noticed, in addition to a few typos, that it still seemed a shallow treatment of this issue. I thought that today I would address two issues that are of utmost importance to myself: Asperger's and religious belief and socially constructed Asperger's. I shall begin with the second first, apropos given that the first shall be last, et cetera.

What do I mean when I say that Asperger's might just be a socially constructed artifact? Well, from this aporia let me continue by saying that there is no one normality in human behavior. There is rather a range or spectrum of behaviors. Some of these are functionally adaptive, meaning that they lead to success. Others are maladaptive; that is, they lead to failure. These can be maladaptive or functionally adaptive in various spheres. For example, the ability to concentrate on one issue or thing may be useful in studies or science, but it might be maladaptive for social situations where stimuli are many and transient. This means that the degree of adaptivity or maladaptivity is relative to the frame of reference from which it is viewed.

Human behavior ranges widely and the variety of behaviors and traits is difficult to comprehend. However, for any individual, his behavior is defined as normative by the society in which he lives. Thus, for example, when I board a bus or train in America and there is only one other person on board, it is typical in America for me to seat myself a fair distance from that person. Alternatively, if there are lots of people who enter at once, they will most likely each try to space themselves equidistantly (if possible) throughout the train. However, on my brief experiences abroad in the Arab World, I have noticed that people tend to group together. when they board a train or a bus. Now, let me state in all fairness that public transit in Egypt as I experienced was much more widely used and the city had a much larger population, but I couldn't help notice that people, when there were empty spaces, tended to prefer being around other people.

It is difficult to define what is normal in human behavior, even within a single society or group. I have recently been reading Umberto Eco's "Kant and the Platypus," which treats semiotics and linguistics. He discusses how language shapes our understanding as well the interplay of cognition and language. Frankly, I find much of it arcane, since I am not an expert in semiotics, but I can understand his greater arguments. For example, in the first chapter he discusses Being, the mere fact of existence. No one can adequately define what it is to exist without generating a tautology. If you say, To be is to exist; you have merely restated in your predicate what you said in your subject. You can try a negative approach (and this is popular both in metaphysics and its less rigorous cousin mysticism) by saying, Being is not being nothing.

Eco argues that while we cannot define Being, we cannot let it mean everything (and hence mean nothing at all), but nor can we define strict limits. Instead, we have "resistances" as he terms them. We can't define exactly why a cat and a dog are different, but they are. Something resists them being lumped together in the same genera. This means that as we trying to assay experience, we run into "resistances" that force us to categorize what is around us. Like the blind men and the elephant, we grope and feel. We are aware that there is a boundary, but the harder we try to pin it down, the farther it slips away. Imagine, for example, a cloud. From far away a cloud (and let us take a nice fluffy cumulonimbus since they are my favorite) has a very distinct border that separates it from blue sky. True, there may be wispy fringes, but in general, if you were asked to describe the boundary of the cloud, it appears very evident. However, the closer you draw to the cloud, the less clear this liminality becomes. Blue becomes gray becomes white without every showing a clear boundary. Still, we know when we are in a cloud and when we are out of a cloud. These two facts exists, but they overlap like a Venn diagram creating a space that is both cloud and sky while also being neither cloud nor sky!

Human behavior is much more complicated but analogous. It seems clear that many people fall along a continuum in various fields of behavior such as sociality, deliberateness, introversion, et cetera. Human beings exhibit many different behaviors and in each of these they fall within a wide range along the spectrum and so the individual can be quite complex behaviorally. It seems likely, however, that some behaviors are interrelated and that the relationship among them complex. The degree of one behavior influences the degree of another (as I noted before). I will not, however, go into that here. Another time, perhaps.

All human societies have normative behaviors that are both obvious and impossible to pin down. These are often termed (negatively) "stereotypes", or (positively) "traditional values." Like our cloud, we cannot always pin down the boundaries of these behaviors, but the center seems clear and is orbited by a periphery of interrelated and dependent behaviors that arise from and influence one another in a fashion that I will not attempt to delineate here (both because it is beyond the scope of my interests for this essay and because I am not qualified to discuss it).

It American society, where in recent years there has been an explosion of Autism spectrum diagnoses, we live in a society that sociologists term "low context" culture. That means that unlike a more homogeneous society like Finland or Japan, Americans have much less shared cultural and interpersonal shared meaning. Norms of behavior are much less rigid here. That means that each individual much be constantly interpreting the signs around him anew. Non-verbal communications are not a given in our society as they might be in Japan. Individuality matters much more. We Americans praise our individuals and make heroes of the mavericks (a word, naturally, coined in the American West and originally referred to a stray calf). However, the down side of the low context culture means that each of us must put much more effort into understanding others.

This low context, highly individualized society makes it difficult for persons who might have a predisposition towards having difficulty distinguishing the subtle non-verbal clues. In fact, studies (and my own experience have shown) that people on the the Autistic Spectrum fare well in structured environments where the societal relationships are well defined. Thus, it would seem, persons diagnosed with "Asperger's" in America, might, in Japan, be fairly well integrated by virtue of the fact that they need not be constantly trying to figure out verbal clues. These structured rules of interaction allow him or her to concentrate their efforts on other issues and thus they are able to be more successful at navigating society. However, those same persons in America would find society almost unmanageable because without rules, the subtle clues are too numerous and contradictory to make out. Thus what is a strength in one culture, leads to failure in another for the individual with Asperger's would feel liberated in the high context culture while someone with a more maverick personality would feel constrained. This means there might be disorders in Japan that would have no social meaning here.

Early psychologists used to speak of women suffering from "Hysteria" (a typically female's only disease according these all-male scientists who thus named it from the Greek word for uterus). In a repressive, Victorian middle class society, suffering from nerves was a natural for women who could find no outlet for their frustrations. This "disorder" has all but ceased to exist. In southern Egypt and the Sudan, there exists the Zar cult among traditional societies. This cult (in the ethnographic sense, not the pejorative sense) is confined mostly to women. In the Zar cult, women become possessed by spirits, frequently male spirits, and under the influence of this spirit, they act and speak like men. Men in the community will even treat women under the influence of the Zar spirit (which comes from the Arabic word for visitor) as a man. In a society where women have no voice, those who struggle against the social norms have no outlet and so they become men in order to give vent to this possible subconscious desire.

These examples show that some "disorders" might very well be socially construed. They represent the inability of certain segments of society to adapt to the prevailing societal norms. For people like me, who thrive on order and structure, our inability to adapt to the chaotic social norms of American culture manifests itself as "Asperger's Syndrome." This is not to argue that all the behaviors and traits of Asperger's are socially constructed. If any reader things I have argued that, then either I have done a poor job of explaining myself, or the read has done a poor job of reading. My argument may be summed up thus: Whether it be due to nature, nurture, or both, there are those whose personality traits are ill suited to the prevailing societal norms. These traits, neither good nor bad per se, lead to classes of behaviors. Under a society where these traits are maladaptive, these behaviors become a disorder; whereas under different conditions, these traits might be an asset. Let it be said, however, that even under contrary society where said traits are maladaptive, they may still bear fruit if only fruit choked by weeds.

As the hour is late and the words verbose, I will save my second theme; Asperger's and Mormonism, until a later entry.