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,
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.
Some
conservatives have tried to excuse the terrorist by saying that he had suffered
abuse as a child. I have no opinion about this. But a black man could not have
used this excuse.
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.
