As the Case May Be: The Subjunctive Mood and Human Evolution

Humans are the only species with true language. Monkeys can respond differently to different calls, and chimps can learn a few symbols. But to have true language, you have to have vivid imagination, which is unique to humans.

Language can communicate situations that do not yet exist—the future tense. In English, we could say if he will go. In French, s’il ira. But even more than this, language can communicate an alternate reality that is different from the one you are experiencing. If he were to go implies that he is not going to go. In French, s’il aille. This is the subjunctive, as it were. You can even have a past subjunctive: if he had gone, s’il soit allé. Language students hate learning subjunctives, but they are a marvel of intellect. That does not mean, of course, that you have to like them.

Organisms have lots of ways of responding to their surroundings. The ancestors of vertebrates specialized on intelligence as their mode of response. As explained in an earlier essay, intelligence is expensive. In humans, natural selection favored larger brains in a runaway spiral of greater and greater intelligence. It is expensive. Along the way in human evolution, a threshold was crossed into the kind of self-awareness that permitted the oft-maligned subjunctive mood.

The Evolution of Language...and Manipulation

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.

The Evolution of Isolating Mechanisms, as Observed in France (or, The Cheese)

This is another in my series of essays about what I learned in France. Be prepared for some surprises.

In an earlier essay, I explained that geographical isolation has led to speciation: for example, both France and America have maple trees, but not the same species. The Atlantic Ocean keeps the European and American species from intermixing.

But another major force in evolution is isolation caused by actual biological or social processes. These are isolating mechanisms. These mechanisms permit members of one group—which may later become its own species—to recognize other members of that group, and to distinguish them from outsiders. Isolating mechanisms have led to a great amount of evolutionary diversity. For example, most mating behavior functions in this way. When a male and female blue-footed booby get together, how does the female booby know that the male is really the right species? You’d think the big blue feet would be a dead giveaway, but no—she expects him to go through a silly and humiliating booby-dance.

Humans are the prime example of isolating mechanisms. Human social groups have many, complex, and difficult behaviors that take a lifetime to learn and therefore label an outsider as an outsider for life. I discovered this in France. I will never ever ever be French.

In many ways, I am pre-adapted to be French. I already drive a small car, and am satisfied with modest luxuries and being quiet. I already treat food as an experience rather than as just a way to stuff my face. An American driving a big fuming pickup truck and yelling loudly would never fit in to French society. But I am not that kind of American.

But I will never be able to communicate fluently in French. Many languages communicate primarily by consonants. Hebrew even omitted the vowels and just wrote the consonants. But in French, most of the consonants are ignored, even the ones that, according to the rules, should be spoken. Many of the syllables are dropped. For example, commençaient (they began) is pronounced “ko-mans” (you can barely hear the s), just like commence (I begin) and commencent (they begin). In commençaient the final five letters are silent and usually the final six. I can read most things in French but understand hardly anything that I hear.

But French has about thirty different vowel sounds. Some of them are easy to distinguish. Everyone knows that eau and eaux and os and où and ou and eu and eux all sound different. That’s the easy stuff. But there are other examples, even more subtle, about which I would tell you except that I don’t know what they are. If you use a slightly incorrect vowel sound, they will not understand you. Maybe in Paris they will rudely pretend to not understand you, but in Strasbourg, they really sincerely politely do not understand you.

And if you cannot handle those vowels, you are no more a Frenchman or woman than a catbird is a mockingbird—close relatives, but unable to speak to one another.

Another cultural feature that weeds out the outsiders is cheese. There are certain kinds of cheese in France that are so ripe that, as I understand, it is illegal to export them to America. An example from the Vosges Mountains, near Orbey, just southwest of Strasbourg, is Muenster cheese. It was invented in the Muenster Valley, of which I posted photos in an earlier entry. Oh, you can buy mild stuff that is called Muenster here in America. But the stuff in France has a fragrance that fills a room even if it is wrapped.

Real Muenster cheese, some French are proud to say, smells like shit. And it is something that is overwhelming even to many French. A family that hosted us to dinner on our final night in Strasbourg (a wonderful family, who got out the special 1971 wine and treated us royally, a family of intelligent, creative, polite people) told us the story of how one of them took a well-wrapped piece of Muenster cheese onto a train compartment. Nobody would share the compartment with them except a young family with a baby. The young family immediately checked the baby’s diaper and, finding it clean, glanced over at my hosts and quickly left. I repeat, they told us this story proudly. (I swear it’s true. You can’t make stuff like this up.) They also found that you can smuggle anything you want (even though they did not actually do so) if you put it under some Muenster cheese. Then they unwrapped some for us. I just politely watched the others eat it. It was expensive and they were saving it for a very special occasion, which was us.

You can study French in college, but you may never be able to learn the subtleties of French speech, and you will probably never learn to love, really love, the kinds of French cheese that are illegal in America. You will never be French unless you already are. So don’t try. Instead, you should try being exotic. If you are part Native American, you will be revered as a curiosity. I got pretty good use of the only two words of Cherokee I know (osiyo and wado) and from the story about my grandfather having a Cherokee name (Tsisqua). If I ever move to France, I will put a dream-catcher in my window.

What Language is for

I am sure most of us are tired of hearing about the silliness of fundamentalists insisting upon a literal interpretation of the Bible. Like you, I have no interest in revisiting this topic. It is quite clear from reading the Bible itself that the Bible does not use literalistic language. The only people who do not know this are probably the fundamentalists who have not actually read the Bible, but have just listened to fundamentalist preachers. This may be most fundamentalists.

What is interesting to me is that fundamentalist insistence on literalistic language is based on a misunderstanding of what language is for. And it is a misunderstanding that also plagues many scientists. Both creationists and scientists often believe that the purpose of language is to convey information; and that language is better when it conveys information more accurately or precisely or correctly. (Accuracy, precision, and correctness are three different things.) A creationist gets all bent out of shape if someone suggests that “day” in Genesis 1 is not a 24-hour time period, or even a time period at all. And some of my fellow botanists get all bent out of shape if an amateur calls a dandelion a “flower.” See? That amateur called a dandelion a flower—that shows how much he knows. In reality, a dandelion of a whole bunch of flowers crammed together, each with its own petals and reproductive naughty-bits. It is a composite inflorescence. I teach about composites because once you see that a dandelion is a bunch of flowers, your eyes are opened to new evolutionary possibilities: new adaptations can arise from previously separate components merging together. But I don’t get bothered by an amateur calling a dandelion a flower. Matter of fact, “amateur” is not a derogatory term; it comes from the Latin for love. An amateur is someone who does something because he or she loves it.

Scientists are generally OK with similes, but generally reject metaphors, unless said metaphor has become incorporated into a standard set of scientific phrases (such as “seed bank”). But when I teach or write for a wider audience, I use metaphors all the time, and say some downright wrong things if they get the main idea across or (perhaps more importantly) get the listener to appreciate and enjoy the world more. (With apologies to Will Rogers, I could say I never metaphor I didn’t like.)

Language did not evolve primarily as a way of communicating information, although this was one of its functions. It evolved as a medium of relationship. The use of imprecise, colorful, sometimes factually incorrect statements helped to negotiate relationships between individuals within a tribe, or between tribes—and it still does. One of the best mediums for this is humor. What little bit of culture I have inherited from my Native American ancestors helps me to understand this. Native Americans don’t worship Trickster Coyote. It is a set of humorous stories that helps us make sense out of an otherwise chaotic universe. A lot of God-talk among tribal peoples is to be understood as metaphor or simile, a human way of picturing something otherwise incomprehensible. As one Anishinabe speaker said, “When we talk about the holiness of a tree, we don’t mean that the tree is a god. We’re not stupid. We mean that the divine represents itself, among other ways, as a tree.”

Even fundamentalists cannot resist using imprecise language. They might say something like, I was just flying down the highway. Does this mean that they have wings, or were in a hang glider skimming too low to the ground? Or flapping their arms as they ran? My guess would be no. And they will say things like, He knocked me over when he said that. Really? If that is literally true, you’d better file assault and battery charges. Especially when, as a fundamentalist might say, he literally knocked me over when he said that. Fundamentalists will use figurative language themselves, but forbid God to do so. But why would a fundamentalist, or anyone else, use such language? Imprecise language usually occurs in little conversational groups in which altruistic relationships are being built, often using humor as a thickener. (I’m not sure that metaphor worked.)

At least scientists have a reason for insisting on literally precise language. We need it in order to understand the actual mechanisms that are occurring in nature. But once we have done this, why don’t we relax a little?

So when fundamentalists insist on literalistic Biblical language, or scientists insist on precise language even after hours, all I can say is, go ahead and enjoy the flowers, even the ones in the family Asteraceae that aren’t really flowers.