This year the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures graduated 60 new BAs in French, German Studies, and Spanish and granted 11 MAs in Foreign Languages and Literatures. We wish all our new alumni great success in their future studies and careers. At our spring ceremony, our guest speaker, Dr. Dwight Stephens, Program Director, Critical Languages Institute and Project GOLD (Global Officers Leadership Development, An ROTC Language & Culture Project), spoke about his ideas concerning language learning and its importance, and we are pleased to share his insights with you in this post.

  

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Gross, parents, students, faculty, and friends. Since I’m going to talk to you about categories, I’ll mention right away that those categories are not mutually exclusive.

I want first to recognize our foreign language graduates and wish them much success and happiness in their careers and personal lives.

This is the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. The Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures is part of this college. Classes and exams are done, and now that things have settled a bit, Saturday, May 11, 2013 is a good day to reflect on the function and purpose of these two institutions, whose degrees we will confer.

“Humanities and Social Sciences”– I have a particular fondness for this name, and not just because of the administrators, staff, faculty, and students with whom I’ve developed personal relationships. It encapsulates for me the purpose of education, which is the removal of ignorance and the formation of a whole human being. Certainly the university does many other good things, but it has this one purpose.

I was a foreign language major as an undergraduate, but in those delirious first four years I was chasing after ideas as one would butterflies with a net and had no idea what was changing in me. To try to get at what happens to the mind of a student of language, let me tell you the three main awakenings of my personal history as I see them now: My Epiphanies.

The First Illumination: It’s the year nineteen-hundred-and-something. Age 13. Fall, seventh grade. I’ve just been enrolled in my first foreign language class. Latin 1. They’ve handed out the textbooks and I’ve just got back home. I can see the scene even now, after all these years. I’m sitting in an armchair in the living room, by the window, sunlight streaming in. I open the cover, and on the first page I see a brown watercolor of the boot of Italy half surrounded by some aquamarine water. The caption reads:

Italia non est insula.

OK, italia … that’s got to be Italy. (So that’s where Latin came from!) …non must be not. …insula…. insulated. Italy is not insulated…. Italy is not an island! This is great! It’s like secret codes!

I did like Latin, because it was like secret codes, and because I liked it I studied it, and because I studied it I got good at it, and then people gave me pats on the back and so I studied it more.

It was a path of least resistance. But liking something is miraculously important. From that year, I still remember all the verbs in Latin which require the dative case: believe, favor, please, trust, command, obey, pardon, persuade, resist, serve, spare, harm, envy, and threaten. I know what etc., i.e., e.g., a.m., and p.m. mean.

But there was also a cognitive benefit. I had discovered the first layer: language as a symbolic system. Intriguing—no, miraculous—that some things could stand for other things and entirely different kinds of messages about the world could be sent and received. This was an important first step, because the sub-plot of symbolism winds its way through all the labors and all the pleasures of the mind.

Consciousness and conscience are the same thing. Anybody who has one has scruples from time to time. I had several as I was composing this address. The word “scruple” is a good example of the evolution of a symbol. In Latin, scrupulum is a tiny pebble which might accidentally get into your shoe and cause you to have to pause to remove it. As a symbol, it followed the normal course of development from concrete to abstract: from “small rock” to “second thought.” We live among these metaphors, which blossom and die all around us in the ether of our social mind, or culture. As a Star Wars fanatic friend of mine says:

Metaphors be with you!

The Second Illumination: Fast-forward ten years to age 23: graduate school. My goal is to understand how thoughts in one brain become sentences, and then again thoughts in another brain. At this point it’s dawning on me that languages are not just formal systems—algebras—but rather a uniquely human medium requiring more than one participant, a collaborative medium of sharing something. I begin to see language as a communication system. I study several languages and am beginning to see that they categorize the world differently. Other languages seem to have different categories, like boxes for the pieces of the world, but the boxes are not the same size and shape as the boxes of English and things don’t fit.

I remember translating a poem by Rumi, the Persian poet. I was stuck on a certain word. I looked it up in a big Persian dictionary, and it said “friend, lover.” This bothered me. For Westerners, these are definitely two different things which belong in two separate boxes. I asked all the native speakers I knew which one it meant, and they said: Both. So, sometimes it’s not possible to say the same thing in two languages. Our best translators tell us that this is, in fact, the case. But if speakers of different languages are talking about the world in different terms, they must be perceiving the world differently.

Fast-forward another ten years to the present. Still haven’t figured out how thoughts become sentences and how sentences become thoughts. Still working on that one. My third big revelation is that these different ways of seeing the world cause us to construct reality differently. Now, I say “construct reality” because the reality we know as the world is, in fact, an internal construction. This includes the reality of the identity of others and the composition of our own self.

This is the third stage of my initiation into the mystery of meaning. Language as the architecture by which our internal reality is built. How we construct Other-ness and the world. And for me, this is the secret: Another cannot build his self without the collaboration of Another. We cannot know Self without knowing Other. This critical psychological mechanism—essential for the cognitive development of a human being—is conferred principally by the study of language.

I remember hearing Alan Watts on the radio back in the early 70s saying that hippies and corporate businessmen needed each other in order to feel validated and secure in their identities. Language is one way we build the categories we accept and the ones we reject, the groups we join and the ones we vilify.

One thing my father taught me was never ask a guy what he does for a living. When you ask a guy, “What do you do for a living,“ in a way you’re saying “Are you smarter than me? Are you richer than me? Are you playing the same game as me? Should I even bother to listen to what you have to say? Are we in the same club, in which case I can nod approvingly, or in the other club, in which case I can ignore you.”

You may have heard Ambrose Bierce’s famous definition of war as “God’s way of teaching Geography to Americans.” It should be revised to “WAR: God’s way of teaching Americans foreign languages.” NC State is one of only six universities funded by the Department of Defense to provide language and culture training to the military. In our program, we train Special Forces soldiers in Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish. As part of an orientation for our soldier-students at Ft. Bragg, I show them a video, which you can find on You Tube, of a Special Forces Lt Colonel cursing in English at a division of Iraqi policemen, calling them wimps and cowards, excoriating them in the worst language imaginable. The reactions of our students watching this video vary widely: some laugh outright, some look blank, some uneasy, and some have their eyes and mouths open in horror. Yet, in spite of its crudeness, it wouldn’t shock any American high school or college football player. It’s the coach’s typical half-time speech.

For our players, in our Power Culture, who after the game go back to the parking lot where their SUVs are waiting with golf clubs in the back, it’s motivating. For Iraqi men, who have few physical possessions and no material security, it is shaming. Their culture is an Honor Culture. The American Lt Colonel stripped them of the thing they value most: their dignity. Now, I’m not arguing for some kind of political correctness, or generic platform of global diversity. I’m onto something deeper: this is a sort of cognitive deficiency, stemming from the inability to conceive of other mentalities and the worlds they make.

This limited bandwidth is the natural condition of most, if not all, humans. We are all to some extent solipsistic, or narcissistic. It’s the nature of having an individual consciousness which is always and exclusively the center of the universe. Think about it: there is no experience you’ve ever had in which you were not at its absolute center. Our natural hard wiring is to be deeply and literally self-absorbed, that is, to perceive and interpret everything through the lens of a solitary consciousness—to build an inner model of reality which is exclusively private. It reminds me of Freud’s joke about the man who told his wife: “If one of us should die, I shall move to Paris.”
In one College Board survey of 830,000 high-school seniors,

• 0 % rated themselves as below average in ability to get along with others,
• 60% rated themselves in the top 10%, and
• 25% rated themselves in the top 1%.

This is not to be attributed to the success of our middle school programs in self-esteem; it’s the nature of isolated consciousness.

Here’s a thought experiment to illustrate the point. Try to imagine what the world is like for a tick. Seems easy enough. It hangs out in the woods, in the luxuriant greenery, listening to the birds singing, relaxing in the sunshine, watching the movement of the leaves in the wind, maybe thinking about philosophy, music, or art, until it gets thirsty… No, wait. That’s the world for us.

Here’s life for the tick: The tick hangs motionless on the tip of a branch in a forest clearing. If she smells butyric acid—which is emitted by the skin glands of all mammals—this stimulus makes her let go of the branch. She falls, who knows where, maybe onto a mammal. When she falls, if she hits a hair, the reactive movement of the hair does two things: it extinguishes the butyric acid response and it causes her to start running around like crazy. She will do that until she encounters heat of approximately 37 degrees Celsius. If she does, this stimulus does two things: it extinguishes the warmth reaction and it causes her to burrow. She’ll drink until she is full, then fall off and die, having given her eggs the nutriment they need.

So, the tick’s entire world—her Umwelt—consists of three perceptions: butyric acid, a bump, and 37 degrees. These three dimensions, which can be perceived only one at a time, rigidly prescribe the course of her actions, and the very poverty of that world guarantees the certainty of her actions and her survival. Her world is perfect for her.

The mere act of classifying other things in our search for essences—dividing up the world linguistically from our centralized point of view—threatens to neglect or negate worth. Probably a tick would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us classify it as an arachnid. “I am no such thing,” she would say. “I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.” We’ve all been put into a box by someone else, and know how nearly impossible it is to get out, and to be seen as we see ourselves.

Imagining the world and its inhabitants as immutable things in fixed boxes gives us the illusion that truth is directly observable and easily accessible. On the other hand, thinking in models reminds us that truth is hypothetical. Thinking in things turns people into the furniture of our lives. The world doesn’t come with labels on it. We do this with language, but it’s a trap. Alan Watts used to say that philosophy was building a cage out of words and then trying to get out of it.
We assume that our world is the same as everybody else’s because each of us has only one reality, the one we have constructed “in here.” A Nobel prize winner in Physics famously remarked at a conference: “Gentlemen, there is no ‘Out There ‘ out there.”

The tick thought experiment helps us understand that there are perceptual dimensions in the culture of the Iraqi policemen which are inaccessible to us. Likewise, the tick would need a broader bandwidth to grasp our human concepts. Even to us our own culture is invisible. It’s like the two young fish swimming along, and an older fish coming the other way greets them: “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” The two young ones continue along their way for some time before one of them turns to the other and says: “What the hell is water?”

The search for truth requires that we constantly consider the possibility that there may be more to a given reality than we are conscious of; that we might be wrong; that our categories are limited and our models out-dated. We construct our truth about others from the templates of our native language and culture, and the refinement of those models takes us closer to what’s true. The disciplines of the humanities: literature, psychology, history, anthropology, foreign languages, and so on, train the mind to make better and better judgments about the categories of humanity and the values we assign to them. If there are cages to get out of, it’s helpful to know words which open doors. If language builds the selves of others and our own, better language will build more authentic relationships.

The greatest unrecognized and unheralded benefit of the study of foreign languages and cultures in the context of a liberal arts education is the refinement of our psychological faculties. It’s not just about jobs; it’s not just resumé padding; it’s not about being able to read the menu when you go abroad. These graduates take with them a unique gift of consciousness: the intense awareness of multiplicity—in nature, in persons, in art, religion, and social behavior. This cognitive faculty—and the spiritually evolved judgment it confers, which resists the facile packaging of others—might facilitate the collaborative hopes of mankind.

Yesterday, I watched on TV as workers put the top spire onto One World Trade Center to bring it to a total height of 1776 feet. I thought about the men and women who worked on it, and their parents, and grandparents, who built the Twin Towers and the Empire State Building. This poem I’m going to read to you now, about building skyscrapers, came to mind as a way of recognizing the parents, the college administrators and staff, the department faculty and instructors, who supplied the intellectual and moral scaffolding for these young men and women to stand on as they build a new world.

“The Cathedral Builders”
by John Ormond
They climbed on sketchy ladders towards God,
with winch and pulley hoisted hewn rock into heaven,
inhabited the sky with hammers,
defied gravity,
deified stone,
took up God’s house to meet him,
and came down to their suppers and small beer,
every night slept, lay with their smelly wives,
quarrelled and cuffed the children,
lied, spat, sang, were happy, or unhappy,
and every day took to the ladders again,
impeded the rights of way of another summer’s swallows,
grew greyer, shakier,
became less inclined to fix a neighbour’s roof of a fine evening,
saw naves sprout arches, clerestories soar,
cursed the loud fancy glaziers for their luck,
somehow escaped the plague,
got rheumatism,
decided it was time to give it up,
to leave the spire to others,
stood in the crowd, well back from the vestments at the consecration,
envied the fat bishop his warm boots,
cocked a squint eye aloft,
and said, “I bloody did that.”

The speech was given during the graduation exercise ceremony on Saturday, May 11, 2013.