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ON LANGUAGE

Some paleoanthropologists and evolutionary biologists once speculated that Homo Sapiens won the genetic arms race with their Neanderthal cousins because of the development of language by the former facilitated an enormous non-zero sum cultural revolution that the latter could not match. A one-sided linguistic advantage for Homo Sapiens may not have been true but language certainly represented the greatest innovation in human history and even today, often structures the core of our personal and collective identities.

I make mention of this because there were two very interesting posts today relating to language and its uses by Younghusband of Coming Anarchy, who is himself a linguist and also at NuSapiens ( hat tip to Dave ).

Younghusband lambastes the theories of George Lakoff, the Democratic Party’s ” framing” guru who I have blogged on previously. An excerpt from YH’s post “Highjacking the American Language“:

[On Lakoff’s ” Framing”] “Unfortunately this is pseudo-science at best, and is based on the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis which was effectively disproven by the cognitive revolutionaries of the 60’s, and absolutely demolished by my linguistic hero Steven Pinker. The point is, people don’t think in words, thus you cannot control their thoughts by controlling their language. Sorry Mr. Orwell! Ever knew what you wanted to say but couldn’t put it into words? Ever have an idea that you couldn’t explain? As much as the military says “collateral damage” everybody really knows what it means. A “Personal Hydration Engineer” is really just a “waterboy.””

Over at NuSapiens, we have some speculation on the mechanics by which Indo-European languages replaced their indigenous predecessors in “Some Thoughts on Language Replacement“:

“In a nutshell: I wonder whether Indo-European can be seen as an ideology associated with a technology, rather than a language associated with an ethnicity or culture. Many people associate the spread of IE languages with the spread of agriculture in Europe following the last Ice Age. But how did Indo-European replace indigenous European languages? Maybe old languages don’t die, they just fade away. Reductionistic linguistic models might miss this by looking for the wrong things: maybe change happened gradually without anyone realizing they were “adopting a new language.

…Our model biases our view: we look at European languages, and see them as Indo-European. We look for common grammatical structure, common words, etc. But what about other variable elements, such as tonality or “accent”? A Spaniard once described Spanish to me as “Latin with a Basque accent.” Well, what is this “accent,” something linguistics might consider random or trivial? Remember, modern linguistics is part of the Indo-European linguistic-thinking system, so how can it objectively view itself? The parts considered trivial or invisible are most likely to maintain survivals of pre-IE influences. “

There’s some logic here but being a certified outsider to the field of linguistics, I’m wondering how this hypothesis stacks up by looking for Indo-European’s ” invisible” connections with Uralic languages and Basque ? Any ideas out there from my learned and multilingual commenters ?

THE FIRST ON MY BLOCK !

Dr. Barnett was kind enough to have his publisher send me a copy of the uncorrected proof limited edition of his Blueprint For Action for me to review for another venue ( which I will cross-post here at Zenpundit) allowing me to get the jump on the rest of the blogosphere – and not a few old media reviewers.

If you have been following Tom’s blogging this past year you already have some idea of the shape of BFA but as I scan quickly, there are some twists and surprises in the text even for those familiar with PNM. I’m going to start digging in this weekend but my tentative impression – coupled with a close reading of Dr. Barnett’s interview with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for Esquire magazine – is that BFA may be a far more influential book in terms of public policy than The Pentagon’s New Map.

The first book was the vision. The second looks to be the structure.

MAKING DE FACTO RULERS THE NEW DE JURE SOVEREIGNS

Jeff Medcalf at Caerdroia had an excellent post “Towards a New Understanding of National Sovereignty, and the Utility of the UN “- on the impact that the traditions of diplomatic make-believe regarding sovereignty and legitimacy now have as an increasing number of states slide into dysfunction and state failure. An excerpt:

“Pakistan does not control its northwestern provinces. Mexico does not control Nuevo Laredo or most of the rest of the US border area, nor does Mexico control Chiapas. In what sense can Pakistan or Mexico be said to be sovereign over these areas? Well, in a legal sense, but that only. The modern definition of sovereignty dates from after the Renaissance, and was more or less formalized in the Treaty of Westphalia. I don’t believe that the issue has been addressed in formal international law since the Montivideo Convention in the 1930’s.

…While most of the challenges to sovereignty come in the form of transnationalism – that is, most of the challenges have been attempts to tear down nation-state structures and replace them with broader and generally less representative structures. The ultimate end goal of this would be a single government encompassing the entirety of humanity – there is no requirement that sovereignty be understood in that light. It is equally plausible (and far more sane in view of the various horrors visited upon humans throughout history in the name of centralization of power) to devolve sovereignty onto each individual person, and have governments obtain their sovereignty explicitly from the individuals who form them.”

As usual, Jeff nails a large number of salient points with a very economical use of words. There’s more to his post and you should read all of it.

Transnational Progressivism, in theory aspires to erecting an international supragovernment – not the ” one world government ” once feared by the John Birch Society, that would be far too accountable and easily blamed – but a diffuse mosaic of transnational entities with ill-defined but very broad, overlapping, jurisdictions and vaguely articulated but far-reaching powers. All of course, that would claim to legitimately supercede the rights and powers of nation-state governments. That is theory.

As a matter of practical application, most of these trans-prog NGO activists content themselves withad hoc legalistic gambits to hamstring the execution of legitimate, democratically-elected and accountable state authority. The documents they do manage to produce at a diplomatic level – Kyoto, The ICC agreement, the EU Constitution – are all noteworthy for their convoluted and excessively complicated structures and avoidance of responsibility in terms of the purpose for which they were created. Their spirit is not democratic but oligarchical, giving shadowy groups of unelected activists on the NGO circuit the power to gum up the works.

Take for example, the ICC; a great moral idea, one consistent with the spirit of Natural Law and the Genocide Convention. Unfortunately, the ICC as it stands today adds nothing because any signatory to the Genocide Convention already has the legal jurisdiction to punish genocidaires. Secondly, the ICC is dominated by states whose jurists would refuse on principle to mete out death sentences – giving defendents convicted of crimes against humanity 10-15 years in jail isn’t much punishment for herding thousands of people to their deaths. Or a deterrent against future acts of genocide.

What the ICC does well is constrain great powers from intervening to stop acts of genocide by hanging the prospect of politically-motivated prosecution over their heads. Or failing that, force the intervening power to adopt so restrictive a set of rules-of-engagement for their troops that they are rendered militarily impotent in the field. The howls of European outrage over the bilateral agreements negotiated by the United States and countries in the Gap indicate that the Europeans viewed the ICC at least partly as a wedge to get more of a say on how the Pentagon uses the American military.(If the Europeans were sincere about genocide rather than leverage, they’d have put 500,000 troops in Dar Fur).

The old Westphalian Rule-set is dying. Sovereignty is being challenged by forces of transnationalism, subnationalism and state failure. There is of yet, no agreement on the Rule-Set to replace the current standards of international diplomacy that rely increasingly on polite fictions that are at ever greater variance with reality. There is in fact, much dispute over whether the cognitive dissonance of treating geographic expressions like Somalia as nation-states is even a problem.

We need a Rule-set reset to move international law into better alignment with reality but before that can happen a cognitive reset must occur to force global elites to acknowledge that reality.

SHORT TERM FUTURISM: ALL CONNECTED, ALL THE TIME

From the Eide Neurolearning Blog we get an article from IT heavyweights hailing the coming of the uberconnected society with all the important socioeconomic and psychological paradigmatic shifts that entails. I previously speculated on ” The Coming of the Global Hypereconomy” and Tom Barnett’s special edition newsletter features an IT specialist and scientist Dr. Stephen DeAngelis on the emerging tech of Rule-set compliance.

I also note that blogfriend Stu Berman has published a piece on IT security in Network Magazine called ” Take my Social Security Number – Please!” that complements the above topics nicely and puts the accent correctly on individuals, not the state, controlling their information profile.

THE HOME OFFICE WORTH CREATING

Busy setting up bookcases and unpacking, organizing, shelving several thousand books today – a project long delayed – so that a car may park in the space in the garage currently occupied by my giant cube of paking boxes. This cube has sat untouched for oh, six-seven months and my excuses have run out ;o)

I’ll be posting later but in the meantime, here are new voices that have joined my blogroll of late:

American Digest

Brad Plumer

Captain’s Quarters

Conjectures & Refutations

Critt Jarvis

Digital Dissent

Nothing Aside

Organic Warfare

The Useless Tree

Typewriter King

Back in a while……