From: Man Alive! - "Speaking in tongues."

[Greg]

From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind.

( http://selfadoration.com/ManAlive.html )

by Greg Swann


Chapter 3. Speaking in tongues.

I told you I use the words "human being" as a term of art. Here
is why: Because there is a valid and valuable distinction to be
made between a genetic _Homo sapiens_ (the surviving issue of the
recombination of genes) and a human being (a genetic _Homo
sapiens_ within whom has been cultivated the gift of mind). A
genetic _Homo sapiens_ can have the _potential_ to become a human
being -- although this capacity or its existential realization
can have been damaged or destroyed by disease, injury or birth
defect. But _until_ the mind has been cultivated within a
particular genetic _Homo sapiens,_ that entity will not be a
human being.

A human life is an artifact, a man-made thing. The existence of a
genetic _Homo sapiens_ is a manifestation of nature, just as with
any tree or reptile or kitten. But the existence of your life as
a human being is a consequence of a vast number of
conceptually-conscious choices made by your parents and other
human beings when you were just a baby. Had they failed to
cultivate the gift of mind within you, you might have survived as
a genetic _Homo sapiens,_ but you would never have become a human
being. You owe your biological life to nature, but you owe your
life as a human being to choices made by other human beings.

It's funny for me to listen to abortion ideologues, pro and con,
argue about when human life begins: Conception or birth? The
truth -- as a matter of ontological fact -- is that, for normal
children raised in normal circumstances, human life begins at age
four or five. The transition from toddler to child is slow and
gradual, but the distinction is obvious once you know what to
look for. A toddler is little more than a very smart dumb animal
-- an exceptionally talented dancing bear. He does amazing
things, compared to the clumsy efforts of trained animals, but
like a trained animal, he does not understand conceptually what
he is doing or why. A child, by contrast, is a small and
relatively inexperienced human being. He thinks in concepts, and
he can name the reason for everything he does.

And that's the bright-line distinction, of course: Thinking and
choosing in concepts. Mammals have sense organs, obviously, and
they can perceive the world around them. They can recollect some
of their perceptions at some level of organization, and they can
even draw crude inferences about those perceptions -- pattern
matching. They can communicate by bodily signaling. They can
want, make no doubt, and they can pursue their wants quite
willfully. What they _cannot_ do is collect their perceptions
into conceptual categories, reason proportionately about those
categories and make informed choices on the basis of that
reasoning. No mere animal can do this, no matter what breathless
claims are made for its "uncanny" Dancing Bear behaviors.

That kind of cognition -- rationally-conceptual volitionality --
is found _only_ in human beings -- _only_ in a normal genetic
_Homo sapiens_ child or adult within whom the gift of mind has
been cultivated -- by the repeated, persistent,
fully-conceptually-conscious choices of the adult human beings
who raised that child. If you're like me, you never thank your
parents enough for all the gifts they gave you when you were
growing up, but your humanity itself is the greatest treasure
they conferred upon you -- and I expect they didn't even think
twice about that, at the time they were doing it.

Mainly, they cultivated your potential simply by delighting in
it. You learned motor skills by playing "patty-cake," and you
learned to speak -- in a sort of verbal semaphore, at first -- by
being spoken to. You learned to categorize by sorting among the
many toys they gave you, and you taught yourself the laws of
identity and causality by playing with those toys -- taking the
same simple actions over and over again and observing the
results. You learned to think subjunctively -- to think about
things not immediately in evidence -- by playing "peek-a-boo" and
"which-hand." This exploration of the subjunctive was honed by a
hundred-dozen lectures about bad behavior from your parents and
other adults: "Would you like it if little Tommy took _your_
toy?" You came to _be_ a human being by being raised _as_ a human
being _by_ human beings. Your _capacity_ for a human level of
cognition was natural, in-born -- a function of that great big
brain in your cranium, the brain that, not-coincidentally, no
other kind of organism possesses. But the _cultivation_ of that
capacity was the product of thousands of choices made by your
parents in the process of bringing you up.

I said you learned to speak in "a sort of verbal semaphore," at
first, and this is also an important distinction. One of the
things that protects humanity from all of the philosophers and
academics who insist that we are nothing special is the power of
speech. Not speech deployed to argue against them; for the most
part we are intimidated by their pedigrees and their supercilious
posturing. But the power of speech itself defends us, because
each one of us can easily see that this is a power that human
beings alone possess. Lab-coated academics never stop trying to
convince us that chimpanzees or dolphins share the power of
speech with us, but regardless of what we say -- or don't dare
say -- in rebuttal, most of us recognize that these claims are
absurd.

That's just more of the Dancing Bear Fallacy, of course, but it
is worth listening to the people who make these arguments -- and
to the people who chortle their support for them. A laboratory
dolphin possessed of rationally-conceptual volitionality would
immediately file a lawsuit seeking manumission from the
clipboard-wielding sadists holding it captive. Ten thousand
chimpanzees sitting at computer keyboards cannot produce the
works of Shakespeare, nor even one line of intelligible verse.
Not ten thousand, not ten million, not ten billion. The purpose
of making these nonsensical claims about the specious verbal
abilities of trained animals is not to confer an unearned status
on those animals, but to rob you of the status you earned by
mastering your mind. Animals cannot make informed choices by
reasoning about concepts -- nor do they need to. They are perfect
the way they are -- and so are you.

The goal of modern philosophy -- in all probability unknown to
you and to the scientific researchers who make these breathless
claims about the imaginary conceptual abilities of animals -- is
to undermine the mind. Slavishly following those knowing
philosophers of mindlessness, there are vast cadres of very well
paid professional butterfly collectors whose job it is to make
tautologically obvious observations about animal behavior in the
most exaggerated ways they can. And slavishly following _them_
are hordes of popularizers -- journalists and artists and
so-called "thought leaders" -- whose passion is to blow those
exaggerated claims even further out of proportion. And, sad to
say, at the tag end of that long slavish train, there are a great
many ordinary people who hate the human mind enough to seek any
bogus evidence of its impotence, its incompetence, its
fundamental ugly corruption. I told you the world is at war with
your mind. This is how that war is fought.

So let's talk about what the power of human speech really is --
and why it is so different from the bodily signaling we observe
in animals. I can't promise you that you won't get fooled again,
but at least you won't be stuck trying to defend your mind
unarmed.

What's the difference between "a sort of verbal semaphore" in a
toddler and true human speech in a child? Simply everything.
Animals communicate by bodily signaling. They don't know _why_
they communicate. They do everything they do because that's the
way they do things, and they cannot change, add to or improve
their in-born signaling ability. Whether the signal is a bee's
flight patterns, a dog's wagging tail or a chimpanzee's chest
puffed out to express a territorial belligerence, the behavior is
a semaphore, a cipher, with no underlying conceptual content.

I call that kind of communication Mothertongue, and all higher
animals do it -- including us. When you sing a lullaby to an
infant, that baby cannot possibly understand the words you are
singing. But he can understand the Mothertongue component of your
message -- the love, the care, the comforting -- and he can
respond in kind, also in Mothertongue, by smiling and cooing back
at you. You and your spouse can do this, too -- kiss and cuddle
and coo -- and very probably the best of the communication that
flows between you is carried on without words. We express joy and
pride and anger and impatience and every other emotion in
Mothertongue, and we can drive each other completely crazy by
saying one thing in words while communicating the exact opposite
position in Mothertongue.

When a toddler first learns to use words to communicate, he is
not at that point communicating concepts. The words he masters
are just new signals to him, new semaphores, more precise
versions of the laughing and crying and smiling and grimacing he
has been using to communicate since birth. Gradually, over time,
the toddler will come to understand that a word can subsume any
number of instances of the type of object or idea it denotes,
some immediately obvious, some not presently in evidence and some
purely imaginary. This is the birth of Fathertongue in the
toddler's mind, and the acquisition of Fathertongue is the point
of graduation from a largely-animalistic toddlerhood to a
fully-human childhood.

In the broadest possible scope, Fathertongue is any notation
system -- codified memories, speech, written language,
mathematical symbols, musical notation, choreography, drawing and
painting, computer software languages, etc. -- any system by
which a human being seeks to retain and communicate complex
conceptual information. Mothertongue is active, immediate,
visceral and fleeting, where Fathertongue is generally passive,
patient, cerebral and enduring. The world of sense experience can
be cluttered and chaotic, and the mind itself is much too good at
wandering off on meaningless tangets. Fathertongue is the means
by which the mind focuses itself, the means by which it hangs
onto matters of importance while shedding itself of everything
that does not matter.

That's important. We have been talking about communication, but
Fathertongue is about _thinking_ first and always. Even in
isolation -- stranded on a desert island -- you would still have
to retain your thoughts to survive, even though there is no one
present with whom to communicate those thoughts. Which berries
are tasty and which make you sick? If you don't make an effort to
recollect your past experiences, you are as much at risk as any
dog of eating bad food -- without the dog's built-in
easy-regurgitation system.

As an aside, the terms Mothertongue and Fathertongue are not
sex-role related. Thoreau used these coinages, originally, in a
very different way. To him a mothertongue was the kind of
language Heinlein would have called a "milk tongue" -- the
locally-prevalent language of casual discourse, like English or
Spanish, that you learn first at your mother's teats. Thoreau
contrasted this with the fathertongue languages -- Latin and
Greek -- you would later learn as a part of your formal
education.

My own usage of these terms is different. Every notation-based
system of recording, preserving and communicating human cognition
-- memory, speech, poetry, prose, math, music, the visual arts,
choreography, software -- is Fathertongue in my formulation.
Fathertongue can be communicated at a distance, across time,
without any direct contact between the communicants, to anyone
already versed in the notation system -- _and to no one who is
not._ Every sort of communication that can be carried out without
formal notation -- even if a notation system is used for
convenience -- is Mothertongue. When you sing to an infant, the
_words_ you sing mean nothing to the baby, but the embrace and
the warmth and the comfort and the caressing and the _sounds_ of
your singing mean everything.

Fathertongue is the means by which human beings collect and
organize our perceptions into concepts, and, stripped to its
essence, Fathertongue is the means, mode and method of
conceptualization. We devise notation systems -- words and images
and sounds and symbols -- so that we might share our concepts
with one another, transmitting them across the room, across the
globe, across millennia, thus _massively_ increasing our
knowledge base. But you cannot denote and communicate what you
have not first abstracted in the silence and solitude of your own
mind. Fathertongue is the means by which you organize your
thoughts so well that you can understand, retain and communicate
them.

Dogs bark and dolphins chitter, but only human beings are
possessed of the power of Fathertongue, and for this reason among
many others, it is inappropriate to compare the mental
functioning of animals to the conceptual prowess of human beings.
Philosophers and academics can do this if they choose to, but
they will be introducing obvious, palpable, outrageous errors
into their arguments. And now you know how to identify those
errors -- and how to defend your mind from them.





Save the world from home -- in your spare time!

That headline is my favorite advertising joke, a send-up of all
those hokey old matchbook covers. I don’t know if anyone still
advertises on matchbook covers. I don’t even know if anyone still
_makes_ matchbooks. Presumably, by now, smokers can light their
cigarettes with the fire of indignation in other peoples’ eyes.

But I have always believed that ordinary people _should_ be able
to save the world from going to hell on a hand-truck. Our problem
is not the tyrant-of-the-moment. The only real problem humanity
has ever had is thoughtlessness -- the mindless acquiescence to
the absurd demands of demagogues.

That’s the subject of this little book: The high cost of
thoughtlessness -- and how to stop paying it. It weighs in at
around 75 pages. I’m nobody’s matchbook copywriter, and I would
have made it even shorter if I could have. But it covers
everything I know about the nature of human life on Earth --
what we’ve gotten wrong, until now, and how we can do better
going forward.

Why did I bother? Because the world we grew up in is crashing
down around our ears. Nothing has collapsed yet, and there is no
blood in the streets -- so far. But as the economists say, “If
something can’t go on forever, it won’t.” My bet is that you have
been watching the news and wondering what you will do, if things
get ugly.

Doesn’t that seem like a fate worth avoiding? And yet: _What can
one person do?_ My answer: Read -- and propagate -- these
ideas. The book itself is offered at no cost -- and it always
will be. Even so, the price I ask is very high: You have to pay
attention.

If you find that you like this book, I encourage you to share it
freely, far and wide, in any form, with anyone you choose. Print it,
photo-copy it, email it -- shout it from the rooftops if you like.

You can read it at SelfAdoration.com.
( http://selfadoration.com/ManAlive.html )

Or you can download an easy-to-share PDF version.
( http://selfadoration.com/ManAlive.pdf )

If you post to public forums or you have your own
web site or weblog, download the propagation kit.
( http://selfadoration.com/ManAlivePropagationKit.zip )

Why should _you_ bother? Because if anything is going to save
civilization from tyranny, it will be ordinary people like us. _And
there are at least 2.5 billion of us on the internet._ Think what a
big difference some new ideas could make in that many human lives.

How _do_ you save the world from home in your spare time? _One mind at
a time..._