If you didn’t see Arrival, or you were lost, read this helpful Wikipedia entry on linguistic determinism. It’ll help with what I’m about to do here.
So in Arrival, learning the heptapod language allows our hero to experience time in a circular nature, not bound by the syntax of a sentence. This is similar to something Gunther Kress expressed about images, claiming that if you look at a photo of a person opening a door and walking out into the sunshine, the photo doesn’t tell you those things in a specific narrative order (but a sentence does– we have to specify something first, and we create a chronology in doing so). I’m not a trained linguist (took some classes, but not my expertise), so I’m not going to attempt to prove or disprove the cobbled together Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. I don’t think it’s quite accurate, but I really only speak one language proficiently (unless we start talking about code as language).
Here’s what I suggested last night, as I got tired of trying to express myself typing on my phone screen before bed: I think that the way that we organize our thoughts does inform how we see the world and communicate with others. The example that I used last night was the difference between American university system’s privileging of deductive reasoning over inductive reasoning and it’s direct relationship to how binary American culture is. We can see the deep rooted problems with this binary nature everywhere. Look at the bathroom issues right now (the solution, which some places have executed elegantly, is to just have bathrooms with doors that lock that are for people– why define a gender? Why do we NEED to do that with a bathroom). Look at how people pick A politician and then follow that person off a cliff. Wear a U of Michigan sweatshirt to an OSU football party. People in America are binary thinkers. Batman is good, Joker is bad. Luke is good, Darth Vader is bad. Oh, crap! No, Darth Vader is good sometimes, but he goes bad again! He-Man is good. Skeletor is evil. Dalmations are good. Cruella DeVille is bad. You get where I’m going with that.
Because I think inductive thinking is useful, I’m going to share some.
I came to believe that there was a critical difference in how people think based on how they conceptualize understanding (and that it was a cultural problem) during a particularly difficult year of coursework in my graduate studies. There were two things that led me to see the world differently.
The first was that I was in a class on American Indian Studies and Critical Theory. The instructor of this course, like myself, was mixed-blood. But our concepts of what that meant were always at odds. He angrily railed into me during the second week of class because I said I was part Cherokee. He got literal, and he mockingly asked me what “parts” of me were Cherokee, if my legs or arms were, for example. He insisted, loudly, that a person couldn’t be “part” native.
Which was funny. He was the one stuck in the Westernized binary. To him, I had to be Cherokee or not. I couldn’t exist in the middle. Ironic, given that he talked about Homi Bahbah frequently but didn’t grasp what third space meant. This same professor came at me over and over because he didn’t like my ideas. For example, I suggested once that while a bit of First Nations theory we’d read was interesting and engaging, I didn’t feel we could apply it to our view of Native American issues because of the differences in how the Canadian government and the American government had treated their indigenous populations. He then cracked into me for claiming that the theory was useless. Because, again, he couldn’t listen to what I was saying due to being absolutely locked into a binary where if I claimed a theory would need to be adapted to go from one governmental system to another, I was apparently saying it didn’t work at all. This happened over and over– when I questioned the reasoning of a book by one of his mentors that claimed that the academy cannot be changed to be better for Indigenous scholars (written by an Indigenous Scholar inside the academy, mind you). I suggested that perhaps the author was employing too much hyberbole, in what I thought was a tongue-in-cheek way, as it didn’t make any sense to say “what I am doing in this book can’t be done by someone who has a job like the one I have,” as an activist scholar. But if I was suggesting something that might mean looking at the work differently, to my professor I was claiming it was “bad” or “wrong.”
In his mind, he was Superman and I was Lex Luthor, I guess. I doubt he’d give me that much credit. I think he was King Kong and I was a tiny soldier on the street.
At the same time this class was happening, I was in another course, on a different campus with totally different people in a totally different program, about Material Rhetorics. The Material Rhetorics class was a grad/undergrad split course, and there were only two grad students, myself and a friend who I will only identify by saying was white and of strictly European ancestry. That course was amazing, actually, other than my group of undergraduates refusing to collaborate and creating a fragmented mess of a final project. But one day, we had a conversation that I thought was a perfect example of the problems of culture clash.
We were talking about Bear Lodge Butte in Wyoming, or what most people know as Devil’s Tower. It’s a national monument, but it’s also a sacred place for the Lakota, the Cheyenne and other plains tribes, given the sacred stories of how it came to exist (often as a gift from the Great Spirit, saving children from bears by erupting from the earth and providing a high place, but the stories vary of course). As a national monument, people are allowed to rock climb on the Butte.
If you’re a person of faith, imagine me jogging around your church, stepping on all the various structures and artifacts, the books, the altar, then when I finished my workout washing my feet in the holy water. That’d be awful, right? That’s how it feels to see hipsters with ropes in ridiculous outfits climbing a sacred landmark.
As we discussed this in class, the other grad student said “but if they cared so much, why didn’t they just make sure the land was theirs? Why’d they sell it to the United States?”
They didn’t exactly sell it, but that’s not really the point.
I looked at the other student and said “because ownership doesn’t work that way in Lakota culture. There wasn’t a sense that a person– like you or me– could own the world, could own rock formations, could own a mountain. That was the world. It was Europeans who came here and decided they could own pieces of it.”
The other students– the other grad student and most of the undergrads– didn’t get it. It wasn’t that they disagreed with me. They understood the issue. They just couldn’t get their heads around it. Because their culture told them that land could be owned, so it belonged to someone, and anyone else had no claim to it because that’s how American senses of ownership work.
So what’s the other way of thinking? A more inductive way of thinking would dictate that we consider any given situation as having a series of potential solutions, a series of potential ways of being. To attempt to crystalize it in a playful way, I want to use another well-worn chestnut: Schrödinger’s cat.
The real theory is described well, again, by Wikipedia (it’s not a bad source, people). but when used for discussion in less scientific circles, the big generalized part of this becomes the sort of joke of the idea that the cat in the box isn’t dead or alive until you look at it (that somehow it exists in both states). This, of course, once again draws on a binary. Why is it that even in a hypothetical situation that involves complexities we must believe something is dead, alive, or exists as the binary opposition of dead or alive? Why is there no possibility of another state?
Because that’s not how Westernized thought works. For all the desire for complexity, the Western tradition has actually made people more like machines (or built the machines in their image of perfection) where everything is either a zero or a one. A democrat or a republican. A Wolverine or a Buckeye. A Cowboy or an Indian. A Cop or a Robber. A Jet or a Shark.
Meanwhile almost everything that exists is somewhere in the middle of two conditions, spiraling somewhere in the mysterious space that is our world.
I feel bad for people who need absolutes. They limit themselves by believing there are only two options and that one has to be vilified.
It’s the creation of “us” and “them.”
We know better.