Normal Dissonance

The best way to describe my generation is angst-ridden. We feel as though we are at the precipice of a cultural revolution, but can’t pinpoint the method for instigating such a change.  

Many of us spent our college days studying the depth of institutional corruption, impunity, and the general sustainability-crisis. By day, we sat in desks, Macs at attention, saluting grassroots campaigns, fair-trade, ‘glocal’ movements, and cursing the corporatocracy. By night, we argued about ethics over micro-craft brews, all in consensus that change was in order, feeling fulfilled that we were contributing to that shift in our status as students producing work.

In an ever-capitalistic flair, our culture equates production with worthiness; the more you produce, the more worthy a member of society you are. In college you exist in a in a verbal matrix where written and spoken word carry the weight of ‘progress.’ When you get an ‘A’ for your sustainability proposal or extra credit for your reproductive rights campaign, this is positive feedback that you are ‘okay,’ you are worthy, you have produced something in line with your values. As students, our production beast is fed with the institutional stamps of approval.

The thing is, once you leave college, lip-service no longer pays. And we are tasked with carving a unique niche in which we can provide for ourselves while also (ideally) contributing to the type of society we so vehemently advocated for in the classroom. Sadly, our education system arms us abundantly with an abstract knowledge of the current problems at hand, but leaves us high and dry when it comes to actualizing a life that counteracts those issues. Our generation has been given the precious gift of awareness and the curse of bushwacking new routes for change.  

The feeling I get is that we are all overwhelmed. Psychologically, it makes sense that we would throw up our hands, get a job serving or a 9-5 in a corporation, while continuing to pay homage to our ideals with literature and newspaper articles. This is comfortable.

In essence, this is what we have been doing our whole lives—talking about the necessity of change without follow-through.

Hey, we all gotta pay the bills and it’s no doubt a relief to have all of your I’s dotted and T’s crossed when it comes to explaining your ‘plans’ to the  people at large. The pressure of expectation builds the mental infrastructure for feverish hamster-wheel spirals—going through the motions to bite the cheddar because it’s just ‘what you do.’

 This cultural script of externally placed worthiness is deeply embedded in us. Even if we don’t agree or recognize the irrationality in it, we can’t help but be influenced by the cognitive grooves of social perception. When we are not on a societally condoned path towards ‘success,’ it takes a conscious effort to not make choices from a place of fear and/or ambivalence. We have a culturally programmed fear of the unknown, of taking risks, of listening to our intuition even when the outcome may not be reasonable.

It seems that cognitive dissonance is as quotidian in adult life as mortgages, infidelity, and psychotropic medications. Such realizations could tempt any aware individual into the spiral of nihilism, but we must have hope, for these ‘normalities’ are the very reasons why we should seek to confront and rewrite the stories undergirding the tide of our time. 

Confessions of an Economic Hitman

  

            Today, men and women are going into Thailand, the Phillipines, Botswana, Bolivia, and every other country where they ope to find people desperate for work. They got to these places with the express purpose of exploiting wretched people--people whose children are severely malnourished, even starving, people who live in shanty-towns and have lost all hope of a better life, people who have ceased to even dream of another day. These men and women leave their plush offices in Manhattan or San Francisco or Chicago, streak across continents and oceans in luxurious jetliners, check into first-class hotels and dine at the finest restaurants the country has to offer. Then they go searching for desperate people.
             Today, we still have slave traders. They no longer find it necessary to march into the forests of Africa looking for prime specimens who will bring top dollar on the auction blocks in Charleston, Cartagena, and Havana. They simply recruit desperate people and build a factory to produce the jackets, blue jeans, tennis shoes, automobile parts, computer components, and thousands of other items they can sell in the markets of their choosing. Or they may elect not even to own the factory themselves; instead, they hire a local businessman to do all their dirty work for them.
            These men and women think of themselves as upright. They return to their homes with photographs of quaint sites and ancient ruins, to show to their children. They attend seminars where they pat each other on the back and exchange tidbits of advice about dealing with the eccentricities of customs in far-off lands. Their bosses hire lawyers who assure them that what they are doing is perfectly legal. They have a cadre of psychotherapists and other human resource experts at their disposal to convince them that they are helping those desperate people.
           The old-fashioned slave trader told himself that he was dealing with a species that was not entirely human, and that he was offering them the opportunity to become Christianized. He also understood that slaves were fundamental to the survival of his own society, that they were the foundation of his economy. The modern slave trader assures himself (or herself) that the desperate people are better off earning one dollar a day than no dollars at all, and that they are receiving the opportunity to become integrated into the larger world community. She also understands that these desperate people are fundamental to the survival of her company, that they are the foundation for her own lifestyle. She never stops to think about the larger implications of what she, her lifestyle, and the economic system behind them are doing to the world--or of how they may ultimately impact her children's future.

----From Confessions of an Economic Hitman--John Perkins pg 180-181

This book gives an inside look into the vast corporate empire running the globe. I highly recommend it for a better understanding of America's role in globalized business.

Global Language

 

Two years ago, in the dwindling days of December, I found myself wandering round a bustling marketplace in downtown Cape Town. This was my first trip to Africa and usually when I visit a new place, I go downtown to get a feel for the culture, the language. Before my departure, as always, I did some research and had a feel for the predominant tribal groups, ethnic minorities and majorities. In South Africa, with its eleven official languages, I expected to hear some Afrikaans, Zulu, or Xhosa in the streets; yet amidst my meandering between booths, heavily laden with stylistically streamlined African artifacts, I heard only English.

English is being described as the new global language, dominating science, medicine, academics, business, government, technology, media and most of all, the Internet. One quarter of the planet is fluent in English, native and non-native speakers, and this number is growing exponentially (Crystal, 4). Of course, with any global issue, there is a heated debate as to its advantages and disadvantages. Many individuals view the spread of English as an inevitable result of globalization. With English as a baseline mechanism for communication for the ‘global village,’ business runs easier, travel is less daunting, information can be shared without tedious translation, and people of many different backgrounds can come together to express ideas in a common tongue. At the same time, many, including myself, see the domination of the English language as an expression of cultural imperialism and homogenization, fearing for a loss of diversity within the realm of human experience. In this essay I will vouch for the preservation of diversified language because I believe each human’s identity and culture, both of which are intrinsically connected with language, contain ineffable value that should not be suppressed by the powers-that-be.

To critically analyze an issue, one must have an idea of its roots and mechanisms of maintenance. David Crystal, in his book, English as a Global Language, describes a global language as one that is recognized internationally for its special uses and purposes (Crystal, 2). Crystal claims that languages spread, not due to the inherent nature of the language itself but because of the power of the people who speak it, particularly military and economic power (Crystal, 7). He applies this concept to 19^th and 20^th century politics, when Britain and America were thriving as militant, economic and technological superpowers. British colonization and the growth of the United States as an economic heavyweight spread English around the world. With this financial padding, Anglo-phonic countries invested more in research and technology, marketing this knowledge through the multinational corporation and further entrenching the supremacy of English. This empire was finally consecrated with the invention of the Internet (8).

Around 72% of Internet pages are in English and majority of telecommunication infrastructure resides in developed, English aware countries (Ngai, 2012). Obviously the Internet is a huge wealth of information, available only to those who speak English. One doesn’t only need to learn English to be tech-savvy, but to be a member of the global marketplace, to have a chance at economic and social mobility, to communicate with younger generations, the list goes on. In the words of Mark Warchauer, a professor of education and informatics at the University of California, "English has become the second language of everybody. It's gotten to the point where almost in any part of the world to be educated means to know English,"(Mydans 2007). It seems in today’s world the mantra rings, assimilate or perish.

The spread of English and globalization have been like twisting strands of a double helix, complementing and supporting each other. As Warchauer comments, “"Having a global language has assisted globalization, and globalization has consolidated the global language,” (Mydans 2007). As with globalization, there have been countless benefits to the ubiquity of this language. For one, a mono-linguistic comportment has provided a platform for international communication in the public and private sector. For example in international business meetings, Saudi Arabian, Chinese and Brazilian individuals could use English as a common ground of communication instead of hassling with interpretation. Costs of translation and interpretation within global relations definitely factor in the promotion of a lingua franca (The Guardian 2001). Some proponents claim that a global language would reduce cultural misunderstandings although there is no empirical support of this notion (Crystal 13). Learning English can be a ticket out of poverty in developing countries and many families prefer sending their kids to English schools because they feel it will serve them better in the long run.

There is also an overall sentiment that English is already a global language and therefore we might as well use it to our advantage. Some people take the middle ground by promoting a bilingual stance to linguistic globalization; that is, people should utilize local languages as well as English depending on the context. This is keenly expressed in an article written for The Guardian, an online news source based out of the UK, “there is no need to set up an old-fashioned dichotomy between local languages and English as the "hegemonic aggressor": there is a place for both, because they fulfill different functions,” (The Guardian 2001). In other words, many supporters of a lingua franca believe that people don’t have to identify themselves, culturally or socially, through English, but should recognize the language’s relevance in modern society. In a globalized world we need to have a global language; indigenous languages have no use in the world of blogs and happy meals.

At first glance, the aforementioned statements are rendered intuitively sound; unfortunately the relationships between language, identity and society are not so cut and dry. Individuals are against making English a global language for numerous reasons: they believe it promotes the homogenization of humanity; it is a mechanism of cultural imperialism; it will result in a loss of indigenous knowledge, music, poetry, stories—a loss of culture. But there is a question that presupposes all of these adverse conclusions, a question linguists and psychologists have been quarreling over for decades: does language affect thought?

In his chapter, Babel Revisited, Peter Mühlhäusler, describes two theories through which to understand the relationship between language and the world: mapping theory and the linguistic relativity hypothesis (Mühlhäusler 104). The mapping or labeling theory contends that our world is made up of fundamental units for which language has different labels. This view is expressed by linguist and psychologist Steven Pinker, who claims that language is an adaptation; language evolved out of necessity to label the things around us and communicate cognitions (Pinker 2003). Pinker expands on Noam Chomsky’s ideas of universal grammar by claiming that all languages can be broken down into basic cognitive categorizations, in other words, language doesn’t shape our thoughts (and therefore our experiences), but language works as it does by virtue of innate, adaptive biological mechanisms (Chomsky 1977, Papineau 2007). In the words of Mühlhäusler, "according to this theory, the differences between languages are only superficial and all languages are fully inter-translatable,” (Mühlhäusler 104); therefore a global language is neutral because all languages end up communicating the same universal labels and cognitions.

The second theory through which to understand the role of language in society is referred to as the Sapir-Whorf or linguistic relativity hypothesis (Mühlhäusler 104). The idea of linguistic relativity is expressed eloquently by David Crystal, during his feature in the documentary, In Languages We Live: Voices of the World, a film by Janis Billeskov Jansen and Signe Bryge Sørenson, “the world is a mosaic of visions, and each vision is encapsulated by a language… every time a language is lost, one vision of the world disappears;” in other words, language defines how each human experiences the world (Jansen and Sørenson 2005). In an article for the New York Times, “Does Your Language Shape How You Think?” Guy Deutscher comments on re-vamped understandings of linguistic relativity, “if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about,” (Deutscher 2010). For example, English is a gender-neutral language and therefore its speakers are less focused on gendered dichotomies in their comprehension, whereas a Spanish or French speaker would view this information as vital to their understanding of the world (Deutscher 2010).

Deutscher continues to comment on how language demands us to speak, feel and think about concepts differently, such as space, color, perception, time, geography etc. Peter Mühlhäusler also describes the immense diversity between languages with regards to communicating certain phenomena: specifically with nature, plants, weather, color, kinship ties, parts of the body, emotions, states of mind, religion, spiritual ideas, social distinctions, and metaphors (Mühlhäusler 106). For example: some indigenous cultures having thousands of names for plants, whereas the western knowledge of nature is quite generalized; the Hopi of North America have no word for ‘depression’; the Tofa people of Siberia have many terms for ‘reindeer’ similar to the Tuvans who use special names for colors, body patterns, and head marking of horses, cows, and yaks (Harrison 2007, Sommers-Flanagan 2012). David Harrison in this chapter, An Extinction of (ideas about) Species, contends that humanity is at risk of losing an amazing vault of eco-knowledge with the extinction of languages (Harrison 2007).

There are around 6000 languages left in the world it is predicted that in 100 years, half of those languages will be extinct. If this occurs, as David Crystal describes, not only will we lose specialized knowledge of the natural world, “[but] if we do nothing…half of the world’s heritage will be gone,” (Jansen and Sørenson 2005). Crystal’s statement alludes to the idea that we experience reality through language, we experience ourselves, and this is only so pure in our mother tongue. The book, Counseling and Psychotherapy Theories in Context and Practice, written by John Sommers-Flanagan and Rita Sommers-Flanagan, describes the self as a narrative concept, birthed in the cultural parameters of language. Language and identity are two sides to the same coin; if our concept of the self is intrinsically linked to our personal narrative, then taking away that understanding and filtering it through another cultures’ perspective is very undermining and detrimental to psychological and emotional health (Sommers-Flanagan 2012). As Director Janus Jansen describes, “to lose my mother tongue would be like being forced into language exile. I would lose my family’s history and culture,” (Jansen and Sørenson 2005).

I believe the only way to truly observe issues of global injustice are through a holistic lens. In the documentary, The Color of Fear, a group of mixed-ethnicity men explore issues of racism. At one point in the documentary, a white men comments that he doesn’t understand himself as part of an ethnic community and is perplexed at why race has to be such an issue, “why can’t we all just be members of the human race?” Two African American men retort,

“This is the problem with racism…As a white man, he doesn’t have to think about his position in life, his place in the world. The history books tell him, as they are written, that this is his world…he doesn’t have to think of himself as a white person because the way the world is set up, America in particular, white is a human-being…they step into a world that is theirs.” (Mun Wa, 1994)

Similarly with language, those who grow up speaking English don’t understand why globalizing the English language has to be such a problem, because they are already privileged in that they speak it. I have noticed this paradigm of globalizing homogenization in which what it means to be human is to be a white male who speaks English, dresses a certain way, expresses emotion a certain way, eats certain foods, celebrates certain traditions, practices a certain religion. This idea of English as global language, which is supported by many valid points, is just another veiled expression of white supremacy. What English as a global language is saying to the marginalized peoples of the world is that their cultural contribution does not matter; they do not matter unless they assimilate and essentially ‘lose themselves.’

I am against promoting English as a global language not only because I support the aforementioned arguments that there will be a loss of diversity, culture, and knowledge; I also believe this trend to be another form of Anglo-phonic oppression on minorities. From the moment I first inhaled, my senses were inundated with stimuli of privilege. For example: I was born in a sanitary hospital, with all the necessary accoutrements to meet my medical needs; I was taken to a warm home where I was fed properly and loved; my genealogical heritage is such that my skin color is defined as ‘white’; the first words I heard were English words and English is my mother tongue. All of these things, probably reminiscent stories of many individuals born in the United States, although seemingly basic, are flagrant status symbols, laying the bedrock for my certain success in the world. I agree with Crystal when he claims,

“a global language will cultivate an elite monolingual linguistic class, more complacent and dismissive in their attitudes towards other languages…[who] will be more able to think and work quickly in it, and to manipulate it to their own advantage at the expense of those who do not have it, thus maintaining in a linguistic guise the chasm between rich and poor,” (Crystal 2003).

            The promotion of a mono-linguistic world disrespects my basic tenet that each human has something very unique to share with the world and this ability to share is an intrinsic right that should be protected. With the extinction of language not only will we lose culture and knowledge, but also we will be affirming a paradigm that doesn’t respect the inherent value of human beings. Although there are some advantages to English as a global language, economically, corporately, communicatively, the advantages seem to favor the privileged. I believe accepting these veiled rationales without digging deeper into the perpetual top-down injustices would be an ignorant conclusion. And while those who speak English can remain linguistically blind to their true advantage and vouch for everyone to be like them for sake of convenience, I believe that forcing people to eschew their mother tongue and essentially, their identity for the sake of a further globalized, homogenized, interdependent monoculture is not worth the price.

Works Cited

“A Stateless Language that Europe Must Embrace.” The Guardian 18 April. 2001: Web. Accessed 5 Dec. 2012.

Chomsky, Noam. Essays on form and interpretation. New York: North-Holland, 1977.

Crystal, David. Why a Global Language? New York: 2003. Cambridge University Press. New York, NY. Print.

Deutscher, Guy “Does Your Language Shape How You Think?” New York Times.  26 Aug. 2010: web. Accessed 9 Dec. 2012.

Harrison, David. “An Extinction of Ideas about Species.” Oxford University Press. 2007. Print. p. 23-55.

Jansen, Janis Billeskov and Signe Bryge Sørenson, dirs. In languages we Live: Voices of the World. Final Cut Productions, 2005. Documentary.  

Muelenhausler, Peter. “Babel Revisited.” Print. p. 103-108.

Mydans, Seth. “Across Cultures, English is the Word.” New York Times 9 April. 2007: Web. Accessed 5 Dec. 2012.

Ngai, Phyllis. Power Point. Lesson 2: Globalization, Informatization and Communication. 2012.

Papineau, David. “Caveman Conversations.” Rev. of The Stuff of Thought, by Steven Pinker. The Independent 5 Oct. 2007. Web: Accessed 9 Dec. 2012.

Pinker, Steven. “Language as an adaptation to the cognitive niche.” In: Kirby S, Christiansen M Language evolution: States of the Art. Language evolution: States of the Art. New York: Oxford University Press; 2003. p. 16-37.

Sommers-Flanagan, John and Rita Sommers-Flanagan. Counseling and Psychotherapy Theries in Context and Practice: Skills Strategies, and Techniques. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2012. Print.

The Color of Fear. Dir, Lee Mun Wa, 1994. Documentary.

The Story of Stuff & a commentary on Deep Ecology

In the spirit of upcoming Earth Day, watch this short, informative video. Either we ditch capitalism or we ditch the environment....enjoy

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         Our definition of ‘the good life’ is reflected in policy, behavior, and social norms; and rhetoric defining ‘the good’ has always been a moral inquiry. One of the things that struck me most from reading about Deep Ecology was the synthesis of metaphysical and environmental discourse.

We cannot begin to reshift our understanding of nature until we understand ourselves. I appreciate Deep Ecology's emphasis on the interrelationship between the moral/spiritual realm and our overt behaviors towards each other and the environment. As quoted by Devall and Sessions, "spiritual growth, or unfolding, begins when we cease to understand or see ourselves as isolated and narrow competing egos and begin to identify with other humans from our family and friends to, eventually, our species,” (Devall & Sessions 435).

Expanding the realm of injustice to include the whole biotic community is a huge move. Doing this opens the space to address how the maltreatment of each other stems from our relationship with the environment.  A good friend of mine always posited that we treat mother nature in the same way we treat our women--we abuse, manipulate, objectify, compartmentalize, and find value only in superficial beauty. I think this idea is eloquent because it illustrates an axiom of deep ecology: that our social norms with regards to other humans reflects our norms with all other beings.

What we do to nature we inevitably do to ourselves. With the homogenization and loss of biodiversity, we are also promoting a monoculture society, in which everyone has the same gadget, hair-do, and Prius. Sometimes it seems like corporations are even trying to commidify  environmentalism into an industry of 'green-cool.' Not to say that the incorporation of sustainable ideas into the capitalist market isn't a huge step forward, but the promotion of ecology in this sense perpetuates a broken system.

            Our system is broken because it functions around the golden arrow of consumption. We have become a nation of consumers—this is our identity. Our value is measured and demonstrated by how much we consume. Because of the prime placed on novelty, almost 99% of the stuff we produce is out of vogue within the next year. We have converted the buying and use of goods into our new religious practices and seek to solace the deep existential angst by consuming more goods.

            Bringing it back to the quote mentioned above, our society defines the self in narrow terms—by virtue of the things we are consuming and whether or not those THINGS are the newest, best, shiniest, fastest, most popular things. And we are addicted because we are trained like rats in skinners box. We have been trained that always wanting more ‘things,’ is the moral good, because it is good for a productive economy.

            And we wonder why our nation is the fattest, saddest, sickest, most addicted, anxious, and violent on the planet—because our society aims at an illusory moral good. Just think of how our culture could be transformed if we defined ‘the goodlife’ in terms of spiritual satisfaction as opposed to a mass accumulation of material goods.

            I think what Deep Ecologists were trying to get at was that an economy which functions under the basic assumption of unlimited resources, aka capitalism, cannot only flourish for so long on a finite planet. While I can understand how people would see Deep Ecology as too radical, I appreciate the attention they call to systemic injustices and the call for aggravated action against top-down injustice. At this point what we need is a radical paradigm shift.  

References

Devall, B. & Sessions, G. Principles of Deep Ecology--from Worldviews, Religion, and the Environment. (2003). Thomson & Wadsworth. 

Naess, A. Ecology: The Shallow & the Deep. chapter from Green Critique. 

Venus of Urbino

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This lil’ piggy hears the corporate chime,

Dyes violet blonde and whines.

Feeling buffalo blah? This liquid gold

Turns wonder inside out. It’s the secret

Of glam-vicious—sparked by ignoble dukes

Who reign supernovae, where stars come

To die. So, rock, paper, screw you!

I am Woman, of swollen root and form.

Oh my Guinness, cuckoos an un-

Conventional daphne.  It’s the blind,

Leading the blind, an atom bomb

In my ovaries. Where stars come

To die. In alabaster tombs, votives cry

Where is Venus in the ‘I’

Hashtag empires buzz,

Vendi, Vidi, Vici—

 

Angelina Jolie's Louis Vuitton ad: a commentary

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A concept that coincides with environmental sustainability is the sustainability of culture. It seems that globalization, while wreaking havoc on the environment is also homogenizing the multifaceted nature of human existence. So by virtue of disrespecting the environment, we are disrespecting and denying the preservation of a cultural heritage. The commercial I chose to analyze is a part of the Louis Vuitton 2012 campaign, dubbed ‘core values.’ This campaign seeks to capitalize humanitarian or ‘dream-fulfilling’ celebrities to equate their products as the moral good. The specific campaign that has caught my eye in the magazines and after watching this long interview was with Angelina Jolie. In the ad, Ms. Jolie talks about her life-changing journey to Cambodia—how much she connected with the spirituality of the place, the compassionate culture, the resilience after times of strife. She delves into some esoteric moral ground, describing her learned life-experiences in this unique country. She touches on the basic, humble values of the locals—their idyllic lifestyle. This is illustrated through a series of ‘portraits’ of the people of Cambodia—very rural, poor, within natural settings, engaging in mundane tasks, yet they are all smiling and happy.

With incorporating the idea that this brand can facilitate life-changing experience by virtue of engaging with the ‘glocal’ community, LV seeks to promote the sustainability of moral and experiential development through the consumption of their brand. There is this feel that if you use this product while on your journey, you will find that lost sense of community, that rural, slowed down life which is idyllic for any consumer in a fast paced market. LV is promoting its product as timeless—by setting their ad in a place that seems ‘untouched’ by the forces of globalization, LV is trying to redefine their mega-brand for the consumer as a supporter of glocal experience. This ad also idealizes nature with the location, choice of dress and makeup for Angelina Jolie and with the ethereal nature sounds in the background. They are trying to reverse the idea of this LV logo as one with nature, as opposed to a high-status symbol, but something that perhaps even the local Cambodians featured could attain if they simply ‘engage in their journey.’

Although this ad is aimed at Anglophonic consumers, I think it brings an interesting perspective of how mega-corporations are trying to include the marginalized into their advertizing to feign concern for rampant global inequality. Personally, I find the whole ad very hypocritical—I at no point understand how the connection is drawn between a ‘life-changing journey,’ facilitated through cultural exchange and witnessing of impoverished strife, and the bags Louis Vuitton is trying to sell. The whole ad seems completely disconnected with the product, yet all those profound sentiments expressed through the most beautiful woman in the world’s story are inherently associated with the brand itself. They are promoting this idea that if we travel (in sheek style obviously) and engage with other cultures, we are promoting sustainability because we will become more aware of the world. This idea has some truth, but I hate it how the brand is claiming that their product is a perfect vehicle for these transformational shifts.