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Breaking all the rawls: Individual and collective rights in language-planning
SASS Friday 2.5.2003, Minneapolis
Two years ago UNESCO published the second edition of its Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger of Disappearing, edited by Stephen A. Wurm of the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra. The publication of the atlas marks a new departure for UNESCO which until recently limited its efforts of conservation to material artefacts in the cultural and natural environment, to bricks and mortar, bones and stones. The atlas signals an interest in the politically more loaded area of immaterial culture; it is financed partly by the Japan Trust Fund for the preservation of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, and it is clear that this shift has been brought about partly by the new director general of UNESCO, Koïchiro Matsuura. Another of Matsuura’s projects was the proclamation, on 18 May 2001, of 19 of the world’s most remarkable examples of oral and intangible heritage. Amongst these we find the Garifuna Language, Dance and Music of Belize, the Oral heritage of Gelede in Benin, the Sicilian Opera dei Pupi, Cross Crafting and its Symbolism in Lithuania and the Mystery Play of Elche in Spain. Of the nineteen examples of intangible heritage all, including the five so-called «cultural spaces», are dependent on language for their definition and maintenance.
The interest in the rapidly advancing problem of the impending extinction of large numbers of the world’s languages is not of course restricted to international bureaucracies like UNESCO. We have long had studies of the demise of individual languages (one such is Reg Hindley’s thorough study of Irish, its «qualified obituary» from 1990), and more recently wide-ranging studies of language-death as a cultural phenomenon. An important publication in this genre is Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine’s Vanishing Voices from 2000, which sees the extinction of languages as a permanent feature of human cultural development propelled first by what they call the «biological wave», and then by an «economic wave» which drives before it a linguistic monoculture whose inexorable advance threatens to engulf everything in its path. Andrew Dalby’s more recent Language in Danger: How Language Loss Threatens Our Future is motivated by similar political concerns to those of Nettle and Romaine, and also uses a rhetoric of cultural ecology.
If we return to the atlas, we can see that few of us in Europe live very far from a site of actual or impending linguistic extinction. In Scandinavia all the Sámi languages are to some extent ‘endangered’, on UNESCO’s definition. North Sámi, in the best position, is merely ‘endangered’. South Sámi and Lule Sámi are ‘seriously endangered’; South Sámi has around 500 speakers left, and the rate of transmission to children is low (www.nrk.no/nyheter/kultur/2615011.html). Inare Sámi in Finland and Skolt and Kildin Sami on the Kola peninsula are in a similar, or worse, position. Pite Sámi and Ume Sámi in Sweden, together with Akkala and Ter Sámi in Russia are ‘moribund’, that is, they are no longer transmitted at all, and Kemi Sámi has ceased to be. This pattern is reproduced all around the developed world. Of the three hundred languages spoken in the present-day United States at the time of Columbus, only 175 survive, most, as Nettle and Romaine say «possibly only a generation away from extinction» (5). In Australia 90% of the 250 or so Aboriginal languages are near extinction, and only 18 of these have as many speakers as South Sámi (9).
In this grim context it might appear facetious or even decadent to mention New Norwegian, although I well recall the comment of the idiot who read my first attempt as a student to write New Norwegian: Gratulerer med din freistnad på å skrive dette utdøyande målet. It is of course not unusual to hear the fear, often a thinly-veiled hope, that New Norwegian will soon disappear. New Norwegian has half a million or so users, that is to say writers, since New Norwegian in the sense in which I am using the term here, is a written language. It has ten times as many users as Faroese, itself not threatened, twice as many as Icelandic, also a vigorous language. The number of users of a language is not in itself an indication of the prognosis for it, since once processes of extinction are set in train, the end can come very quickly, as in the cases of Manx and Irish. There is no immediate danger of New Norwegian disappearing, but the reasons for this do not primarily have to do with numbers. Three conditions pertain which have brought about a relatively stable biliteralism – not bilingualism - in Norway. Firstly New Norwegian has an official status which enshrines its position society as a whole, and in the education system as an almost universally taught norm. Secondly it has colonised the whole educational pyramid, that is to say, it is possible to use New Norwegian at all stages in the education system from kindergarten to doctoral dissertation. And thirdly it is associated with a territory, although rather loosely and ambiguously. If any of these conditions were to change, the fall of New Norwegian could be precipitate. However the salient feature of Norwegian biliteralism is its very stability, in theory since 1885, and in practice since the introduction of sidemålsstilen in 1907.
Norwegian biliteralism is interesting in our context because bilingualism is the strategy the editors of the UNESCO atlas promote as the only viable basis for the survival of endangered languages:
Bi- and multi-lingualism make it possible for speakers of languages under threat from languages spoken by bearers of aggressive cultures and civilizations to acquire a good knowledge of the latter for economic and other reasons, while maintaining a good knowledge of their original languages. This allows them to preserve their cultural and traditional identity and maintain their own self-respect and self-esteem. Bi- and multilinguals tend to be superior to monolinguals in having more flexible, more alert minds and a greater volume of memory which they have for mastering two (or in the case of multilinguals more than two) different language systems with different vocabularies, grammars, sound structures and idiomatic expressions. Bi- and multilingualism from very early childhood onwards, to be maintained past the age of six years, is the most advantageous quality any person can possess. Unfortunately, it is not encouraged in most of the major cultures, the speakers of whose languages are overwhelmingly monolingual and wrongly regard monolingualism as the norm and the preferred state for human language (15).
This is a strongly normative view, but one which in part is advanced on the basis of a psycholinguistic argument which is verifiable empirically. What I want to do in this paper is to look at the cultural ecological arguments for language maintenance from a moral philosophical point of view, and relate them to the political context in which we find ourselves in late modernity.
It has occurred to me more than once that the much-publicised clash of civilisations took place not so much on the battlefields of Iraq or the hillsidesof Afghanistan, as in the corridors of the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University in the 1970s, where Professors Robert Nozick and John Rawls must have been uneasy co-habitees. Nozick and Rawls are often paraded in tandem, not unnaturally since Nozick in his Anarchy, State and Utopia from 1974 specifically attempts a rebuffal of Rawls’s ideas of redistributive justice. Nozick and Rawls, the Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee of moral philosophy, are natural counter-poles in any attempt to derive a basis for what we can call a ‘redistributive justice of culture’.
Time is short here, and you will doubtless be familiar with the outline of Nozick’s and Rawls’s thought. In the reductio ad absurdam which follows, I aim only for maximum contrastive effect, and not for exhaustive exegesis.
In the blue corner, then, we have Nozick, the ubiquitous sage of the American New Right, the enormously influential exponent of the minimal State whose advocacy led to the free markets being extolled in the eighties and nineties as a universal good with the vigour reserved for free sex a decade or two earlier. Nozick elides the fact of our biological individuality into a social individualism, and rejects a priori co-operative solutions to the difficulties of the human condition. With what is truly his most revealing metaphor, he postulates that «each person is a miniature firm» (1974:186). Thus, rather than capitalist production being a solution to concrete problems of distribution and exchange, it is elevated to the level of a universally applicable representation of the basic conditions of life.
Nozick rejects explicitly the concept of rights, a term used ubiquitously in the discourse of language maintenance.
The major objection to speaking of everyone’s having a right to various things such as equality of opportunity, life, and so on, and enforcing this right, is that these «rights» require a substructure of things and materials and actions; and other people may have rights and entitlements over these. No one has a right to something whose realization requires certain uses of things and activities that other people have rights and entitlements over (238).
It is important to note that Nozick immediately here translates the notion of various abstract rights to an understanding of rights exclusively as the right to own or dispose of property. Will Hutton has recently argued that the restriction of the idea of rights to property rights, and to those political rights which bestow unlimited freedom to enjoy property, is a hegemonic position within American society, and a fault-line between the American and the European world-view (2002:43). In Europe political thinking at any rate from feudalism onwards has recognised the importance of mutually binding social obligations, beyond relations deriving from ownership of property. Basic rights, including cultural and economic rights, have been recognised as essential to the full participation in society of its members, so that they can fulfil the obligations membership of the society ineluctably places on them. Under late modernity we have witnessed a profound ideological struggle. In the context of globalised media and a persistent intensification of communication, the limited understanding of rights propagated by Nozick and the US New Right has become hegemonic, also outside the United States, and has been sanctified with the absolute moral authority of the notion of the market as a natural and unalterable force, virtually an act of God. The task of intellectuals in Europe and other parts of our intellectually occupied world must therefore be to unmask this promotion of a specific system of production and exchange as an ideology, denude it of its normative pretentions, and propose alternatives.
Nozick’s abundant silliness makes the task easier and more pleasurable than one might expect. His invective breaks down when confronted with empirical objections. It might make a good sound-byte to proclaim that the minimal state is the only morally defensible one, that «the state may not use its coercive apparatus for the purpose of getting some citizens to aid others» (ix), that «taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor» (169) and that municipally-financed street-cleaning transgresses the inalienable rights of those who could not care less whether or not their street was knee-deep in rubbish (94); since 1974 the citizens of sufficient numbers of unfortunate countries have been the victims of attempts to demonstrate the validity of Nozick’s strictures, that we have amassed ample reports of their inaccuracy.
Further down the corridor at Harvard, and in the, if not red, then at least pale pink corner, we find John Rawls. Rawls has, by all accounts, been less than influential in public discourse in the United States, but occupies still (after his death last year) a central place in political philosophy in Western Europe.
In contrast to Nozick’s zoological reductionism, Rawls argues from the starting-point of the social and co-operative nature of human beings, of which language, a collective system practised and continuously remodelled by individuals, is, together with sex, the most obvious example. Although Rawls has an altogether greater appreciation than Nozick of the rigour that the objective correlatives of empirical observation bring, he nonetheless starts off in his main work, A Theory of Justice from 1971, from what he calls the «original position», a purely notional state of complete ignorance in which men and women would choose a certain régime of distributive justice. The social nature of human beings, itself an empirically quantifiable notion, ensures that the concern with problems of distribution is fundamental to the satisfactory organisation of any society; reluctance to address them will inevitably result in the perpetuation of inequalities perceived as illegitimate.
Rawls’s system and his argument are complex as well as strangely satisfying from a purely æsthetic pioint of view. They are summarised in § 46 of his Theory:
First principle
Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all.
Second principle
Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both:
(a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, consistent with the just savings principle, and
(b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.
First priority rule (The priority of liberty)
The principles of justice are to be ranked in lexical order and therefore the basic liberties can be restricted only for the sake of liberty. There are two cases:
(a) a less extensive liberty must strengthen the total system of liberties shared by all;
(b) a less than equal liberty must be acceptable to those with the lesser liberty.
Second priority rule (The priority of justice over efficiency and welfare)
The second principle of justice is lexically prior to the principle of efficiency and to that of maximizing the sum of advantages; and fair opportunity is prior to the difference principle. There are two cases:
(a) an inequality of opportunity must enhance the opportunities of those with the lesser opportunity;
(b) an excessive rate of saving must on balance mitigate the burden of those bearing this hardship.
Rawls’s theory shares with Nozick’s the characterstic of being economistic. Both conceive of distributional problems first and foremost in terms of the distribution of material goods and services, rather than in terms of the intangible and immaterial cultural goods to which the new UNESCO policy now gives room. There is an obvious difference between Nozick and Rawls in the extent to which each allows for the possibility of real political and communicative action. In Nozick’s scheme it is extremely difficult to conceive of political discourse in any meaningful terms, since no political activity may interfere with the free enjoyment of property on the part of those fortunate enough to own it. Indeed, this totalitarian abolition of real political discourse is a prominent feature of the late modern dispensation. In Rawls’s scheme political activity is necessary at the point where latent conflicts of interests over redistribution have to be discussed.
Perhaps because of the economistic nature of Rawls’s theory (and the long-windedness of his book), there have been few attempts to apply his insights to the field of cultural practice. This seems to me to be a serious omission, since his theory readily translates to a coherent, modern and unsentimental defence for the moral necessity to maintain cultural and linguistic diversity, and to resist monoculturalism and monolingualisation.
Once the desirability of maintaining intact the cultural ecology of the world is recognised, it becomes the shared responsibility of thinking people, especially those in what Stephen A. Wurm calls «aggressive cultures and civilizations», to militate for an equitable distribution of the burdens and joys of bilingualism and biculturalism. To be concrete, for a more extensive cultural liberty to strengthen the total system of cultural liberties shared by all (cf. Rawls above), the responsibility for achieving bilingualism can no longer rest solely with users of minority, endangered and half-dead languages.
Bilinguals whose first language is a minority language, have the great advantage that they instantly recognise themselves as members of a linguistic and cultural minority, a condition they then easily recognise in others. Monolingual speakers of majority and dominant languages can easily become entrapped, and are generally entrapped, in the error that their particular cultural perspective fully encapsulates the sum of human experience and ambition. Stable bilingualism, brought about by a free and rigorous public education system available to all, is the only possible antidote to this error.
The horrifying and tragic dimensions of the expansion of a monolingual and monocultural world-view have never been more obvious than in the attempts of the American New Right to impose itself on the rest of the world through all possible means from trade negotiations to war. Rawls’s voice offers us an alternative, and principles with which to resist.
References
Dalby,Andrew, 2002: Language in Danger: How Language Loss Threatens Our Future, London
Hindley, Reg,1990: The Death ofthe Irish Language, London
Hutton, Will, 2002: The World We’re In, London
Nettle, Daniel and Suzanne Romaine, 2000: Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages, Oxford
Nozick, Robert, 1974: Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Oxford
Veg, Sebastian, 2001: First Proclamation of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, Paris
Wurm, Stephen A. (ed.), 2001: Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger of Disappearing, Paris Rawls, John, 1999 [1971]: A Theory of Justice: Revised Edtion, Oxford
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