Podsnap’s Own, or The Bull in the Biplane

Ever known a really really smart person who—wait a minute, when I say really really smart I don’t necessarily mean school-smart, or the sort of person who likes to tell you what a high IQ he or she has, or somebody who made junior-year Phi Beta Kappa, or somebody who’s fond of quoting indecipherable French structuralists; I mean a highly capable, resourceful and creative person, not a crazy and not an idler, someone who actually does things, makes things (paints pictures, builds bridges, climbs rocks) and whose intelligence is as sudden and striking as a sunrise—have you ever known anyone, I say, who was bright as this and who was also fluent in many languages? Even several languages?

Have you?

Well maybe you have, but I haven’t. In fact, I am going to lay it down as an article of belief that linguistic fluency is the hallmark of the weak character and mediocre mind. I say this as a brilliant steadfast person (striking as a sunrise), who has never been able to do much more than order a drink in any tongue other than my own; and who has noted a distinct lack of polylingualism among my intellectual and creative peers.

My CV says I can also speak French and German, but that’s just for show. I really I ought to take that line out. I probably put it in because I saw it on some professor’s CV years ago (ho, that’s the ticket! emulate a fucking schoolteacher!).

I’ve certainly never gotten a job on the strength of this résumé. Either my potential interviewers are on to me (“Hardly seems possible to be as bright as she is and still be able to speak more than one language”) or else they swallow the line completely, and their native horse-sense tells them that anyone who speaks three or more languages must be a shallow dope.

I have a Euro-Chinese acquaintance (male) who grew up in Los Angeles and Paris and now works for a major international bank. He married a Caucasian girl from Buenos Aires, and they now live in central London with their longheaded, slant-eyed, slightly overweight two-year-old girl.

This brat is a piece of work: ill-tempered, undisciplined and uncontrollable. I would feel great pity for the parents, were I not too busy smacking my lips and rubbing my hands with glee. You see, the parents don’t care if little Zelda screams and shouts incessantly, or breaks every lamp and vase in the house. All they care about is that Zelda grow up polylingual.

They coo gently at her, in French and Spanish and English and Dutch and a bit of Mandarin, while she hurls ginger jars against the fireplace and sets fire to the cat’s tail. Such exposure to languages, they feel, will give little Zelda an enormous advantage in life.

I wonder what advantage they are thinking of. Surely they are not expecting this flash-card technique to give their mad, twisted little mongrel a rich and nuanced appreciation of Racine, Shakespeare and Borges, or to add to the cultural patrimony of the West.

No, Zelda’s parents think that knowing a lot of languages will help one somehow get on in life: that is, she’ll be able to buy and sell among a dazzling variety of the world’s people’s.

Perhaps she might even get a posh job with International Megabank, like her father: traveling around the world once a month, checking her Blackberry every four minutes, staying awake for 2 am phonecalls to Melbourne…but mainly, putting her superficial knowledge to good use as she attends meetings and conferences and pretends to digest eye-glazing investment analyses written in any of five different tongues.

This ambition, I expect, would represent the summit of human endeavor to a hard-bitten Singaporean Chinese, or a Levantine trader out of the Arabian Nights. Or any other uprooted, historyless, cultureless people who live in an eternal present, hoping only to enjoy as much comfort and animal pleasure as they can in their wretched existences.

Crowded amongst the junk on my shelves are two books that are virtually worthless but difficult to throw out. One is a printout from the online Project Gutenberg edition of Madame Bovary, cleverly formatted (by me) to fill each page with nearly a thousand words. The other is Richard Leakey’s The Origins of Mankind, a cheaply printed paperback, now five years old and quite foxed. I picked it up one day when I felt I should learn more about anthropology (I think I was going through my Bruce Chatwin phase then). The first book’s unreadability is entirely due to my poor formatting, since as everyone knows, anything by Flaubert is a real page-turner. The second book on the other hand is just a lousy, fuzzy-minded survey of recent anthropological theories, and teaches you nothing. Now I’m not one to fault a book for failing to satisfy my thirst for knowledge. I once bought The Oxford History of the French Revolution because I felt I did not know enough about the French Revolution; and although I finished this massive tome feeling as baffled as when I started it, I’d learned lots of names and other trivia (such as the months of the Revolutionary calendar, which I can still recite); and I was massively entertained. The Leakey book not only failed to entertain, it failed to give me the tiniest bit of useful information about the origins of mankind.

The alert reader will have guessed that I am going to wing off into some clever tie-in between the Leakey book and the Flaubert. And here it is. Leakey’s book confirms what I have always darkly suspected about paleo-anthopology: nobody really knows anything. Apparently there were lots of monkeys a half-million years ago, but there is not a shred of real evidence to connect any of their jawbones and other leavings with the yoomin beings of today. (I leave aside DNA groupings, since these prove nothing: we share 99% of our genes with Mr. J. Fred Muggs.) Let me ask you, Mr. or Ms. Educated Person, and please try to answer this question without resort to your college textbooks or internet search engines: how far back did written language first appear? Fifty thousand years ago? Fifteen? Five? And how far back, so far as we know, is there any evidence of organized religion or anything that we would now consider “art” or “science”? Again: Fifty thousand years ago? Fifteen thousand years ago? Five thousand years ago?

The answer in both cases is c), five thousand years ago. Check it out if you don’t believe me.

So far there is scant evidence that anything we would regard as human (as opposed to merely primate) walked the earth prior to about 3,000 years B.C. Note I say “scant evidence,” not no evidence. There is the odd artifact and cave painting, but even these go back no further than the middle of the last Ice Age, or about 15,000 years ago.

In other words, absolutely nothing happened worth talking about (or putting in your diary, or blog, or postcard to Aunt Fiona) until about sixty generations before the Trojan War. And then—bingo! Suddenly we had enormously complex cultures, inflected languages, art forms, belief systems, philosophy, commerce, Linear B, the Pyramids, massive armies, theories of statecraft. It all virtually happened overnight. You don’t have to be a Bible-thumper (and I am not one—but what if I were?) to see that the author of Genesis was scarcely exaggerating.

Now, unless you subscribe to the extraterrestrial theory of the origins of human civilization, you have to wonder why it all happened in so short a time. Was the earliest writing (carving runes into clay pots and slabs) such a technological leap that it riveted the best minds of the next generations, leading quickly to such offshoots as mathematics, astronomy, and lyric poetry? My guess is yes. Writing and record-keeping changed human society head-to-toe. After a few dozen years the average person, even if he couldn’t read or write himself, couldn’t even begin to conceive of the preliterate society of his grandparents.

We don’t know who invented writing, but it seems likely that it was the product of just one Prometheus-type—or perhaps Prometheus and his Mister Watson. No more than a few people, anyway, all working around the same time. We can make up an alternative explanation—that it evolved for many centuries, perhaps out of primitive pictograms—but this is difficult to imagine, let alone find any scientific support for. A written language that evolved over millennia would leave traces of its evolution behind: beginning with a few pictowords here and there; then gradually, painfully, becoming sophisticated enough to provide tombstone inscriptions; and then, some centuries after that, we might find cunieform bills of lading and doctors’ prescriptions. But the archaeological evidence shows nothing like this. Writing did not come about through gradual evolution or through slow historical necessity. Somebody created it—like Madame Bovary. And that’s where it came from.

It’s easy to see why our Nineteenth-Century betters loved the Great Man Theory of History. Individual innovation was an undeniable fact, whether in statecraft or in technics. If anyone asked them who invented the wheel, they’d quickly surmise it was probably Og the Caveman, tinkering in his lapidary lab.

In recent decades this model has come to be seen as corny and preposterous, the stuff of Ayn Rand novels. The Marxist model of history swept good sense aside, reconstruing all achievements of the last five thousand years as byproducts of mass movements and historical necessity—grey, faceless, mumbling hordes without a single independent thought among them. Thus, the wheel was not invented by an individual Mr. Og: rather it came about because the mass community collectively understood, pretty much all at once, the enormous economic advantage of rolling things along. Rationalistic theories of religion’s origins follow a similar pattern: God-notions did not originate through isolated revelations or individual intuitions, but rather just grew like Topsy in the collective brain of the pullulating masses. Ask the average person where the notion of God came from, and you’ll likely get an answer like this: “Primitive peoples looked at the moon and wondered where it came from, and made up stories to explain it and other natural phenomena; and over many millennia this evolved into organized religion as it is today.” But there is no evidence at all for the first part of the proposition. It is itself precisely the sort of fairytale that it is hypothecating. “Humans of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries looked at religion and wondered where it came from; so they made up stories to explain its origin.”

Today, February 27th, is the Feast Day of St. Farthingale (1054-1098), Rector of Basingstoke, Bishop of Antrim, and Martyr of the First Crusade. He was renowned in his youth for his acts of Christian Charity and wide learning, taking top marks at the Keswick Abbey School for his successful defense of Christian Doctrine against the neo-Pelagian cults of Scotland and Ireland. He was then only ten years old. The following year, on a class trip to Rome, he greatly impressed Pope Urban I with his proposal to retake the Holy Land from the infidel. Funds were short, however; and the growing crisis on the matter of lay investiture (q.v.) meant that Rome was able to pay only scant attention to young Farthingale’s proposed crusade. Over the next twenty years, Farthingale took orders and was stationed in many of the top spots throughout the British Isles and Normandy. While in France he encountered the young nobleman Godfroi of Bouillon (q.v.) who offered to fund the Holy Land expedition although he himself was heavily indebted. Farthingale dusted off his old parchment and found the plans still quite intelligible. No sooner had Godfroi and his company of merry men set out on their quest, however, than a vicious rumor arose which claimed that the Christian Knights’ real objective was to murder all the Jews and/or Mohammedans and/or Nestorians and/or the Byzantines, and anyone else the calumniators could think of. While spurious, this story had its intended effect among the excitable and ignorant peoples of the Levant. While crossing the plains of Anatolia at the head of the Crusaders, Farthingale was ambushed (24 February 1098) by “a large mob of uncertain origin” (Butler) who tortured him cruelly for three days until he died, a scarce few moments before the arrival of a rescue expedition. After capturing Jerusalem, Godfroi brought Farthingale’s heart to the Pope, who immediately declared him a saint, to be known henceforth under the rubric of Scourge of the Infidel. Farthingale is considered the patron of precocity, versatility, and long expeditions.