re:considering

Recently author Jo Walton posted a review of the trilogy Chanur’s Venture/The Kif Strikes Back/Chanur’s Homecoming. It’s an interesting piece because it highlights the way interpretation can vary, and the way different people put different meanings in a word.

For me what Pyanfar does is not to commit treason to her species but to risk being ostracised for her defence of the Compact, the stability of which she views as a guarantee for Hani autonomy.
In her case it means going against the Han, the ruling body of her culture, and this is the core of the issue – is the ruling body, of any society, the same thing as the society it governs? Is it possible to be loyal to the society and not to the governing body, at the same time?

I, of course, think so. My continuous questioning of those managing the company employing me is based on that tenet. I view that as loyalty towards my employer – I want the company to thrive so I get interesting assignments and a reasonable salary. Pyanfar does much of the same, even if it becomes personal when Sikkukkut threatens annihilation of her species. That this loyalty crosses swords with the narrow-minded self-interest of a local government is only to be expected because that is what happens when you have people entrenched in status quo, with vested interests in maintaining the present situation.

If someone commits treason it is Tully, the only human. But looking at his motives it becomes clear that he doesn’t share the interests or motivations of the human fleet (which is neither Mazianni, Alliance or Union – I read it as a Sol initiative to seek it’s luck in the opposite direction, to make it possible to sever the connection to the three aforementioned forces) – he feels more at home with the hani crew than with his own species.

So, even looking at the same situation it is possible to name it two things – treachery or loyalty.

No wonder we humans don’t understand each other.

Good thing we haven’t met any aliens yet. We would mess it up beyond repair ;-)

What is language? And how came it to be what it is? Language is so central to us as as human beings that most of us never even stop to wonder how it came to be that way. True, linguists works hard to dismantle language, to isolate the parts and to put labels on those parts, working away like physicists trying to find the smallest possible building blocks of the known universe and beyond. But the question of how language came to be have largely been left untouched, largely because spoken language do not leave archaeological finds as a physical track so whatever theory have been issued it have been founded largely on guesswork and wishful thinking.

In The Talking Ape linguist and anthropologist Robbins Burling tries not to dismantle language but to look at language and in a bid to understand how it evolved. He piece by piece pick apart prevailing ideas about the origins of language, scrutinizing them for contents and useful bits and then present the idea that language, while the common theory has been we evolved it because it gave us an upper hand in doing things like hunting, is that it has facilitated social interaction and that social interaction, planning and learning is what has set us apart form other animals.
The topic touches at a lot of sensitive and uncharted areas, like that of consciousness, and Burling is careful to underline that what he poses is a hypothesis, nothing more, but at the same time at least I think at the core looking at language and ask “why did it evolve, why did people who had language win the race for prevalence” is a sound method.

While me makes a good case against creationist linguistics (we woke up one morning and behold, there was language in our heads!) I do think he misses the impact culture and economics has had on humans and therefore on our language. Yes, we need language to sustain a city-dwelling society, but why came cities to be? The author is an anthropologist, and as such refers to his own field studies in agrarian communities. Based on is own observations and present knowledge of how human civilisation has evolved his theories are valid, but they fall somewhat short when he lacks them means to validate them against a city culture. Not that they would not hold together (a double negation! what a sacrilege!) but with the holistic take he has chosen this lack shows clearly.

Never the less I think this book is very much worth the effort and I recommend it to anyone interested in the topic.

The book has also been reviewed on the blog Popular Science.

I’m sorry, I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings here, but that seemingly innocuous word ‘gratitude’ makes me cringe.

Often it is used to state that we should be grateful for our general circumstances, implying we have nothing whatsoever to do with them being what they are.

It doesn’t matter that we have a system were we pay taxes aimed at upholding a health care system, or schools, or libraries, or public transport, or housing. We are ‘lucky’ to live under such circumstances and should be ‘grateful’ for being given those things – political decisions or lobbying or public movements had nothing to do with it; it’s all down to luck.

Eh?

Or when we should be ‘grateful’ for being able to do things that in reality is the result of endless hours of practise.

Sorry, I just can’t stand it. It implies we cannot change our lives; we’re subject to fate, a roll of dice, and whatever effort we put into it doesn’t matter, in the end – someone or something else provided us with ‘fortune’, for which we should be ‘grateful’, possibly based on having (or not) led a pious life.

The very anti-thesis to the concept of free will, without which we could just lie down and die, in my opinion.

So. No thank you. I will not every be grateful, and I will continue to cringe when I hear otherwise intelligent people use the word.

As said in an earlier, in fact my previous post ;-), the range of topics possible to discuss when having read Cherryh’s Chanur books are many and varied. One of the ones most often talked about is gender. Therefore I’ll let that thread rest. Maybe I’ll pick it up later. But for now I’ll reflect on another topic – that of trust.

Take eight different species, three of them not breathing oxygen and one of the oxygen breathers an intruder. Even so the four resident oxygen breathers are very different from each other – from different planets, and thus from vastly different cultures. It should be obvious to us as readers to appreciate the differences, but instead we fall into the trap of anthropomorphising. Or at least I do. Repeatedly.

And what happens is that despite the characters too knowing about these differences, and in some cases learning about the at the same moment as the reader do so, they have troubles with understanding and interpreting each other. It becomes clear to the reader that language is a cultural construct, something that resides within the culture, and not every expression translates very well. Rather the opposite, and it is visible in the pidgin language shared between the hani and their mahendo’sat allies. But it is also obvious in the clashes between groundling or station bound hani and their spacer kin – culture can change within a species as well, culture is in constant evolution – it is the means by which we handle our reality.

It’s almost that the truly weird kif are easier to understand because they are so alien anthropomorphising is not an issue.

So while the hani captain Pyanfar ought to trust her two mahen “friends” Ana and Jik she doesn’t. This is partly because she realises they have been meddling and manipulating, both her and others, and it isn’t until the next to last book that we learn the reason for their behaviour (conditioning), and maybe we don’t exactly understand how their society functions until the next to last chapter of that fourth book.

Are these issues unique to a pretend universe? I think not. Cultures here on our planet places value on different things and behaviours. Immigrant parents don’t understand their kids who have grown up in a different society not only because the surrounding culture is different from what their parents grew up with but because they are younger, and culture and society are fleeting, almost as chimeras. Even waster gaps exist if you look on a greater scale, between and across continents.

How can we expect trust when we can’t even talk to each other without misunderstandings? How can we expect trust when one bows to the other only out of fear? How can we expect trust when one thinks he’s more valuable than another, just because he’s of a different colour or religion or, indeed, only wealthier?

Valid questions. Because I think trust is essential when humans deals with each other – without trust politic society wouldn’t hold.

Will it?