The Power of Babel revisited

Not long ago I wrote in praise of John McWhorter’s The Power of Babel. He demonstrates that language of itself changes constantly, like the random mutations of living creatures according to the theory of evolution—hence the subtitle of the book, A Natural History of Language.

After a great many examples illustrating his fundamental premises, McWhorter concludes:

One thing that follows simply and ineluctably from this is that, despite the almost irresistible pull of the sociologically based evaluations that attach to dialects, there is no such thing as human being speaking ‘bad grammar.’ There are no dialects in any way analyzable as ‘decayed’ versions of the standard or of anything else.

Any theory that just so happens to promote what Obama has called “the virtue of tolerance” prompts my eyebrows to seek a spot just a bit further from sea level. I will point out just two problems with McWhorter’s thesis, but I invite you to sound off in the combox.

First, McWhorter contrasts merely “sociologically based evaluations” with an objective view of language as good or bad. But keep in mind that language has a natural purpose, namely to cause communication between people; in other words, the creation and maintenance of society is what language is about. Language itself is sociological. To evaluate grammar based on where it places one in society is perfectly in accord with the nature of the thing.

Second, we have to recall that language exists first of all within the individual speaker: before the spoken word comes the imagined word. Although language is made for communication between people, before it can do that it must transform the interior life of each person. It operates right at the juncture between immaterial and material, between intellect and imagination, and it organizes the imagination in such a way that reason can effectively operate; kids who never learn language never become fully rational. Now it is hard to see why one would say that any old language creates the interior life of the human person as well as any other. Given that language organizes the imagination, it seems clear right away that the imagination can be organized better and worse, and that some tools for organizing it will do better than others. In other words, language is not just sets of sounds, but has a real nature—and yes, some languages are better and some are decayed.

Thing brings us back to McWhorter’s comparison of language development with evolution. From the fact that animals change from one species into another by a large number of tiny and random changes evolutionists commonly conclude that one species is pretty much the same as another, just happening to fit a different ecological niche; as McWhorter paraphrases it, “Bacteria, toads, wallabies, and orangutans do not fall on a cline of increasing closeness to God; all four are equally well suited to leading the lives they lead.” In the same way, he argues, language changes are not geared toward improvement: “Instead, languages change like the lava clump in a lava lamp: always different but at no point differentiable in any qualitative sense from the earlier stage.”

For you Aristotle buffs, let me put the issue succinctly. Modern scientists deny purpose and nature in things, admitting only material and efficient causality; McWhorter denies purpose and nature in language, admitting only arrangements of sounds (babel/babble) and forces of change. But things like humans do have purpose and nature, and so consequently does human language. Orangutans are closer to God than bacteria, and some humans do speak bad grammar.