A Voice for the Voiceless

I am very interested in languages and how they shape how I think.  It must have been more evident than I imagined because upwards of  twenty five years ago the editor of a series on linguistics asked me to submit a manuscript I had completed. It was about the use of language as a tool of social demonizing.  The request was a gift because it gave me an intellectual structure I could use, one I actually needed, to move from scattered ideas that came readily to my mind to the structuring of written outlines. These required the hard work of being clear about what I was saying.  But I was capable, it turned out once I had to do it, of laying out the plan for a book. It is a journalist’s or story-teller’s outline, not a scholar’s. But the computer allows the story teller to write, read, and - in my case printing it out a few pages at a time - to decide based on what is right before you that mome of what you have written - interesting though it may seem - is irrelevant or maybe even a waste of time.  

It took a while for me to grasp that the diversity in the texts was a diversity not of ideas or subjects but of languages. Diversity may need its own language to buttress its borders. From early I saw that languages of all sorts are artifacts, human creations and as purposeful creations.  I was already interested in the function of languages in our national life.  The real move was in seeing how purposefully they were created to meet the need for embedded social controls.  The contexts in which Americans live and earn our livings and especially relate to one another - all in speaking English - have their own languages. Languages include more than words. They include all the moral and patriotic images we draw from to express who is trustworthy and who is not; which agreed on sentiments - like religious values we may take for granted - are fundamental in helping us know which people are our people and who don 't deserve to be in our own world.  We talk about race using a language that was created as a means to do the talking that assured us of the truth of our premises and conclusions even before we begin to talk - because that is what it was created for.   As I noted above, I see languages not as a force of nature, like sound of sight.  Languages are artifacts.  Languages are human creations.  We create languages to communicate how and what we want to communicate, so languages reflect the local minds and hands that create the channels of communication.  Since my ideas are in print in a Cal series on linguistics I will let it go at that.  And go on to tell a story about the challenge that made me stop taking languages for granted.   But that story merits a place of its own

In 1965 I received a post-graduate fellowship from NIMH to work in an operational unit of the psychiatric department of the University of Pennsylvania’s med school. Our work language was the standard Freudian jargon of sub-conscious motivation - humanized by a very inventive mix of Wasp and Jewish humor. And we tied it to the profession’s common psycho-therapeutic methods as a way to help people.  To go about the concrete work of looking and being available to other professionals in the city, the usual source of our clients, we relied on the social work models that came from the School of Social Work at Columbia.  Put together these formed a working model that allowed us to respond to the requests for help that never stopped coming.  

Simultaneously I was going through the motions of faking an intention to complete the third of three degrees in theology. This required occasional trips to Catholic University in Washington.  That tight, clerical world – and it was what sociologists call a total institution – knew it had all the answers. And as we joked at the time - ‘many answers to no questions.’ Then in the summers, back in California, I continued my participation in a program for about one hundred twenty five high school students from different racial, economic, and cultural backgrounds. This involved a few weeks off in the mountains in a camp we rented. Our hope was to  help them experience close-up some of the realities of racial and social issues they lived with at a distance in their still-segregated communities. The program staff and presenters obviously did not pretend to have all the answers.  Most of us were not sure that we had any answer close at hand. At the time I knew, of course, that we were trying to put labels on what it was we were living through- we were teachers after all. But in retrospect being drawn into these different, even foreign worlds, and in Southern California worlds oI can see that these experiences were very humanizing.  

Now, my point here is that each of these three groups where I spent my time and energy was large. Each had its own language that it used to explain to itself - and by extension to any educated and intelligent person - why its sets of mind and working frameworks were on target.  And each one, for all practical purposes, dismissed the others languages as and rationales as the prejudices of a narrow group, usually from limited ethnic and cultural backgrounds.  Yet each one played at the time - and still plays – an important role in how we cobble together our own national understandings of life in the United States.  Groups have their own symbolic system, their values.  And they shape their languages so they can talk in agreement with one another about what they hold in common. People with common religious and political views, and also with their own house-grown bigotries and enemy lists, need common languages. They needed a common language for each days editions of Pravda and Isvestia, as well as for our own world's Sunday Styles section of the Times.  And you don't have to explain or justify it.  Its existence is all the explanation, all the justification it needs.  Looking back I realize that what each of these groups did not have was a common language in which they could talk with the others.  Nor, it seems, did they seem to sense that as a lack.  They could talk with themselves, with each other within their groups.  Nor was that barely making it, no more than enough.  There was nothing more one could want.

I was an outsider to each of these groups. I talk about this in detail describing my work editing Church Magazine in New York. I was glad at least I hat I was not hemmed in by what I saw as their limited views. But what I did not know was that there was a humane alternative to life as a party-line insider and the insiders really were party-liners.  So my outsiders views are limited.  You can't pretend to be any sort of expert out on the flanks.  Just a commentator, one man with one man's view. But that is a reality I can live with, and in peace.  It doesn't require any justification or confirmation from the outside.

Our social views, even our religious views and equally their proponents have a tragic lack of interest in the misery of the people they describes.  For the descriptions seem to me to be reductive, re-imagining of troubled people into dependent clients, lesser peoples. We did not discover their lesser natures, we created and imposed them.  And our lack of awareness is culpable. We created  metaphorical languages like the language of slavery because we wanted slaves.  But being smart and Christian we needed our language of slavery to appear not as our artifact but as a fact of nature. And the artifact itself rests on yet another -  using the current sciences of observable differences to explain why some must be masters, others servants.  Or as our founding divine wrote on the deck of the Arabella, God i his most holy and wise Providence "has so disposed the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity, others mean and in subjection...'   The observing lenses change over time, from God's eyes to the natural section of the fittest.  But the end result is the same. 

I have found it disconcerting to realize that these realities, which I have been writing about for a dozen years or more, are now important enough to me personally, that I no longer wish to live as an acquiescing insider to that world.  Of late I have described myself as an outsider.  In fact I titled a memoir that I published a dozen years ago “The Story of an Accidental Outsider.” Well, my place on the outside is no accident and it never really was. In these stories with whatever  creative and intuitive parts of me are still functioning I hope to present some stories of use to others. As an old man moving to his end I find it a help to produce ideas, insights or whatever that I can take seriously.  This means being willing to take myself seriously and with it the obligation of being more than a quiet observer. 

I have had a very interesting life, largely because I have always felt the need to see, touch, walk in in and around whatever I wished to write about. Before I felt free to write a chapter on the Cathars in an earlier book I knew I had to climb to the top of Monsegur, and walk through and sketch the bastides in Lanquedoc whose unusual, head-down, hyper-rational sense of order built right into the city's buildings was also placed on disorderly Cathar folk who needed to be ordered, a process today we see as demonization.  deserved to be ordered.  Today we say the Cathars  were demonized.  used to demonize ant try the Cathars. Before writing about the Modoc War I had to spend a several days walking in and around Captain Jack’s fortress. As long as I was there I made sure to drive toward Tule Lake where the 'worst' of the interned Japanese Americans were transferred for its well-known severe treatment.  It is now witnin a Caltrans truck lot, being quietly allowed to fall apart like Captain Jack's Fortress out of sight.  Most upending were the hours and days I spent going through the cardboard boxes in the newly opened archives of the KGB headquarters, looking at  the terrible photographs - even the snapshots printed on birthday party paper with lacy edges - of  broken and frozen bodies - partisans, villagers, who knows what - they were just dead and left in the snow.  And then the interviews with partisan survivors, village underground members, and surviving families of the deported.  This day in and day out exposure to Soviet terror was all necessary before I had the sense that my partner and I  had to tell that story. Fortunately he was a documentary film maker. And it was what those years - and their slow whittling away of my reluctance to be involved in the lives of anyone else - did to me, not what I learned from them, that made me need to tell their story.  And to tell it here as well.