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For
whom the chopper lands
By
Spengler
Neolithic hunters aiming arrows
at a rescue chopper stand out among the terrible
images of the December tsunami (Early warning? Ask Nicobar's
stone-agers, January 9). For the aborigines of
the Sentinel Islands, the last stone-age people to
resist contact with the world, an Indian Coast
Guard helicopter landing on their shores seemed a
direr threat than the tsunami. It is not known
whether more than 40 of them survived the events
of December 26 out of an estimated population of
100, the remnant of 10,000 at the turn of the 18th
century.
Because we often have seen the
dreadful fate of primitive peoples thrust into the
modern world, their hostility surprises us not at
all. They would rather die on their own terms than
live as our wards. Like Friedrich von Schiller's
William Tell, the Sentinelese will cry, "Better by
the hand of God than the hand of man." To refuse
disaster aid would seem an irrational choice for a
Swedish tour group, but not for aborigines, for
whom the approaching chopper resembles an
exterminating angel.
"Send not to know for
whom the chopper lands: it lands for thee," a
modern John Donne might have written. [1] Who is
less rational, the aboriginals of the Andaman Sea
or today's Europeans? The former are fighting to
keep their culture, while the latter are
liquidating theirs, first of all by failing to
reproduce (Why Europe chooses extinction,
April 8, 2003). Our actions seem more rational
than those of the Sentinelese because we live at a
greater distance from the existential boundary.
The Sentinelese live in wariness of the next
anthropologist to step out of the bush. Remote by
contrast seems the day in which other people will
inhabit the hills and valleys of our land, and our
language will be preserved only in libraries, in
Franz Rosenzweig's memorable phrase.
Thousands of ethnicities face extinction.
"The world's languages are disappearing at the
rate of one a fortnight," the London Economist
began a December 29 necrology for the world's
6,800 languages. That is a cautious estimate;
other sources put the rate of disappearance at two
per week (Live and let die, April 13,
2002). "Already well over 400 of the total of
6,800 languages are close to extinction, with only
a few elderly speakers left. The list makes
melancholy reading ... Worse, probably 3,000 or so
others are also endangered." These for the most
part are the tongues of South American native
tribes, lesser African peoples or Pacific
aboriginals. There is a morbid fascination in
perusing the complete list at www.enthnologue.com.
"Pessimists reckon that in 100 years' time
90% of the world's languages will be gone, and
that a couple of centuries from now the world may
be left with only 200 tongues," observed The
Economist, in a plaidoyer for funding to
preserve the grammar and vocabulary of doomed
idioms. French and German may not be among them;
200 years from now, at current rates of population
decline, they will be spoken only in hell (see Why
Europe chooses extinction, link above).
Of
innumerable civilizations that once flourished,
the vast majority vanished without trace; most of
those whose existence is known left behind nothing
but a sandal strap or a shard of pottery. A tiny
proportion of this remnant left us fragments of a
dead tongue's vocabulary and grammar, eg,
Etruscan. We can count on the fingers of both
hands the number of ancient languages whose first
speakers would recognize a phrase or two in modern
major languages (eg, Chinese, Latin, Sanskrit,
Western Semitic, Gothic). Only Hebrew among modern
languages would still be understood by its first
speakers of 3,500 years ago.
Why should we
care whether a graduate student in linguistics
arrives in Costa Rica to record the last five
speakers of Boruca, to pick a random example,
before Boruca is taken by eternal silence? We care
because the chopper also lands for us; our
language one day will exist only in a dusty tome,
awaiting the desultory interest of a linguistics
student desperate for a dissertation topic.
The standoff between the Sentinelese
aboriginals and the Indian Coast Guard is a
special case of the defining conflict among
civilizations today. Samuel Huntington's
celebrated thesis does not explain why some
civilizations should clash but others not. There
is no particular reason for Chinese civilization
to clash with the West, for example, given the
Chinese genius for absorbing Western ideas and the
symbiotic relationship of the American and Chinese
economies (Santa Clausewitz, a minor Chinese
god, December 21, 2004).
Some
civilizations simply will give up and wave in the
chopper. Hispanic civilization may go quietly, as
Latin America adopts North American ways in
religion (encroaching Protestantism), economics,
and culture, as well as the United States itself,
through immigration. Few of the inhabitants of
Latin America benefited from the shotgun marriage
of Spanish and pre-Columbian cultures, and many
are abandoning their culture without a trace of
sentimentality. In a recent volume, Professor
Huntington warned that Hispanic immigration might
pollute America's "Anglo-Protestant" character
(review, The crusade for monoculture, December 25,
2004). The US has less to fear from the Hispanics
than Huntington believes; on the contrary, the
second generation of Hispanic immigrants typically
rejects the parental language. The original
Anglo-Protestant impulse in the United States'
founding had dissipated by the turn of the 19th
century (Is 'Americanism' a religion?,
January 4), and its Protestant character
reawakened through subsequent revivals among
people other than the descendants of the Puritans.
Why should this not happen among the Hispanics,
who offer fertile territory for evangelical
missionaries?
Arab civilization is a
different matter. Not much distinguishes a
stone-tipped arrow pointed at a rescue craft in
South Asia from a rocket-propelled grenade aimed
at a military helicopter in Baghdad. Islam has
profound roots in traditional culture (Why Islam baffles America, April
16, 2004), and seeks to defend traditional culture
by remaking the world in its own image (Islam: Religion or political
ideology?, August 10, 2004).
Arab
culture cannot easily adapt to global change, as
the 2002 Arab Human Development Report made clear.
The pace of global change, I believe, has reached
a point of no return such that China's emergence
as a world export power closes the door for other
prospective competitors.
For more than a
year, I have predicted that the Iraqi resistance
will fight until its numbers are too depleted to
continue (Will Iraq survive the Iraqi
resistance?, December 23, 2003). US
policymakers will wait in vain for Iraqis to act
in what Washington considers their rational
self-interest. Life does not lend itself to
rationality, because inevitably it is a failure,
due to death. Given the certainty of death, it is
perfectly rational to enjoy what one can in the
meantime, as do the Europeans, without the trouble
of yowling progeny.
Today's European
nations may die out, but their present inhabitants
will attempt to maximize their pleasure in the
meantime. To work hard, save one's income, and
hope that the next generation makes it all
worthwhile is an act not of rationality but of
faith. "Culture is the stuff out of which we weave
the illusion of immortality," I wrote on August
31, 2001 (Internet stocks and the failure of
youth culture). "Frequently, ethnic groups
will die rather than abandon their 'way of life'
... Historic tragedy occurs on the grand scale
when economic or strategic circumstances undercut
the material conditions of life of a people, which
nonetheless cannot accept assimilation into
another culture. That is when entire peoples fight
to the death."
The Sentinelese, for the
time being, have kept the chopper at bay. But the
chopper has landed for the Iraqis, with tragic
consequences.
[1] No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the
continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod
be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well
as if a manner of thine own
Or of thine
friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore,
send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
- from Meditation
XVII, John Donne
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