Years of Poems and Spirits

I was waiting at a traffic light when I heard the news that David Halberstam just died. All I remember now was that for a long while after hearing the news, I just stared at the muffler of the car ahead of me, not even knowing while I was moving or not.

I thought the world of Halberstam: he was the one who introduced America to me. Through his books, The Powers That Be and The Best and the Brightest, I came to know so many things about this country and so many characters in its history. Today, writers like him are perhaps dime a dozen. However, when I was 17 or 18 still in China, he was like a mentor I never met. I read Chinese edition of The Powers That Be so many times I even brought it with other must-haves when I moved to the States.

Although my father is a journalist, he’s left a mixed impression on me: on the one hand, I know he’s a wordsmith for the authority. But when he is not working and let his guard down, things he says and stories he tells are just fascinating. Yet I never know what journalism really is until I read The Powers That Be.

Although Halberstam failed to inspire me to become a journalist, he’d succeeded in openning my mind. There was never any doubt whether to become a citizen here–I’d always wanted to join this polity thanks to the works of Halberstam.

Just read a profile in the New Yorker on a Chinese dissident, Zha Jianguo.

It is a moving narrative about a lonely man who is an outcast in a society he cares the most but is hailed a Prometheus in another he refuse to escape to. The saddest thing about him, though, is that even his little sister wrote him with much affection but little conviction. Ever so subtly, she casts doubts on who to blame on her brother’s predicament: afterall, the warden is friendly, the authority is accommodating, his sympathizer in the West thinks he should just pack up and run … and his mother thinks he has a “hero complex” since a kid. Even herself seems to imply that his conviction might have something to do with a succession of failed business ventures.

Zha’s problem is that he is a “professional” dissident that lacks originality. Solzhenitsyn was kind of the same in that he was an endogenous element of the discidence business (where as Andrei Sakharov and Garry Kasparov are outsiders hence an “exogenous” factor upon entry). But Solzhenitsyn had the good luck of being the first to document from within and did so at a time when the liberals in the West was seeking a good excuse to break clean from the Soviets. I read part of the The Gulag Archipelago, it was morally powerful but not a treatise on Communism by any stretch of imagination.

Zha, on the contrary, has neither the fame nor the fortune to be of any significance. The revelation of his failed business endeavors does not help either: he’s had the courage but one wonders whether such courage came from a strong conviction or an opportunitistic speculation that China will eventually liberalize through one of those colored revolutions. If it is the latter, the saddest part is perhaps that Zha hasn’t realized that he’d been victimized twice: once during the Cultural Revolution when he was tricked into Mao’s grandiosity. Once is now: he still believes in the promise of being a dissident–a mirage projected from the West.

It takes me great pain to write this down. I remember being very emotional while reading Anthony Marx’s Faith in Nation–he convinced me how brutal state consolidation is. It is a similar kind of feeling. The great patriot, 谭嗣同, once said: the reform business is going nowhere because no one is willing to die for it–allow me to start the tradition then. I can never have his courage but I wish one day I will have equally strong conviction.

All of sudden, I have heard so much about an ongoing academic debate: a linguistic professor is challenging whether Chomsky’s tree is really that universal in all languages.

I first heard of Dan Everett on a Sunday morning when I forgot to turn off the alarm clock set for the day before. NPR’s weekend edition has a nice piece of how an Amazonian tribe “converted” a missionary into an atheist professor and inspired him to challenge Chomsky.

I was a dirt poor immigrant student struggling with libido, money, grades and finding a job when I first learned the Chomsky’s theory in my Compiler class. I almost failed the class. It was not until all those temporal issues were settled did I realize what I had missed: one day I hit an epiphany and became a convert. I even bought his political arguments (the return on that was much lower though).

Hearing someone challenging Chomsky was enough to keep me awake on a gray Seattle weekend morning. I did some research on the topic but couldn’t understand all the original documents flying back and forth among Everett and his challengers.

A day later came the Apr 17th issue of the New Yorker that has a featured article (c) about this very topic. It made things much easier for me to understand but I guess I am still missing the part I don’t understand.

As described by the NYKR article, the central question is whether recursion is part of the “universal grammer” that is innate to human beings. Chomsky thinks that vocal communication is not unique to human, but recursion is. It seems so far, all the languages in history has bore him out until Dan Everett met the Piraha tribe in the Amazon jungle.

What Everett, a gifted linguistic expert and a former Evangelical missionary, found is that:
1. The Piraha tribe is a capable people: they have a history, a body of knowledge that enable them to survive in nature and, most importantly, they seem to have fostered a tradition or a culture–not in the forms of dances or rituals but in how they think. For example, they don’t trust outsiders and are resistant to outside influences.
2. Yet their language seems to be extremely primitive: it does not have words for directions or numbers.

The whole affair is enormously fascinating. I have so many questions that I don’t even know where to start. For example, Everett seems to suggest that the Pirahas do not use, nor do they understand, abstraction: they have to deal with something concrete and immediate. For example, a boy can build a model airplane but only when there is a real one in front of him. Instead of using directional words, they use physical landmarks (e.g. turn to the river). What I don’t understand is, if this is true, how can they pass knowledge around? How does a father tell his son how to evade a jaguar? Does he have to do so in front of a live one?

Other questions include: is Everett’s discovery really enough to unset Chomsky’s universe? Or maybe the Piraha case is an exception of the close coupling of culture and language?

More importantly, is there a parallel between language structure and knowledge structure? Theoretically speaking, if a body of knowledge can be described by a langugae, the knowledge should conform to the Chomsky normal form as well. For example, let’s say how to work with a spreadsheet is a body of knowledge, then there a tree-like form that encompasses all the necessary information (e.g. feature list) and sub-knowledge (e.g. what is a spreadsheet). Interestingly enough, a business guru, Barbara Minto, advices businessmen to use a “pyramid structure” to carry out effective communications (i.e. to convey/exchange a body of knowledge).

This kind of link back to what I have always thought as the “meta-concept” in a language. To put it simply, a meta-concept is an abstraction of a collection of lower level concepts until one hits physical senses. For example, the colors red, green, blue are concepts derived from physical senses and the concept/word “color” is an abstraction of all visible colors. Color, texture and rigidity may be further abstracted as the concept of “attribute” (of an object)… and so on.

My argument is, the more high level meta-concepts a language espouses, the more powerful the language is (e.g. more capable of delivering complex concepts). This is perhaps too self-explanatory to make a difference. However, that is exactly why the Piraha case is so strange. Something is not quite right here: either humans can survive with limited language ability or the whole language-knowledge relationship is wrong: e.g. the Pirahas can use limited vocabulary and recursion-less structure to express complex meanings. Either way, it doesn’t make a whole lot sense.