Knowledge and Vocabulary : The joys and sorrows of broadening the mind

The more you learn, the more special-purpose words you use.  This is something everyone guesses; little kids who read a lot tend to use bigger words (and depending on their family, they get criticized for it, or admired for it).  One thing that should happen in college is that undergraduates should become more aware of the actual meanings of words (in contrast to what they may have thought they meant) and their use of language¹ should become more exact.

Something that irks people is that college educated people tend to speak with more difficult words, and often with longer sentences.  The difficult words are because they are probably thinking more difficult (and nuanced) thoughts and trying to get them across; longer sentences because they feel the need to set limits on every thought.  Here's an example: "We need to have stronger laws concerning the buying of guns--though, of course, we have some laws now, but they don't seem to be working."

I got on to this subject by reading an article in Wikipedia, called Cultural Relativism.  This is an idea that came up a few years ago when I was a member of a committee that steered the better students at our school in a special ongoing program, which presented extra seminar topics over their four years of college.  We were studying the Middle East that semester, and one of my colleagues introduced this idea, and he was philosophically opposed to it.  To make it clear, the basic idea, expressed precisely, is that when it comes to studying other cultures, it is impossible for us to be objective.  Our own cultural background most definitely gets in the way.  Expressed crudely and inaccurately, as it is expressed by some people in the government: our culture is better than your culture.

[I forgot to explain the meaning of the title of this blog post.  Most interesting topics of learning require learning new words and phrases: technical terms.  For this reason, it gets daunting to delve into these topics, though many of these 'new' words are just words borrowed from ordinary language, which are (temporarily, within that subject) given a special meaning.  For instance, in geometry, we have the word eccentricity.  In ordinary language it means a little not right in the head, or having a set of assumptions that is different from the norm; but in geometry it describes how far an ellipse is from being a circle.  Anyhow, I was just thinking how difficult it was to read the article, simply because of all the new words, and as I was going along, I was alarmed to find that I was learning the meanings of words that I had sort of ignored all this while, and was feeling resentful at all this forced education.]

I started reading casually (since it has been many years since I got heated up with this topic) with the view that, hey, it seems a lot of fun (I'm kidding; actually, it's pretty heavy going) but not really relevant to me, when I came up against a related concept called moral relativism.  I was marveling at how beautifully these guys and gals expressed themselves; you had to admire their skill at getting across some really tricky ideas, and some incredibly fine points, and believe me, some of the ideas are among the trickiest I have encountered.  And to my amazement, there was a practical application, and an important one at that.

Right after WWII ² the United Nations decided to come up with a Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  But the anthropologists warned that it was looking very much like a declaration of Western Human Rights, and not universal at all.  This was a issue of moral relativism, but an important one; for instance if the Declaration had things in it that said guys had the Right to have any number of wives they wanted--as was the custom in many non-Western cultures--it would become something that Westerners could not support; on the other hand, if they said One Man, One Wife (at most), it would have been a Right that people in those other cultures could not support.  (In the end, luckily, no mention was made about marriage at all, which probably was good, considering the chaos that has ensued ³ because of what I consider the gains in marriage equality in the USA.)

The belief that one's own culture is superior to all other cultures was observed with interest by Western anthropologists studying other cultures.  They came up with a name for it: ethnocentricity.  They declared that it was a serious shortcoming of those cultures, and used in some quarters to illustrate how immature those cultures were.  But it was gradually realized that the strongest instance of ethnocentricity was Western ethnocentricity; in old-time anthropology--which was conducted almost entirely by Westerners, every new culture they studied was compared to Western Culture as the implicit standard, as the undisputed most superior culture.  This meant that if Western anthropologists were to continue business as usual, the validity of their findings would be destroyed.  The only way around it is to study as wide a spectrum of cultures as possible, and avoid judging any culture by any other culture.

In earlier posts, I have struggled to understand and to explain the value of a college education, but now I think I would probably say it this way: a young person who has been through a (good) college education will not make the mistake of judging other cultures, but instead see the value in them, and their importance in the life of that graduate.  The language I used was that education enables a person to appreciate things (cultures) that may be far removed from everyday experience.  This would flow not only from the courses the graduate has taken, but also from the diverse sorts of fellow-students he or she would meet in college.  (Even at the grade-school level, this is one reason to avoid home-schooling; but some families do have special needs, and cannot tolerate cultural conflicts.)

I do not recommend the Wikipedia article to everyone; you have to have the time to read and enjoy it.  But every time I encounter ⁴ a great article in Wikipedia, two things happen.  I marvel at the time and thought that has gone into writing it, though of course, it must be a topic close to that writer's heart; and secondly, my vague feeling that the world is going to hell is reduced a little, and I think to myself, like Shakespeare, O brave new world, that has such marvels in it!  Wikipedia is a treasure of our times, and should be appreciated, despite the fact that many people are scornful about how little authoritative it is.  To paraphrase Bernard Shaw, it is not that the dancing dog dances well, but that it dances at all.

This presents education as a survival skill.  It is getting increasingly harder to keep cheerful in the face of the carefully planned chaos that seems to be creeping in.  An appreciation of numerous wonderful things does help to slow down the hopelessness!  But you have to be ready to learn some new words.

Arch
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¹  That is, speech and writing
² World War Two
³ Quite unnecessarily, but inevitable, I suppose
⁴ Come across