Press 1 For English
[powerpress]http://www.fuub.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Press-1-For-English-.m4a[/powerpress]
Press 1 For English
Ana Levy-Lyons
February 9, 2014
First Unitarian, Brooklyn
A new boycott of Coca-Cola is brewing. Not because of their water usage in drought-stricken third world countries. Not because of their bribing the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry to say that it’s not really clear that Coke is bad for kids’ teeth. Not because of their environmental record or their labor record. No, this boycott would be because Coca-Cola ran a Superbowl ad in which “America the Beautiful” was sung in several different languages. It also showed two men who were obviously a couple. You may have seen this ad and you may have heard about the conservative uproar afterwards.
Apparently it was a “slap in the face to America.” And “pushing multiculturalism down our throats.” Someone said that this ad was a sign that America is “on the road to perdition.” Someone tweeted, “Coca Cola is the official soft drink of illegals crossing the border.” A former congressman complained, “It started rather patriotically with the words of ‘America the Beautiful.’ Then the words went from English to languages I didn’t recognize.” (Stephen Colbert commented, “This man once represented Florida, and then served in Iraq. How is he supposed to recognize Spanish and Arabic?”)
The point here is that language has power and everyone knows it. Conservatives know it, liberals know it, and Coca Cola’s brand managers definitely know it. Our languages lie at the heart of who we are, how we see the world, and how much social currency we have. This is why language repression is one of the primary tools used by dominant cultures to control and eradicate minority cultures. We’ve seen it all over the world, throughout history. We’ve seen it in Lithuania when the Russian Empire forbade writing or speaking Lithuanian; we’ve seen it in Quebec, where the government repressed the aboriginal languages of Cree, Micmak, and others; we’ve seen it in Tibet, when the Chinese government set up Chinese-only schools and abolished Tibetan instruction. And we’re seeing hints of it in the U.S. today.
Tom Tancredo, who’s now running for governor of Colorado, has said that we need to seal off the border entirely for a period of time — let no one in at all until the immigrants who are already here have been thoroughly assimilated into American culture. How will we know they’ve assimilated? He says when we’re on a phone call to a customer service line and we no longer have to “press 1 for English and 2 for any other language,” that’s when we’ll know.
Thirty-one states have declared English their official language. And there is currently a bill in the House called the English Language Unity Act of 2013 that would make English the official language of the United States. This would make it illegal to provide federal forms or perform any public services in languages other than English. The ACLU has stated that this would literally endanger lives of American citizens. If you can’t read and understand and speak English close to fluently, you’ll be effectively disenfranchised and unable to access public health services. The message is clear: speak English or disappear. The larger message is also clear: languages can be dangerous.
The knowledge of the dangerous power of language dates back at least to the ancient myth of the Tower of Babel. God had created humans and given them language, but now God’s little beings were getting minds of their own, becoming more ambitious and starting to challenge their creator. God fretted aloud that they had too much power and “nothing they scheme to do will be precluded from them.” So God took down their erected tower simply by destroying their language. God had given humans language to empower them, and then destroyed their language to disempower them. Whether or not this is a true story that literally happened this way doesn’t matter. What does matter is the basic truth of the power of language.
I want to add another layer of mythology to the Tower of Babel story – this is not in the Hebrew Bible – this is my own invention – but I think it gets at a meaning that is quite possibly implied there: I’m trying to imagine, if this were a true story, what this language would have been that everyone spoke before God babbled the languages. I have a feeling it wasn’t English. I imagine that this language was a primordial meta-language. It contained infinite words — it had the capacity to express every possibility in the universe. It was a language of pure, unmediated expression. With this primordial language came perfect communication and perfect understanding. It was the language in which God said, “Let there be light.” It had the power to create. It was the language of God.
This is why God was so stressed out in the story. It wasn’t that the people were going to be able to build a tower because they knew how to say, “Pass the hammer, please” to each other. It was because with their infinite lexicon, the people had infinite power. God says, “Here they’re one people and they all have one language… And now nothing they’ll scheme to do will be precluded from them.”
So if this is true on any level at all, why all the fuss today about letting other languages in or keeping them out? Wouldn’t we want to somehow regroup? Why are people so threatened by languages they experience as “foreign?” Does anyone really fear that English is going to go away? What’s the big deal about having to press an extra button on your touch-tone phone? Obviously this issue touches a nerve that goes much, much deeper. It’s not about convenience; it’s not the survival of English.
It’s about power. When you have to press 1 for English, it forces you just for a split second to notice that you are speaking a language. One among many. This may seem like a small thing, but actually it’s huge. We live in a country where many of us have the privilege of assuming that the way we talk and live is simply the way it is, just normal, default – other ways of being in the world deviate from the norm in ways that are exotic or quaint or annoying.
But we are the norm. We teach our children that a table is called a table, rarely thinking about the fact that the word “table” is only one possible symbol for this four-legged object and that really it’s only a minority of people in this world who refer to it as a table. We think of teaching our children to speak, not to speak English. Because of the dominance of American culture worldwide, we have the luxury of forgetting that we are speaking a language. One among many. My 3-year-old son asked me yesterday, “What’s English?” And it was really hard to explain!
When you have to press 1 for English, it relativizes your universe. If what you speak every day is just a language, one among many, then so too your worldview is just one among many; your religion, one among many; your sexual practices, one among many; your moral code, one among many; your lifestyle, just one among many. Your right to live your life exists alongside everyone else’s right to live theirs. On some deep level, pressing 1 for English triggers all these realizations. And this can either be deeply threatening or just appropriately humbling. It reminds us that we are all children of the Tower of Babel.
I learned to speak French when I was little at the same time as I learned to speak English. I was born in France, my parents were Francophiles and they wanted me to learn to speak French. The wonderful gift of this to me was not so much that I learned to speak French – I’ve basically forgotten everything – but the real gift was that I learned that whenever I spoke, I was speaking one language or the other. I grew up understanding that when I expressed myself, that expression always came through a filter of language. A filter of one color or another. There’s no such thing as no filter when it comes to language. That primordial meta-language is gone, if it ever existed. The language we speak is never neutral. It is always particular and it colors what we say and even how we think every moment of the day.
It is fairly common knowledge that a language can express a concept that simply can’t be expressed in another language. Some Native American language systems place little emphasis on time or verb tense; others make little differentiation between nouns and verbs. Can you even imagine a language that doesn’t distinguish between nouns and verbs? That in itself suggests a whole different way of understanding reality. And yet we destroy languages all the time. Most of the Native American languages are now endangered or extinct due to the destruction of the native communities by European colonists.
In my enhanced version of the Tower of Babel story, when God babbled the languages, that primordial meta-language was divided up like a pie, and each group of people got only a slice — a subset of the original. Each people was left with a language that could express only partial truths, that gave only partial understanding, each incomplete in itself and incomplete in its power. It was not simply that people couldn’t understand each other that made it impossible for them to finish the tower, it was that they couldn’t understand anything as well as they could before. Certain concepts, certain ways of thinking were suddenly unavailable to one group and only available to another group.
I believe that each culture with its language has a piece of that mythic original pie—that perfect, complete language. We will only come close to achieving true wisdom by assembling all the pieces — when we genuinely embrace all the rich diversity that humanity has to offer. When we can teach each other our languages and use many languages, many ways of seeing and knowing, as the building blocks of our tower.
We need those different ways of thinking. We need to be able to see the world through different lenses. Our survival as a species depends on it. We need every culture, every language, every insight, every philosophy that’s out there. We can’t spare a single one.
I don’t know that Coca-Cola is the best standard-bearer for this vision, but my prayer for this country is that we will someday sing together in many languages. I pray that we will welcome the wisdom of all dimensions of the human experience. That we’ll reject attempts to promote assimilation that make our world narrower. That we will instead learn new languages. And teach multiple languages to our children. And practice humility as we go about our day knowing whenever we open our mouths to speak, we are speaking a language, and there is only so much we can say and do and understand through that language. Let’s gratefully press 1 for English, reminded that our worldview is but one and that we need them all. Then we will build our human tower to the sky and nothing we scheme to do will be precluded from us.
