Many of you are familiar with the story of the Tower of Babel, but just so
we all start on the same page, here it is (from King James version):
1 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they
found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn
them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter.
4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose
top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered
abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
5 And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the
children of men builded.
6 And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all
one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained
from them, which they have imagined to do.
7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that
they may not understand one another's speech.
8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of
all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
So, according to Genesis, we begin with one original language which
(implicitly) helps us cooperate to achieve amazing things, like
constructing a highway to heaven ...which threatens God, who decides to
confound our efforts by taking away that language.
In his essay, "De Vulgaria Eloquentia," (On Eloquence in the Vernacular),
Dante offered a different account of Babel as the source for many languages:
"Almost the whole human race, indeed, had come together for this work of
iniquity [the building of the tower]. Some were giving orders, some acting
as architects, some forming the walls, some making them straight with
levels, some laying on mortar with trowels, some quarrying stone, some
transporting it on land, some on the sea, and various other groups were
engaged in various other occupations, when they were struck with such
confusion from heaven that, where all had been served in the work with one
and the same language, they, having been divided among many languages,
ceased their labors, and never again found themselves able to cooperate in
a common medium of exchange. For the same language remained only to those
who worked together in the same action; that is, all the architects had one
language, all those rolling the stones, one, all those preparing them, one;
and so forth with each group of workers. And thus to the extent that there
had been varieties of skills contributing to the labor, to that extent the
human race was now divided into language groups; and to the extent that
their skills were more noble, to that same extent theri language was now
more crude and barbaric."
There are two things that fascinate me about Dante's version: the first is
his assumption of a pre-cataclysmic multiplicity of professional dialects,
one for each trade, which form the seed for the subsequent division of
languages ; the second is his concluding remark about how 'the more noble
the skill...the more crude and barbaric the language.'
At any rate, I submit this to the ongoing thread on "experts" because I
think Dante is expressing two very powerful ideas: the first being his
warning about the dangers inherent in the division of labor and the second
being his suggestion that the more labor is divorced from the real world
(the more noble or abstract it is), paradoxically, the narrower its compass
becomes...the more impoverished...the more barbaric its language.
Though he is not "scientifically correct" in what he says; how could he be?
...he is constructing an allegory, I think there are great and important
truths in his poetic ideas. Experts do evolve lexicons that are particular
to their field, and while these might be necessary for the task at hand,
they can equally serve to obscure what experts do, to isolate these experts
from others, and to diminish the human sensibility and perhaps, ultimately
the human capacity of these self-same experts. Expertise is a two-edged sword.
This is not an argument for the abandonment of the professions but for
awareness of the other edge of the sword.
Joanna
