Book review: American Insurgents, American Patriots

Ah, the American Revolution. The King was a tyrant so the colonists rebelled - it's as simple as that, isn't it? If you're not sure, just see what Schoolhouse Rock had to say about it. It's not too different from what my 6th grade teacher taught me.

Ah, but then you make the mistake of going to college, taking a history class or two, and it all gets more complicated. The taxes weren't that high, the colonists seem to have never felt prouder of the British Empire than they did in the 1760's, and the complaints mostly came from a handful of merchants in just one city. How did that turn into a wholesale revolution?

John Adams famously commented, "But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people." TH Breen's latest book, American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People, addresses both how and when that happened.

In Breen's view, the revolution is not a steadily-rising tide of resistance as it's usually portrayed, from the Stamp Act crisis, through the Tea Party, and culminating in the Battles of Lexington and Concord. Instead, there was a particular revolutionary moment, and it occurred in 1774 when the British government reacted to the Boston Tea Party by imposing the Coercive Acts, designed to harshly punish the entire city of Boston.

The Coercive Acts were indeed dramatic. First, they reorganized the governor's Council and filling it with royal appointees, where before the democratically-elected Assembly had the councilors. Parliament judged that there was too much democracy in Boston and they intended to correct the imbalance.

More punitive yet, they closed Boston Harbor to all commercial traffic until the East India Company was compensated for the vandalism. This not only attacked merchants like John Hancock, but guaranteed economic distress among the poorer classes who worked on the wharves. Everyone would suffer until everyone had submitted.

And to enforce it all, the navy arrived to blockade the harbor, unloaded three thousand British troops in the city, and replaced the governor with a military commander. After eight years of negotiation and appeasement, Parliament had decided that the time for patience was over, and this time they would teach the colonists a hard lesson in obedience. The decision was disastrous.

The British believed that the loyal populace - surely the majority of the colonists? - would take courage from the invigorated royal presence and turn against that handful of noisy agitators who had gotten then all into such trouble. Wrong, utterly wrong. In the modern parlance, the battle for hearts and minds was over and the British had just lost, decisively and irrevocably. To the waverers who might have thought cries of Tyranny! were overblown, there was no longer any doubt. No, it was all true: Parliament had sent an army to wage war on Americans and intended to grind them into poverty and deny them the self-government they were accustomed to. Fear and anger overwhelmed the common folks outside Boston, who had until now been more spectators to the crisis. Almost overnight they became revolutionaries - or, Breen now calls them, insurgents. The moderates were suddenly radicalized.

The fear spread to the other colonies at the beginning of September that same year of 1774, when a strange event happened. Rumors began to fly around Massachusetts and Connecticut that the British navy had bombarded Boston, then landed and burned the entire city. They hadn't, but thousands of farmers and townsmen in New England grabbed up whatever guns they had and began marching toward Boston to exact revenge, before learning the truth and turning back.

The first consequence was that mob of farmers and townspeople - the folks who would come to style themselves Minutemen - had proven to themselves that they would really turn out in the event of war. Until then, they had been full of talk, but who knew how many of these braggarts would actually risk their lives if the British army began shooting? Now they knew: perhaps more than 20,000 had grabbed their guns and begun to march, easily enough to overwhelm Gage and his men. No matter that they had responded to a false alarm - they had responded, when the danger seemed extreme. Their pride, confidence, and radicalism soared.

But it also just happened that a first Continental Congress was gathering in Philadelphia right when the hysteria broke, and this had a strong effect in rallying the other colonies to Massachusetts's side. In the aftermath of the horror they had felt at believing the British army was killing people in Boston, the delegates voted to support the Suffolk Resolves, an appeal from a rather ordinary town in Massachusetts that called for the colonists to stop cooperating with the British government and to boycott all commerce with Great Britain. The members of this Congress were still rattled, but they also saw how inflamed the rest of the public was. In fact, the "leaders" of the resistance were now scrambling to stay in front of the mob.

At this point, a local resistance movement an intercolonial rebellion. The Continental Congress called for the total boycott and recommended that all communities set up a committee to enforce it. Breen loves these committees, because they made the Revolution a creative event and not just a destructive one. The rebels could retain their attachment to law and order, even as they removed the existing governmental structure by chasing away royal officials, and they could restrain mob violence and retain a fig leaf of due process, even as they enforced the revolution upon the unenthusiastic.

That due process was a bare cover for coercion, to be sure. The rebels tolerated no dissenting opinions or evasion of the boycott. Violators were likely to be called before the committee, or even visited by a mob of angry neighbors, and strongly urged to confess their error and recant. If they didn't, they could find themselves shunned by the rest of their community, perhaps wearing tar and feathers, or even having their house pulled down. Freedom of speech was not one of the revolutionary virtues in 1774. But two points bear emphasizing here.

One, these were neighbors, and violence was fairly uncommon, especially compared with other insurgencies and revolutions we know about. The patriots wanted reconciliation, harmony, and they wanted to control the message. All you had to do was go along: a full confession and apology would usually restore one to good graces. It was mainly outsiders (Scottish Presbyterian merchants, for example), former royal officials, or the most stubborn loyalists who received the rough treatment.

Second, I used the language of a religious inquisition. Breen doesn't use that terminology himself, but I don't think he would disagree with it, either. Many of the common people did understand their revolution in religious terms. Without reading Locke (and here I am returning to Breen's arguments), they believed their rights came from God himself. As a corollary, any government that would trample its citizens' rights had ceased to be godly and resisting tyranny was virtually a religious obligation. Just like religious authorities, the rebels wanted unanimity, or at least the public illusion of unanimity. And they had great success. The British hoped a majority of loyalists would stand up for the Empire; the rebels were out to prevent it and, whether or not they were more numerous (we don't really know), they were far more energetic than their opponents. For all practical purposes, the entire countryside really was on the side of the rebellion.

Despite their reliance on intimidation, the occasional use of tar and feathers, and even beatings and vandalism, the insurgents of 1774 managed to minimize mob violence, keep order, and maintain a functioning quasi-government in the midst of revolution. This is what Breen admires about the common people of the Revolution. He sees what so often happens in revolutions: unrestrained violence, endless cycles of recrimination, and the destruction of a previously-functioning society. The American patriots created, perhaps accidentally, new institutions that created more than was destroyed.*

Although Breen never references it, the American experience in Iraq and Afghanistan always hovers around this book, not least in the use of the word insurgents. In fact, from the title I expected a more revisionist book, one that applying theories of insurgency and counter-insurgency to understanding the Revolution. That's not what this book is, but the experience of the last eight years intrudes anyway, especially in the use of contemporary language such as "losing hearts and minds." In retrospect, one wonders whether the British could ever have reestablished control over the colonies, even if they succeeded in crushing Washington's army; they certainly could not afford to keep foreign mercenaries on permanent garrison from Massachusetts to South Carolina forever. We Americans like to boast of the long odds against us in the Revolution, but we've tried counter-insurgency from the other side, too, and it's harder than it looks. Killing enemy fighters and controlling the country are vastly different matters and I wonder if, had the American army dissolved at Valley Forge, the British would only have found themselves back in 1774 again.


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* Incidentally, Breen has compared our current Tea Partiers to their more orderly forebears and believes the latter were the better people.

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue

I recently read John McWhorter's book Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English, which is an excessively self-conscious revision of the history of the English language. Excessively self-conscious because McWhorter's jabs at the "history of English experts" quickly grow tiresome, and frankly make him sound like something of a crank - the sort of tone that creationists take towards scientists. But an interesting revision because he also explains why a different set of skills allows a different kind of linguist to see a different history to our language.

The primary difference is that McWhorter doesn't specialize in a single language: he specializes in creoles, those curious half-and-half languages that arise when competing native languages occupy the same space. And he argues that English grammar displays the tell-tale signs of miscegenation, a salad bowl of features that tell the history of Angles and Saxons landing in Celt-occupied England in the 5th Century CE, the Viking invasion of same 300 years later, and the Norman conquest of 1066.

These incidents are well-known, of course, but McWhorter believes their effect on the people's speech is not. Traditionally, the Celtic language is believed to have gone extinct and been more or less completely replaced by the speech we know as Old English. The evidence is the extreme shortage of words in English that can be traced to Celtic origins - the subjugated Celts seem to have contributed almost nothing to the invaders' language. In my own linguistics class years ago, my instructor presented this as a mystery: the absence of Celtic words would suggest that the Celts were quickly killed off; however, the archaeological evidence didn't show an unusual amount of warfare and suggested a long period of coexistence. How to resolve the paradox?

The key to the puzzle may be to approach language with less attention to vocabulary and more attention to grammar. This is what McWhorter does. Throughout the book he displays a familiarity with a vast number of different grammars, especially the funky features that are rare and even unique to one language or another. And through grammar, he sees strong evidence that the Celts lived on for many years, kept their own language, and occasionally spoke English. When they did use English, they added a couple twists that seemed natural to themselves, but probably sounded quite strange to the Angles. Eventually, those oddities began to sound familiar and became the common way to speak.

One of these is the "meaningless do," the semantically pointless addition of "to do" in a sentence when we ask a question or state a negative. It's the reason why all other speakers of a Germanic language can say, "Read you the book?" and get the reply, "I read not the book," but if an English speaker tries that, he sounds like he's channeling Yoda (who, to be fair, did learn his English a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away¹⁾. The English speaker says, "Did you read the book?" and hears, "No, I didn't read the book." "Do" adds no meaning to the sentence, but it is necessary in order to be grammatically correct.

It's a weird construction because none of English's close relatives construct their questions and negatives this way. In fact, this sort of thing is rather rare across the globe. But there are a couple dead languages that are known to have used the meaningless do: Celtic and Welsh. The people who were ruled by invading Angles and Saxons, learned the invaders' language, but continued to speak their own at home. What are the odds that English picked up do from their subjects' language rather than inventing in de novo?²

The Vikings had a different effect on English, an effect that McWhorter describes as "battering" the grammar. If you've put some study into German, you know that its nouns and adjectives rarely appear in sentences as they do in the dictionary. Instead, they take all these damned endings: one of three different endings, depending on whether its gender is masculine, feminine, or neuter, and another for the plural. And each of these will change depending on whether the word is a subject, direct object, indirect object, or possessive. Germans don't seem to have trouble with it, but what a pain for the rest of us!

The Vikings found those endings to be a total pain, too. In fact, it appears that they couldn't get the hang of them at all and just ... dumped them. It must have been a horrid-sounding English to the natives, as horrible to them as it would be to me if someone relentlessly used -ed for every past tense (gived, throwed, hitted, etc.). But the Vikings came in waves of all-male groups, married local women, and raised children who heard this nasty tongue from their fathers, if not their mothers. The version without endings spread, across the country and through the generations. English differs from German today because, to some extent, we speak German like lazy, dumb foreigners.

These developments have been obscured because historical linguists tend to look at written texts for their evidence of past languages. And the written record doesn't seem to show these developments. But McWhorter's explanation is plausible enough: writing was uncommon, reserved for formal occasions, and deliberately preserved the ancient modes. The vernacular changed, but the professional scribes did not deign to record it.³

Then came the Normans. For 150 years, French was the lingua franca⁴ and the style of formal, written Old English was forgotten. When the English cast off French and returned to their native tongue, they began writing it as they spoke. Suddenly, Middle English enters the written record.

And the Norman influence on English? Although they wrote in French, there is documentary testimony that the Norman overlords were speaking more English than French. However, there were only few of them and they didn't mix with their subjects - their influence on English grammar was negligible. The language picked up an enormous number of French words -- it was written, not spoken, French that left its mark -- but this doesn't seem to interest McWhorter very much. He's much more interest in grammar than vocabulary.

At every turn, McWhorter's analysis of English's evolution is grounded in historical circumstance. The Celts added only a few subtle grammatic changes, a consequence of continuing their own speech apart from the English speakers, but over enough centuries to add a few distinctive constructs. The Vikings mixed with the local people, intermarrying and adopting the local language immediately - but badly, in a grammatically stripped-down form. And the Normans arrived in very small numbers, and remained a tiny elite, apart from the rest of the people; their written documents enriched English vocabulary, but left no mark on its grammar.

Finally, recall that McWhorter studies creoles, specializing in the mixing of languages. He has bones to pick with grammatical nitpickers, the sort who fret over split infinitives, prepositions at the end of sentences, who v. whom, or "He done read the book" (my example, not his). I don't know what he thinks of "refudiate," but you can almost hear him laughing at those prissy grammar Nazis⁵ who think they're speaking some sort of "pure" English, when in fact their speech is descended through a long line of folks who just didn't know how to talk good.


[Addendum]
As a followup to Heidi's comment, here's a map showing the maximum spread of the Celts. As you can see, they had a pretty wide influence in Europe, although not so much the Scandinavian countries:



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1. Although Yoda, as I recall, sometimes uses "do" in the modern manner. He's had a long time to listen to those young Jedi.

2. The progressive "He is reading" is another form that existed in Celtic and today is peculiar to English.

3. It should be no surprise to academics. After all, they're the ones who have to teach their students "You don't write like you talk, dude, or your grade'll suck!"

4. Yes! Pun intended! Would you doubt me?

5. Which, yes, often describes me.

Traffic

Just before holiday break*, I came across an interesting-looking book in the library catalog, while I was helping a student locate something else for her research. So I spent part of the break reading Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us). And lo and behold, suddenly I come cross a blog entry about the same book at Cognitive Daily, complete with this interesting video of Parisian drivers negotiating the ridiculously unorganized intersection at the Arc de Triomphe.


Paris Traffic from Dave Munger on Vimeo.

David Munger describes the book pretty well, so I won't rehash it all here, but I did want to expand on his discussion of the confusing traffic circle. Vanderbilt describes how a cognitive shift takes place when the traffic engineers start adding or removing safety barriers and curbs, or reducing the width of the right of way. Moving buildings and sidewalks farther from the street, for example, would seem to enhance safety, but there is a countering tendency for drivers to think of the street as a highway** and drive as if the surrounding city weren't there. Or more precisely, they are quite aware that the road has been given priority and they drive on the assumption that everyone else agrees.

But when you start moving things back close to the street, maybe even eliminating curbs and crash barriers, the driver becomes more aware of the city and even a little confused. Who has been given priority, the cars or everyone else? Whose turf is he on? And he slows down and pays much closer attention to what's going on around him. Arguably, this is a safer frame of min for the driver to be in, rather than whizzing down the street assuming that everything off to the side can be ignored.

That same sort of cognitive shift was also at the heart of what I always thought was wrong with traffic in Yellowstone. For us employees, the roads were roads, those strips of asphalt that connect the place where I am with the place I would prefer to be. You drive on them. For tourists, though, it always seemed to be a little different. Sure, you drive on these roads, but you also creep down them at ten miles per hour, or stop, or even park in the lane and leave your vehicle. Things you would never do on any road at home, but in the Park it was just different. In the same way that people don't take lane markings seriously in a parking lot, tourists in Yellowstone took all the familiar signs and markings as vague suggestions. I came to believe, for example, that the real definition of intersection was "a place to stop and read your map."

It's a testimony to the power of categorization. The whole category of behavioral rules that go along with roads suddenly disappeared, because the drivers didn't conceive of the Yellowstone roads as roads in the normal sense. As soon as they left the Park, normal behavior returned; you rarely saw the same type of driving in the National Forest lands surrounding the Park. Those had roads, you know, with highway designations and everything***. Totally different.



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* Christmas break, for those who get worked up about such things.

** And the significance should be evident from the fact that we use two different words, street and road, to decribe the same object in different contexts.

***Technically, there are several US highways running through Yellowstone: 191, 287, 89, 20, 14, and 16. You won't see a sign for any of them inside the Park boundaries, though. I wonder what difference it might make in driver behavior if the signs were there?

Books - Nim Chimpsky

I just finished reading Elizabeth Hess's Nim Chimpsky: The Ape Who Would Be Human, the story of one of the earliest attempts to teach chimpanzees to use human language. Nim earned a bit of fame by being raised among humans, as a human baby, and learning to use a small American Sign Language vocabulary to express his needs and desires.

Actually, it would be better to describe the book as the story of the subject of that research; the title does not mislead. Nim was caught in an impossible situation: raised by people who had no experience with apes and the limitations of nurture, in the middle of an under-planned and poorly administered study with unclear goals and virtually no budget. As he grew larger, stronger, and more self-willed, Nim became dangerously impossible for amateurs to handle (he sent many to the hospital, at least once with permanent injuries). Nor did it help that some of the key participants seemed to engage in as much infighting as they did research - Nim had a way of provoking strong feelings, while careers and professional status were on the line for most of the people as well. Few of the human actors come out entirely clean, at least if anyone else in the story has anything to say about them.

As he became older and more difficult to handle (perfectly normal for a male chimpanzee, but intolerable for humans who like to keep their flesh and furniture intact), Nim was transferred back to his birthplace at the Institute for Primate Studies at the University of Oklahoma. The language education continued - under different researchers with different ideas of how it should be done - until the IPS shut down in 1981 amid poor funding and poor conditions. A public outcry, led by animal advocate Cleveland Amory, narrowly saved Nim from a medical research facility (most of the other IPS chimps were not so lucky) and he spent his last years at Amory's Black Beauty Ranch in Texas. Those years were tragically short, as Nim succumbed to a sudden heart attack in 2000, barely middle-aged at only 26 years old.

The language studies themselves were inconclusive, which may have been the inevitable results for the first efforts. In the 1970s, the field was dominated by Skinnerian behavioralism on the one hand, and Chomsky's position that syntax and grammar are the essence of language and only humans can have it. Certainly Nim learned to use signs in a purposeful way, but most of the data was not rigorous enough to stand up to hostile scientific scrutiny; videos of his performance left open the possibility that he was employing the "Clever Hans" effect as his handlers praised his successes.

Much of the discussion, though, has always struck me as misguided. The insistence on grammar and syntax as the litmus test of "language" seems a distraction at worst, although not without offering some insight of its own. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, who performed ground-breaking work of her own with the bonobo Kanzi, complained bitterly about grammar as a red herring. For her, the key factor was that Kanzi had grasped the concept of symbolic representation - this symbol stands for that real-world thing. If the version of the water-pump story we've all learned is accurate, this was the essence of Helen Keller's breakthrough, too. Once she understood what a symbol was good for, she rapidly learned to communicate. Neither Skinner nor Chomsky seem to have considered language from this perspective, but it's a vital insight nonetheless.

As far as I know, there isn't a lot of language study going on these days, but no one doubts the essential personhood of apes any more. One of the tragic consequences of Nim's human environment was that he was always caught between people who saw him as a little boy and those who saw him as a research animal. Nim himself couldn't please either group entirely; he was too wild to be fully socialized into human society, but bonded with his handlers at a level that didn't allow them to seem him treated as a lab rat. Nim moved from houses to cages, saw people enter his life and leave suddenly, and surely never understood any of it.