When itĬlaims a privileged relationship to reality, it becomes dangerous and Science, in its everyday uses in the service of justice and clarity, what IĬall the father tongue is immensely noble and indispensably useful.
In our Constitution and the works of law, philosophy, social thought, and Subject/object, self/other, mind/body, dominant/submissive, active/passive, World, valuing the positive and devaluing the negative in each redivision: His language expresses the values of the split If you want to succeed in business, government, law, engineering, science, education, the media, if you want to succeed, you have to be fluent in the language in which "success" is a meaningful word. You came here to college to learn the language of power-to be empowered. So the continuous growth of technology and science fuels itself the Industrial Revolution began with splitting the world-atom, and still by breaking the continuum into unequal parts we keep the imbalance from which our society draws the power that enables it to dominate every other culture, so that everywhere now everybody speaks the same language in laboratories and government buildings and head-quarters and offices of business, and those who don't know it or won't speak it are silent, or silenced. Enormous energy is generated by that rending, that forcing of a gap between Man and World. The essential gesture of the father tongue is not reasoning but distancing-making a gap, a space, between the subject or self and the object or other. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.
Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective thought. I do not say it is the language of rational thought. It is the language of thought that seeks objectivity. Newton's Principia was written in it in Latin, and Descartes wrote Latin and French in it, establishing some of its basic vocabulary, and Kant wrote German in it, and Marx, Darwin, Freud, Boas, Foucault-all the great scientists and social thinkers wrote it. It began to develop when printing made written language common rather than rare, five hundred years ago or so, and with electronic processing and copying it continues to develop and proliferate so powerfully, so dominatingly, that many believe this dialect-the expository and particularly the scientific discourse-is the highest form of language, the true language, of which all other uses of words are primitive vestiges.Īnd it is indeed an excellent dialect. The political tongue speaks aloud-and look how radio and television have brought the language of politics right back where it belongs-but the dialect of the father tongue that you and I learned best in college is a written one. What I have is the responsibility you have given me to speak to you. But it is such an authority that I possess for the brief-we all hope it is decently brief-time I speak to you- I have no right to speak to you. The difference wasn't clear to the White invaders, who insisted on calling any Indian who made a speech a "chief," because they couldn't comprehend, they wouldn't admit, an authority without supremacy-a non-dominating authority. The difference between our politics and that of a native Californian people is clear in the style of the public discourse. It makes something happen, makes somebody-usually somebody else-do something, or at least it gratifies the ego of the speaker. This is the effect, ideally, of the public discourse. This is the public discourse, and one dialect of it is speech- making-by politicians, commencement speakers, or the old man who used to get up early in a village in Central California a couple of hundred years ago and say things very loudly on the order of "People need to be getting up now, there are things we might be doing, the repairs on the sweathouse aren't finished and the tar-weed is in seed over on Bald Hill this is a good time of day for doing things, and there'll be plenty of time for lying around when it gets hot this afternoon." So everybody would get up grumbling slightly, and some of them would go pick tarweed-probably the women. I thought I was going to study French and Italian, and I did, but what I learned was the language of power-of social power I shall call it the father tongue. And I thought how I have learned, more or less well, three languages, all of them English and how one of these languages is the one I went to college to learn. Thinking about what I should say to you made me think about what we learn in college and what we unlearn in college and then how we learn to unlearn what we learned in college and relearn what we unlearned in college, and so on. Bryn Mawr Commencement Address Ursula Le Guin The Mother Tongue Bryn Mawr Commencement Address
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