The Minister of Meaning

I forgot that S amuel Ichiye Hayakawa was born in Vancouver, Canada, and I forgot that he was elected to the United States Senate.

I remember that he liked jazz, and that he was President of San Francisco State College, and that he was one of the few who spoke with precision about what was going on during the Vietnam war protests. I liked what he said, facing down the heated rhetoric on campus, insisting on civility and accuracy in public discourse.

The campus did not like what he said, since they wanted action at all costs. But the greater body politic embraced him, and that is how the Japanese-Canadian professor who resembelled actor Pat Morito became the junior Senator from the Golden State in 1976.

His last crusade was the adoption of the English Language Amendment, which promoted the formal Constitutional adoption of English as the only official language of the United States. He died in 1992, at the dawn of the Clinton era’s embrace of multiculturalism. Whatever else you might say about Mr. Clinton, he certainly was a pragmatist.

Hayakawa’s book on semantics, Language in Thought and Action , remains in print and is now in its fifth edition.

I always think about multiculturalism when I am San Diego. It is a slow week for tourism, which is the reason that the conference was scheduled so early in the New Year. The lack of high-rolling guests means that I have a view of the Bay, rather than the parking lot. It is still early, but the buffed residents of Coronado Island are already plodding along the path by the water, and the Mexicans who maintain the resort are arriving for work.

In the darkness, I listened to the news from the eastern provinces of Turkey. The bird flu is spreading now. I don’t know if the genie is out of the bottle or not. Cultural factors are evident. Chickens are part of many families, and the children consider them quasi-pets, which accounts for the spread of the disease among them. The holiday is another contributing factor, since families have stocked up on food and hunkered down in their homes, making it hard for public health workers to contact them.

It is the end of the Hajj, the great pilgrimage to Mecca, and the start of the three-day Feast of Sacrifice, Id al-Adha.

That is where my admiration for S.I. Hayakawa becomes relevant. Not in his insistence on English, though I agree with him. Multilingualism is great for individuals, and disastrous for nations. The greatest gift the British Raj gave to India was not the grand buildings or the Civil Service. It was the establishment of a common tongue, across the hundreds of dialects on the subcontinent. it enabled them to communicate.

If the devotees of Sanskrit had succeeded in imposing their language on the new nation, I doubt if the economic miracle could have occurred so swiftly.

We need someone who can act as a traffic cop for meaning. I am learning at some cost the intricacies of a Great Faith. The rites of Islam have an immediacy about them these days. The feast that complicates the public health response is relevant to my day on the West Coast. Their Holy Days feature people from the Christian bible stories, and the books of the children of the House of David.

Accordingly, I belive we need someone like S.I. Hayakawa to provide context, a Minister of meaning, if you will.

We have accepted meanings for words like �Hajj,� and �Jihad,� and �Sharia Law,� that appear to be narrower than their actual linguistic meaning. Or perhaps not. I would like very much to know if the ravings of the murderer Zarkawi convey something accurate or not. His latest tape talks about establishing Sharia Law throughout the world, by the sword.

I need better context for the semantics. Is that what he said? Do people take that seriously? If so, I need to purchase more ammunition. But perhaps it is not, and my current stockpile is sufficient. We cannot understand what is happening to us if we cannot understand the context and the meaning of it.

Exile, sacrifice and atonement underscore the commandment to make the pilgrimage of the Hajj, or at least that is what my translators at the New York Times claims this morning. I was thunderstruck, watching the light come up across the Bay.

The pilgrimage is an allegory for the wanders of Adam and Eve after their expulsion from the Garden, and their eventual reconciliation with God in the blasted desert of Arabia. The place where they atoned for their sins is known in Arabic as �Arafat,� which is derived from the word �arafa, or �to know.�

I don’t know about that. I work in the context of my language and my culture, and have been more concerned about brushing up on my Spanish than worrying about the nuance of Arabic.

Hayakawa was right in so many ways. We need attention to semantics, and we need some consensus on context. So many of our public debates are about things we cannot describe in the words we possess.

We lack the language to accurately convey our thoughts. This is a huge deficit. The world is having one of those relationship moments when someone speaks the most ominous contextual words in English:

�We need to talk .�

I think it is pretty clear what we need to talk about. I’m on the look-out for a prospective Minister of Meaning to take care of the problem. If you see someone who seems to understand what is going on, and can describe it with a certain precision, please let me know.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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