|
Audio: Listen to this post.
|
I don’t know about you, but I wish I had been born with the user manual for the human being or at least received instruction in school about the basic equipment every human being possesses. In my youth, I was incredibly ignorant about my senses, emotions, memory,
imagination, intellect, and will. For me, it was like waking up alone, finding myself on board the space shuttle, and then through trial and error, trying to figure out how to fly the machine without much success. After a series of personal disasters that are irrelevant to report here, I was forced to write a user manual to help guide me through life. I began with what makes us human.
1 Language Makes Us Human
Wild Boy of Aveyron
In the history of science, the only event remotely akin to the philosophical concept of a person living in a state of nature, untainted by civilization was the discovery, in 1801, of the feral boy of Aveyron, an eleven-year-old found running naked and wild in a forest.[1] Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, a French surgeon, thought the wild boy of Aveyron was the Rosetta stone for deciphering human nature. He spent five years trying to train and educate the boy, before concluding that the boy’s prolonged isolation from humanity rendered him incapable of language and consequently incapable of living a genuine human life. Itard’s answer to “What makes us human?” — language.
Helen Keller
Helen Keller gives us a glimpse of how the world is experienced without language. When she was 19 months old, an acute disease, possibly scarlet fever or meningitis, left her blind and deaf. She soon “felt the need of some communication with others and began to make crude signs. A shake of the head meant ‘No’ and a nod, ‘Yes,’ a pull meant ‘Come’ and a push ‘Go.’ Was it bread [she] wanted? Then [she] would imitate the acts of cutting the slices and buttering them.”[2]
Without language, Helen’s interior life was limited to sense perception, motor skills, tactile memory, and associations. She exercised neither will nor intellect and was “carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus.” She felt anger, desire, and satisfaction; however, she never “loved or cared for anything.” She describes her inner life then as “a blank without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation, without wonder or joy.”[3]
Ms. Keller recounted that the sign language she learned from Anne Sullivan “made me conscious of love, joy, and all the emotions. I was eager to know, then to understand, afterward to reflect on what I knew and understood, and the blind impetus, which had before driven me hither and thither at the dictates of my sensations, vanished forever.”[4] She no longer lived an animal life; language freed her to be human.
Through language, humans bring out the full potentiality hidden in matter, advance the building of bird nests and beaver dams to architecture and engineering, the gathering of nuts to farming, squawks and barks to music, sexual reproduction to love and compassion, and limited animal perception to the intellectual jewels of modern Western culture, Newtonian physics, Maxwell’s electrodynamics, special and general relativity, quantum physics, and the biology of the physical basis of life, including the deciphering of the genetic code.
Project Nim
R. Allen Gardner and Beatrix Gardner, two University of Nevada psychologists, hit upon a brilliant idea — teach chimpanzees American Sign Language. The Gardners claimed their chimpanzee, Washoe, a female, used more than eighty-five signs after three years’ training[5]and even coined new words; she signed “water bird,” after seeing a swan.[6] Francine Patterson followed this sign language approach with Koko, a female gorilla.[7]Skeptics, however, were unconvinced.
To investigate if chimpanzees can truly learn sign language, psychologist Herbert Terrace organized an elaborate project.[8] At the cost of over $250,000, with four years’ labor, Terrace and sixty other teachers attempted to teach American Sign Language to an infant male chimpanzee, nicknamed Nim Chimpsky, a playful taunt of Noam Chomsky, the founder of modern linguists, who insisted that language is innate and uniquely human. This project, the best documented of its kind to date, produced over forty video-tape hours of Nim signing and more than 2,000 teachers’ reports.[9] Analyzing the 19,000 recorded signs produced by Nim, Terrace found “no evidence of lexical regularities,” no sentences, no grammar.[10] Nim’s numerous long strings of signs had no syntax, not even linking an adjective to a noun. Nim always combined signs in a series of repetitions with little new information and much redundancy. After his extensive analysis of Nim’s signing, Terrace concluded, “Each instance of presumed grammatical competence could be explained adequately by simple nonlinguistic processes.”[11]
In the 1960s, astrophysicist Carl Sagan and many other scientists hoped to read the diary of a chimpanzee to discover the interior life of one of our fellow creatures. What they would have read were pages and pages of Nim’s longest combination of signs, for example, “Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you,” and such like “sentences,” repeated again and again. Figure 2 shows a chimpanzee supposedly meditating upon such profound thoughts.
Terrace also analyzed the signing of Washoe and Koko and concluded that neither of them had learned sign language. The signing of both lacked syntax, and their lengthy strings of signs did not convey more meaning. Terrace pointed out that “Washoe may have simply been answering the question, what that?, by identifying correctly a body of water and a bird, in that order. Before concluding that Washoe was relating the sign water to the sign bird, one must know whether she regularly placed an adjective (water) before, or after, a noun (bird). That cannot be decided on the basis of a single anecdote, no matter how compelling that anecdote may seem to an English-speaking observer.”[12] One hundred percent of Koko’s signs were prompted or asked for by her teachers, in marked contrast with young children’s speech, which is more than eighty percent spontaneous and increases steadily in length, richness, and complexity.
The work of Terrace convinced linguists that animal communication lacks syntax and thus is not a truncated version of human language. After a thorough survey of the evidence that chimpanzees possess the ability to learn sign language, linguists Thomas Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok concluded, “Real breakthroughs in man-ape communication are still the stuff of fiction.”[13] And Chomsky added, “It’s about as likely that an ape will prove to have language ability as that there is an island somewhere with a species of flightless birds waiting for human beings to teach them to fly.”[14] After Terrace’s exhaustive, critical analysis, the entire field of teaching sign language to nonhuman primates collapsed.[15]
Robert Sapolsky, a primatologist and neuroscientist, explains why nonhuman primates cannot speak. Only the brain of Homo sapiens has Broca and Wernicke areas, the regions needed for language production and comprehension, respectively. The brains of the other primates, including chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos, orangutans, and rhesus monkeys, have only the beginning of these structures, a mere cortical thickening.[16]
We Are Social by Nature
Our connections to others make us human. Without language, without others to learn language from, the mental capacities that Ms. Keller, you, and I were born with would not have developed, and our lives would not have been much higher than that of an animal. The language my children learned at home was not unique to our family or neighborhood. Learning English in the home connected them to a larger community with much in common. Conservative estimates place the number of native speakers of English at 365 million; an additional 510 million use English as a second language; and, if a lower level of language fluency is included, then over one billion persons, an eighth of the world’s population, speak English. The number of persons my children can easily communicate with is staggering.
We need things that are impossible to get if we live alone; thus, by nature, we are part of a group that helps us live well. Even a recluse who retires to a remote region of Alaska to live alone brings with him knowledge and skills acquired from prior group living. In our highly technological society, no person knows how to produce everything that he or she consumes or uses in a single day. What person knows how to grow broccoli, make eyeglasses, weave cloth, generate electricity, and fabricate a microchip? The community of humans supplies all our needs. The farmer is given the fruits of ten thousand years of experimentation with the growing of crops; the poet, a language and the poetry of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare; the physicist, the understanding of Newton, Einstein, and Bohr. No farmer, poet, or physicist could ever pay for all the gifts he or she receives gratuitously.
2 We Are Born Radically Incomplete
Last week I went hiking near Santa Fe, New Mexico, my hometown, and almost immediately, I came across a Texas orbweaver spider patiently waiting at the edge of its web for prey. A friend of mine, an entomologist, nicknamed the Insect Lady by her students, had once lectured me over coffee on the properties of spider webs. The strength of spider silk is double that of steel and is more elastic than nylon. Some web threads are not sticky, so the spider does not get caught in its own web. Embedded in every live spider is a genetic code that directs matter to build a particular spider, and later directs it to construct a web. The Texas orbweaver’s way of life is completely determined by nature, and that is true for the higher animals.
Imagine six animals queued up for scrutiny, much like in a detective movie. Our animal lineup has an anteater, a zebra, a rhino, an astronaut, a stockbroker, and a sumo wrestler. Nature furnishes the anteater, the zebra, and the rhino with a fixed occupation, a fitting dress, and an appropriate emotional profile, respectively. The long, tapered snout of the anteater is its tool for carrying out its occupation, eating ants and grubs. No two zebras have identical stripes. A baby zebra identifies its mother by her stripes. Lions and other animals that prey on zebras are confused by the flashing stripes displayed by a running zebra herd. The dress of the zebra fits its way of life. An adult male rhino, in mating season, marks out territory with its urine. A rhino occupies the center of its territory and aggressively chases away any male rhino that challenges it. A male rhino, however, must leave its territory for water, and then, out of necessity, it crosses the territories of other adult males. When a rhino intrudes into another rhino’s territory for water, it becomes submissive. The farther a rhino strays from the center of its territory, the more submissive it becomes. The aggression of the male rhino is regulated by nature.[17]
Except for Homo sapiens, all the animals in our detective lineup have a complete life given to them by nature. In our strange collection of animals, those in our detective lineup, Homo sapiens is the strangest of all. Nature gives human beings no specific way of life — no fixed occupation, no fitting dress, and no appropriate emotional profile. The life of an anteater, a zebra, or a rhino is infinitely easier than the life of a human being, although infinitely smaller. We humans must struggle to find an excellent way of living if it exists, but we have a vastly richer interior life — Sophocles, in his play Antigone, claimed that nothing great occurs in human life without a curse.[18]
We Possess Nearly Unlimited Freedom
Our way of life is not determined by our DNA. Historically, Eskimos lived in igloos and ate meat and blubber from seals and walruses; the Bedouin inhabited the desert regions in North Africa, herded goats, sheep, and dromedary camels, and mainly ate dairy products. Two totally different ways of living.
Nature obviously gives every human being the capacity to comprehend and speak any of the estimated 6,800 languages now spoken worldwide. All the spoken sounds of the world’s languages are reducible to approximately fifty phonemes. Infants in all cultures can discriminate the whole human phoneme repertoire but learn gradually to concentrate on the sounds of whatever language they hear around them and eventually forget the others. Japanese infants, for example, can easily discriminate the ra/la contrast, while Japanese adults have difficulty making the same discrimination even after hundreds of attempts.
For we humans, culture gives us a way of life, not nature, and that cultural way of life may be contrary to our nature.
3 American Culture Is Contrary to Our Social Nature
The individualism we first learn in grade school opposes our social nature. Consider a typical fifth-grade class observed by anthropologist Jules Henry. “Boris had trouble reducing 12/16 to the lowest terms and could only get as far as 6/8. The teacher asked him quietly if that was as far as he could reduce it. She suggested he ‘think.’” Undoubtedly, Boris remembered hearing the teacher tell him to reduce the fraction to lowest terms, but then he could not speak. When the teacher told him to think, his mind was probably paralyzed, and his ears buzzed. Other children, frantic to correct Boris, waved their hands to get the teacher’s attention. The teacher, quiet and patient, ignored the waving hands and asked Boris, “Is there a bigger number than two you can divide into the two parts of the fraction?” After a long silence from Boris, she asked the same question again, this time more urgently, and still there was not a word from Boris. She then turned to the class and said, “Who can tell Boris what the number is?” A forest of hands appeared, and the teacher called on Peggy, thrilled to give the correct answer, four. From the smile on her face, Henry knew Peggy felt great about herself; Boris’ failure was his problem, not hers.
In the schoolhouse, winners are taught to look to the good they have gained and ignore the unavoidable, emotional damage caused to the losers. The goal in a competitive society is to win without violating the rules. That’s how the game works in America, and that’s how the natural empathy young children feel for the pain of others is squashed by the ethos of capitalism.
The following week, Boris’ class was divided into two competing teams for a spelling bee. Boris was the last person chosen and the first to go down. The following week the communal activity was show-and-tell, typically reserved for younger children. As an educational experiment, Boris’ teacher asked her students to bring to class an object beginning with the letter “b.” Boris thought of bringing himself but brought his baby blanket; though faded and frayed, it always comforted him. When he stood in front of the class to give his one-minute description of his show-and-tell object, the magic of this baby blanket failed him. His palms sweated, his knees knocked, and he managed to say, “My baby blanket.” Some students snickered, others laughed, and one boy said, “Way to go, Boris.”[19]
In this fashion, Boris learned to hate the students who excelled, for they robbed him of dignity and worth. He was trapped in a situation that subjected him to repeated humiliation.
When the pain became unbearable, he would “act out,” tear pages out of his textbooks, tip over his desk, and punch one of the “winners,” usually Anton, the boy seated behind him. He was then sent to the school psychologist to diagnose Boris’ problem. Neither the psychologist nor any teacher had the insight or courage to say the problem was the system that set students against one another, not Boris.
Like Boris, the unsuccessful students grow to hate the successful ones. “Since all but the brightest children have the recurrent experience that others succeed at their expense, they cannot but develop an inherent tendency to hate — to hate the success of others, to hate others who are successful, and to be determined to prevent it. Along with this, naturally, goes the hope that others will fail. This hatred masquerades under the euphemistic name of ‘envy.’”[20]
Not only Boris, but many other children in grade school learn readin’, writin’, ‘rithmetic, and ‘atred. Yet, we are shocked when that intense anger and hatred spill over into a school shooting. The officials hire security guards, install metal detectors, and institute practice lockdowns but seem unable to see how their competitive education instills self-loathing and hatred.
Ten years later, probably few of the students that Henry observed will remember how to reduce fractions. But surely, no student will forget the real lessons learned that day, the three moral precepts of capitalism. I succeed only if someone else fails, and the converse — if someone else succeeds, I must have failed. Implicit in these two precepts is a third: My success is entirely due to me, and no other person has a legitimate claim on its benefits — the ultimate injunction of capitalism, an economic system based on individualism, where each person is solely responsible for his success or failure.
Many of us in our childhood and youth heard in Sunday school and church, sermons and homilies that God is Love and that we should love others as Jesus loved us; yet the ethos we came to live was taught and practiced first in elementary school and continued through graduate school. Public and parochial schools are founded on grading, a system of competition that instills the ethos of capitalism.
Loneliness
The 2000 U.S. census uncovered that one out of every four households consists of only one person. Roughly twenty percent of Americans feel so isolated from others that loneliness is a major source of unhappiness in their lives,[21] irrespective of race or gender.[22]
Our highly competitive society breeds loneliness. In school, through competitive sports, academic grading, and the constant vying for popularity with peers, school taught us that a student who fails does not have much value. We saw only two categories of persons — winners and losers. Since each of us desired to be loved, we wanted to be a winner or associated with a winner. Under such circumstances, friendships could not last if we exposed our weaknesses and deficiencies. Consequently, we learned to hide behind masks. To escape from the fear of failure, rejection, and loneliness, we never revealed our true selves to others.
In the workplace, “the isolated individual has to fight with other individuals of the same group, has to surpass them and, frequently, thrust them aside,” according to psychoanalyst Karen Horney. “The advantage of the one is frequently the disadvantage of the other.” [23] The situation where everyone is an actual or potential competitor of everyone else creates a diffuse, hostile tension between individuals, as is clearly apparent among members of the same occupational group, regardless of the disguised attempts to camouflage envy and hatred by politeness.
When a friend and I compete for the same prize, his success makes me sad and depressed, and I ask, “Why do I seem to secretly hate my friends?” Writer Gore Vidal said publicly what many of us feel privately: “Whenever a friend succeeds a little something in me dies.”[24] In the twisted world of individual competitive success, the desire to be a winner leads to envy and the hope that “friends” and strangers alike will fail, that everyone will fail but me.
In everyday life, we Americans exhibit a profound disconnection from our fellow citizens. We Americans move away from our families, do not know our neighbors, and get accustomed to walking down the same crowded streets every day without looking anyone in the eye. We are careful not to invade another’s personal space. If a stranger in a fast-food restaurant asked us to share a booth, we would immediately perceive him as a threat or perhaps as mentally unbalanced; we are perfectly happy to sit alone in a swivel chair facing a blank wall. We have little physical contact with others except for elevators, buses, and trains that force us into close physical proximity.
Living contrary to our social nature induces physical and mental disease. Vice Admiral Vivek H. Murthy, the Surgeon General of the United States from 2014 to 2017, reports that “loneliness and weak social connections are associated with a reduction in lifespan similar to that caused by smoking 15 cigarettes a day and even greater than that associated with obesity, [as well as with] a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, depression, and anxiety.”[25]
4 Cooperative Education
In the third grade, I sat at my desk, in a row of identical desks; mine was the farthest from the teacher, who sat at a large desk at the front of the classroom. Each one of us occupied a small cubicle with invisible walls. When my best friend, Joey Prinko, reached across the aisle separating our respective rows of desks to hand me a pencil or a crayon, the teacher yelled at him and told him to keep his hands home.
The classroom’s architecture was designed to prohibit students from discussing the lessons. The student was supposed to master the assigned material and offer courteous obedience to the teacher. Joey, the other students, and I were expected to show no initiation; we were expected to study and obey, to mindlessly regurgitate the lessons designed by whom — we had no idea.
Maria Montessori observed, in 1913, that in rural Italy, the “pupil is considered the most intelligent who best succeeds in echoing his teacher. . . . This fact is so well known that it has come to be utilized as one of the clever tricks for obtaining higher marks even in university examinations and for winning competitions.”[26] In the twenty-first century, the classroom architecture remains the same as in my era; however, students now are taught not to echo their teachers but their textbooks and the material used to prepare them for standardized tests mandated by the Federal government.
Montessori argued that the ethos of capitalism, a system of rewards and punishments, enslaves the student’s spirit. “We know only too well the sorry spectacle. In a classroom, a bustling teacher is busy pouring knowledge into the heads of his charges. To succeed in his task, he must keep his pupils immobile and attentive even by force, making generous use of rewards and punishments in order to keep his condemned listeners in the proper frame of mind. But rewards and punishments, to speak frankly, are the desk of the soul, that is, a means of enslaving a child’s spirit . . .[27]
Many parents engaged in homeschooling have rejected the traditional education that instills individualism and competition. Those parents are generally close observers of their children and thus, on their own, have discovered the fundamental educational principles espoused by Montessori. The teacher is a guide in a mixed-age classroom; each student is unique, desires to know, and has the freedom to choose.
My wife, for instance, taught our two daughters to read at an early age; Tanya was four and one-half years old, and Brett was three. Every day during lunch, Ann would set up a portable chalkboard in the kitchen. Tanya began to learn the alphabet, and at first, Brett seemed a bystander, but that was not the case. Ann did not give letter grades to our daughters or force them to compete against each other. Learning the alphabet and later words and sentence structures was fun. Tanya and Brett advanced at their own rate, with the older child helping the younger. Ann’s guiding principle was enunciated by Aristotle 2,500 years ago: All men, women, and children desire to know by nature.[28]
The joy that Tanya and Brett experienced was not in receiving an A+ but in reading books, first Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat and much later Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Ann and I discussed at bedtime and later around the kitchen table whatever books Tanya and Brett were reading. Both of our daughters are excellent readers and have a life with books. Tanya, on and off, has worked as a copyeditor, researcher, and report writer. Brett cannot remember not being able to read. She has published two books, Hidden View, a novel about hardscrabble, off-the-gird life in Vermont, and Unstitched, a nonfiction account of opioid addiction in Vermont.
My undergraduate career at the University of Michigan was a near disaster. I had no idea what I was doing at the University; the undisciplined life I led as a teenager growing up in Union Lake, Michigan, became even more unbalanced in college. I attended fewer than half my undergraduate classes. If nothing of interest happened in a class, I stayed away, read the textbook, and passed the exams with my customary B. Once I could not remember if I was still registered for a class on complex variables or if I had dropped it. I had to call the registrar’s office to see if I had to take the final exam. I thought nothing odd about my behavior, although half the people I knew at Ann Arbor could not figure out why I had not flunked out of the University.
Lectures at the University were generally delivered from one point of view; students in the humanities and the soft sciences were expected to mindless take notes and on exams to vomit up what they had learned, someone’s opinion about something or other, usually worthless, arcane controversies squabbled over by academics and easily forgotten.
I set up an office at Drake’s Coffee Shop, where I did some homework for my classes but mainly met friends and fellow students of mathematics and physics for penetrating discussions that revealed deep philosophical issues that we often could not resolve. I learned best through dialogue with others. In a friendly give and take, my fellow students and I exposed our mutual ignorance and slowly advanced to the truth.
Unlike our formal education that treated us as passive spectators, my friends and I assessed many different viewpoints, some wildly mistaken, but from which we learned immensely. We followed an argument wherever it led. We were naïfs, uncorrupted youths from rural Michigan, enthusiastic about discovering truths to orient our lives; besides, seeking the truth together was fun. Unbeknownst to us, we discovered on our own what high-minded philosophers call dialectics, where two opposing ideas are carefully examined and, with some luck, resolved, generally as a new, unexpected third position. Years later, we learned that we were following Einstein’s advice: “The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.”[29] We did not possess the vocabulary to convey that we were engaged in Socratic seminars and acquiring good minds.
5 The Good Mind
The study of music, language, literature, mathematics, and science develops our capacity to define, analyze, and draw conclusions. For these studies to bear fruit, we must acquire more than knowledge, techniques, and general rules. We must be trained to think well; this is possible because we are unfinished by nature and thus must perfect ourselves. A good mind is open, thinks concretely, and seeks interconnections.
Openness
The open mind willingly accepts truth from any source. Mozart, a model of open-mindedness in music, writes, “People make a mistake who think that my art has come so easily to me. Nobody has devoted so much time and thought to composition as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not studied over and over.”[30] Mozart’s reaction to Bach’s music reveals his childlike openness. When one choirmaster and his forty-pupil choir performed for Mozart an eight-part motet by Bach, the music had scarcely began “before Mozart started with an exclamation, and then was absorbed in attention. At the conclusion he expressed his delight, and said, ‘That now is something from which a man may learn.’”[31]
Close-mindedness often arises from laziness or disdain. If a person rests contentedly with his opinions, how can he learn from others? Similarly, the stubborn mind desires to refute anyone on any topic, a major obstacle to learning. An open mind, in contrast, recognizes that all of us are profoundly ignorant and thus easily admits that it does not know much — nobody does!
If we admit our ignorance to ourselves, we will see that our opinions carry little weight and thus need to be examined, especially culturally-given opinions that most of us take as obviously true. If we are willing to confess our ignorance in public, we can ask questions openly and engage in genuine dialogue. If we are constantly aware of our ignorance, then we will always have the freshness and innocence of a beginner, who is astonished again and again by the new wonders he or she encounters. We will never forget that all learning begins with wonder and amazemen and that profound truth appears strange to cultural opinion.
Concreteness
In thinking, concreteness yields clarity. One of the maladies of modern life is substituting a fuzzy verbal world for actual, concrete experience. Psychologist Abraham Maslow observes that creative thinkers “live far more in the real world of nature than in the verbalized world of concepts, abstractions, expectations, beliefs, and stereotypes that most people confuse with the real world.”[32]
Physicist Enrico Fermi was noted for his quick and clear thinking. One reason for his mental agility and clarity of thought was he had “a whole arsenal of mental pictures, illustrations, as it were of important laws or effects.”[33] He would not simply keep Newton’s third law in his head, for example. (To every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.) He would discover and etch in his memory a paradigmatic example of the law, such as a man jumping from a boat to a dock where clearly the boat must move away from the dock with a momentum equal to the man moving toward it.
If we cannot give a simple, obvious example of something, we probably do not know what we are talking about. Using this principle to assess ideas, theories, books, and lectures, either our own or those of others, enables us to cut through extraneous matters to the essentials in a rapid fashion.
Interconnections
Without seeking interconnections as we learn, what fragile knowledge we gain can be easily lost. We, thus, should form the habit of connecting what we are learning to what we already know. For example, when we hear Stephen Daedalus, the protagonist of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, argue that the three universal qualities of beauty in the arts are wholeness, harmony, and radiance, his translation of Aquinas’ integritas, consonantia, and claritas, we should seek to see if this trio describes beauty in the sciences. Einstein does give these three elements: “A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises is, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended its area of applicability.”[34] As a further confirmation that beauty is a common ground that unites the arts and the sciences, physicist and novelist C. P. Snow writes, “The literature of scientific discovery is full of aesthetic joy. The very best communication of it that I know comes in G. H. Hardy’s book, A Mathematician’s Apology. Graham Greene once said he thought that, along with Henry James’s prefaces, this was the best account of the artistic experience ever written.”[35]
The main image by Leonardo da Vinci, photo from www.lucnix.be.
Endnotes
1 Language Makes Us Human
[1] See Harlan Lane, The Wild Boy of Aveyron (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979) and François Truffaut, director, Wild Child, Les Artistes Associés, film.
[2] Helen Keller, The Story of My Life (Mineola, New York: Dover, 1996 [1903]).
[3]Helen Keller, The World I Live In (New York: The Century Co., 1904,1908).
[4]Ibid.
[5] R. Allen Gardner and Beatrice T. Gardner, “Teaching Sign Language to a Chimpanzee,” Science 165 (15 August 1969): 664-672.
[6] Roger S. Fouts, Deborah H. Fouts, and Thomas E. Van Cantfort, “The Infant Loulis Learns Signs from Cross-Fostered Chimpanzees,” in Teaching Sign Language to Chimpanzees, ed. R. Allen Gardner, Beatrix T. Gardner, and Thomas E. Van Cantfort (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989), p. 281.
[7] Francine G. Patterson, “Linguistic Capabilities of a Lowland Gorilla,” in Language Intervention from Ape to Child, ed. Richard L. Schiefelbush and John H. Hollis (Baltimore: University Park Press, 1979), pp. 325-356.
[8] See the documentary Project Nim, director James Marsh, (BBC Films, 2011).
[9] See Herbert S. Terrace, Nim (New York: Knopf, 1979) and also the documentary Project Nim.
[10] Herbert S. Terrace, L. A. Petitto, R. J. Sanders, and T. G. Bever, “Can an Ape Create a Sentence?” Science 206 (23 November 1979): 900.
[11] Ibid., p. 891.
[12] Ibid., pp. 895-896.
[13] Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok, “Performing Animals: Secrets of the Trade,” Psychology Today 13 (November 1979): 91.
[14] Noam Chomsky, quoted in Time (10 March 1980), p. 57.
[15] For a witty, short history of the efforts to teach American Sign Language to nonhuman primates, view the last twenty-five minutes of Robert Sapolsky, Human Behavioral Biology, Lecture 23 On Language.
[16] Ibid. Human speech also requires the correct anatomy, see Philip Lieberman, Why Human Speech Is Special, The Scientist (July 1, 2018).
2 We Are Born Radically Incomplete
[17] See Norman Owen-Smith, “Territoriality in the White Rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum) Burchell,” Nature 231 (4 June 1971): 295.
[18] Sophocles, Antigone, trans. R. C. Jebb, line 614.
[19] Henry does not report on Boris’ subsequent life. The rest of his story given here is a possibility envisaged by me.
[20] Ibid.
[21] See John Cacioppo and William Patrick, Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection (New York: Norton, 2009), p. 5.
[22] Cigna U.S. Loneliness Index: Survey of 20,000 Americans Examining Behaviors Driving Loneliness in the United States (2018).
[23]Karen Horney, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (New York: Norton, 1937), p. 284.
[24] Gore Vidal, interview, Sunday Times Magazine (London, 16 Sept. 1973).
[25] Vivek H. Murthy, “Work and the Loneliness Epidemic,” Harvard Business Review (Sept. 27, 2017).
[26] Maria Montessori, Pedagogical Anthropology.
[27] Maria Montessori, The Discovery of the Child (New York: Ballantine Books, 1967), p. 13.
[28] Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. W. D. Ross, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), I. 980a21, p. 689.
[29] Albert Einstein in response to not knowing the speed of sound as included in the Edison Test: New York Times (18 May 1921).
[30] Mozart, quoted by Joseph Machlis, The Enjoyment of Music (New York: Norton, 1963), p. 308.
[31] Edward Holmes, The Life of Mozart (London: Dent, 1845), p. 251.
[32] Abraham Maslow, “Creativity in Self Actualizing People,” in Creativity and Its Cultivation (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), p. 85.
[33] S. M. Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician (New York: Scribner’s, 1976), p. 163
[34] Albert Einstein, “Autobiographical Notes,” in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, ed. Paul Schilpp (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), p. 33.
[35] C.P. Snow, “The Moral Un-neutrality of Science,” in his Public Affairs (New York: Scribner’s, 1971), p. 189.