Noah (and Herder) on Obama on Language

So yesterday, Noah Millman--who has been, at the least, intrigued by Senator Obama's presidential campaign, as I think any intelligent person ought to be--came out swinging hard against a brief comment the man made during a campaign stop in Georgia. The substance of his comment was, simply, that more Americans should strive to learn another language, and in particular we should, as a nation (and as parents and teachers), try to ensure that our children are learning some Spanish. You can listen to his comments here (that seems to be how most people are learning about them), but here's the actual transcript:

I don't understand when people are going around saying, "We need to have English only." They want to pass a law "We want English only." Now I agree that immigrants should learn English. I agree with that. But understand this. Instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English. They'll learn English. You need to make sure your child can speak Spanish. You should be thinking about how can your child become bilingual. We should have every child speaking more than one language. It's embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe and all we can say is merci beaucoup, right?

For a variety of reasons--a couple of which I respect, but others of which I just find silly--this comment really ticked Noah off, and he unloads on Obama. Well, allow me to unload back:

Noah says--
We do not want a formally bilingual America. We don't! I can think of only one clearly successful multilingual polity--Switzerland--and it's an exceptional society in almost every way. Bilingualism is an inescapable historical fact in Canada and Belgium, and as such it is appropriately a political fact as well, but any argument that it has been beneficial would be very strained. And there are plenty of countries with distinct linguistic minorities--Spain, Israel, China--and others with no real linguistic majority--India, South Africa--but in neither case would anyone say that these are optimal situations. The optimal situation from almost every perspective is to have a national language that everyone acknowledges and speaks.

I completely agree with the Noah here...but then I also completely agree with the senator? How is that possible? Well, for one, as a couple of commenters on Noah's post have pointed out, what Noah is attacking in his first point isn't anything Obama actually said. He wasn't calling for a "formally bilingual America" in this little riff; all he was doing was 1) condemning what he sees as a kind of paranoia behind the "English Only" movement, and 2) making a jab at a kind of stereotypical American parochialism, in that we don't seem to be too concerned about our lack of knowledge of other languages. Pretty straightforward, yes?

But of course, Noah is a thoughtful man, and this first point of his--the most important one in his whole post--deserves a thoughtful response. And my response would be two-fold:

First, I agree agree with him: if one has a choice, bilingualism is to be avoided. I say this for pedagogical reasons (more about that below), for political reasons (having to do with the civic element which comes along with any proper education, an accommodation and teaching about civic life in America--or any nation--which will be inevitably complicated and perhaps even compromised if it has to be conducted in more languages that one shared one), and for philosophical reasons as well. I'm both a student and an admirer of J.G. Herder, and he of course is well known as advocating a kind of cultural--or more particularly a linguistic nationalism, and position I find intellectually important and not a little morally persuasive. I've written about this professionally a couple of times and on both this and my old blog before as well--in that latter case, specifically addressing and somewhat defending Samuel Huntington's concerns about the "Hispanic challange" to America's national identity, particularly in regards to his belief that, because of the particular historical products of this country's "Anglo-Protestant" culture, Mexicans and other immigrants to the U.S. "will share in [the American] dream and...society only if they dream in English."

So--am I changing my mind? Not really, I don't think. My defense of Huntington's ideas was more an attack on some clumsy attacks upon it, coming from the likes of David Brooks and others. There is a weakness and a xenophobia present in his arguments (and even more so in many of the "English Only" claims which Obama was mocking), but dismissing his concerns as irrelevant and outdated in our globalized, cosmopolitan, supposedly post-national world doesn't do the trick. As I wrote then: "The English language spoken in the U.S. is by no means the sum total of American identity, but it is a vital part of it. America is a whole lot more than an 'Anglo-Protestant' culture, but that doesn't mean that specific heritage can be completely dispensed in understanding how it is that our country perpetuates itself either. Assimilation, in one sense or another, is a real issue, and a hard one, and easily disregarded by universalists of one stripe or another on both sides. When folks like Brooks say that being an American just boils down to having 'a common conception of the future,' he's dealing in platitudes that make it easier for xenophobes to justify themselves. And when folks like Huntington impose rigid civilizational lines on complicated questions like, for example, language assimilation, it makes it easier for liberals to think that 'culture' needn't mean anything at all."

Herder is, I think, a pretty good guide to these complicated matters, and while I'd hardly take it upon myself to give reading advice to brilliant guy like Noah, I would suggest that he give his writings a chance; there's a lot to be gained from this late 18th-century cleric, critic and philosopher's ideas, especially regarding language. Forgive me for quoting myself again, this time from one of the articles linked to up above:

[A] Herderian reading of the relationship between language and nationality is "conservative" in some ways:...it assumes that national communities have an enduring place in the moral structure of the world and argues that said nations should acknowledge the necessity of maintaining a dominant linguistic field, for the sake of perpetuating the meaning which a people may culturally realize within their group. Herder's communitarian vision thus suggests that a choice-driven policy of bi- or multilingualism is greatly limited in its ability to transform or shape the realization of a people's affective identity, because it ignores or distorts the context by which we are aesthetically brought into a sense of belonging....But Herder's understanding of language and identity would also seem to have "progressive" elements as well, in that it denies the value of specific linguistic forms apart from their always fluid use and adaptation by the people who discover the content of their identity through them....[T]he idea that changes in language will necessarily lead to the "demoralization" of a nation is far removed from Herder's philosophy. ["J.G. Herder on Language and the Metaphysics of National Community," The Review of Politics, Spring 2003, 255-256]

For all his ferocious and philosophically informed defense of the German Volk and their way of speaking, for all his contempt for cosmopolitanism, Herder never saw any good reason not to be acquainted with other languages...in fact, he thought a fuller appreciation of one's own tradition would only come through a greater awareness of how other traditions are articulated. He made this pretty clear in his early work, On Diligence in Several Learned Languages: "How little progress we would have made, were each nation to strive for learnedness by itself, confined within the narrow sphere of [its] language?" This isn't linguistic imperialism; this is saying that languages deserve respect, and that means teaching one's own properly, as way of making possible the sort of growth and judgment which comes from learning other languages as well. And if time and circumstances make certain kinds of growth and judgment more important to and incumbent upon responsible citizens than others, than plainly, that's where one's efforts ought to go. Which leads me to...

Second, we Americans probably are not going to have too much of choice in these matters. A--if not wholly, than at least significantly--bilingual America is on its way; in some parts of the country, its already here. The Spanish language (and here feel free to blame and/or praise immigration or demographics or any combination thereof you please) is shaping, bit by bit, large swaths of America's popular culture, dress, religion, diet, and more; and that influence will likely only increase further in the years and decades to come. The American southwest and Florida are not really Quebec yet, and for historical and political reasons almost certainly never will be...but so long as we're talking about education and the value of bilingualism and the long-term here, we might as well be cognizant of the significantly Hispanicized America which is on our horizon. In the 18th and 19th centuries, there were German nationalists who thought that the Dutch republic was a scandal that never should have been allowed to get out of the German cultural orbit; Herder thought such folks were ridiculous: there was a new Volk out there, one to engage and learn from. America ought to do the same with the Spanish-speakers among us and south of us just the same. That's not an invitation to "a formally bilingual America"; that's treating the cultures around us, and the need America has, as an English-speaking country, comprehend what they are and what they can reflect back to us, with respect.

Okay, that was good enough for a post all on its own. Let me try to run through the rest of Noah's post quickly:

Noah says--
English-speaking peoples don’t learn a second language. It’s a weird but true fact.

Well, actually he's probably correct here. Because of English's global dominance in areas of mass (especially electronic) communication, high finance, and scientific exchanges, there are very few cost-beneficial reasons for English-speakers to branch out. And perhaps there are deeper linguistic/cultural factors in play as well. But how is that a normative claim? A practical warning not to indulge in pie-in-the-sky hopes that we'll all become linguistic cosmopolitans overnight--Herderian and communitarian that I am, I wouldn't want that anyway--but a reason not to encourage the study of foreign languages? Doesn't seem to cut it to me.

Noah says--
Spanish is good for basically two things. First, communicating with immigrant neighbors, employees or clients. Unless we are aiming to create a permanently bilingual America--and we shouldn’t be--there is no reason for our strapped primary schools to be paying for this; you can get a perfectly good working knowledge of everyday Spanish without studying it in school....Second, learning any second language is good for expanding one’s cultural and intellectual horizons, gaining perspective on how one’s own primary language shapes one’s thoughts, and so forth. But this is, relatively speaking, a luxury good. For your average student, it’s much more important that they understand the concept of compound interest than that they learn Spanish.

All well and good (though I think more than a few students of Spanish and/or aficionados of one or another aspect of Mexican culture might want to question how he frames the "usefulness" of Spanish); I suppose I can't fundamentally disagree with any of this. But even allowing what Noah says in his first claim, he's still not really disputing the "ought" in Obama's rather prosaic and offhand statement; he's now merely detailing the marginal costs and benefits of doing so. Which are certainly worth looking at--Obama is, of course, speaking as a potential president, and hence a setter of priorities and budgets--but such side concerns are not particularly on his real point.

Noah says--
Whatever one might think of it in theory, in practice, bilingual education is a massive boondoggle that hurts immigrant children.

I agree: making certain people have, insofar as possible, a shared and sufficient grounding in a single language before--or concomitant to--branching out into other areas of study is crucial. Throwing kids into a school system where basic math is taught in this classroom in Spanish as part of an "immersion" is moronic. But urging everyone to learn a foreign language--in the context of thus discussion presumably, though I guess not necessarily, Spanish--isn't the same as bilingual education: it just means getting the foreign language there in the curriculum.

Noah says--
[W]hat does this have to do with being President of the United States? Why is this wish even remotely on the list? If I thought this was some indication that Obama thought tougher education of the American elite needed to be a higher Federal priority, that would be an interesting development. But it isn’t. It’s just intellectual luftmenschtichkeit.

Oh sure, Noah, condemn the man for encouraging the study of foreign languages, and finish it off by displaying some of your erudite-and-perhaps-completely-unique German/Hebrew/Yiddish/whatever.