Learning another Language: the Paradox of Snobbery

Because Art with a capital A seems to add so little to GNP, its traditions and assumptions are rarely accorded the scrutiny that characterizes, say, the “creative destruction” of an unendingly innovative economy. It’s a pity. For our humanities infrastructure remains shackled by habits and responses which have caused our educational system to lag far behind our technology, indeed exacting a cruelly hidden tax which vitiates much of what we do in our cultural life.

Consider how we have taught second languages since national vernaculars begin to replace the lingua franca of Latin since the Renaissance. Consider how I was “taught” German at the University of Detroit in 1949. We “graduated” to high literature as soon as syntax and vocabulary had been drilled, consciously, into our reluctant consciousness. Now, over 50 years later, I can repeat the opening lines of Heinrich Heine’s “Die Lorelei” as easily as I can pledge allegiance to the American Flag, or recite the “Confiteor”. I learned to say as an altar boy of eight:

Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten
Dass ich so traurig bin.

Fifty years later, when I decided to live in Weimar, Germany, I had forgotten all but these these lines and two words, “guten tag”! When I came to observe Weimar’s year of glory in 1999 as Kulturhaeystadt Europas, I was really traumatized by isolation in a non-English speaking land: In formally Ossie Thuringiea more adults knew Russian than English. Faute de mieux, I started reading Bild.

I learned to contend with the contemptuous snobbery of my high IQ friends with a pseudo-rationale: “Ich lese Bild weil die worter send emfach, lie Satze sind nakt. Wam ich zu mude von Deutsch zu lerner, ich fliche die Maedschen und zu Leben zuruch-homme ich.” Blue collars guffaw at my joke; eggheads titter nervously. We must again go back to the Renaissance to understand this cultural neurosis.

That is when the false destruction between “fine art” and “mere crafts” was first formulated. Marshall McLuhan used to tell me that the Balinese had no word for art. They just did everything they needed to do as well as they could, i.e. artfully. Was Benevetuo Cellini’s incredibly involuted salt cellar “art” and Bauhaus Kunsterliu Marianne Brandt’s table service mere “craft”? To pose the question is to instantly see its absurdity.

Cellini’s “conspicuous production” anticipates Thorsten Veblen’s Theory of Leisure Class “conspicuous consumption” by several centuries. The rich could “afford” to be wasteful; the poor had to be content with mere survival. The Bauhaus, out of the dispirited chaos of Germany’s defeat, proposed to fuse art and technology to bring the very best everyday things to everyman – the first truly egalitarian aesthetic in human history. Alas, hyperinflation, Versailles’ cruelly vindictive reparations, and the Nazi reaction defeated this still inestimable vision.

The diaspora of the Bauhaus (Weimar/Desau/Berlin/Chicago/Harvard) put that still viable vision on ice, still flourishing first at Cranbrook with the Saarinens, then in Japan. (I was stunned, as I reported in the Asahi Evening News, at how Bauhausy the Osaka Design Conference was in 1982). The tradition morphed into Finland’s Marimekko, Sweden’s IKEA, Germany’s Braun.

The tradition is alive and well, ready to be amplified. Hans-Joachea Gunde lacks program at the Thuringian Design Center to kick start the sluggish Ossie economy with great designers like Wolfgang Schneider, is the latest episode in the unending effort to maximize excellence for all. Learning second languages by reading tabloids is the linguistic aspect of this struggle.

Snobbery has been the original sin of the ruling classes. The Beatles taught us this was not only not good for the overlords, it was clearly very bad for their underlings. Waste for them was want for us. To justify what the great Norwegian-American Thorstein Veblen called “conspicuous consumption” in his classic, The Theory of the Leisure Classes, the spurious distinction was made between arts (high) and crafts (low). Actually the word “art” in Latin, and “technology” in Greek mean the same – skill.

Doing something exceedingly well, viz very skillfully. The increasingly valueless avant-garde establishes the antithesis, things made so carelessly that they take all the meaning and significance out of the word, “Art”. Who proves too much, proves nothing. If anything is art, nothing is. We’re back to the Balinese who had no art: they just did everything they did as well as they could.

Snobby also infects the world of media consumption. At my first college English teaching job – at blue collar Trenton State from 1956-57, our chairman insisted that all freshman English classes assign the New York Times every weekday. He assumed they would become Walter Lippmans by osmosis. They didn’t. They couldn’t. Growth and maturation don’t happen like the angelic doves on Pentacost. Media tastes show more complex in tiny daily increments – if the subject is interested in growing. You can lead a student to excellence, but you can’t make him think. He has to want to.

That is why it was a tragic error in American pedagogy when the Modern Language Association was formed in the 1880s, they tried to make students multilingual by forcing them to begin by reading snippets of classics in a particular language. Heine in German, Cervantes in Spanish, Dante in Italian, Moliere in French. It’s as if you forced a youngster who can’t yet play the piano to conduct Beethoven’s Fifth.

Patently foolish. Yet that’s how we wasted a century in our lackadaisical efforts to encourage fluency in a strange tongue by beginning with the best that has been thought and said in a language. (That of course is the ultimate aim. But not by any means the means.)

Begin with the simple – and with luck and grit, some will prevail to the mastery of the complex. Most, however, have been so frustrated the enormous (and wasted) effort of starting on top, that they’ve sunk to the bottom, suddenly and deflated. We dig our own pedagogical graves.

Such speculation led me to learn German by reading the tabloid Bild every day. And that is how I am now learning Spanish – by bringing home the tabs published for Hispanics in Philadelphia.

There is another extremely useful and wholly unanticipated result in teaching, say, middle level Bundesbank employees, a foreign language by assigning them Bild not FAZ, as a stepping stone. They see what their underclasses are thinking and feeling. They may even, thereby, seem to emphathize with those they must lead. Of course, never be satisfied with Bild level German.

In my case I’m about in control of Thuringen Allegemeine, on my way with luck and persistence to FAZ and SDZ. Maybe even have time for Die Zeit as I attempt to better understand Der Welt. Bild as Verbild.