Tolerance, and a call to arms

By David Simmons

Egyptian Prime Minister Hisham Qandil wants the US and, I suppose by extension, the civilized world to “take the necessary measures to ensure insulting billions of people – one and a half billion people – and their beliefs does not happen”. This was one of the more reasoned responses in the Islamic world to the film Innocence of Muslims, a clip of which appeared on YouTube.

By “reasoned” I mean that to our knowledge, Qandil did not set fire to any buildings or kill any ambassadors.

I haven’t seen the clip but accept the word of those who have that it was deliberately offensive to Muslims, not to mention those who value good production techniques. But how exactly is a culture founded – unlike Islam – on freedom of expression to follow Qandil’s advice? How does a secular society avoid “insulting” Islam, or any superstition for that matter? The fact that the other four and a half billion of us get on perfectly well without bowing and scraping to some Arab who died nearly 14 centuries ago is itself insulting to those who cannot, isn’t it?

So what we have here is the most intolerant of the world’s major religions pleading for tolerance. To stress that point, The Onion published a cartoon designed to be extremely offensive to the four other major religions, then reported, under the headline No one murdered because of this image: “Though some members of the Jewish, Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist faiths were reportedly offended by the image, sources confirmed that upon seeing it, they simply shook their heads, rolled their eyes, and continued on with their day.”

By screaming for tolerance while themselves being intolerant to the point of murdering people such as Ambassador Christopher Stephens, whose only crime was holding the same citizenship as the makers of Innocence of Muslims, these representatives of Islam are making impossible demands on the rest of us, probably knowingly. Why not? If one’s religion makes tolerance a sin, surely it is the duty of the faithful to create pain for those who practise it.

This ploy is not the monopoly of extremists. Prime Minister Qandil does the same thing, but to even greater effect because he commands respect, unlike the mob, who command only contempt. His call for not merely the common-sense restraint most right-thinking people carry out as a matter of course, as a necessary tool for surviving in and contributing to a community, but for legislation prohibiting offence against a particular set of superstitions to which he subscribes and most others do not, is a logical impossibility, and he knows it.

The reason is that even within Islam itself, there are hugely differing views not only on what is acceptable behaviour, but what constitutes holiness. Some believe the thugs who killed Ambassador Stephens were practising jihad, holy war. Some believe the hijackers who flew jetliners into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were even holier. If we disagree with them, we are of course insulting a segment of Islam, and if Qandil had his way, we would presumably be punished for it.

Yet shrugging off Qandil’s pleas as nonsense doesn’t get us off the hook. Most of the civilized world has bought into the idea of tolerance as a general principle, though of course exceptions abound – most of us don’t tolerate theft or murder or child abuse, and there are grey areas such as abortion, or voting Conservative. So we cherry-pick as well, just like “moderate” Muslims.

Maybe we should take another look at the principle of tolerance and be more careful how we use the word. It comes from the Latin tolerare, “to endure”. Is that really how we want to live in our communities, simply “enduring”?

If so, life becomes quite a chore. For life is full of annoyances; the human ones alone now number about 6 billion, and on top of this we have biting insects, ill-timed rain showers, incontinent soi dogs and the occasional errant meteorite (left).

Endurance has its place, but it should not be a guiding principle. Another word comes to mind: “embrace”, derived from the Latin bracchium, “arm”. By a happy coincidence, in English the word “arm” has two completely different meanings, the first – the appendage we put around those we love, or extend in friendship, derived from Anglo-Saxon – and the other, from Latin again, in the sense of the hard and unyielding stuff knights used to don, or in modern times clads military personnel carriers, tanks, and the Brink’s vehicles delivering each day’s pillage to the one per cent.

To take this analogy just a tiny bit too far, we can argue that embracing our fellow human beings, figuratively or otherwise, is the best way of arming ourselves against evil and despair.

The Language of ‘Seamless Trade’

By David Simmons

Would the European Union work any better if it made a non-European language the official one for the bloc? Maybe Mandarin, or Arabic?

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations has done something similar, making a non-Asian language – English – official for the bloc’s intra-regional business. It could be argued that UNASUR, the EU-like Union of South American Nations, has also done so: It has four official languages, none of which are indigenous but are the tongues of former colonizers Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands and England.

The EU, for its part, has 23 official languages.

The ASEAN choice of English makes practical sense. The bloc is one of the most ethno-linguistically diverse in the world, and is dominated by four language groups: Malayo-Polynesian (primarily Malay and Tagalog), Austro-Asiatic (Vietnamese and Khmer), Tai (Thai and Lao), and Tibeto-Burman (Burmese). About half the region’s population belongs to the first group, but Malay is rarely heard outside Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, the four nations of the bloc where it is official, while Tagalog, the basis of the Philippines’ main official language Filipino, is only heard outside that country among its vast overseas workforce, such as the hordes of maids gossiping in Hong Kong’s Statue Square on their Sundays off.

The Philippines’ other official language is English, and fluency in both tongues is quite common, which has been important in making Filipinos highly valued as workers in other countries, fuelling the homeland’s remittance-based economy. The only other ASEAN country where English is official is Singapore, where it shares that status with Chinese (a dialect of Mandarin is mostly spoken by the Chinese community), Malay and Tamil.

Amid all this official linguistic diversity in Southeast Asia are myriad smaller languages, dialects and sub-dialects, some say as many as a thousand. But the fact remains that if you are a Thai trying to ask directions in Jakarta, or a Malaysian lost in Ho Chi Minh City, the language you are most likely to have success with is English.

I’ve written previously that the dominance of English as a global lingua franca is a rather unfortunate accident of history. Its highly complex grammar is almost impossible for Asians to grasp fully; its spelling system is bizarre and inconsistent among its dialects and sub-dialects. It was, of course, imposed on much of the world by English colonizers, and took root throughout the British Empire as a result of a combination of harsh intolerance of indigenous tongues and a belief in the importance of education, even of “savages”. As that empire decayed, another one it had spawned, the American Empire, took up the mantle of global English-language hegemony.

In the study of European imperialism, Southeast Asia again has a unique history. Of the 10 nations of ASEAN, only one – Thailand – was never colonized by a European power. The British Empire embraced four of them (Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei and Myanmar), the French Empire three (Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos), and Spain and the Netherlands one each (the Philippines and Indonesia). Interestingly (to me, anyway), the languages of the latter three – French, Spanish and Dutch – are now almost unknown in the region except among scholars. As a lingua franca, they have been completely supplanted by English.

Outside former British Malaya/Borneo and Myanmar (which was administered as Burma by British India until the late 1940s), the imposition of English has been largely the work not of Britain but the United States. In only one case, the Philippines, was this done by imperial force, resulting after the Spanish-American War in the rapid expulsion of any trace of the previous Spanish tyranny except in personal and place names. Everywhere else in Southeast Asia the embrace of American English has been a practical response to the need to survive in a world dependent on US economic power.

This process, predictably, has been far from smooth. Educational standards vary wildly across the region. The differences between American and British English also complicate matters, a situation recently aggravated by the growing influence of a third English dialect, South Asian. Outside Singapore and the Philippines, official spelling standards exist only among the highly educated and journalists, and even those two countries don’t agree on them: Singapore uses a form of British English (spiced up by non-official but widely spoken “Singlish”), while the Philippines uses the US standard (Webster). In Thailand, while businesses tend to prefer (usually extremely poor) American English, Bangkok’s two daily newspapers stubbornly cling to British English as official style.

But as in all things, Thailand has gone its own way through all of this. Even among the educated elite and in the all-important tourism industry, English-language facility is generally very poor. This has little to do with financial poverty; Thailand has the second-largest economy in ASEAN with negligible unemployment, and for decades has placed strong official emphasis on education, yet one finds better English skills even in the poorer countries of Indochina. It seems to be more a factor of Thai nationalism and isolationism. Thais want to be part of the larger world, but only if it doesn’t mean a lot of work.

In 2015, a region-wide “seamless trade” area, the ASEAN Economic Community, will be established. Most Thais, including businesspeople, know or care very little about what this will mean. Some of the private-sector organizations are rubbing their hands in glee, as it will make it easier for them to get around even the few and inadequate Thai laws protecting labourers, as the borders open up to workers flowing in from poorer countries, three of which – Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar – share national boundaries with Thailand, while Vietnam is not far off. Others, especially the hospitality industry, fear the increased competition.

The Thai government, for its part, seems to be very aware of the country’s ill-preparedness for the AEC, but as always lacks the competence, and support from the elite, to do much about it. It has, however, announced a new emphasis on language education, and to its credit, it has not confined this effort to English but is also pushing the learning of other regional languages, especially Malay. This is in addition to its previous encouragement of the study of Mandarin, for the obvious reason that Chinese trade and investment have a huge influence on the economy of the entire East Asian region, especially outside the other two powerhouses Japan and South Korea.

There is little evidence so far that the Thai street shares the government’s newfound enthusiasm for improved foreign-language skills; more than likely Thais will find themselves overwhelmed after 2015 by the influx of cheap, reasonably skilled and English-speaking labour exploited by highly efficient Singaporean and Malaysian corporations taking over the kingdom’s factories, resorts and office towers.

“Seamless trade” motivated by nothing other than corporate greed will in Southeast Asia, as everywhere else, turn out to be bad news for Thailand’s lower echelons for the most part, but these blocs often also have some (unintended) good consequences. Thailand’s quest to modernize is to a large degree held back by its passionate yet utterly unfounded nationalism, epitomized by its obsolete and draconian lèse majesté laws. The necessity of competing with the more efficient nations of the region, particularly Singapore and Malaysia, and those with far better English proficiency, particularly those two plus the Philippines, may provide a starkly needed rude awakening.

Time will tell. In the meantime, what about the original suggestion at the top of this essay, that the adoption by a regional trade bloc of a foreign language as its official means of communication could be a unifying force worth trying? Think of the money the EU could save by laying off the droves of translators necessary to handle 23 official languages, if it adopted just one.

And how about the Americas using language politics to throw off the vestiges of imperialism once and for all? The obvious choice for UNASUR would be Quechua, an Amerindian language with about 10 million speakers that already enjoys official status in Bolivia and Peru.

Such a policy would be more challenging in North America. The North American Free Trade Area has three official languages, all of them, like those of UNASUR, those of former imperial masters, in this case England, Spain and France. But in the US and Canada, native languages have been crushed into near non-existence. Even in Mexico the most widely spoken indigenous language, Nahuatl, now only has about 1.5 million speakers.

Since this was my idea, I make a modest proposal, that the official language of NAFTA herewith be Secwepemctsín, the indigenous language of the part of south-central British Columbia where I grew up. Lesson 1 would be how to pronounce its name.