Beyond Language

Can you force someone to learn another language? The answer to this question is more complex than one might expect. Setting aside a person’s age and natural predisposition for learning languages, if they have one, which they may not, the question pertains to that crucial element of empathy which enables commonality between persons. Commonality between persons has to do with empathy, and empathy is felt most strongly through a spoken language, and through the languages of art and music. Commonality between persons makes for a cohesive society. But you cannot force empathy and you cannot bring about commonality by forcing people to learn your language, especially if you are reluctant to learn theirs. Language is always two way traffic. Furthermore, if you speak another person’s language fluently you understand what makes them tick, so you are disposed to trust them, at least initially. I can vouche for this personally, as I grew up speaking both French and English, and later Spanish, fluently.

The danger which really faces us, when it comes to obliging refugees or asylum seekers to learn English lies in the area of the kind of trust which comes with understanding. Our problem is that we cannot trust those whose first language is not English. We are instinctively wary of those who sound 'foreign', and even more wary of those who look foreign as well. I think this has to do with our subconscious defensiveness as an island nation. We have, until fairly recently, looked out on the world from behind the ramparts of our own unassailed cultural context.

Those who live in a closed cultural context not only stifle their own cultural growth, they kill it off. Closed cultural contexts, or sectarian movements, down the centuries have revealed, at some cost to human life, that no society, whether secular or religious, can survive if it is sustained by a spirit of fear. This, incidentally, is true of the Church today, especially the Anglican Communion whose life is riven by sectarianism.

Perhaps what David Cameron is trying to do, in a rather clumsy way, is to oblige those whose first language is not English to help us feel less afraid of them. He may be on to something, but he is proposing a one sided equation. As far as possible, anyone with the slightest disposition for language needs to learn Arabic and Urdu, not to mention French, Spanish and German if we are to begin to understand what makes others tick. It is not just a question of ‘foreigners’ being obliged to learn English.

It is only when we get a glimmer of the kind of understanding which comes with bi-lingual fluency that we can begin to communicate effectively. Effective communication is a matter of both speaking and listening. When a person’s attention is taken up by the desire to understand what another person actually means, that person will have less time, and be less disposed, for acts of violence. Where there is speaking and listening at the deeper level of fluency, we are in the same room, so to speak.

This does not imply that we will agree about everything, but we may find areas of agreement and commonality that we never had thought of. Even if they seem irrelevant to the contentious issue itself, they will afford an opportunity for us to hate each other a little less, and so be in less of a hurry to destroy each other because, for a moment at least, we are all a little less afraid of each other.

The institutional Church should of course be leading the way here, but it is killing itself off in its own unwillingness to arrive at some kind of bi-lingual spiritual fluency. Issues of plain injustice, not to mention cruelty, have made this almost impossible. The institutional Church is way past the stage where the kind of shared language I am speaking of could solve its problems. Added to this, is the obvious fact that it has so far departed from the language of its founder, in so many areas of its life, that its continued existence as an institution is in question.

But it is not too late for our nation to learn trust and to inspire it in others, especially when we remember that the vast majority of people who seek asylum here, as well as a better life, wish us nothing but good. Our fearfulness, even when it is understandable, given the violence we have seen in both France and Germany, diminishes us.