The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [61]
But why, I ask—why, Dr. Norman Plumlee, did you decide that external bodily elements of communication do not count as part of language? Is language not comprised of an entire flexible interface of both spoken and visual interaction? No human mother speaks to her infant only while wearing oven mitts and a welding mask! Spoken language is but a single component of communication. We speak as much with our hands and eyes and faces as we do with our lungs and throats and tongues—namely, principally, with our brains. Analog gestural communication isn’t “cheating.” Removing words from the interface of the body only removes them from their natural environment, like putting an animal in a cage.
Yet Norm doggedly continued to insist upon the necessity of the mask and mittens, so the fact that I understood what Lydia was saying might be taken more seriously by potential skeptics. Taken seriously by whom? By whom, Norm? Whence this desperate, this pitiful fear of not being taken seriously? This fear permeates everything, everything humans do! This terrible fear of not being taken seriously haunts the heart of every scientist!
What is science? Must science necessarily be enslaved to rigid methodology?—to the quantifiable?—to the repeatable?—to the measurable?—to the (dare I suggest it) publishable? If you’re studying the inanimate world, sure… the unconscious world, the world of quarks and quasars, of waves and particles, of the chemical and mechanical movements of the universe’s material… I have no beef with the scientific method as it is applied to, say, physics. But when you are studying another sentient being, a fellow conscious organism? Of course, of course the good scientist must follow proper methodology, collect data accurately and draw conclusions carefully and responsibly if he is to publish, and the good scientist must of course publish if he is going to apply for grants to fund further research and maintain his post at his institution, if he is to secure tenure, in order to keep making money, in order to eat! And in order to do all this, he must publish, publish, publish—or not get any money—and by extension, perish! I sometimes wonder if the demands of capitalism enfeeble certain fields of science. Because that was why Norm was in such a rush to test, to record, to document, to prove, to publish—to be taken seriously. He wanted this to be hard science. He did not understand how soft it is—soft and vulnerable, like flesh itself. Like life. Like me. My brain, the seat of my soul, is as mysterious and plastic and irrational a thing as yours, Norm, or any man’s for that matter. It bucked against your numbers! In your frenzy to publish, in your desperation to be taken seriously, you tried to cram “soft” science into the same box as the hard stuff—and in the process you ignored all the evidence that was right in front of your face! You lost it! Lost! Much is lost, and much is never found that might be if scientists would only allow themselves to look in the right places. The very hardness of hard science sometimes renders it too impoverished to study a subject so protean and spontaneous as language. Lydia came to understand this, and Norm did not, and that, I believe, was at the heart of their falling-out. That and, obviously, me.
Lydia had an almost quixotic faith that she would be able to teach an ape to fully understand and to perhaps even verbally communicate in English, if only she were able to find the right pupil—someone special, some exceptionally brilliant Nietzschean überchimp such as (ahem) myself. And don’t try to feed me any of the usual nonsense about undescended larynxes and so on, about the vocal tracts of apes being anatomically unequipped for articulate speech. Put that aside, and simply listen to the sound of my voice. The mere physical equipment of vocal communication constitutes