Linguist, Psychologist, and author Claude Piron authored an interesting essay, which I just came across, on Psychological Aspects of the World Language Problem and of Esperanto (English Translation), which has some interesting parallels to the cause of classical liberalism.On a fervent desire to have one’s movement go forward more quickly, substitute classical liberalism / laissez faire / libertarianism for Esperanto in this selection:
“The widespread idea that Esperantists have, that their cause is not going forward fast enough, has its source in one of the most important parts of the human psyche, that is: desire. We want Esperanto to go forward, and we react to that desire like a little child; we do not want to see all of the obstacles that stand like great walls between our desires and their fulfillment. So we feel frustrated. When we feel frustrated, instead of facing the fact that we were not realistic in the first place and, because of that, that the mistake was our own, we look outside of ourselves for people to blame; those will be the outside world which does not pay attention to us or in those bunglers in the Esperanto world who fail to act effectively and purposefully.
“This is childish. When I say this I am not being critical. I am only expressing something about the way the human psyche normally works; when strong desires emerge, we tend to act like little children. Impatience because Esperanto is not making enough progress and looking around for guilty parties to blame is completely normal and natural. This is how normal adults react in most areas of their lives. We are really mature only in some aspects of our lives. In many areas, such as politics, metaphysics and human relations, we continually react like little children.”
This impatience regarding true liberalism was indeed a phase I went through as a libertarian. It took me a while to realise that a mature response, such as Mises’s proposal to build a “Liberty College” and adopting a long view, were the most sound investments for the friend of freedom.
On the composition of the movement when hope wanes thin, I see here Rothbard’s description of modal libertarians of the 1970′s, and feel free to substitute Rothbard’s name for Privat’s:
“As I see it, psychologically Esperantists fall into one of two categories. On the one hand there are people who are not well adapted to communal life, who feel themselves somewhat isolated from what is currently fashionable, from society, from the prevailing ideas and ways of acting. They are individuals who have gotten used to the fact that they are different from most people or who feel themselves rejected by most people. It is not easy to take on the burden of the fundamental solitude of human existence. That is why people who feel themselves different from the majority tend to group together and, with others like themselves, form a community in which they can feel at home. They then get together and keep on telling each other how right they are and how wrong the exterior world is. This is perfectly normal and human. Esperanto gives many who are not well adapted to society a place where they can find others like themselves who are also not well adapted, a place where it is possible to find the consolations and the strengths they need in order to make life more bearable. This was especially true in the period after the first hopes for an immediate world-wide adoption of Esperanto were shown to be illusory and before the body of arguments favorable to Esperanto became sufficiently strong and factual; in other words, between the First World War and the seventies and eighties. A large percentage of the Esperantists of that period consisted of neurotics, that is, individuals who had either more emotional problems or greater emotional problems than you find in an ordinary person.
“We owe an enormous debt to those neurotics, to those individuals who suffered from crippling emotional problems, because without their efforts the language would have simply died off. It is naïve and unjust to look down on them, as some proponents of the “Manifesto of Rauma” do. In the historical circumstances in which they found themselves, those rather sectarian wearers of the Green Star were needed so that the language might develop. Normal people could not get interested in Esperanto and use it and keep it alive. If the language were not in constant use, if nobody wrote in it, if it were not utilized in correspondence, meetings, and congresses (even if these consisted mainly of eccentrics) it would not have been able to develop its linguistic and literary strengths, it would not have been able to enrich itself, it would not have been able to gradually lead to a deeper analysis of the world language problem. I am convinced that after some centuries historians will consider these people to have rendered an enormous service to mankind by keeping the language alive and developing it, even though their motives in part lay in a kind of psychological pathology.
“Besides the neurotics, the eccentrics about whom I have just spoken, Esperanto attracted people whose personalities were especially strong. People who enjoy full mental health can be part of a nonconforming group only if their personalities are so healthy that they can face the great majority basing their positions on foundations that are so clear, so well-tested, of such consequence that they can feel that they are right without being arrogant about it. Happily, many people of this sort were found in the Esperanto world from the very beginning. One of them, for example, was Edmond Privat. We owe a great debt to them too, because they helped things go forward and because, in various circles, they gradually demonstrated that Esperantists were not only a bunch of fanatic oddballs.”
There are other interesting parallels, but this blog is already too long.
And, yes, I’m an Esperantist. Horrors!
{ 7 comments }
Due to the obscurity of this topic, I have buried it in this comment.
Just for grins, I googled mises.org and lewrockwell.com for “esperanto” and found 7 references, not counting jokes or quotes of the originals shown here.
I comment on these briefly.
1. “every Briton who opposes the substitution of Esperanto for English is no less dogmatic and orthodox,” Mises in Human Action(Link)
comment: Opposing this would make sense, but Esperantists do not wish to displace national languages. I know of no movement that ever aimed at such.
2. “This is why the artificial
language Esperanto failed to take hold.” Kinsella in JLS(Link), referencing Bruno Leoni’s Freedom and the Law
comment: Neither Leoni nor Kinsella cite any of the extensive linguistic literature on constructed language movements and their history. This is mere conjecture on their part.
3. “What Confucians condemn as ‘innovation,’ then, is not any and all changes in the li, but only changes that attempt to construct social practices de novo rather than reforming existing practices from within; it is, in effect, the difference between neologism and Esperanto.” Long in ASC8 working paper(Link)
comment: While Long characterizes Esperanto correctly, he does so in a context which sets Confucianism up as an ally of Libertarianism, with Esperanto thereby, perhaps, opposed. Further, Long seems to embrace Confucianism’s conservatism through a Hayekian lens, whereas one might argue that Mises’s Social Rationalism would be more (tentatively) open to a rationalist proposal, such as Esperanto. One needn’t be a statist to embrace SI units for international commerce. Why should it be the case for Esperanto, as well?
I might go further and note that Mises, as a European, was well aware of the dividends paid to the scholar’s study of languages, and the problems of international communication. There are too many such passages from his books to link here, but see this(Link), this(Link), and this(Link) as examples.
These problems are only more intensified today, as international communication and trade continue to be more frequent than ever before.
4. “Greenspan speaks central-banking Esperanto very well,” James Grant in AEN(Link)
comment: none
5. “…[the] Social Democratic organization provided an efficacious remedy [to the problem of the standing of workers in German society]. The Social Democrats gave the workers bowlÂing clubs, dances, and outdoor gatherings of their own. There were associations of class-conscious proletarian canary breeders, philateÂlists, chess-players, friends of Esperanto, and so on.” Mises in Omnipotent Government(Link)
comment: This is interesting, since Donald Harlow has written about the use of Esperanto by governments as means of propaganda(Link). Especially interesting for modern history are his comments on China and the state-funded publication “El Popola Cxinio”.
6. “It is no more possible for a government commission to revive this lost commitment [to national participation] through a national program than it is for a committee of linguists to persuade people to speak Esperanto as a second language.” North in LRC article(Link)
comment: Or, we might add, for libertarians to persuade the general public to embrace their (non)political programme. Up until now, neither have suceeded. Libertarians have something to learn from Esperantists on this account, and vice versa.
7. “Esperanto in Verse,” Henry Hazlitt, New York Times, July 5, 1935.
comment: I don’t know what this contains yet.
Thanks to Jude Blanchette, here is what you seek:
New York Times, July 5, 1935, unsigned but written by Henry Hazlitt (as seen in the Hazlitt bibliograpy(Link))
I was both surprised and delighted to see Claude Piron’s name appear in this context. When I first saw it, I thought perhaps he had written a new or updated article on the subject. Although that is not the case, it is nice to see this article getting a wider audience, especially one that has an intellectual framework suitable for understanding its wider implications.
I am an Esperantist and have been for well over a decade. For me at least, that is a simple statement of knowledge and use of the language rather than a political statement. There are a number of points about the history of Esperanto and the politics of the Esperanto movement that are worth examining from an economic point of view. I’ll summarize two that I think are relevant here.
First, S-ro Piron has pointed out in another article (search for the phrase “Unethical use of financial resources”) the costs of translation in international bodies. As an experienced translator himself, I trust that his information is reliable. I am by no means convinced that the world would have adopted Esperanto as the solution to international communication in an environment free from the market distortions created by international political bodies. However, it is abundantly clear that in cases where a market solution is sought, making every document available in multiple language is not the solution that is chosen by private entities.
The second point I think deserves some discussion here is the means by which Esperanto originally achieved a large enough number of speakers to become a self-sustaining linguistic community. Dr. Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, recognized the network effect. The utility of a language is strongly dependent on the number of people it allows you to communicate with. In his first book on the language, he included a pledge for readers to sign promising that they would learn the language if he received similar promises from a sufficient number of people. I don’t have a reference handy here, but I believe he set the number at one million.
While Esperanto has hardly achieved the explicit goal of becoming a universal second language, it has been remarkably successful. It has gone from a single speaker in 1887 to estimated 2 million a century later. Clearly, there are a large number of people who have found Esperanto useful for something. Significantly, it has reached this point without being an official language anywhere.
Dale, this comment is especially interesting to me:
“making every document available in multiple language is not the solution that is chosen by private entities”
It reminds me of Piron’s article(Link) on the estimated costs/disadvantages of various systems of overcoming language barriers. In brief he considers these possibilities:
-the UN system, where the working languages are limited to a subset of the members’, and translations are limited to that subset, as well.
-the multinational system (that is, the system adopted by most businesses that must deal across linguistic lines), where a single national language is chosen for use as the working language
-the EU system, where every member’s language is a working language, with translations into all others.
-the Esperanto system, where the working language is not a national language, but otherwise like the multinational system.
He scores the Esperanto system highest (cost=5), followed by the multinational system (cost=39).
Why do international political bodies adopt language policies that are clearly not cost effective (costs=65 and 76)? I would guess that it’s due to the fact that taxation removes the economizing influence that drives private business to the multinational solution.
Whether or not the (in theory) more efficient Esperanto solution will ever be widely adopted, remains to be seen.
I think that Piron rightly sees a psychological identification of a people with their language that blinds them, similar to what Rothbard describes in What Has Government Done to Our Money? with respect to national currencies. Whether these psychological factors prove decisive in the very long term will indeed be a sight to see.
Gil,
Thanks for posting that link. I remembered reading the particular article you cited (Piron’s Comparative Field Study), but I had forgotten the title. Piron’s analysis of the problem of international communication is particularly telling because if his recommendations were accepted, it would effectively make his role as a translator obsolete when fully implemented.
Another mention of Esperanto on mises.org is in Leland Yeager’s article, “Are Languages Like Markets”, QJAE(Link):
“(footnote) Here I am tempted to put in a plug for Interlingua…(main text)…Esperanto, by the way, is not the same thing as Interlingua, and is even something of an embarrassment to Interlinguists.”
comments:
It seems that, as Dale has suggested, there are perhaps a number of economists interested in studying language projects, and rightly so (Yeager has good arguments in the subject article about why economists should be interested in languages as spontaneous, unplanned orders, and to what extent several languages have been codified by a small group of people or even one man, at one time or another).
Of course, I can’t quite understand Yeager’s antipathy toward Esperanto, nor his embarrassment about it, since Esperanto predates Interlingua, and Interlinguists are in no way responsible for Esperanto (Esperantists are). Indeed, and perhaps Yeager would cringe at the suggestion, they are quite similar in construction.
To the extent that language projects such as Esperanto and Interlingua attempt to lower costs of communication, one can only wish them all well.
On their relative success, it seems that Esperanto is slightly more popular today than Interlingua, based solely upon hits in google: 2.12 million versus 437,000.
Note on the figures Gil quotes, Google hits on Esperanto vs Interlingua.
Two factors have to be taken into consideration before using those counts. First, both Esperanto and Interlingua are used in several different ways. Esperanto, besides being the name of a language, is also used metaphorically as a synonym for “universal language”, speaking generically — see e.g. its use in Derek Gregory’s article of this Monday on Znet about Abu Ghraib. Interlingua, as well as being the language produced by IALA in 1950, is also the name of a previous planned language (aka Latino Sine Flexione), and in addition has been used for many years as a common noun referring to any intermediate language used in relay translation.
Secondly, there are — at least for Esperanto — many pages on the web in Esperanto in which the word “Esperanto” is not mentioned, any more than “English” is mentioned in most English-language pages.
I’m not sure how pronounced these two effects are for the two languages, relatively speaking, but I am sure that they should be considered.
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