Letter to the Editor of New Scientist magazine
Dear Editor,
PAH! To borrow the deaf expression, finally now's the time when I'm able to articulate, in English, rather than my native American Sign Language, my sentiments as a deaf person standing at the crossroads of the impending paradigm shift. Will our so-called culture and bonafide language as we know it last much longer, or will deafness and its supplementary contribution to civilization, dissipate into the dustbin of history as an evolutionary anomaly cured by Man? I can very well say that I am deaf due to evolution, due to the fact that my connexin-26 gene determined my deafness, or should I consider myself intelligently created? Evolution sure is a failure, if deafness is a flaw of Nature, something to be fixed by humans. Either that or be considered a form of God/Allah's ineptitude and/or wrath. At least we are no longer called "deaf and dumb" these days. I like my form of reality much better than the others imposed upon me.
Even though I'm one of your most avid American subscribers, there is but ONE thing that consistently nags me: your apparent blindness (or should I say deafness) to how the mere presence of deaf people contributed to civilization's growth.
It irks me that you apparently can find such "superpowers" in blind people, such as Ray Charlesian superhearing (29 January 2005), or Rainmanesque supermemory of certain Autistic persons (18 June 2005), all the while consistently ignoring how society may benefit from those who live in a world of silence. In your sustained focus on curing deafness via cochlear implants, genetic engineering, nanotechnology etc., seem to inadvertently have became "deaf" to the loud deafness-induced achievements. Take Beethoven or the painter Goya, who were both deaf. As well were the wives of Samuel Morse and Alexander Graham Bell, hence their respective gifts of Morse Code (he tapped into her palm to communicate) and the telephone (which stemmed from Bell's failed attempt to invent an electromagnetic hearing aid for his profoundly deaf wife). If it was not for AGB's (failed) crusade to "eradicate" the scourge of deafness, Elisha Gray would have been a household name today. A notable exception, though, for that New Scientist has recognized Henrietta Swan Leavitt and her keen super-eye, who discovered Cepheid variable stars, which enabled Edwin Hubble to conceive of the Big Bang, hence Hubble being a household name today (25 December 2004).
The list goes on and on. Thomas Alva Edison, being hard-of-hearing, was shut out from the hearing world of his peers. His recourse was to retreat into his own little world and devour books like food, amassing the knowledge which enabled him to become The Inventor. Or, take Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, another deaf bookworm who later became the father of modern Russian cosmology.
One very important thing that deafness brings to us today is the understanding of how the brain works via the study of cognitive neurolinguistics. Sign language, the de-facto mode of communication for the world's deaf, have given intelligence researchers a tool to communicate with animals, such as the signing apes KoKo the gorilla (26 February 2005, 14 August 2004) or Nim Chimpsky the chimpanzee (famously named after Noam Chomsky).
Another gem that the deaf might have to offer is being the harbingers of world peace. You gave two very good examples of how the mere presence of deaf people can itself be a role model for peace-making between the Arabs and Israelis (26 February 2005). I don't know how many other joint Israeli-Palestinian research projects there are, other than the one aiming for a genetic cure of deafness. Talk about a catch-22 situation! If they cure deafness before peace is achieved, they will no longer have cause to collaborate. Moreover, you have another solution staring right at your face, a solution for the great communications barrier between the deaf and hearing: sign language. It is apparent that the hearing members of the Al-Sayyid Bedouin tribe in Israel has no problem using sign to communicate, despite the deaf numbering only 80 out of 3,500 (22 October 2005). Corollarily, they are also a vivid, living example of how Arabs and Israelis can coexist peacefully.
As soon as society embraces sign language as an effective visuospatial mode of communication, along with the spoken and written form, the people of the "deaf culture" will start embracing the modern marvels of technology that will finally enable us to comprehend the resonant undulation of the air that conjures up music nirvana in our minds. Thankfully, time is on our side. It takes time for both the technologies to be perfected and for sign language to earn wide acceptance as a language in its own right. In fact, it is the best mode of communication for babies - I had a 6-month headstart on my linguistic development, luckily because my deaf parents used sign language AND English from the beginning. They were able to discern my babbling from my signing, and start fostering my language development at a very early age (15 July 2004). I travel all over the world, never encountering great difficulties communicating with any deaf person I might bump into in some non-English-speaking third world country.
Now, if all these enlightened deaf fellows had an entire auditory cortex to utilize in the way that Stevie Wonder utilizes his visual cortex, you may very well find within the deaf population the Einstein-Newton hybrid that you have been longing for quite a while (03 September 2005, 20 August 2005). In fact, as a person merely standing on the shoulders of giants, I find it exceedingly easy to elucidate the whole basis behind the equation E=mc2 to my signing deaf peers, even those with inferior reading/writing abilities. Goethe and Einstein's biggest complaint was the general difficulty of language to be able to describe the abstract concepts of science and physics (27 August 2005). I have here a solution for the linguistic conundrum of using arcane symbols and equations to describe very simple and basic principles of Nature: sign language. Might just as well be the deaf world's gift to humanity before we inevitably get cured en masse.
Thank you for opening up your mind and giving us a glimmer of hope.
-Jason Lamberton
PAH! To borrow the deaf expression, finally now's the time when I'm able to articulate, in English, rather than my native American Sign Language, my sentiments as a deaf person standing at the crossroads of the impending paradigm shift. Will our so-called culture and bonafide language as we know it last much longer, or will deafness and its supplementary contribution to civilization, dissipate into the dustbin of history as an evolutionary anomaly cured by Man? I can very well say that I am deaf due to evolution, due to the fact that my connexin-26 gene determined my deafness, or should I consider myself intelligently created? Evolution sure is a failure, if deafness is a flaw of Nature, something to be fixed by humans. Either that or be considered a form of God/Allah's ineptitude and/or wrath. At least we are no longer called "deaf and dumb" these days. I like my form of reality much better than the others imposed upon me.
Even though I'm one of your most avid American subscribers, there is but ONE thing that consistently nags me: your apparent blindness (or should I say deafness) to how the mere presence of deaf people contributed to civilization's growth.
It irks me that you apparently can find such "superpowers" in blind people, such as Ray Charlesian superhearing (29 January 2005), or Rainmanesque supermemory of certain Autistic persons (18 June 2005), all the while consistently ignoring how society may benefit from those who live in a world of silence. In your sustained focus on curing deafness via cochlear implants, genetic engineering, nanotechnology etc., seem to inadvertently have became "deaf" to the loud deafness-induced achievements. Take Beethoven or the painter Goya, who were both deaf. As well were the wives of Samuel Morse and Alexander Graham Bell, hence their respective gifts of Morse Code (he tapped into her palm to communicate) and the telephone (which stemmed from Bell's failed attempt to invent an electromagnetic hearing aid for his profoundly deaf wife). If it was not for AGB's (failed) crusade to "eradicate" the scourge of deafness, Elisha Gray would have been a household name today. A notable exception, though, for that New Scientist has recognized Henrietta Swan Leavitt and her keen super-eye, who discovered Cepheid variable stars, which enabled Edwin Hubble to conceive of the Big Bang, hence Hubble being a household name today (25 December 2004).
The list goes on and on. Thomas Alva Edison, being hard-of-hearing, was shut out from the hearing world of his peers. His recourse was to retreat into his own little world and devour books like food, amassing the knowledge which enabled him to become The Inventor. Or, take Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, another deaf bookworm who later became the father of modern Russian cosmology.
One very important thing that deafness brings to us today is the understanding of how the brain works via the study of cognitive neurolinguistics. Sign language, the de-facto mode of communication for the world's deaf, have given intelligence researchers a tool to communicate with animals, such as the signing apes KoKo the gorilla (26 February 2005, 14 August 2004) or Nim Chimpsky the chimpanzee (famously named after Noam Chomsky).
Another gem that the deaf might have to offer is being the harbingers of world peace. You gave two very good examples of how the mere presence of deaf people can itself be a role model for peace-making between the Arabs and Israelis (26 February 2005). I don't know how many other joint Israeli-Palestinian research projects there are, other than the one aiming for a genetic cure of deafness. Talk about a catch-22 situation! If they cure deafness before peace is achieved, they will no longer have cause to collaborate. Moreover, you have another solution staring right at your face, a solution for the great communications barrier between the deaf and hearing: sign language. It is apparent that the hearing members of the Al-Sayyid Bedouin tribe in Israel has no problem using sign to communicate, despite the deaf numbering only 80 out of 3,500 (22 October 2005). Corollarily, they are also a vivid, living example of how Arabs and Israelis can coexist peacefully.
As soon as society embraces sign language as an effective visuospatial mode of communication, along with the spoken and written form, the people of the "deaf culture" will start embracing the modern marvels of technology that will finally enable us to comprehend the resonant undulation of the air that conjures up music nirvana in our minds. Thankfully, time is on our side. It takes time for both the technologies to be perfected and for sign language to earn wide acceptance as a language in its own right. In fact, it is the best mode of communication for babies - I had a 6-month headstart on my linguistic development, luckily because my deaf parents used sign language AND English from the beginning. They were able to discern my babbling from my signing, and start fostering my language development at a very early age (15 July 2004). I travel all over the world, never encountering great difficulties communicating with any deaf person I might bump into in some non-English-speaking third world country.
Now, if all these enlightened deaf fellows had an entire auditory cortex to utilize in the way that Stevie Wonder utilizes his visual cortex, you may very well find within the deaf population the Einstein-Newton hybrid that you have been longing for quite a while (03 September 2005, 20 August 2005). In fact, as a person merely standing on the shoulders of giants, I find it exceedingly easy to elucidate the whole basis behind the equation E=mc2 to my signing deaf peers, even those with inferior reading/writing abilities. Goethe and Einstein's biggest complaint was the general difficulty of language to be able to describe the abstract concepts of science and physics (27 August 2005). I have here a solution for the linguistic conundrum of using arcane symbols and equations to describe very simple and basic principles of Nature: sign language. Might just as well be the deaf world's gift to humanity before we inevitably get cured en masse.
Thank you for opening up your mind and giving us a glimmer of hope.
-Jason Lamberton
1 Comments:
Jason, you have to get that letter published.
I hope the editor listens to you. IF not, I'm sure others will!
--Betsy, 1012
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