REFLECTIONS ON SYMBOLISM, LEARNING, AND SOCIAL CHANGE David B. Timmins I was once Sunday School Teacher to a single twelve year old in our small branch in China -- a very, very smart young boy indeed. Sometimes we have some quite brilliant conversational exchanges that led the class in all sorts of interesting directions. Following one such class I promised myself I would try to recapture some of our thoughts on paper, giving genesis to this paper. We know that everything we learn (or teach) is based on relating new experience to previous experience. Nearly all of this is done through language. And, reduced to its basics, what is language? A series of arbitrary sound amplitudes, frequencies, and intensities to which a given language group has assigned agreed meanings. In short, language is no more nor less than sound symbols. Virtually all languages have a corresponding written form which in which marks on paper represent sound symbols -- symbols of symbols. Language as Symbol and Language Drift Linguists tell us, based on crude estimates of word retention among related Indo-European languages, that before the evolution of written languages, as much as a third of the vocabulary of a given language changed every century. This can perhaps be best understood by reflecting on the vast number of new words adopted by each generation of kids. Perhaps the drive for this is a matter of asserting independence from their parents by setting off their lingo from that of dad and mom through a set of "code words". This has apparently been going on generation after generation since humankind came into the world. And what started out as mere pronunciation or word choice differences (dialects) among nearby clans or tribes or rival gangs has resulted in mutually unintelligible languages in as short a period as 150 or 200 years. Writing introduced some standardization and preservation of vocabularies, slowing down vocabulary drift somewhat. As demonstrated by Medieval experience, even written languages took no more than perhaps 300 to 500 years to become mutually unintelligible. Indeed, few native English speakers can understand more than the broad outlines of Shakespeare, written in Elizabethan English, let alone Chaucer's Middle English. And Beowulf, is beyond any but the most learned except in translation. My son Mark, a professional linguist, once wrote an insightful paper in which he observed that as new words enter a language's vocabulary pool, they tend to displace older words which often then drift off to the periphery, not infrequently becoming disused archaisms. In time, some if not all such archaic forms are resurrected, often taking on new meanings. The new meanings are not infrequently related in some way to the older denotation -- sometimes as direct antonyms. A case in point is the contemporary use of "bad" in Black English, meaning "really good". In my father's generation "square" meant "upright, just, dependable". By the time I was a teen, "square" had come to mean "old-fashioned, stodgy, a bit behind the times". In our day, another, more positive, element has entered into the language drift equation. The economics of radio and TV insist that languages are now being heard far beyond regional dialect boundaries -- indeed the VOA and BBC are heard worldwide. My childhood home in the mid-Rockies was influenced by both Mid-west and West Coast speach patterns. As a young professional, I had the experience of being in a class at the State Department's Foreign Service Institute taught by a Linguistics Professor by the name of Smith, whose boast was that he could place anyone within a hundred miles of his birthplace by speech pattern. Seems that there are a number of phonemes which set off sub-Mason-Dixon Line speech (greazy vs greasy) from New England speech) from Mid-Western speech and West Coast speech ("Mayry" vs "Merry" for Mary, " rout" vs" root" for route, and "crick" vs "creak" for creek). So happened that My mother was a Mary (whose name my father always most carefully pronounced Mayry in the fashion of his English-born father). I had never tasted anything "greazy" in my life; and I spent many a summer with my cousins playing on Summit Creek (pronounced 'creak'). I was the only person in my group of twenty whom Professor Smith was unable to place. Jump ahead forty years: US News & World Report informed the world in an early 1992 article that the center of gravity for US speech patterns had shifted west and "standard American speech" is now located in the Provo-Orem-Salt Lake-Ogden conurbation. I assume Mr. Smith was unable to identify my regional dialect because I had none. I was the lone example in my group of "standard American speech". Back to our topic. As a result of the influence of nationwide radio and TV, regional dialects are now being weakened and, instead of being intensified and drifting apart -- many languages are becoming more standardized. From personal observation I know this is true in France, Spain, and Great Britain. Indeed, the BBC recently adopted the policy of hiring news readers (announcers) with Scottish and Transatlantic (American) accents. Never in the heyday of Greek trading coine, or Roman Regimental Latin, or Nineteenth Century diplomatic French, has as great a proportion of the world's population ever spoken one language as now speak English. It is estimated that as much as a fifth of the earth's population reads, understands, or can make itself minimally understood in the language which took form between 1100 and 1600 A.D. in the quasi-isolation of one of the world's smaller islands. Other Teaching Symbols The notion of language as "symbol" can without difficulty be extended to more technical aspects of language. Simile, metaphore, and allegory, and other figures of speech can be seen as evocations of mental images (picture symbols) going beyond language itself to assist in the task of transferring understanding from one mind to another. What has been said about language can, moreover, largely be repeated with respect to national dress, customs, folkways, and religious rites and beliefs. There has always been tension between preserving the inherited ways of the past and borrowing exotic new beliefs and ceremonies from near and far. With specific reference to Christianity, the simple teaching and practices of the Primitive Church were, within three hundred years, substantially substituted by more exotic Roman Court ritual and Court dress and the intellectually more acceptable philosophical teachings of the Greek Academies, particularly neo-Platonism. Symbolism, Morality, and Lifestyle In our man-boy Sunday School exchange, we at this point agreed that God's teachings are not arbitrary commands intended to deprive man of any chance at happiness; but, rather, are based on His age-long experience with countless other worlds, reflecting what has been learned about the best way for men to get along with each other, minimizing war, injustice, sickness, and personal conflict, with the objective of maximizing human joy. We then considered how a loving Heavenly Father, bound to leave his children to exercise their Free Agency walking by Faith, so as not to bias their earthly probation, would set about slowing down drift away from safe doctrinal moorings. Our discussion brought us back to symbols, the sine qua non of both teaching and learning, bearing in mind that God is the Master Teacher. We decided that God would clearly use both language and ritual in powerful symbolic form to teach the meaning of life and how to pursue the optimal lifestyle to minimize unecessary misery. As the first, and central ritual, animal sacrifice was taught to Adam upon his being driven from the Garden. "And after many days an angel of the Lord appeared to Adam saying: Why dost thou offer sacrifices unto the Lord? And Adam said unto him: I know not, save the Lord commanded me. And then the angel spake, saying: This thing is a similitude of the sacrifice of the Only Begotten of the Father, which is full of grace and truth. Wherefore, thou shalt do all that thou doest in the name of the Son, and though shalf repent and call upon God in the name of the Son forevermore" (Moses 5:6-7). Can anyone conceive of a more powerful or evocative symbol than the sacrifice of an innocent lamb or dove to keep generations of primitive men looking forward to the promised coming of a Savior and the hope of resurrection? Yes, some minor bloody cruelty is involved. But men still slaughter livestock in greater quantities than perhaps any previous generation of history. And without any ritual or life-style benefit whatsoever. Anticipating the consummation of His own sacrifice, which Christian missionaries within a few hundred years would make known virtually worldwide, Jesus during the Last Supper with his disciples, replaced animal sacrifice with a "symbol of a symbol" fully acceptable for ritual purposes. "And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me. Likewise also the cup . . . saying, This cup is the new testament of my blood, which is shed for you". (Luke 22:19-20). I challenge anyone to conceive of symbols more contrived to impress indelibly the minds of primitive folks with the future sacrifice of One who would save mankind from their sins through His own death than the ritual slaughter of an innocent animal -- and following His personal sacrifice, which became one of the more notably reported events of history, than the weekly partaking of broken bread and wine to keep them in mind of his death and teachings. Likewise with God's second powerful teaching symbol: baptism. I have written elsewhere about the meaning of baptism as portrayed in its symbolic content. Again, none of man's attempts at improving on the Master Teacher's original symbol comes close to incorporating all the symbolic elements contained in simple immersion: burial in the water, reminding even the eight year old that one day even he must die; coming forth from the water , bringing the promise that even dead, each will one day be raised from the tomb; at a second level of symbolism, being washed in wat er, the universal solvent, symbolizing being made clean of all previous sinful tarnish; while, at a third level of symbolism, experiencing a second birth from a watery womb , being born into a new family, the family of Christ, thus becoming an adopted child of Christ and taking upon oneself His name and manner of life. Sprinkling just doesn't do it -- nor does aspersion. Finally, worthily partaking the symbols of his death each Sabbath "that they may witness unto thee, O God, the Eternal Father, that they do always remember him, that they may have his Spirit to be with them" (D&C 20 77-79), symbolically renews the convenant of baptism (and other covenants), making one as clean and new as if one were rebaptised each week. Nearly all other God-considered and God-selected symbolic teaching/learning rites are similarly pregnant with meaning, though conferred only in Holy Temples and beyond discussion in this paper. Neither God's original words nor His rites can be improved upon. They were instituted by the Father from earliest days and, at least through the first five dispensations, served to keep a faithful minority in active memory of the purpose and meaning of earthlife and what manner of lifestyle will enable the dedicated to avoid most of the major miseries or life, even should the events of life bring personal catastrophe -- as with Job. It seems that by the time of the Dispensation of the Meridian of Time (Christ's lifetime) human curiosity and invention had speeded up to such degree that even the most powerful of symbols failed to keep people focussed on the essential truths for more than a few centuries, after which time came the Great Apostacy ("The earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof; because they have changed the ordinance and broken the everlasting covenant". Isaiah 24:5). In the Dispensation of the Fullness of Times (our day) it has been confided that despite our being no more immune from the trials and apostacy of previous ages, man will this time not lose hold of the central truths of the Plan of Salvation. One can intuit that this is because the inventions of printing, film, radio, video, and rapid world-wide air transportation, have so materially slowed down the drift of language and rite and so fixed our knowledge of even remote history that no modern equivalent of the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria will be able to wipe out man's knowledge of the Restoration. And because the Church has had time to build upwards of 50 temples spotted around the world to the end that Church members everywhere now have the chance to receive a personal "endowment of knowledge from on High". These powerful teaching/learning symbols will, as designed, enable enough worthy folk to know and fulfill the purpose of their creation that the "whole earth [will not] be utterly wasted at His coming." (Joseph Smith 1.39.)