Showing the Flag

 

 

    One of President Clinton’s most famous quotations can serve as the epigraph for this post: “That depends on what the meaning of is is.”  He was ridiculed for it at the time, but it was in fact a recognition of the desirability and often enough the necessity of precision in linguistic communication, too often incomplete, unclear, or ambiguous.  So let me move on to the two SAs (Saint Augustine and Samuel Alito) and the upside down flag.  Considering such topics inevitably raises the status of human language as a system of signs and the larger question of non-verbal sign systems generally.  It should be obvious that the study of language must involve the study of sign theory.  One of the Greek words for “sign,” sema, is the root of the technical English linguistic term, semantics.  A famous Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure used the term semiology to refer to both verbal and extra-verbal sign systems.  It is interchangeable with another fancy word, semiotics.   It means: the study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation.

 

Around the year 400 Saint Augustine wrote one of the most brilliant books about language and signification the world has yet seen.  Its title (De doctrina christiana) is usually translated as On Christian Doctrine, but this is misleading.  Latin doctrina does not mean “doctrine” as that word is now mainly used.  It means “teaching” in the active sense of pedagogy: how we go about teaching and learning.  Augustine intended it as a preface to biblical study.  All teaching, he says, is about one of two matters: either res (things) or signa (signs).  “But things are indicated by signs.”*  Augustine was trying to defend the adequacy of human language to communicate truth.  Ancient Sophists, like their modern progeny, the so-called deconstructionists, liked to argue that precise communication was impossible because it depended upon the use of words, which are by nature fatally ambiguous.  “Words are explained only by other words”.  In terms of achieving clarity, that is like “bringing an unlighted candle into a dark room.”

 

Augustine makes a distinction between two kinds of signs.  Some signs are natural, meaning deriving from the world of nature.  Think for a moment about fire.  Smoke, heat and visible combustion are all signs of fire.  They are natural signs of the thing, fire.  They are easily interpretable by every human being on earth.  But what about the word “fire” itself?  It is a sign of a different kind.  It is a conventional sign—meaning one that has been established by the agreement of a certain group of people, namely English-speakers.  Speakers of other languages will use other signs: (ignis, pyr, feu, fuego, Feuer, etc.).  If someone offers you a gift, you are more likely to be pleased if you are in Birmingham than if you are in Berlin, as Gift is the German word for poison.

 

Of course, there are many non-verbal signs that play important roles in all our lives: traffic lights, for example, and many road signs, among a myriad of others.  The other SA of this essay, Samuel Alito, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, is currently involved in a controversy with broad semiological implications with a non-verbal sign: our nation’s flag.

 

The flag, it turns out can do much more than indicate national identity or patriotism.  And the marked “indeterminacy” of the idea of “patriotism” is suggested by the fact that the January 6^th invaders of the Capitol sincerely claimed it as their motive.  The only demonstrator actually shot dead by the police, Ashli Babbitt, bore no conventional weapon but was said to be using a poled American flag in an aggressive fashion.   Clear video evidence records others using flag poles as clubs.  Now it is not suggested that Justice Alito committed any violence; but his private residence does have a flagpole, and there are photographs clearly showing the American flag flying upside down (i.e. with the blue quadrant with the fifty stars at the lower right rather than the upper left.)  Now, it is not easy to produce a simple meaning for the American or any other national flag.  It is a national symbol, but different people will have a variety of different associations with it.  But by semi-convention an inverted flag is “a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property."  This is the language of the semi-official “American Flag Code.”  But we already now have two semis—meaning (for me) that there is no definitive meaning to the display of an inverted flag, an ambiguous act subject to much subjective interpretation.  Alito’s critics claim that since the inverted flag was carried by some of the Capitol rioters on January 6, 2021—a claim that seems plausible, though one I have not been able to confirm from easily available iconographic evidence—the flag so displayed is an approbation of unlawful insurrection.  So Justice Alito must be a—a what?  According to his own testimony this whole thing had nothing to do with him—it was his wife!—not that he acknowledges any impropriety or assigns any definite meaning in her flag display.  The meanings being imputed to him are murky, but in every case unflattering.  Even if he is not an insurrectionist, he must be expressing a belief that the nation is in mortal danger?  Of course, a number of the most vociferous complaints about Alito’s signals come from folks who subscribe to their alleged content—that our nation faces a serious, indeed an “existential” threat, should Mr. Trump be elected to a second term.  This concern parallels that of many others who find a similar threat in Trump’s possible re-election.

 

                             "Signs, Signals, and Code" Merit Badge Patch

 

But there is a branch of sign theory that does deal with non-verbal signs of this sort extensively.  Nonverbal communication is important enough to merit its own Boy Scouts’ merit badge.  “The Signs, Signals and Codes merit badge covers a number of the nonverbal ways we communicate: emergency signaling, Morse code, American Sign Language, braille, trail signs, sports officiating hand signals, traffic signs, secret codes and more.”  Quite a lot more, if you think about it: thumbs up, thumbs down, middle finger, cut throat, clenched fist, index finger sealing lips, etc., etc.  When you come right down to it, signs, signals, and codes seem the very essence of Augustinian linguistic theory.

 

A major component of the preparation for the merit badge is the study of flag-talk, or semaphore.  The word means “sign-bearing,” and signifies a system that tries to convey verbal messages by means of creating a conventional alphabet of corporeal gesture by waving colored flags. This system grows ever more obsolete in an age of electronic communication, but it still exists.  The purpose is to achieve significant verbal communication over fairly long distances where the sender is visible but not audible, especially between ships at sea.  The would-be communicator holds the brightly colored flags (usually red and yellow) and “spells” out the message by moving body and flags in conventionally agreed upon patterns.  An adaptation of the technique for nighttime use employs flashing lights patterned to the alphabetical Morse code: most famously, SOS!  You might say our nation began with such a signal: One if by land, two if by sea…

 

Semaphore alphabet

 

            The subject of interest to the old Stoic logicians, and to their critic Augustine, was the possibility of precision—and thus lack of ambiguity—in human verbal constructs.  But the “meaning” of flags, and of the motives for their display, is often anything but clear.  So I must conclude that flag-waving is a rather poor way of communicating complex or nuanced ideas.  It is also manifestly subject to gross misunderstanding and practically invites intentional distortion. 

 

 

In a very crucial moment of Virgil’s Æneid, the hero’s meeting with Cumaean Sibyl, the hero begs that she deliver her prophecy in oral rather than in written form.  We may find the implied idea that spoken language is invariably clearer than written language surprising; but we have no Demosthenes, no Cicero in our public conversations.  I wish I could believe that the two verbal “debates” agreed upon by Presidents Biden and Trump promised substance and clarification, but on the basis of past experience, I cannot.  It is that fear that my quotation marks hope to imply.  More like bringing an unlighted candle into a dark room.

 

...and I on the opposite shore will be...

 

 

 

 

*Omnis doctrina vel rerum est vel signorum, sed res per signa discuntur.

 

 

Sign Me Up

 

            The title of one of Augustine’s most brilliant and accessible works—De doctrina christiana (On Christian Doctrine) is likely to mislead and possibly discourage potential readers who probably would find its contents fascinating.  In our English language doctrine usually means a specific dogmatic proposition or article of faith, but doctrina here refers less to what is taught than to what teaching itself is.  He begins by saying that all doctrina deals with one of two objects, res (things) and signa (signs).  Oversimplifying only wildly, the world of res is our STEM world: empirical observation, measurements, calculation, material analysis and so on.  The sign-world of signa is our humanistic world of interpretation and moral and aesthetic analysis and judgment.  Augustine was curious about the world of things (science), but this particular book is devoted to that of signs, concerning which he makes another two-part distinction.  All signs are either natural or conventional.  Smoke on the horizon is a natural sign of the thing fire.  Any sentient human being can interpret the sign correctly.  But how about the word “fire” (ignis in Latin)?  It too is a sign of fire, but only by convention among speakers of Latin.  Other groups, according to other conventions, will call it pyr, fuoco, brand, feu, ogién, and fire.  The identification of human language as conventional sign systems is what makes Augustine’s book an important contribution  to language theory to this day.

 

            Not everybody acknowledges the kinds of signs that animate this essay, but they permeate our language in such phrases as signs of life, signs of spring, signs of the times, or the tired joke that “it’s a sign that you’re getting _______ when you ________".  I have now enjoyed the excellent protections of our national Medicare insurance for many years.  For quite a while, eligible recipients could use their Social Security cards for purposes of Medicare identification.  A few years ago, however, partly in an effort to combat fraud and identity theft, the Federal government developed a special Medical Insurance card with an eleven-part identification code, a mixture of majuscule letters and Arabic numerals.  The transition complete, these new cards became, in theory, required for all Medicare business.  We swim in an ocean of little paper or plastic rectangles in order to go places by bus or subway, buy things, gain admission to museums, drive machines, or get a free cup of coffee as a reward for buying twenty overpriced ones.  One can carry about in one’s wallet those few that may be needed on a daily basis.  In addition I made two special little packets—one marked “Medical,” the other “New York”—to be fetched when needed from   their special box and returned to it.

 

            Trouble is, I hardly had gotten the new Medicare card when I lost the whole “Medical” pack.  I used it at a doctor’s office and when I went to fetch it a couple of weeks later, it was not in the designated box.  Lost!  If you are far enough along the spectrum that you make little packages of business cards in the first place, you’re certainly far enough along it to obsess over losing one of them.  The lady in the gospel who swept her house “diligently” in search of her dropped drachma had nothing on me.  I turned the place upside down.  No luck.  And there were annoying practical consequences.  Despairing of finding the card, I sought to replace it.  The Medicare website has to be among the top ten digital hells in the entire national bureaucracy; and that, as we say, is saying something.  Lasciate ogni speranza…

 

            Months passed, and at this point my story becomes cloudy and serious because my wife had a serious health event that involved scary tests and the kind of scary specialist consultation concerning test results at which a husband wants also to be present.  My nervous preparations for this meeting included a desire to dress halfway decently.  I went to my rack of shirts and chose one of the better ones, long unused during the Pandemic.  The moment I took it from the hanger I could sense a slight surplus weight on the left side.  Something was in the pocket.  Without investigating, I immediately knew what it was, and more importantly that it was a sign, a very good one.  This consult was going to be okay.

 

            At first blush, this experience is so embarrassingly easy to demystify that I scarcely have the nerve make an anecdote of it.  I wore a certain shirt to a go to a medical appointment many months ago, and I chose the same shirt for the same purpose a week ago.  In the interval the shirt was simply hanging unvisited in its closet.  Yet those facts, which certainly are facts, have embarrassments of their own.  The shirt is not one that I would be likely to wear without a jacket.  I always (I thought) secured the little packet of documents in the inner left-hand pocket of a jacket.  So firm was my misplaced faith in the inviolability of this practice that when I was doing what I considered a root-and-branch search for the lost items, and ransacking the pockets of every jacket I own, including the highly improbable ones in dress suits and even (absurdly) a tuxedo, it never entered my mind to work through a row of shirts.

 

            The “signs” that Augustine was interested in were biblical.  Like his Jewish and Christian contemporaries he regarded the sacred text as a vast web of allegories.  The signs I have encountered during my life tend to be secular and often enough banal—the kind of amusing wake-up calls from the Universe that Carl Jung called “synchronicities” or meaningful coincidences.  I was very impressed years ago by Arthur Koestler’s book The Roots of Coincidence—at least to the extent that I could follow it.  Like all flirtations with ESP (“extra-sensory perception”) Jung‘s speculations concerning synchronicity have been assailed by materialistic physicists as pseudo-science.  But all dogma, whether spiritualistic or materialistic has to be assessed within the context of an individual life experience.  For there is more than one kind of empiricism.  Physical theory teaches us that effects have causes; that does not preclude them from having forms or echoes as well.  My own experience leads me to suppose, slightly paraphrasing Hamlet to Horatio, that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your departments of philosophy.  It was a mathematical genius, Blaise Pascal, who wrote “The heart has its reasons that reason does not know.”

 

            There is a difference between being open to the possibility of providential signals and the attempt to cultivate them through necromancy, the examination of the inner organs of birds and beasts, Tarot cards, ouija boards, or the I Ching.    Divination created a kind of extra-linguistic conventional sign system needing interpretation by an elite priestcraft.  The search for “signs” by state augurs and oracular interpreters was a major part of the Roman state religion, but some philosophers disdained it for its fatalistic “insider trading”.   Kings wanted to know in advance which side would win a prospective battle before deciding on fight or on flight.  In Lucan’s Pharsalia the great moral hero Cato declines the opportunity to consult the oracle of Jupiter Ammon, for his interest is in the justice rather than the prosperity of the cause for which he fights.  Our word “auspicious” derives from the Latin term for an interpreter of the predictive meaning of bird flights!  Self-interested clients wanted to know whether a prospective journey, marriage, horse purchase, or financial investment was auspicious.  One form seemed specially designed for literature professors: bibliomancy, or the use of great texts like the Odyssey or the Aeneid as philosophical bingo cards.  Virgil himself has some harsh things to say about ancient divination—though that of course is Dante’s Virgil (Inferno 20: 29-30).  The tedium of Medicare cards lost and found is typical of my small and banal sign-life, one far from shared and conventional but individual and eccentric.  Yet perhaps there is still time for an upgrade.  Jung thought you could by training fine-tune your resonance to synchronicities.  But then he himself had gotten off to a flying start by finding a gold bug on his windowsill at the very moment he was listening to a patient’s account of her dream of a golden scarab.  I have never stumbled upon a golden Medicare card.