states, some 90 percent of which are populated by more than one ethnic group. Interestingly enough, this number corresponds to the number of languages spoken within the world. And thus the concern: as pointed out by Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine, writing in Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages: half of the world’s 5,000 to 6,700 languages will be extinct by the year 2100. At greatest risk are the 90 percent of the world’s languages that are spoken by only 10 percent of the world’s people, groups that happen to be comprised of less than a 100,000 people.20
Language is thus an important indicator, if not contributor, to cultural preservation. As Michael Oakeshott, a now deceased but highly regarded British political theorist who in many respects represents a nontraditional “western” view, noted, a culture is:
not a miscellany of beliefs, perceptions, ideas, sentiments and engagements, but may be recognized as a variety of languages, and its inducements are invitations to become acquainted with these languages, to learn to discriminate between them, and to recognize them not merely as diverse modes of understanding the world but as the most substantial expressions we have of human self-understanding.21
One means for accomplishing this task is for museums and other public spaces to structure their exhibits around continuous endeavors to study language: the language of science and mathematics, the languages of language and literature, the language of history, and the language of philosophy. Here, within the study of such languages, men recognize who they are essentially to be: mere utterances of humanity, who have the capacity to form their own distinct character within the words of other men. As man’s character is formed by his personal moral vision, refined through the conversations with other men, languages become the means for acquiring a depth of knowledge about different visions. Thus, someone like Oakeshott goes on to describe liberal learning as “above all else, an education in imagination, an initiation into the art of the conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices; to distinguish their different modes of utterance, to acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to this conversational
relationship and thus to our debut as dans la vie humaine.”22
Equally, as Simon Schama says, “history’s mission is to illuminate the human condition from the witness of memory.”23 In other words, if men and women were left solely to the dictates of worldly appetite, they would remain arrested adolescents. Yet in the interplay of memory and imagination, properly organized by scholars to afford visitors/students the greatest respect, individuals and cultures mature because they know both from whence they came and where they might go. They do so by participating in an experience that has been structured through language and conducted over a variety of lifetimes. It is for this reason that the task before us, before museums, is, as MacIntrye points out, one of “continually trying to devise new ways to allow these voices to be heard.”24
But the fact of the matter is: in many ways museums and other institutions are already engaged in such a practice, or they are headed in that direction through practices that have become sensitive not only to cultural but to individual needs.
Liberal learning as “above all else, an education in imagination, an initiation into the art of the conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices; to distinguish their different modes of utterance, to acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to this conversational relationship and thus to our debut as dans la vie humaine."
- Michael Oakeshott
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