The subjunctive, the Joker and the three literary references

To start with, what is grammatically wrong in this sentence:

It is important that she goes to London every month.

That's right: it should be using the subjunctive. "It is important that she go."

The subjunctive is a truly wonderful thing. I just had a great conversation with a Spanish teacher and some other linguists about its cultural significance. I only know two languages, but it is fascinating sociological/anthropological practice to compare them and the different cultures they represent. The subjunctive in Spanish was originally part of the Moorish influence that permeated the new Spain for many centuries after the last Muslims were kicked out of Iberia in the middle ages. Islamic culture is a brilliantly fatalistic thing, in which people believe that events might only occur (did you notice the subjunctive there as well?) if Allah wills them to. Thus the Spanish word Ojalá, which is actually a twist on an Arabic word meaning "God willing". Ojalá is always followed by the subjunctive.

The subjunctive "mood" expresses some kind of uncertainty, and it really moulded well into the new Hispanic-mesoamerican culture that was created by Spanish colonialism in Latinamerica. The same fatalism that was present in the rampant Catholic-Islamo determinism of Southern Europe fit in perfectly with the god fearing indigenous way of life. The subjunctive had a field day. It is important to note, however, that the subjunctive culture is not simply one of superstition. It is a means of living; a form of belief that recognises that we really have no idea what is going to happen to us tomorrow. Life happens to us; we don't control it.

At this point I am going to use the first of my literary inspirations on this topic. This is a little story in the first chapter of Mikhail Bulgakov's masterpiece The Master and Margarita, in which two atheists find themselves in an argument with a stranger about the existence of God. The atheists explain that there is no really valid proof of God, so logically we cannot say he exists. The stranger says but in that case who controls everything, who causes events to happen the way they do? The atheists explain that humans have mastered everything and we can have control over our own lives. The stranger replies, but you don't even know what's going to happen to you tonight! One of the others replies, I do know; I'm going to a meeting at x place at y time etc etc, and storms off and promptly is run over by a tram.

It is a lesson to us all: use the subjunctive to express doubt about your future doings.

To return to the analysis of subjunctive culture, it is of course particularly interesting to compare it with our western indicative culture. While Spain and France were still asking God for permission to continue with their lives, the Protestant revolutions of Northern Europe left the subjunctive lying in the dust. As good old Weber famously explained, Protestantism goes hand in hand with capitalism, and the culture of control, despite its early flirtations with predestination. To be a capitalist, you have to organise yourself, and do things the way you want them done. The puritan free-marketeers of Northern Europe and America do not think that life happens to them, despite all the evidence that it does. They seek to control their surroundings and become frustrated and psychotic when they cannot. It is particularly significant that English speakers have largely forgotten that the subjunctive even exists, as illustrated by the sentence at the top of this post. We always use the indicative, even when it is grammatically incorrect; everything for us is real and beyond doubt.

Compare this once again with Hispanic culture. In Spain itself, where the Moors left several hundred years ago and the Church's importance has declined drastically since Franco's demise, the subjunctive has started to be used less and less. But in Latinamerica, where the power of indigenous tribal religions is still subconsciously prevalent, the subjunctive is doing very well. My Spanish teacher was telling me how Mexicans cannot comprehend the idea of the diary or timetable. It seems completely bizarre to them to be planning in such detail events which we have know way of knowing will even occur. To them, capitalists like the Americans and Japanese are - in the immortal words of the Joker - schemers ("Schemers trying to control their worlds. I’m not a schemer, I show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are." - for an excellent analysis of the subjunctivism of the Joker's philosophy, see here).

Latinamerican culture is ruled by the fatalism of the subjunctive. This is particularly well demonstrated by my second literary reference for today (only one more to go!): García Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold. In this novelette, the protagonist, a certain Santiago Nasar (significantly of Arabic origins) is murdered by the brothers of a women he is alleged to have slept with out of wedlock. Apart from the fact that the crime is motivated by the cult of virginity that is just as much a product of psycho Catholicism as the subjunctive culture is, the book is relevant because of the way it is told. The reader is informed from the beginning that Nasar will die at the end. The events of the tragedy are then unfolded in GM's typically dry, disinterested way, despite their extraordinary nature. Every inhabitant of the town is fully aware that Nasar will be killed, and they know the murders, the method and the time. They even let the murderers take the weapons with which the crime is committed. The murderers themselves don't even want to do what they do. The only person in the town who doesn't know the sequence of events in advance is Santiago Nasar himself, and nobody tells him because they believe there's no way he can't know about it. Indeed, Santiago is seconds away from salvation (still in his ignorance) when he finds the door of his house miraculously locked, by a freak chain events, thus forcing him to remain outside at the mercy of the killers. Everyone, including the murderers and the murdered, leave everything up to fate - they don't even try to overcome the inexorable events that unfold before them, unappealing as they are.

An sublime analysis of Columbian culture, the book makes us question the benefits of subjuntivism in excess, but it is my belief that a lack of any kind of fatalistic mindset is also incorrect, if not dangerous. And I feel that this post is as good a time as any to write down one of my pet theories that I find hugely interesting. That of fate.

When I say that this is my theory, I am being blatantly plagiaristic. Yet again, my theory is inspired by/taken from others. Inspired, in fact, almost in its entirety by our final text, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. A terrific novel, a historical analysis, a romance, a social commentary, a 19th century equivalent of a war film, there are very few genres that are not covered here. But the really inspiring bit comes in the epilogue, with Tolstoy's foray into historical philosophy. His question, which I regard as the bedrock for all sociological study, is simply: "what is the force that drives nations?" Tolstoy attacks the common view of historians that historical evens occur because of the actions of certain protagonists, like, in this case, Napoleon or Tsar Alexander or Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Do thousands upon thousands of people march hundreds of miles across an entire continent, raping, pillaging and murdering as they go, simply to get slaughtered, endure miserable conditions and then march back again, simply because someone who calls himself an emperor tells them to? Clearly not. Each man goes for his own reasons, be they money, fear or pleasure. Yet even this is not the real reason why they go. There are very few people, even in 19th century France, that can be induced to kill other people merely for money. People become soldiers because of the force that drives nations: society.

But the important thing for our purposes here is not Tolstoy's sociological insight, but his point that we have not yet discovered a method for predetermining these social forces that drive the events of history, and probably never will. This is because humans do not have the free will that they think they have. Here Tolstoy really gets philosophical, and it's brilliant. No one doubts that we should aim for freedom for all people. Yet this is clearly an impossible situation. For a start, we are limited by physics. We cannot fly, we cannot stop ourselves being crushed by falling buildings when there is an earthquake. We cannot live in the sea. Secondly, we are limited by society. We cannot go around killing people at will, because we will be locked up. Thirdly, societies are limited by other societies. If we want a patch of land, we will encounter resistance from its owners. There are a whole catalogue of other limits on human activity, those are but the most obvious. As Tolstoy explains (I'm paraphrasing): we say we have free will, and we lift our arm to demonstrate this. But could we have not lifted our arm in that moment? To prove that we could not have, we leave our arm motionless for a few seconds. But at the time when the arm was lifted, is there any way we could have exerted our free will and not have lifted it?

In short, the message is that we should recognise the role of fate in our lives a bit more. It's dangerous to think that we can control everything, when we are but one element in a massive universe of happenings. We should see the demerits of our indicative culture, and perhaps remember next time to say "it's important that she go" (inshalla).