The Wrong Lesson

As a beginner, one of my earliest experiences with actually trying to use Esperanto was quite negative. In the letter I sent to the US chief-delegate of UEA, explaining why I wanted to become a delegate, I said that I wanted to drive Esperanto out of California. That's not what I intended to say, of course. I intended to say that I wanted to expand Esperanto out from California, where it was particularly strong, to the rest of the country. I got a scathing letter in return that railed at me for suggesting such a thing. I had had enough other positive experiences with Esperanto that I wasn't completely turned off. I continued studying Esperanto and did eventually become a delegate. But I learned an important lesson.

The lesson that I learned is that there are malicious people everywhere. Like the kid I know who got beat up at a Quaker retreat, I learned that just because someone is learning Esperanto doesn't make them an altruistic believer in peaceful dialog.

I worry, however, that I learned the wrong lesson.

In dealing with people from other countries, I have found that experienced Esperanto-speakers are generally careful about jumping to conclusions about what other people say. When someone says something that seems surprising or outrageous, experienced speakers generally understand that it's a good idea to reserve judgement until you probe a bit more for meaning. They know that many Esperanto-speakers speak the language with only the skill of a komencanto or progresanto.

At the same time, in spite of the obvious collapse of the entire organized Esperanto movement, in every Esperanto-organization to which I've belonged, there has been an underlying element of hostility and animosity toward anyone that tries to introduce change. Humphrey Tonkin, in various places, put it this way:

No sane person, who saw close-up the internal battles in the heart of the Academy of Esperanto during the last four or five years (like every other member, I consider myself the only sane person in this important body), could avoid the conclusion that many of our people did not learn even basic lessons of interpersonal conduct, or, that they learned but ignore them, because their only means of validating themselves is through creating maximum confusion and conflict among others.

We have similar issues in my local town government. It's a saying in English that "Eighty percent of success is just showing up." A corrolary is that crazy people, who have nothing better to do than to stir up trouble, always show up for everything. In Esperantujo, this problem is particularly acute, because our community tends to be desperate for "new recruits" and, hence, our standards for accepting new members tends to be quite low.

Furthermore, Esperanto-speakers are individualistic and iconoclastic. They don't just go with the flow -- if they did they never would have learned Esperanto in the first place. Last year, in comments to the article I wrote Supreniro kaj malfalo de Esperanto , I wrote this:

In my experience, leading an Esperanto organization is very difficult because esperantists are nowhere near agreement -- neither regarding goals nor means. It's more difficult than herding cats. It's like trying to herd together a sloth, a swallow, a porcupine, a hedgehog, and a slug. The sloth wants to sleep. The swallow is gone. The porcupine throws quills everywhere. The hedgehog rolls up into a ball. And the slug just goes his own way paying no attention to the others. Anything you do as leader will raise a chorus of unhappy -- even angry -- voices. Only if you do nothing will the fewest number complain.

This problem is that leaders get worn down and quickly discover that the strategy of doing nothing is the only way to avoid the shouting. This problem is endemic in all our organizations. Or leaders give up and leave the organizations to the crazy people. The crazy people keep showing up -- because they're crazy and don't have anything better to do. Which leads me to what really worries me.

First, I worry that I'm one of the crazy people. Certainly, almost anyone who doesn't speak Esperanto already thinks I'm crazy because I waste any time at all on a dead language -- let alone trying to grapple with the community of crazies to build a better organization for it.

What I worry about most, however, is that the problem is actually with Esperanto itself. Maybe we imagine that Esperanto works better than it actually does. Maybe the reason that our organizations fail is because we actually can't communicate effectively using Esperanto. Anyone watching the Esperanto movement from the outside would have to be REALLY BATSHIT CRAZY to think that our organizations demonstrated the kind of capacity for intercomprehension that you'd want for, say, the United Nations. And I worry that this is the lesson that I maybe should have learned all those years ago.

Convince me I'm wrong.

(This an English translation of an article that appeared as La Malĝusta Leciono at Libera Folio.)