War on Compassion: The Impact of Massification - Free Report Sample

It may well be that the war on compassion has increasingly been advanced by viable linguistic framing that has suitably masked the brutality and oppression that ensues. Massification is one such linguistic framing that has played a critical role in creating a world devoid of emotion and especially compassion. In light of massification, people barely care to reveal their feelings even in the worst of the worst. One would think that the occurrence of some of the most devastating events in the history of life and existence, such as genocide, would evoke caring, compassion, feeling, and a more in-depth consideration and value for life (Adams, 2007).

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While the primary focus of Adams' The War on Compassion lies in instilling a caring and compassionate culture in people meant to redeem a long-ago lost consideration for the value of an animal's life, it goes a long way in exemplifying the scope of the relationship existing between language and social justice. More specifically, a focus on the process of massification raises vital questions whose account lies in exploring concern, including how people can come around to caring about animals. At the same time, another human being's death seems not to matter to them at all (Adams, 2007).

Massification is stimulated by the widespread embracing of false mass terms (Adams, 2007). When animals are only considered collectively in a culture that is blind to an animal's suffering and can only acknowledge suffering when it is subjected to a human being, compassion for animals continuously declines.

Despite the truth that humans ironically need animals as an example and measure their humaneness, unspeakable discrimination has significantly been directed towards animals in an astonishingly normalized approach where the collective end product is a perception that their suffering does not matter. More specifically, massification progresses into an inescapable dismissal of the value of animal life, culminating in their consideration as terminal animals (Adams, 2007).

Since death is a fate shared between both animals and humans, it is incredibly unfortunate that this fate, for animals, is determined by humans (Adams, 2007). How this happens is that without even a string of remorse, a human being knows when an animal will die because we fuel their demand.

Animals are fated to be consumed in their dead state. In what Adams (2007) terms "the structure of the absent referent," it is such that the transformation of a non-human subject into a non-human object eliminates the need to care about the life of non-humans. It becomes unimportant that one should care about a being whose contact has entirely been replaced; meat-eating is not in touch with the animal being eaten because its more suitable connection is food. Furthermore, it becomes arguable that any of the parties involved is suffering (Adams, 2007).

As a somewhat strengthening of the ultimate influence of massification, Mercier (1995) documents an account of how the use of one meaning of a word essentially becomes forgotten as its existence fades away due to the unintentional but sometimes intentional preference for the other. While ambiguity may present in consideration of a word with one meaning in one context and a different meaning in another context alludes to linguistic clout (Mercier, 1995).

Take, for instance, the word bank as a representation of a lexical ambiguity that does not fail to include attachments to one the edge of a river and two with connections to a financial establishment. In such cases, the content of the information contained in any bank presentation experiences a significant reduction when viewed under such situations. The expected result is that one side of the phrase "I am going to the bank" fades away compared to the other even without necessarily relying on the actual indication that this happens (Mercier, 1995).

In agreement, the massification of animals through false mass terms leads to the erosion of specificity, individuality, and particularity, not to mention the animal's uniqueness. During their existence, animals occupy a specific space in life in their uniqueness as non-human beings (Adams, 2007). This sheds light on the offensive account of the relationship between language and social justice. The context in which language applies in issues relevant to social justice determines the considered outcome for the social justice case.

In an attempt to further enhance an understanding of the dilution of empathy and the erosion of compassion that fuels and is fuelled by massification, Adams (2007) paints the picture of genocide perpetrators and what makes them successful. Essentially, these people constrain the targeted victims into a mass term. When such action has been considered, it becomes evident that the only way it can be effectively accomplished is by taking away the individuality and specificity of the targeted people and collectively perceiving them as a people, which offers a distinguishing characteristic over genocide from murder. In this case, the intent creates a demarcation between the two in that the former is bent on causing the extinction of a people; notice how people transform into a false mass term a people.

(Fausey et al., 2010) dwells on the complex role of language in the construction of agency in context. As a focal point of this research, it is evident that language serves as a critical medium through which a significant volume of information becomes known. Due to the systematic way in which the use of language by humans remains structured, communicating in conversations encapsulates many regularities that are made effective by language patterns. These patterns influence someone's perception of another as being an agent of a specific event in addition to ultimately affecting the memory of the people involved in this event. Linguistic framing virtually affects and causes disparities in how people recognize emotion, commit events to memory, and perceive objects (Fausey et al., 2010).

It is unspeakably unfortunate that animals die for their being and not for what they have done. Their death is caused by them being just animals. However, when humans die out of their being, this nature is presumably linked to an animal-like attribution. No human is killed for executing a wrong on an animal. While arguments persist that humans maintain a high capacity to begin and nurture friendships, their perception of animals as brutal and beast-like creatures distinctively constitutes the war on compassion (Adams, 2007).

Since language serves as a master of attention, it could effectively influence our culture's departure from treating animals as passive objects meant to cultivate human enterprise and transplant a new view of animals void of false mass terms (Adams, 2007). However, for this to happen, a critical focus needs to be placed on destroying the conditions that caused violence to flourish as presented by the hierarchical structuring of the world dominated by humans (Adams, 2007). Futile as this may seem, linguistic framing can effectively shape how animals are constructed, seeing as how behavior and perception are increasingly affected by language. Therefore, language can be an active agent of change positively influencing social justice.

Chomsky and Gopnik’s Views on the Nature of Language Development

Chomsky's views on the nature of language development remain significantly influenced by his consideration of language as an infinite collection of words, sounds, and phrases. The complexity of language makes it so that it cannot singularly account for language acquisition when environmental learning is considered. Furthermore, Chomsky cites that language possesses an innate characteristic alluding to the notion that before learning any language, a capacity for language is already part of us when we are born (Chomsky, 1997). Furthermore, Chomsky's approach to language includes an emphasis on the belief that an inherited ability to learn is exemplified in children's ability to acquire any human language.

The nature of developing a language lies in specific linguistic structures that are innate when children are born. These structures, language acquisition devices, are usually found as an imprint on the child's mind whose proper use enhances the child's ability to pick up the language. These language acquisition devices allow the mind of the child to encode the most important principles of any language in addition to its grammatical constituents onto the brain, facilitating the development of that language. Chomsky (1997) is quick to note the departure of numerous approaches to language from common sense.

Under the influence of the language acquisition device, only one task remains for children, which is to acquire a new vocabulary followed by applying the syntax structures derived from the language acquisition device in the formation of sentences (Chomsky, 1997). However, it is essential to note that it is challenging to develop a language, even for a child aided by the language acquisition device, by solely imitating a spoken language in their environment.

These Chomskyan views imply that the highest points of acquiring a language encapsulate the "learning" of a lot of words in a day, meaning that a child is learning words in each independent exposure (Chomsky, 1997). Nonetheless, this leads to a presumption that the concepts of the words contained in this language are previously known to the child; that is the child is already cognisant of the structures and arrangements of these concepts, and the only job that the child has to do is to label these concepts with increasingly limited evidence (Chomsky, 1997).

Not to forget, Chomsky (1997) holds the belief that this nature of developing language is significantly challenging because adult speech can be irregular and ungrammatical, in addition to, frequently breaking up (Chomsky, 1997). The implications of these are profoundly revealed through the fact that regardless of the complexities contained in each language and the similarity exemplified by the inclusion of vowels, verbs, nouns, and consonants, the language acquisition device considerably enhances the capacity of all children to gain fluency in their native languages concluding that the perception of language as a complex system of abilities is misplaced and that a lot of other techniques are involved in language development (Chomsky, 1997).

While Chomsky’s view of the nature of language development is based on essential concepts such as cognitive naturalism and the poverty of the stimulus argument, which cites the ability to learn a language as innate, Gopnik’s views are fundamentally founded on the theory. It is posed as an alternative to Chomsky’s hypothesis on the innateness of the nature of language development (Gopnik, 2003). The central view in Gopnik’s argument regarding the nature of language development is that the two critical Chomskyan hypotheses exist in an imbalance with each other. Essentially, Gopnik’s views are somewhat challenging to the arguments presented by Chomsky.

For instance, Gopnik argues that when the cognitive naturalism thesis is subjected to scientific knowledge, there must be a predetermined belief that learning mechanisms, language acquisition devices, allow the human mind to acquire theories and abstract knowledge from limited evidence (Gopnik, 2003). Therefore, if this belief is held, the argument that these same mechanisms support the development of other types of knowledge, including linguistic knowledge, persist. It presents the theory theory concept, which is representational of the connection between cognitive development and the formation of scientific theory.