I looked forward to reading Hannas' most recent work, having greatly enjoyed his previous book, "Asia's Orthographic Dilemma". I knew Hannas to be both a thorough and entertaining scholar, with persuasive if somewhat controversial arguments; I believed that if he kept up the same standards he showed in his last book, I would probably enjoy this one as well.
Unfortunately, "The Writing on the Wall" fails to deliver. In the book, Hannas seeks to prove a bold thesis -- that the creativity of East Asians (Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese) is hampered by their scripts. He narrowly defines "creativity" as the ability to come up with revolutionary ideas in modern science.
The first third of the book starts off badly. Hannas runs through the various methods that Japan, China, and Korea use to acquire Western -- primarily U.S. -- technology. But, surprisingly, he seems to think that just by highlighting this well-known fact, he already proves one of his main points: that East Asians lack creativity. He does this by completely ignoring context and making inapt comparisons.
South Korea, for example, has an economy and population about the size of Spain. What sense does it make to compare South Korean research efforts to those by U.S. scientists? In that kind of comparison, South Korea will naturally come up short. But would it come up short in a comparison with a country of its own size and development, one that used an alphabetic script? Hannas doesn't even consider it.
And while China is a huge country, its ability to provide first-rate R&D facilities and the funding to run them is greatly limited (I don't even include the obvious point that China's basic educational infrastructure is so weak in comparison to the developed countries in the West that such spending would probably be wasted anyway, even if it had the money). Does this mean the Chinese are not creative? Or is the more likely explanation that China's development is not high or broad enough yet to support those kinds of projects? Hannas doesn't even consider these questions.
Japan, however, is a large and fully developed economy, flush with cash (even after ten years in an economic rut), and equipped with a solid educational infrastructure. Certainly a comparison between it and the U.S. is worthwhile to consider. But even here, Hannas does not explore the issue enough. He admits, for example, that Japanese corporations are where most of the country's R&D money is spent, and where practical applications are put at a premium; he also says Japan spends less per capita on R&D than the U.S. But he doesn't connect the dots. Isn't a more parsimonious explanation for why Japan appears less creative than the U.S. due to economic rather than linguistic factors?
In another section of the book, Hannas argues that the development of an alphabetic script gave rise to Greek science. He does not consider, however, why the Romans - who also had an alphabetic script - had a stable, long-lasting, wealthy, and relatively free (for its time) empire not noted for its science. Again, Hannas does not consider these points, probably because he would have to admit they do grave damage to his thesis.
There are other arguments to consider. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some said the U.S. didn't have enough creative people, that its collective mindset was of a more practical bent than theoretical. It could produce a Ford, but not an Einstein. Not until just before WW2, after a large influx of European scientists into the U.S., did this situation change. Could the U.S. have produced the atomic bomb or gone to the moon without these Europeans? Would its universities be as well respected as they are now if these scientists had not been forced or felt compelled to leave their homes to come to the United States? Not likely. Hannas' refusal to consider these other cases in his comparative study raises questions about the validity of his arguments for the cases he does consider.
Perhaps to deflect such criticism of his thesis, Hannas says several times in his book that his idea about East Asians lacking creativity is not controversial in East Asia, that it is the conventional wisdom there. But Hannas bucks the conventional wisdom so often in his book - especially in linguistics - I'm not sure why he would take the East Asians' word for this particular commonly known fact. In my experience, East Asians are very hard on themselves in some areas, unwilling to take credit where credit might be due. Part of the reason they are such fearsome competitors is due to this nature. That they hold symposiums on the lack of creativity in their schools has probably as much to do with their perceived second-rate status in this area as it has to do with anything else; in other words, if they are not the best, they consider it a problem.
Due to space constraints, I cannot go over the final two-thirds of the book in any detail. Suffice it to say, the book improves somewhat, but not enough to save it. Hannas does cite an enormous amount of interesting studies in these chapters, but unfortunately he is still unable to make a coherent argument. Instead he tries a scatter-shot approach against the East Asian scripts, hoping that enough of his material hits the mark to do damage. Some does; some doesn't. What one finally comes away with from this book is similar to what one came away with from Hannas' first book: East Asian scripts are unwieldy and inefficient. But the author fails to advance his new case that they actually inhibit scientific creativity.
ISBN-13:
978-0812237115
ISBN-10:
0812237110
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