The Dative of Disadvantage
Presented with the cruelty of the ancients, we shrink in horror: how could they think of throwing people to lions, sacrificing virgins? Sweep your hand over the spectacle of modernity and ask anyone of a certain age if the world is improving; you’ll get a rueful chuckle and anything but an affirmative. How can both be true? Perhaps we are just stupid; if not, the best explanation must be that the evolution of language brings with it, as if by accident, a theory of mind that expands, ever so slightly, as we evolve. First, we surprise ourselves with the dativus incommodi: I step outside myself, watch myself; in lieu of the elk’s raw bellow I might have let out before, I pause, I say “this is bad for me, this is unfair to me,” and lo! a norm is born. “It ought to be otherwise.” The dativus incommodi, what a teacher of mine once called “the dearest dative of them all”: the “dative of disadvantage” must have come later. “This sucks for me, Agamemnon, and it sucks for Iphigenia too.” The grammar opens up new possibilities. First, love thy neighbor. Next, love thy enemies. Root for the romantic underdogs. The world lags behind language; it is slower, less capricious, so we always think a better world than we can get. It was once worse: just try saying “love thy neighbor as thyself” to a Denisovan rhythmically pounding his neighbor’s head with a heavy rock until it collapses; imagine Tiglath-Pileser’s mirth at the idea of praying for his enemy. Hence, it is also all going to hell: we live primarily in our language, and hold the world to its impossible standards. Memory creeps back through language (where things are at least a bit better) only to turn its head back around and surprise itself with the inelastic, brutish world. Ergo, ethics is a sub-discipline of linguistics; good and evil are categories of grammar.