WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THE WORLD OF THE SPHERE?
“Globalisation”, one of the most distinctive definitions of today’s world!
In 2002 Prof. Dr. Tuncer Gülensoy, a faculty member of the Department of Turkish Language and Literature at Girne American University, shared his studies showing that we have command of only 5 per thousand of Turkish, a language that is very rich in vocabulary and grammar. We learned of the finding that, although there are 78 thousand root words in Turkish, the greater part of the population uses on average around 400 words in daily life. Against 78,000 root words, 400 words! This result draws attention to how much we read and think, and to the development of our way of life on the basis of analysis.
Prof. Dr. Gülensoy continued as follows:
”In the research we carried out, we witnessed that people, especially in rural areas, use only 40–50 words a day. A very large segment of the population does not truly know Turkish, which has 78 thousand root words alone and has the distinction of being one of the richest languages in the world. For this great mass makes do with around 400 words on average. The other words, since they are almost never used, all but waste away. For this reason, people whose power of expression is diminished frequently use, in their speech, sound-fillers such as (şey), (yani), (ııı), even though this is not elegant at all.”
In that case, let us from here remind Prof. Dr. Gülensoy of the glad tidings that we are sure he knows. The bounty of Twenty Twenty: what has been added to the 50 words identified in rural areas and the 400 words used by a great mass. Now, in a sentence used by every section of society in the course of the day, we can hear global, globalisation, globalists, global gang and so on. And also pandemic, mask, social distance, new normal, quarantine, çevrimiçi, online, distance education, just among ourselves, home office, stay at home, work from home, learn from home, the paradigm has shifted and is shifting, it has slipped and is slipping…
Apart from the word “globalisation”, we can find exact equivalents for the meanings of the other words. But can you find the plainest explanation of the meaning of the global world, the one and only brand of our mask, and of the equivalent of the word root it carries on it?
What would you say to learning the expression “global”, which takes root the more it winds itself around our tongue and has become the opening word of every paragraph in every area of social life, from the world of the sphere? Two books that describe the world of the sphere: The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century and Flatland.
Good heavens! “Wasn’t the world supposed to be round? Flat or round, are we starting over again now…?” Calm down. The world is still round in shape, but its way of life, the world of our mind, has turned out, under the heading of globalisation, to be perfectly flat!
Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland, which has lost none of its topicality from the day it was published to this day, is indeed a work that we might call the strongest reference in the efforts to analyse our problem of “What is happening to us?”.
We may say that there is benefit in reading the cult work entitled Flatland by the famous English Writer Edwin Abbott for these days, and in thinking. He was a very well-known teacher. He encouraged hundreds of his pupils to be educated in a great many subjects. From Sanskrit to chemistry, he devoted his life to theology and to Latin and Ancient Greek literature, and he was at the same time a well-known writer. The story he devised told of what the lives of the people in Flatland were like in two dimensions. And it described how these people lived chained in their own caves, that is, in a state in which, in the world of their minds, they were condensed with bodily feelings. Within their own limits, since they were not in a consciousness programmed to perceive the third dimension, they could not see triangles, squares or circles. The people of Flatland were programmed to live on a flat surface and, as a result of these programmes of existence, were condemned to a life without height (depth). What is more, they could not look at their world from above either, for their world had no “up”. This book was written with the aim of criticising the age of Queen Victoria. Even though the interpretation of the book has reached us with such an explanation, it was in fact speaking of people who cannot become aware of the features of their own creation. The book describes a way of living inside a cave, as if chained to the wall of our mind, on the blue planet that is our world.
He published his book not under his own name but as “A Square”. It points to the differences of view between dimensions. The details concerning the place of woman in society are important. We can think of the different points of view between dimensions as differences of paradigm. He stated clearly how passionately we are attached to the paradigm into which we were born. We understand that we meet the paradigm in which we have to live after the change with a perception of fear and anger. He is a writer who turns upside down everything known to humankind, which has come to believe that it lives in a 3-dimensional universe. In Flatland there is no height (depth). That is, everything consists of width and length. In addition, there is also the dimension of time. In other words, they too, just like us, are beings subject to time. In fact, when we draw our own flat land on a perfectly flat, snow-white sheet of paper, leaving our ideas to one side, we may understand the matter better, perhaps!
Let us get to know our author’s lands a little. In Pointland there is no dimension; the number of dimensions is zero. It is the land of points. In Lineland there is a single dimension. It is the linear land of straight lines. In Flatland there are two dimensions. It is the planar land of squares, circles and triangles. In Spaceland there are three dimensions. It is the land of cubes, prisms and spheres.
You may ask what this book has to do with our real subject. The reason we approach the existence and structure of Flatland through our author’s work is a sphere that enters his life in a strange way. Our hero addresses the “Sphere” as Your Lordship. His Lordship explains the existence of the third dimension to this two-dimensional being, and even makes him live it. He points out that if a three-dimensional universe is possible, four-dimensional and even multi-dimensional universes may be possible too.
The author’s concern is the limitedness of the human mind, the human being’s approach to limits. “If limitation, on account of its physical properties, is in the nature of a being, how can that being overcome this limitation? How can we explain colour to someone who lacks sight, or music to someone who lacks hearing? How can a person explain the different wavelengths of light or sound? He can gain the experience of touch. The mechanism of reason can have an understanding based on intelligence… “But this can never be compared with the level of understanding that would be produced by seeing a garden, even for a few seconds, or by hearing a symphony of Beethoven.” This is how Isaac Asimov puts it in his piece entitled Limitations, written for Flatland. The outcome, unfortunately, is not quite as expected! Our hero, instead of going beyond (his) limits and living the truth, chooses to go gadding about between dimensions.
Where do you think Flatland is? Can we understand what this means in the moulded cave of the mind? With the knowledge that the fire reflects on the wall of the cave of our mind, full of prejudices and bounded by fears?
The people of our country no longer take an interest in subtle things. They have come to be afraid of thinking even about the most basic matters, and indeed even of questioning the basic concepts. They try to hide their fears under a garment of anger. We have lost our reason; we have chosen merely to warm ourselves with obedience in the corners of belief.
Have we no time at all to stop and think, to question…
“What more is going to happen to us?”
Keywords: Girne American University Turkish Language and Literature Edwin Abbott
Translated from the Turkish original.