RKG Interview

 Results of an Interview with Ronald Glossop

 By John Taylor; 2007 October 14, 18 Mashiyyat, 164 BE

 I started off asking Dr. Ronald K. Glossop what he thinks about Noam Chomsky. Answer: mild approval of Chomsky's scholarship but not of the solutions he offers (if, indeed, any are discernable).

 Dr. Glossop started his interest in peace studies when he was on the debating team in High School. The rules required every debater to alternate, taking one side of every issue and then, later, the other side. This was just after World War Two and the new United Nations was a common topic of debate. He found that he preferred to be on the side of world federalism. Later he attended Carthage College, now in Kinosha, Wisconsin. He was studying for the Lutheran ministry when in a Christian education class a crucial turning point arrived. The question at issue was whether Christian education involved spoon-feeding ready-made conclusions or only giving out the ingredients, offering food for thought and letting the laity make up their own minds. The class members took the former side, he and one other student stood alone in disagreeing; to Glossop that was not education but propaganda. So ended his dream of being a minister, and so began his study of philosophy.

 Ronald Glossop got his doctorate at Washington University, specializing in David Hume's ethical theory. At the time, the academic fashion was what was termed the emotive theory of ethics, as exemplified by A.J. Ayer, and especially by Charles L. Stevenson's "Ethics and Language."

 The idea of the emotivists was that when I say "That is wrong," what I am really saying is "I do not like that," or "I get a bad feeling from that." RKG felt the inadequacy of that. There has to be a factual element in ethical judgments and Hume, centuries earlier, had laid out exactly that idea. Both are involved in moral judgment, factual and emotive factors. We start off in empathy, but we need to combine that with information.

 He was teaching at Portland State in 1966 when, like so many in his generation, the Vietnam conflict got RKG politically involved. A professor was needed to lead a discussion about the Kent State and other shootings, and he took on the job. In 1969 he headed the World Federalists, and still does, though last year they changed their name to "Citizens for Global Solutions." He worked for the Mundialization of his college campus, and he was instrumental in having it qualified to fly the flag of the United Nations, and it still does. In 1973 he initiated a department of Peace Studies in his school, one of the first in the world.

 It is RKG's core belief that there is a crucial distinction between conflict and war. War is large scale, violent conflict. But there are many good and positive expressions of conflict. It need not be violent. Such paths to peace are what democracy is designed to work out. Democratic government channels conflicts into positive, constructive ends.

 It was while RKG was researching his widely used textbook on peace, "Confronting War," that he found out about Esperanto and decided to try to learn it. Esperanto, it seemed to him, would solve the toughest barriers blocking the world off from true, lasting peace. So he began to pull strings to get a course in Esperanto taught at his school. If he got twelve names, including his own, the course would sail and he could learn the language while he was at it.

 As the result of an odd concatenation of circumstances they got a visiting professor who had been invited to teach a Shakespeare course, Pierre Janton, at the last minute to teach the course. He happened to be one of the most prominent scholars of Esperanto in the world. RKG had been arguing with a colleague in the language department -- an expert in Italian who was slated to teach the course -- about the pronunciation of the word in Esperanto for "today," hodiaŭ." RKG held that it should be sounded out literally, directly, and Janton said that he was right. Janton held that RKG's lack of qualification in languages was an advantage in Esperanto, and that he should not hesitate in taking over the teaching of introductory courses. (that is what RKG was doing most of the weekend in Silver Bay, teaching the introductory course)

 At one point in teaching the Esperanto course at the university level, RKG asked for a show of hands: how many of the students knew another language? Most knew a couple, many knew several foreign languages. He realized that teaching Esperanto as a specialized linguistic curiosity was not what the language is all about. It is designed to be learned early and used to build the bases of peace. He was reaching them too far along in their education.

 So he turned to the earlier grades. He happened to have a cousin in the local junior high school, so he volunteered to go there early in the morning before school started and teach the language to a class of gifted children. This, he found to be the most rewarding experience of his teaching career. While teaching introductory Esperanto, he saw the need to connect classes and teachers on an international level, so he started "Infanoj cxirkaux la mondo," or, Children Around the World, (www.icxlm.org) which publishes a magazine and mediates pen pals among classes of beginners in various lands. He recently made this part of the American Esperanto group, formerly called ELNA, now renamed "Esperanto USA." It has a full time secretary running the organization and website, which promotes an introductory textbook for kids called "La Bela Planedo," by Charlotte Kohrs. (http://www.icxlm.org/bela/index.htm)

 It was getting late and my handwriting at this point became an illegible scrawl. The only thing I can make out is the following comment Dr. Glossop gave about the history of Esperanto as the world language. Not very many people know this, but it was Francophones, not Americans or other Anglophones, who quashed Esperanto at its birth. When the League of Nations formed the first resolution on the table was whether to adopt Esperanto as an international auxiliary language to be taught in every school. It was about to be passed when the French delegation, who felt that French should be the international language, sent a philosopher, Henri Berson, an Esperanto speaker himself, to go to the deliberations and have it killed. He succeeded.