Language is both our most effective tool and our most powerful weapon. If you want to see how powerful this weapon is, look around.
[...] Dishonest use of language is one way of using words as a weapon. Another is designing, and enforcing, linguistic—and thus, cultural—orthodoxy.
[...] But while language—and thus, thought—policing is most obvious in totalitarian regimes, some form of it goes on in every culture. Language policing is a timeless method by which a cultural or political elite establishes and holds on to power.
[...] These are the swamps into which our linguistic weapons have sunk us.
[...] What ought to be our most glorious tool—symbolic thought, abstracted and represented in words—has become a crude weapon of warfare. Why?
[...] But the ability to read and write is also the ability to abstract. [...] meaning is conveyed through a shared agreement about abstraction.
[...] Sometimes writers can forget how pointless, or just baffling, writing for a living seems to many people. We can forget how much we deal in abstraction. We can confuse these words for the reality they are intended to convey. This confusion—of the signifier and the signified, the original reality and its distilled essence—is one of the reasons we end up with language wars. We think, at some level, that if we can control the signifier, then that control will bleed out into reality. We think that using our symbols to define reality will change the nature of reality itself.
Words are not real. I think we have forgotten this. In a culture that increasingly deals with abstracts, it is a dangerous form of forgetting.
[...] Written language was no longer visually tied to the world of physical, real, naturally-occurring things [...] Language had become internalized. It no longer represented the forms of the world around them. It represented only what they saw in their minds.
The question then became: what kind of minds?
In his 2009 book The Master and his Emissary, writer and former psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist posits, in exhaustive and often fascinating detail, the notion of what he calls 'the divided brain'. Drawing on neuroscience, history, and philosophy, he suggests that the two hemispheres of the human brain have different functional approaches to perceiving reality. While popular mythology might perceive the 'right brain' as dealing with 'emotion' and 'left brain' with 'reason', McGilchrist suggests the division is more fundamental. The brain’s right hemisphere, he suggests, understands the whole picture; the left hemisphere understands how to examine its parts. Both are useful—necessary, in fact—to human life; but a sane way of relating to the world outside our heads requires the left hemisphere to be a servant of the right. In other words, the ability to pick life apart is only useful if it is in service to a more holistic understanding.
Modernity, suggests McGilchrist, has been the process of the 'Emissary'—the left hemisphere—usurping the 'Master'—the right. Now we are paying the price.
This, if true, explains rather a lot. It explains why we believe 'reason' to be the supreme human achievement, and the basis for our society, when it is more likely that reason evolved as a tool for serving our intuition. It explains why concepts like 'intuition' are dismissed in our reason-obsessed culture, despite having a clear evolutionary basis and day-to-day utility. It explains why atheists don’t understand religion. It explains why we fail to grasp the utility of myth. It explains why we imagine the world to be a 'resource' rather than an intertwined network of living things. It explains the subject-object split which has bedeviled us since the Enlightenment. [...]
It explains, too, why our language has become utilitarian and abstracted and often toxic: why it so often serves the purpose of those who would dismantle the world or repurpose it for human use. Language no longer serves the part of the brain which, in McGilchrist’s words, 'believes but does not know'. It serves the part which 'knows but does not believe.' Our words no longer serve wholeness. They serve fragmentation, and we have used them to justify the building of a fragmented world.
If you cannot solve a problem with the mindset, or the tools, which created it, what does this mean for those whose tools are words? It is the question I am coming to now and cannot avoid. Because I have a suspicion—a suspicion I have long held but have circled around, not wanting to fully face. It is this: That words are the problem. That language itself—or at least the kind of language we use, abstracted [...]—is part of the process by which we desacralize the world. That writing, especially, is a tool of ecocide. [...]
In 1980, Russell Means, member of the Oglala Lakota people, of the Sioux tribe, activist in the American Indian Movement, occupier of Alcatraz and Wounded Knee, gave a speech about what he stood for, and why he, with many other American Indians—his preferred terminology—were rising up against established structures. Means had been reluctant to make a public speech and had to be persuaded to do so. He agreed only on one condition: that he didn’t have to write it down. He explained his reasoning in his address:
'The only possible opening for a statement of this kind is that I detest writing. The process itself epitomizes the European concept of “legitimate” thinking; what is written has an importance that is denied the spoken. My culture, the Lakota culture, has an oral tradition, so I ordinarily reject writing. It is one of the white world’s ways of destroying the cultures of non-European peoples, the imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people.'
Any notion of 'liberation', for American Indians or anyone else, said Means, had to go way beyond battles about surface structures—way beyond arguments about economics or politics. It was not a question of Marxism versus capitalism, religion versus secularism, right versus left. These, according to Means, were just different shards of the same broken window:
'Newton, for example, “revolutionized” physics and the so-called natural sciences by reducing the physical universe to a linear mathematical equation. Descartes did the same thing with culture. John Locke did it with politics, and Adam Smith did it with economics. Each one of these “thinkers” took a piece of the spirituality of human existence and converted it into a code, an abstraction … Each of these intellectual revolutions served to abstract the European mentality even further, to remove the wonderful complexity and spirituality from the universe and replace it with a logical sequence: one, two, three, Answer!'
What does this abstracted code lead to? According to Means, this 'European mind'—what McGilchrist would call the left hemisphere, or the mutinous Emissary—leads to the dis-enchantment of the world; to its reduction down into parts which can be utilized for a narrow, poisonous version of human 'progress' which can only end up destroying the human spirit and the web of life itself:
'The European materialist tradition of despiritualizing the universe is very similar to the mental process which goes into dehumanizing another person … In terms of the despiritualization of the universe, the mental process works so that it becomes virtuous to destroy the planet. Terms like progress and development are used as cover words here, the way victory and freedom are used to justify butchery in the dehumanization process. For example, a real-estate speculator may refer to “developing” a parcel of ground by opening a gravel quarry; development here means total, permanent destruction, with the earth itself removed. But European logic has gained a few tons of gravel with which more land can be “developed” through the construction of road beds. Ultimately, the whole universe is open—in the European view—to this sort of insanity.'
[...] originated in Europe [...] but it has spread so fast to all continents and cultures over the last half century. It is the triumph of the Emissary, freed from his chains by our unmoored words.
How can servant be put back into his place again, if he ever can? Primitivist philosopher John Zerzan’s ongoing explorations of the source of humanity’s 'alienation' from the rest of life led him at one point to the same question which began this essay. [...]
Two things detach us fatally from the rest of nature, says Zerzan here. Firstly, our conception of time—of the past and the future, which prevents us from simply existing in the moment. And secondly, language. If this is true—and it sounds convincing to me—what is to be done?
What is to be done? As I type that question, as the symbols which represent its meaning appear on the screen before me, I can’t help smiling. It is the kind of question which only the Emissary would ask. It is a left hemisphere question, a subject-object question. 'One two three, Answer!' as Russell Means put it. And the answer to this non-question is, of course: nothing. There is nothing to be 'done' about who and what we are, at least if that means identifying a problem and then fixing it. The notion of identifying 'problems'—of using language as a tool to pin things down, define them, dissect them, and then improve upon them—is fatally flawed. Life is not a problem to be solved. It is a state to be dwelt in. To believe anything else is to walk the path toward tyranny; the path we have long been walking, even as we believe we are on a pilgrimage toward liberation.
No, there is no 'solution' to the 'problem' of language, any more than there is a 'solution' to the 'problem' of being human. But there are other languages, and other ways of using them. Standardized globalized English, written down and spread throughout the networks, will always serve its Master, the Machine monoculture that is killing Earth. Form defines function. The Machine speaks through our words. Global capitalism has squatted on my native tongue, English, and transformed it into the language of its attendant globalized 'culture', which is not really a culture at all but the product of a world-spanning economic machine intent on erasing all boundaries, borders, and particularities in the name of Earth-eating growth.
[...] If this language—and not only this language—has become a tool of control, what kind of language could be a tool to undo it?
Another way of framing that question: what languages does the Machine not speak?
If the Emissary runs our world, then we all speak his language, because we have all been trained to. It is the language of clarity, dissection, parts and not sums, specialization, dis-enchantment, reason, theoretical rather than practical expertise, technological 'solutions', bureaucracy, abstraction, mechanism. The Emissary will, left unchecked, turn our world into a machine, because he thinks it already is one. In the process, he will turn us into machines too.
Linguistically, then, we should all be encouraging the Master to regain power. This means working with the ways of seeing and communicating which Machine culture downplays or ridicules, but which every traditional society before modernity’s advent understood and worked with. That means myth, religion, practical expertise founded upon physical work, rooted imagery, holistic conceptions of life, communication with non-human beings, poetry, complexity, questions that do not have answers, questions which are not questions at all. It means seeing time as a circle, not a line, life as a process, not a puzzle to be solved, death as a part of that life, not an enemy to be defeated. Sometimes—horror of horrors—it means embracing unknowing. It means learning to stop and be silent.
It means, in short, upending Machine society’s ways of conceptualizing the world we are part of. Impossible? Well, of course, if you are 'thinking globally', as we are all instructed to. This is no political solution. But then, this is not a political project. It is not work for a bureaucracy, a state, a 'movement'. Think like that, use those words, and you have fallen right back into the pit you just crawled up from.
No, this is small, intimate, personal work. It is the work of a life, or several lives. Until you know how to speak, you will have nothing useful to say. Until you understand what kind of weapon your language was designed to be, you will never learn what war the Machine has sent you out to fight, and how you might flee the battlefield for the mountains.
On our long journey into the age of ecocide, we forgot how to speak, or even what we should be saying. We certainly forgot how to listen, and what to listen to. Silence beckons, now. Attention must be paid. The Master must be returned from his long exile. Come. Begin.
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