The War about Words is Killing Us
The Sunday Poem was about language and since there’s much more to say on this theme, I am extending it to the Muse-Ings this week. And oh boy, there’s a lot to muse about. While we Canadians smugly pointed at our marvellous ‘Online Harms’ Bill as proof that we are the most illiberal nation in the west, why, good old Great Britain came out as equally nuts and is passing or has already passed similar legislation. Which makes me think that all of our addled politicians never learned that old children’s playground ditty:
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me
BTW, searching for a suitable image on Google brought a tidal wave of victims looking sad; the above image of defiance was one of the very few I was able to find. The idea that you can be strong, stand up for yourself is not being encouraged, that is clear. Being a victim is simply ‘safer’ in our timid new world order. In other words, you’re not allowed to be a normal, sometimes aggressive, human. In Scotland you can be prosecuted for saying nasty things to your dad in your own home, just to be specific, and the British Tories are currently writing into law a bill just as extreme—in the name of curbing extremism, of course. One could laugh, but I feel more like crying because all this strange and menacing Angst about mere words is so deeply ingrained by now that we have a hard time imagining a life without it. What the hell is going on?
We’re mistaking the map for the actual reality. Words are not things, they are a map of our thoughts, an attempt to cram our feelings, fears, hopes and dreams into symbolic form. Which is fine until you get captured by words and when someone yells insults at you, you are no longer able to shrug and say, well, fine, and walk away to tend your garden, or real life.
As a writer using a second language, my extreme focus on words has exacted a price: I am sometimes tone deaf to the implicit meaning hidden in a conversation. I live more in my head than is good for me. I get into heated arguments all too easily. Strangely, that isn’t just my personal problem; the entire culture suffers from it. We are extreme in our insistence that language is all that matters. We have language wars, propaganda wars, word wars, all of them aided and abetted by the unsocial media. The TV screen was an extension of our eyes, wheels extensions of our legs, computers the extension of our rationality and the Internet is a kind of global brain. According to the great Marshall McLuhan, no less.
The other driver is our divided brain; it is driving us literally crazy because we tend to listen only to the left side, the one that has the words. Dr Iain McGilchrist, a naturally shy and reclusive scholar, is so worried about this tendency that he has come out of his intellectual high tower to explain it to us in interminable YouTube videos. He knows that we no longer read big books, and his are gigantic. So is his message and his warning that we should really really right now stop with the Left Brain Hemisphere already. It’s time.
For more than two decades, IM has pleaded with the public to re-introduce the attention of the Right Brain, the one that adds context, imagination, feeling and the senses of our body. Somehow, this message isn’t getting through with the outcome yet to be determined. It’s not looking good for us.
Our extreme focus on words without context is driving the edgy feeling of hysteria that is poisoning our public sphere. Our use of language is no longer a means of communication, freedom, and good government. It has become a weapon we fear. We have forgotten the lesson of our playground. In so doing, we are making it a warground, a place where normal human communication is impossible.
One of the ongoing frustrations with the ‘vaccine wars’ or even the attempt to unpack what part politics played in choosing a certain ‘scientific’ path, such as making kids wear masks or, worse, shutting schools for months, is that most of us do not speak ‘vaccinology’, first year biology or worse yet, statistics. If you haven’t had years of training in those specific ‘languages’, you’re at the mercy of the experts that are now widely derided. Language isn’t working for you; it’s working against you. The ongoing and extremely bizarre cult of the Woke who insist that you must use words in THEIR fashion or else, is another case in point.
Which brings me to what appears to be a different form of language problem altogether: our current doomsterism regarding so called ‘artificial intelligence’ or AI. To be clear: I’m with all those who protest that this thing isn’t ‘intelligence’ at all, rather, it’s an automated form of grabbing data and assembling it and then spitting it out according to pre-set formulas, that is, Algorithms. This process resembles what our left brain does though it does it much more efficiently; however, it leaves out the more significant parts of human intelligence, that is, imagination, consciousness, emotion, the body, and a sense of Beauty. Even Einstein famously said that imagination is more important than intelligence. And recently, the rather troubling but brilliant Israeli historian, Yuval Noah Harari, said pretty much the same thing during a sophisticated discussion of AI at Cambridge when he insisted that ‘consciousness’ is the most important part of human intelligence and no, a machine such as AI, doesn’t have it and isn’t likely to develop it any time soon.
A machine is not self-aware because it doesn’t have a body. In a fascinating way, the threat of this artificial partial ‘intelligence’ is forcing us humans to remember and rethink who we are and how we differ from the machines we love.
Know Thyself, that famous exhortation on the temple of Apollo, is suddenly extremely relevant to our very survival. Because if we are no different from machines like AI, than we are clearly headed for extinction. But of course, that is pure wordplay without any basis in real life. Though there are peculiar people like the ‘transhumanists’ who worship at the shrine of digital machines we ourselves have created, yearning to merge with them as if they were, indeed, God—most people who do not spend most of their time thinking, know this is a preposterous idea and dismiss it out of hand. So maybe it will not get out of hand, after all. Notice I am using sleight of hand (!) metaphorical phrases based on our body part we call ‘the hand’. We all might want to become a little less captured by words and remember that they are not the ‘real thing’.
I’m waiting for the good citizens of my beleaguered badly governened nation to take to the streets and occupy the equivalent of the White House, our Buildings of Parliament in a city called Ottawa, colder than Moscow in winter. And shout so loud that our idiotic but dangerously deluded political class will stop with the word wars, already. And think, for once in their pitiful lives. It’s about time, which is running out.
Again a convincing essay, dear Monika, which I have shared on Facebook. The danger of "word" is an old an important issue, Goethe in "Faust" points it out, as, for example, in the witty and ironical piece of advice Mepistopheles hands out to the "Schüler": "...mit Worten lässt sich trefflich streiten, / Mit Worten ein System bereiten, / An Worte läßt sich trefflich glauben, / Von einem Wort läßt sich kein Jota rauben." Thank you, Monika!