[A-List] Talking Ourselves to Extinction

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

by Richard Heinberg

MuseLetter #181 / May 2007


Language is a powerful meta-tool that dramatically amplifies cooperative human
efforts to control the environment. Language also opens the possibility for
religion and science - which otherwise would not exist. Language helped generate
our current ecological dilemma. Can language help solve it?

In systems theory and evolutionary biology, the word emergence describes the
development of complex systems or organs; an emergent phenomenon is one based on
the interaction of simpler elements but whose characteristics cannot be
predicted based on a thorough knowledge of those elements. In the course of a
species' evolution a variation may appear that is retained because it confers an
advantage in terms of existing functions; but once in place, the new
characteristic may act in combination with other capacities of the organism to
make truly novel and unexpected functions possible. Life itself has been
described as an emergent property of matter, and sensation and mind are emergent
properties of higher organisms.

Human societies are dynamic, complex systems, and most of their signal features
are understandable as emergent phenomena. It is a fascinating thought exercise
(I've been at it for two decades now) to attempt to trace series of events in
the past in order to identify the most decisive developments that enabled the
emergence of industrial civilization. Of course, societal complexity depends on
humans' ability to capture increasing amounts of energy from their environment,
and so their genetic and social attributes that facilitate energy capture are
crucial. Which of those attributes are keys to understanding the entire process?

Clearly, most of the emergent features of complex societies (their economies,
technologies, and governments) depend on language. Now, language itself is an
emergent phenomenon, a link in a long chain of them; however, it was a
profoundly consequential one. In the grand edifice of human society, it should
be considered a foundation stone.

The questions of how and when language evolved are hotly debated. Some
archaeologists argue that the relatively sudden appearance, roughly 40,000 years
ago, of counting sticks and new kinds of hunting tools suggests that language
arose then. However, humans - including Neanderthals - were anatomically capable
of speech much earlier; indeed, there is fossil evidence that the main areas of
the brain associated with language (Broca's area and Wernicke's area) started to
enlarge up to 1.5 million years ago. Moreover, humans' ability to spread to
regions outside of Africa, and especially to islands, may have depended upon
their use of language to convey information and intention and to coordinate
tasks. It may be that we have been using language so long that our brains,
throats, and chests have all evolved in tandem. The situation is likely similar
to what has happened in the computer industry over the past few decades: just as
hardware and software developers work cooperatively, one designing according to
the needs and capacities of the other, our own internal hardware (brain and
speech faculties) and software (language) have become, in a sense, made for one
another.

Part of the problem in determining when and how language arose may lie in
definitions. The term language can refer in a vague or general sense to any sort
of communication; but this usage is not always helpful. All animals communicate
using sound, color, scent, or gesture. Even plants and fungi communicate with
one another using chemicals and gene-packets transmitted via soil or air. Human
language differs from these kinds of information transfer in its level of
abstraction, its multiplicity of symbols, and in the complexity of its grammar
(or system of rules for the manipulation of symbols). It is one thing to signal
a somatic or emotional state or a general intention, but quite another to
discuss events, including hypothetical ones, in the future or the past, or in
distant places.

Language made these things possible, but much more as well. Language generated
our peculiarly human form of self-awareness: we can talk about ourselves, talk
about talking, and think about thinking. Our relationship with our environment
also changed, as language enabled us to coordinate our thinking and behavior
across time and distance in a way that was unprecedented, making us a far more
formidable species (compare the population size and environmental impacts of
humans today with those of chimpanzees or gorillas). Writing only exacerbated
these trends, heightening the level of abstraction in language and widening our
ability to convey thoughts and align collective action. If talking helped
organize effective hunting bands, writing enabled the formation of nation states.
Add printing, radio, television, and fossil fuels, and here we are today.

But with language came an array of unintended consequences - which, of course,
is just another name for emergent phenomena.


Language and Religion

"In the beginning was the Word", begins the Gospel according to John. In Genesis,
creation commences with a series of spoken commands, starting with "Let there be
light". The creation stories of the ancient Egyptians, Celts, and Mayans
likewise emphasized the generative potency of language.

This striking coincidence, noted by many scholars of world mythology, cloaks a
supreme irony: while religion ascribes magical power to words, there are reasons
to think that religion itself may be an inevitable though accidental outgrowth
of language.

It is interesting to speculate as to whether non-human animals have awareness of
something that humans might recognize as a spiritual dimension of existence. Do
dogs and cats have near-death or out-of-body experiences? Do birds experience
awe and wonder when watching the sunrise? There is no way to know for sure. In
any case, it is fairly clear that no non-human species has developed a religion
- if we mean by this term an organized set of beliefs about the supernatural,
and a set of practices oriented to the service or worship of a divine being or
beings.

Why not? What is unique about humans that would lead us to construct religions?
Are we set apart because we alone possess souls? Or do our brains contain some
unusual structure shared by no other animal? Research into "neurotheology",
while controversial, offers some clues: religious or spiritual experiences seem
primarily to be associated with the right temporal lobe of the neocortex,
implying that feelings associated with such experiences are normal features of
brain function under extreme circumstances. Nevertheless, it is likely that the
problem of religion is as much an issue of "software" (language) as it is one of
"hardware" (brain structure).

Let us suppose that language was initially used only for practical purposes such
as coordinating hunting efforts. Slowly, haphazardly, people must have developed
rudimentary elements of vocabulary and grammar, often in order to aid with
planning - an activity inherently implying the senses of location, time, cause,
effect, and intention. Women, men, and children began to make simple sentences
to ask and to explain - who, what, where, when, and why? Once the abilities to
pose and answer such questions were in place, these inevitably began to be
applied to less immediately pressing concerns. The Pleistocene hunter went from
asking, "Where did these bison come from?" to "Where did stars, the Moon, the
Sun, and people come from?" Hence the mythologies of aboriginal peoples
everywhere are rich in origin stories. Language was seductive in its power: once
a tiny morsel of reality had been verbally nibbled off, its incomplete digestion
provoked a recurring hunger to take another and yet another bite, and eventually
to swallow the world whole.

As power over the environment grew, as society became more complex and
formidable, religion mutated accordingly. Hunter-gatherers saw nature as alive
and filled with spiritual presences that could directly be engaged by way of
shamanic practices. Such beliefs and behaviors grew out of these people's direct
interaction with their environment, and fit their needs for social cohesion
within an egalitarian context. With division of labor and thus a hierarchical
organization of society came full-time specialists who got their food not
directly from nature but from other humans; some of these specialists were
spiritual intermediaries (priests) who appealed to sky gods detached from nature
and the lives of commoners. With writing, myths about the gods could be codified
and carried to distant lands (this story is told in fascinating detail in Bruce
Lerro's From Earth Spirits to Sky Gods) {1}.

These side effects of language have had their own perplexing and sometimes nasty
consequences. With religion we have come to believe absurdities, and
hallucinated gods and demons have become central to people's lives. Here in
America in the early 21st century it is considered normal for people to talk
regularly with a shared imaginary friend, and to believe that this particular
imaginary friend is uniquely efficacious - to believe, in fact, that to talk to
any other imaginary friend is blasphemy. While this behavior appears more than a
tad daft to non-participants, the latter rarely comment on it publicly because
to do so would be impolite, and because the believers are so numerous and so
vehement in the defense and promotion of their practices. Now, talking to
imaginary friends may serve a useful purpose: back in the early 1980s, Julian
Jaynes theorized that conversing with hallucinated gods provides a way for
otherwise walled-off verbal and non-verbal areas of the brain to interact with
one another. Nevertheless, the practice clearly risks personal and societal
disengagement from reality. Many people have been killed simply because they
talked to the wrong imaginary friend, or refused to talk to the right one.

German orientalist Max Mu"ller (1823-1900), who virtually created the discipline
of comparative religion, put the matter succinctly by asserting that mythology
is a "disease of language".

Perhaps the word disease seems too harsh. After all, mythology has its uses as
well: as Joseph Campbell never tired of saying, myth gives us meaning. And
surely meaning is a good thing. Nevertheless, the human need for meaning again
highlights our obsessive and dependent relationship with language. Meaning is
always attached to symbols: we invest a symbol with meaning, and that meaning is
conveyed to whoever correctly interprets the symbol. We see a sentence written
in an unfamiliar language and we wonder, "What does it mean?" As we have become
ever more hooked on linguistic symbols, we have come to see nearly everything as
if it were a sign for something else. AWe look to stars, tea leaves, and
coincidences for meaning. The universe is talking to us! Myths are verbal
narratives that seek to unpack the meaning of existence. We seldom wonder why it
is that life itself must have meaning in order for it to be satisfying; is it
possible that existence could be sufficient unto itself, with no need for an
embedded message?

Religion consists of more than just mythology, though. Surely religion evolved
at least partly to coordinate and moderate collective behavior via systems of
morality and ethics. The senses of good and evil, of honor and shame, have
become such powerful internal motivators for humans that even most atheists are
continually compelled by them. There is nothing quite like this among other
species, whose behavior tends to be less learned and more genetically scripted,
and who therefore do not engage in the practices of rewarding or punishing one
another's behavior nearly to the same degree we do. Ironically, morality often
contributes to humans' most brutal acts, which have little precedent in other
animals (witch burnings, as just one example, were morally motivated).

Nevertheless, the development of complex societies would surely have been
difficult if not impossible without morality - which had previously often been
turned toward ecological ends, as early societies codified their needs to
moderate reproduction, avoid incest, and protect natural resources via their
taboos ("Do not kill the red kangaroo during its mating season!"). But then,
once religion and society had mutually mutated in the direction of abstraction
and complexity, morality became at least partly unhinged from environmental and
genetic necessity and began increasingly to adhere to written myths about the
verbally hallucinated sky gods.

From an ecological point of view, the results were sometimes inadvertently
salutary: religious wars (such as the Crusades) helped temporarily to moderate
human population levels - though comparable results had been achieved by some
hunter-gatherer societies using gentler methods such as herbal contraception.
Some religions also promoted celibacy among priests, monks, and nuns, again
helping to stem population growth. But as people's verbal obsessions began to be
taken up with myths that had more to do with consolidating the power of
religious elites than with regulating people's relations with the natural world,
religion served increasingly as an instrument of social and ecological conquest.

Nevertheless, if language muddied humans' connections with nature by way of
verbal speculation, regimentation, and hallucination, it also fostered a
countervailing tendency.


Grammar, Reason, Logic, and Evidence

Other animals observe, plan, draw conclusions from experience, and continually
revise their mental pictures of reality. These capacities, the foundations of
reason, are not uniquely human. Logic, which is the study of reasoning, is
uniquely human, however, because it requires language.

Logic is inherent in grammar, which people developed and used long before there
were grammar schools, or schools of any sort, and young children still absorb
the basic rules of grammar intuitively without having to be drilled in them. In
language, each coherent packet of meaning (such as a sentence) must adhere to
some agreed-upon standards if it is to be useful. In this regard a sentence is
like a mathematical equation (mathematics, after all, is itself a language):
before an equation can be correct or incorrect, it must conform to basic rules.
Unlike the statements "2+6=8" and "3+4=9" (one of which we would recognize as
being true, the other false), the statement "=5+7 -" cannot be said to be true
or false; it is simply unintelligible because it is not organized as a complete
equation according to the rules of arithmetic. (Quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli,
who was known for his abhorrence of sloppy thinking, once famously commented
that another scientist's work was "not even wrong".)

Grammar and logic give us the basis for making comprehensible statements about
the world; linking logic with empirical evidence helps us formulate true
statements and recognize when statements are false. This, again, is a
long-standing practice: millennia before the scientific method was codified,
people relied on feedback between language and sensory data to develop an
accurate understanding of the world. Are the salmon running yet? Let's go look.

However, not all possible statements could be checked empirically. If someone
said, "These berries taste good", that was at least a matter for investigation,
even if everyone didn't agree. But the situation was more complicated if someone
said, "The volcano smokes - that must be because the gods are angry; and if the
gods are angry it must be because we haven't provided enough sacrifices". Unlike
the observation that the volcano was smoking, the following two statements and
the reasoning behind them had no checkable basis - unless the gods could be
called into the village commons and publicly queried about their moods and
motives (the attempt to do so may have led to the origin of shamanic trance
mediumship). This was magical thinking - reasoning based on mere correlation
rather than an empirically, publicly verifiable chain of causation.

It was inevitable that magical thinking would flourish given that there were so
many subjects of interest for which empirical investigation was impractical or
irrelevant. That situation continues: there is no empirical basis for answering,
once and for all and to everyone's satisfaction, questions like, "Does God exist?",
"Who am I?", "What happens to us when we die?", or "What is the greatest good?"

Yet however strong the temptation to engage in it, magical thinking when tied to
religion failed to provide much practical help in industry or commerce. As these
limits came to be appreciated, and as industry and commerce expanded,
philosophers and students of nature began to construct the formalized system of
inquiry known as the scientific method. Here was a way to obtain verifiable
knowledge of the physical world; better still, it was knowledge that could often
be used to practical effect. The method came to hand at a propitious time:
wealth was flowing to Europe from the rest of the world due to colonization and
slavery; meanwhile the development of metallurgy and simple heat engines had
proceeded to the point where the energy of fossil fuels could be put to
widespread use. When coupled with the project of technological invention,
science and mathematics yielded undreamt-of power over the environment. When
further coupled with capitalism (corporations, banking, and investment) and
fossil fuels, the result was the industrial growth machine.

All of this would have been fine if we lived in an infinite sea of resources,
but instead we inhabit a bounded, finite planet. Humanity had set a course
toward disaster.


Language and the Ecological Dilemma

The ecological dilemma (which consists of the mutually rebounding impacts of
population pressure, resource depletion, and habitat destruction) is certainly
not unique to the modern industrial era; indeed, it is not unique even to humans.
However, modern humans have created a dilemma for themselves of unprecedented
scope and scale.

The dilemma, whether encountered by people or pigeons, is often a matter of the
failure of success: the genetically engrained aims of the organism are to
reproduce and to increase its energy capture, but its environment always has
limited resources. Thus temporary population blooms (which are, in their way,
evidence of biological success) are usually followed by a crash and die-off. In
humans, the powers conferred by language, tools, and social organization have
enabled many boom-and-bust cycles over the millennia. But the recent fossil-fuel
era has seen so much growth of population and consumption that there is an
overwhelming likelihood of a crash of titanic proportions.

This should be glaringly obvious to everyone. We know about the ecological
dilemma from our ecologists' studies of population blooms and crashes in other
species. Our soil scientists appreciate the limits of modern agriculture. Our
geologists understand perfectly well that fossil fuels are finite in quantity.
And our mathematicians can easily calculate exponential growth rates to show how
quickly population increase and resource depletion will outstrip our ability to
satisfy even the most basic human needs. Verbal and mathematical logic, joined
with empirical evidence, make an airtight case: we're headed toward a cliff.

But language also keeps most of us in the dark. This is partly because magical
thinking is alive and well - and not just in churches and New Age seminars.

In the last couple of centuries, the magical thinking associated with religion,
under assault from science, has found a new home in political and economic
ideologies. Economics, which masquerades as a science, began as a branch of
moral philosophy - which it still is in fact. For free-market ideologues, the
market is God and profit is the ultimate good. We have used language to talk
ourselves into the myth of progress - the belief that growth is always
beneficial, and that there are no practical limits to the size of the human
population or to the useable extent of renewable or even non-renewable natural
resources. This particular myth was an easy sell: it is an inherently welcome
message (a version of "you can eat your cake and have it too") and it seemed to
be confirmed by experience during a multi-generational period of unprecedented
expansion based on the one-time-only consumption of Earth's hydrocarbon stores.

Meanwhile, at the business end of economic theory, masters of advertising,
marketing, and public relations have learned deftly to manipulate symbols and
images for emotional effect, sculpting the public's aspirations for comfort and
prestige. This new kind of magical thinking does contribute to commerce and
industry - and spectacularly so! (For historical details on this, see the BBC
television documentary series "Century of Self" by Adam Curtis, and the books of
Stuart Ewen.)

In politics, the 20th century saw battles between the quasi-religious ideologies
of the Left and Right - Leninism, Stalinism, Fascism, Nazism, and Maoism, along
with British "it's-for-your-own-good" colonialism and equally benevolent Yankee
imperialism. In recent years, the political philosophy of Leo Strauss and his
followers has come to the fore via the neoconservative members of the current
Bush administration. Strauss taught a doctrine that is really just the explicit
utterance of an implicit belief common among ruling elites - that it is the duty
of wise leaders to cloak their policies in potent patriotic and religious
symbols and myths in order to galvanize the internal ethical imperatives of the
masses. In other words, lies (if told by the right people for the right reasons)
are not only good and necessary; they are the very foundation of responsible
statecraft. On this basis, however, language ceases to provide a toolset for
accurately mapping the world and instead becomes a mental haze enveloping
society, preventing us collectively from grasping our situation. Only the rulers
are expected (or allowed) to know the true score; but all too often they come to
believe their own myths.

And so we today live in a fog of words so thick that it largely prevents us from
seeing where we are or where we're headed. Language helps us understand, and at
the same time prevents understanding. It enables reason and rationality, yet
also facilitates their opposites.

Simply put, language magnifies all of the conflicting priorities and potentials
of the human organism.


Can Language Help Us Now?

It might seem that the solution to our quandary is a big dose of logic and
empiricism. If only the matter were that simple.

Modern brain research explodes the notion that logic can exist in pristine
isolation from emotion and somatic states: as neurologist Antonio Damasio
explained in his book Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain {2},
emotion and reason are not separate; in fact, the latter is inherently dependent
upon the former. Domasio explored the unusual case of Phineas Gage, a man whose
severe brain injury prevented him from feeling emotions. While Gage remained
intelligent and responsive after his accident, he lost the ability to make
rational decisions and to reason, because his emotions were inaccessible to the
process. Damasio argued that bodily senses give rise to emotions, which in turn
provide the basis for rational thought (as well as irrational thought). Thus our
state of mind merely reflects our state of body, with emotion as the essential
intermediary. The rational and emotional functions of language appear to be
handled differently by the hemispheres of the brain: it seems that the left
hemisphere processes verbiage that conveys linguistic meaning, while the right
hemisphere processes verbal (as well as musical and other artistic) expression
that conveys emotional content. There are indications that, in most people, the
right hemisphere has a tendency to repress the free functioning of the left,
thus making brain activity lopsided and dysfunctional while fomenting
self-sabotaging internal conflict. This may be one reason we can appear
perfectly rational in our pursuit of ends that are, from another perspective,
just plain crazy.

Again, the organism wants energy, space, and the opportunity to reproduce itself.
However, if every human's individual pursuit of those goals went unchecked,
there could be no organized society because all collective effort would dissolve
in continual one-on-one competition. Humans would go from bloom to crash with no
period of stability between, and none of this would serve the organism's
long-term interests.

Therefore the organism also needs to cooperate, to attenuate wants and desires,
and to restrain reproduction. Accordingly we have developed innumerable customs,
institutions, and moral strictures to promote moderation. The result is the
battle of instinct against society that Freud agonized over (and largely
mischaracterized) in Civilization and Its Discontents {3}. In stable societies,
a truce is struck that may last centuries or millennia. In our modern world,
temporary success based on unique historical circumstances has led us to cast
most self-limitation aside, and we have given ourselves perfectly good reasons
for doing so. The truce is broken, and we are at war with nature and future
generations.

Is it possible, now and quickly, to tame the organism's hunger for growth and
head off catastrophe? Yes, in principle. One of the wonders of language is that
it makes rapid societal change possible. Where another species would require
centuries or millennia of genetic variation and natural selection to adapt
itself to new conditions, we can shift our collective behavior in a matter of
months or years, given language, media, and effective appeals to ethics. Whether
it is possible to do so in the current situation, given the enormous growth
momentum developed during the past two centuries, remains to be seen.
Nevertheless, it is a useful exercise to imagine how a rapid surge toward
collective self-limitation might come about.

Somehow, leaders would have to engage the non-rational aspects of mass
consciousness by playing upon our shared needs for meaning and myth, using
verbal voodoo to alter attitudes and behavior as rapidly as possible. Wartime
jingoism has accomplished something similar on many occasions in the past. An
appeal would need to be made, on an ethical basis, to reduce consumption and
alter personal aspirations. President Carter tried to do this when he suggested,
in 1977, that solving the energy crisis was "the moral equivalent of war" - but
sadly other politicians and the arbiters of economy and culture failed to back
him up. To be successful, such an effort would require the enthusiastic
participation of the advertising, public relations, and entertainment industries,
as well as organized religions and all major political institutions.

The campaign would have little chance of success if it were not also based on
sound rational arguments, since purely emotional appeals would be rejected out
of hand by the most intelligent and influential members of society. Moreover, if
an attempt to change collective behavior were not based on empirically
verifiable, survival-based necessity, it would amount to crass manipulation
worthy of a Karl Rove or an Edward Bernays; hence its moral credibility would
soon wane.

In the current instance, the rational basis for the appeal, and its survival
necessity, are clear. Nothing is to be lost and everything to be gained by
sharing accurate and relevant information about our situation; there is no need
to exaggerate the threat.

Today precisely such an effort is already under way with regard to climate
change. Al Gore and his famous movie have framed the crisis in moral terms,
while hundreds of scientists, by endorsing the conclusions of the IPCC, have
established a concurrent appeal to rationality.

As yet, the message does not have a sufficiently broad base of cultural support
to curtail ongoing, richly-funded calls to buy, consume, and travel. Perhaps the
addition of the Peak Oil message, by highlighting immediate economic and
geopolitical threats posed by continued societal reliance on fossil fuels, will
help broaden the coalition of support for needed change. But all of this will
have to happen very quickly.

* * *

At this point, language is a given. For better or worse, we humans are stuck
with it, even if it arguably has contributed to crises that threaten us with
extinction. One way or another, the way we deal with the enormous ecological
challenge facing us will be mediated by words, words, and more words - some
accurately reflecting the situation, others concealing it.

Meanwhile here we are, I writing, you reading. We share - I hope and assume - a
commitment to logic and evidence, and to an ethic of collective human and
non-human survival that transcends the myths of religion and progress.

There is no denying the satisfaction - even thrill - that comes when language
hits its mark by dramatically aiding our understanding of what is by now an
unimaginably complex human matrix. Perhaps the most we can do, now as before,
though with more urgency than ever, is to harness that thrill by using language
skillfully to describe and persuade; and meanwhile to act in ways that are
congruent with the ethical content of our words.


NOTES:

{1} Bruce Lerro, From Earth Spirits To Sky Gods : the Socioecological Origins of
Monotheism, Individualism, and Hyper-abstract Reasoning, From the Stone Age To
the Axial Iron Age ((Lexington Books, 2000)

{2} http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780143036227-1

{3} http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780393301588-9


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