Language Separates Us From Nature
Imagine experiencing nature and the whole of life without words. Just as you paint, swim, feel, hike, or ski without words. Look around your room and just perceive it. Now look around the room again and try to name things as you seem them.
Your mind can perceive instantly while it has to work hard to think of words and look. Living animals are virtual perfect mirrors of our surroundings. Words separate us from nature. We are capable of acquiring language, but we are not designed to experience the world through language.
Wordlessness allows us to experience life in its full exquisiteness—lovers need no words. As soon as we speak, we begin the separation. Development of symbolic language is the moment of rupture of the original unity of humanity and nature.
The Fall in Genesis is the fall into language and time, Adam created language when he ate from the God’s own tree of knowledge. Man became master of things by naming them, “and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.” The beginning of humanity’s separation from the world is located at the naming of the world. We are told in the Gospel of John that God did the first naming, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The myth of the Tower of Babel is also an attempt to come to terms with the separation of humanity from the Garden of Eden—nature. The splintering of an “original language” may best be understood as the emergence of symbolic language.
Creation of symbolic language was a precondition of the creation of time. Before symbolic language, Paleolithic language did not have tenses. Before the agricultural revolution, there was no past, present, or future—there was just now.
For almost all of human existence we have experienced life in most of its wholeness and grace—for 97 percent of our history. There was a vast epoch for three or four million of years that humanity lived well-nourished lives with abundant leisure time. Read Stone Age Economics by Marshal Sahlins. The question is not, “why agriculture and language were not developed sooner, but why were they developed at all?”
This revolution in communication occurred 10,000 years ago with the invention of symbolic language. New technology caused an expansion in language. Neolithic man did not search a farm supply catalog for tools, Neolithic man invented a wedge that could be pulled through the ground to till the soil and then called the invention a “plow.” As with our internet today, technology creates new words—you are reading a “blog”.
The division of labor also began during the agricultural revolution. Specialization further manifests new words. Each new specialty needs additional vocabulary. Farmers, chemists, lawyers, warehousemen, sportscasters, truckers all seem to use their own subset of our language. Each specialization and its ensuing language takes us further from our original unity with nature.
You could almost call it the “language revolution” instead of the “agricultural revolution”. Modern Neolithic language moved humanity from “active” to “passive”—from “unity with nature” to “separation”. Neolithic farmers imposed work–division of labor, property, and civilization on Paleolithic hunter-gatherers.
This decay of sensual active hunter-gatherer language is reflected in the decline of the verb. Verbs comprised approximately half of all Paleolithic hunter-gatherer words. In modern English, verbs account for less than 10 percent of words.
The Navajo language has far more words for touching, sensing, and seeing life. Navajo has an amazing wealth of verb inflections to change the tense, mood, person, number, case, and gender of a verb. Hunter-gatherer languages have far fewer nouns and almost no numbers. Numbers were frequently limited to one, two, or many.
Where I live, almost every peak is named in modern English. Before European settlers however, only one peak was named, Shandoka. In Ute the language Shandoka means “weather maker”. It was named only because it is high enough and in the right location that it literally makes its own weather; clouds frequently form around Shandoka before a storm.
Numbers further alienate humanity from nature by reducing irreplaceable variant “things” to numbers. No one has ever seen identical snowflakes, leaves, clouds, or animals, but numbers assume they are all the same. An entire forest ecosystem, home to millions of living organisms, is reduced to board feet and dollars. Dead inanimate money has been substituted for living animate nature. Numbers are the ultimate tool to diminish all value of life and externalize all costs such as pollutants and social injustices.
Uncivilized Native Americans wondered why early Europeans destroyed nature with detachment; Native Americans felt a repugnance to intellectual effort and especially arithmetic. All that can come from scientific analysis of the world and our artificial economy is numbers. Today’s industrial capitalism sits at the very
pinnacle of concentration on abstract measurement—see the Financial Crisis essay. Language and especially mathematics has allowed civilized humanity to take everything with detachment and leave nothing. Daniel Quinn calls us Takers and native cultures Leavers.
Numbers are probably older than words. In Sumer the first mathematical computations appeared, between 3500 and 3000 B.C., in the form of inventories, deeds of sale, contracts, unit prices, units purchased, interest payments, etc. The Code of Ur-Nammu did no appear until 2050 B.C. and the more famous Code of Hammurabi appeared until 1760 B.C.
Language substitutes the perceptual order of real life experience with empty concepts. Humanity resisted civilization and all of its injustices for a very long time. British archeologist Clive Gamble noted that recent studies have revealed the existence, some 300,000 years ago, of mental ability equivalent to modern man. Freud wrote in The Future of an Illusion, “that civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means of power and coercion.”
Our government has to enact programs such as “No Child Left Behind” to keep us reading. Reading equals laws and laws along with private property and locking up the food forcing people to work within the system equals control.
Every day, the global communication revolution moves us further away from nature. We have sacrificed a deep intimate experience with nature, a household level of knowledge of plants and animals, and a rich hunter-gatherer language. We have gained something with no intrinsic value—information and data experienced in isolation.
Where we have arrived today demands a deep evaluation and reconsideration. John Zerzan wrote, “We couldn’t live in this world without language and that is just how profoundly we must transform this world.” Once we realize how poor we are in our detachment from nature—the Garden of Eden, we may well yearn for a way back to a deep, whole, connected, wordless experience of life.
Personal note—as an experiment we are considering dividing our permaculture farm in into halves: word and a wordless.
Visit www.culturequake.org for more Culturequake essays in our online Magazine and to learn more about the Culturequake book. ©2008 Chuck Burr LLC.
Tags: Agricultural Revolution, culture, Division of Labor, language, Numbers
Dec 10, 2008
Very interesting essay. I wonder how much racism and other -isms have resulted from this separation. Identity has become a matter of separation, of being other than …
Much food for thought. Thank you.
Julia
Dec 10, 2008
I couldn’t agree more!
Dec 10, 2008
Couldn’t agree more!
I’m a teacher that was nearly booted out of my job after I expressed/battled for similar awareness!
You must be “balanced”, because you have expressed in “word-langauge” the very dangers of it.
We can’t go backwards in time, but we can move forward with better awareness & greater connectedness.
Numbers, like words, can help separate us, or can help connect us. The geometry & natural patterns of nature are awesome! An appreciation of “natural math” is an expression of wonder & an act of love to our creator!
Dec 10, 2008
Thanks for the article. I suggest also The Alphabet Versus the Goddess by Leonard Shlain.
I have also read that some native languages had words that were expressions of the natural world around them, as if nature were saying the words through them. As opposed to them naming nature.
Feb 05, 2009
I think a lot about the concept of ‘wordlessness’ is valuable…but I have to smile, that the ideas about that concept are being spread through one of the most widespread word dependent technology of our times: the Internet!
Sorry I had to use words to communicate that…
*Lis*
Feb 05, 2009
An interesting perspective – worth observing that it uses words and assumes that high tech tools such as the internet, email, etc. are available to deliver them.
Feb 05, 2009
Yeah this is a very good article and is something that more people are becoming aware of. I agree with FeralKevin that The Alphabet Versus the Goddess is a very interesting read and made me think about all this stuff in different ways. This makes me think of a couple other excellent books that have to do with the direct perception of nature…
A Language Older Than Words by Derrick Jenson and…
The Heart of Perception by Stephen Harrod Buhner
Feb 05, 2009
those native americans had language.
the structure and action of language is of a piece with the fabric of nature. the sense of separation is an interpretation. an idea that some things are good and some things are bad.
the idea that language separates us from nature is a continuation of this good/bad dichotomy.
separation isn’t intirely negative, btw. ask any lamb that is being hunted down by a wolf.
Feb 05, 2009
those native americans had language.
the structure and action of language is of a piece with the fabric of nature. the sense of separation is an interpretation. an idea that some things are good and some things are bad.
the idea that language separates us from nature is a continuation of this good/bad dichotomy.
separation isn’t intirely negative, btw. ask any lamb that is being hunted down by a wolf.
Feb 05, 2009
this book is wonderful & on a similar note
http://www.amazon.com/Alphabet-Versus-Goddess-Conflict-Between/dp/0140196013
Feb 05, 2009
Jeremy Rifkin and Ted Howard said in 1980 on p.165 of “Entropy: A New World View” that the Greek Pandora’s box and the Christian and Jewish Adam and Eve tale “hold that the original perfection of the world was undermined with the introduction of knowledge.” They also quote Henry Adams’ 1949 “Letter to American Teachers of History” in which Adams suggests that even the human mind, in its gathering and storing of information, was subject to the entropy process. “Each succeeding mental construct from instinct to intuition to reason to abstract mathematical thought exhibits greater ordering, a higher energy flow-through and consequently a greater dissipation of energy in the process.” Thanks for this thought provoking essay.
Feb 05, 2009
It’s an interesting concept, but very contradictory…in order to spread the idea you use words. Plus to promote the ‘wordless’ concept you use the most widespread word dependent technology: the Internet.
I agree with the last writer…we don’t need more black and white ideas, but a rainbow which can include many ways of being within nature. Words are not inherently bad, just how you use them can be.
Feb 05, 2009
Thanks for getting to the point… how many of have lost (or never knew) how to grok things? They say that skilled professionals take at least 10,000 hours of study in any discipline to be able to just ‘know’ their field. Would it take less time if there wasn’t so much verbage cluttering up their day? We’ve gone from ‘dumb as a brick’ to overly self-impressed wordsmiths and now on to texting and twitting mini chapters in your life with 140 characters or less! The point is, is that communication isn’t necessary, understanding and knowing is. Communication is in and of itself is a burdensome task encountered along the way to knowing life.
Feb 05, 2009
Does anyone else find something odd in writing an essay about how language has separated us from nature? Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to grunt and point?
Beyond that, if language does separate us from nature, language also gives us the power to communicate the beauty of nature.
Language is like any tool: it’s inherently neutral. Only its use or misuse makes it good or bad.
Feb 06, 2009
I tried to understand this article but the incoherent sequencing of words got in the way.
Feb 06, 2009
I tried to understand this article but the incoherent sequencing of words got in the way.
Feb 08, 2009
I agree with alflang, there’re some logic leaps in there.
Words are what separated us from apes. Evolution got us to that stage, evolution got us to this stage. I don’t want to be an ape again.
Feb 08, 2009
Fantastic article! I spend lots of time working on computers producing video. At the end of a project or series of them, I used to find myself dazed and empty. Then I started going on long or even brief hikes, snowshoeing, cross-country skiing, or simply standing outside for a half-hour which I had stopped doing when I began my business. It not only changed my attitude toward life but improved my work habits, creativity and productivity. Nothing refreshes the soul like Nature. This article helps us understand why.