Sunday Sundries #24

Language, Noise

Hi Friends,

Here’s a Sunday Sundries entry a day late. It was a particularly busy week, so I’m a bit behind my own schedule. It’s certainly not that I have nothing to write about! On the contrary, a number of topics for thinking and discussion are clamoring for my attention. Finding the time to give them each the attention they want is the challenge. But I started this online writing exercise with the commitment to “just keep publishing,” resisting the temptation to get too perfectionist about it, and let that stop me. So, for now, here is what I came up with this week. It’s inspired by a number of other things I’m thinking about that may show up in larger form in the future. As always, I hope you find value and enjoy reading and engaging!

I read Charles Eisenstein’s latest Substack post with interest. It’s about ways he thinks about the current craze/fad/anxiety-fest about the rise of Chat GPT and AI.

It should be clear to those who read my stuff that I like to think about the nature of ideas, and ideas about nature.  I was thinking as I was walking today once again about language as the medium by which we share many things, including ideas, back and forth with each other.  This makes language so incredibly sacred, so important.  It’s the living art form that connects humans being to each other. That’s why, although I’m not particularly impressed nor worried about all the current news cycles’ obsession with AI, I can see that it’s yet the next step in a long journey we’ve been on for my whole life, of degrading and disempowering language. It is therefore serving to further cut us off from each other, if we let it.

Language is a reaching out on the part of a human being to try to capture through tonality and sounds and gestures, something she perceives that she wants to share with other living beings.  Written language is a further step, in which those of us who write, attempt to convey through symbols alone, some of the power of that transmission and creation of understanding.  Since AI can now write entire essays and production reports and performance reviews, it’s entirely clear that all of that writing was pretty much devoid of meaning anyway.  What a wake up call that is!

We’d better get to re-enlivening language, which is always evolving from our direct experience of the natural world and each other.  We’d better get to reinventing our language to stump the AI’s and all of their lackeys in the world.  Language that flows from direct experience is irreducible and un-mimicable.  I’m not talking about making up new words and coining them, which is happening every day in our woke-obsessed language-deprived cancel culture.  I’m talking about using mostly simple words in new ways to convey new ways of seeing. 

In Wendell Berry’s most recent book The Need to Be Whole he writes about something that he’s written about before. It is a book he loves, a transcript of an extended conversation that a university researcher had, and recorded, with a black farmer in around 1975. The researcher calls the farmer by the pseudonym “Nate Shaw”. Nate Shaw was a successful, and illiterate, black farmer, who also went to jail for a time for becoming active in his local sharecroppers union, and going on what Mr. Shaw called a “shootin’ frolic”. When Mr. Shaw got out of jail, he struggled to regain his success, as by then farming with mules, which was the kind of farming he loved, was being displaced completely by tractors. Berry tries to show, and I think he does so successfully, that a person like Nate Shaw is a person whose language is living, precisely because he devoted his life to the love and art of farming. He was therefore undamaged by formal schooling (although seriously damaged by racism and industrialism) and had shaped his language around his own experience rather than what other forces would have liked him to learn. I think of this as a powerful critique of our whole education system, our obsession with “literacy” (by which most people mean only base language mechanics, only skills that an AI can easily reproduce now, anyway). A true literacy would be hugely expanded to include, for example, the unique literacy Mr. Shaw had farming with his mule team and being jailed by racist and industrial forces; or the literacy Aldo Leopold wrote about as he studied the rhythms and relationship of the natural world; or a literacy displayed in every work of art, however fumbling, done by a human being striving to share their experience.

So, by “using mostly simple words in new ways to convey new ways of seeing” I don’t mean “novel or original ways of seeing” because, as Wendell Berry says in one of his most powerful written pieces I’ve ever read:

"Works of pride, by self-called creators, with their premium on originality, reduce the Creation to novelty–the faint surprises of minds incapable of wonder.

Pursuing originality, the world-be creator works alone.  In loneliness one assumes a responsibility for oneself that one cannot fulfill.

Novelty is a new kind of loneliness."

AI can only create novel reiterations of already dead words, already dead thoughts. This is why I’m not really all that fussed about it. I guess if something worries me, it’s that so many people are impressed by it. This just tells me that so many of us are ripe to be duped because we don’t have sufficient connection to the natural world and our own authentic experience to resist being taken in by yet another replacement for real life, yet another sky-is-falling scenario.

Language that flows from direct experience, that creates understanding, and that leads to better and better ways of working individually and together: this is what human beings are for (which is, by the way, the title of the Wendell Berry book from which I took that quotation: What Are People For? And, it is this book where Berry also writes about Nate Shaw). Language is for relationship, it is for understanding, it is for authentic connection between and among living beings. Most of what is written on the internet and in corporate reports and legislative chambers and “halls of learning” does not serve any of these three, and is in fact a poor substitute that leaves one feeling even more alone and confused. Perhaps AI is doing us a favor by easily pointing out all the noise and chatter that means nothing, in fact never meant anything, and that we can now simply leave behind as we turn back to the rhythms and language of direct human to human connection and the always-speaking natural world.

Photo by Lavi Perchik on Unsplash