Peak Everything (31 page)

L
ANGUAGE 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. Organs for sight and hearing probably originated as emergent phenomena. 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 events in the past in order to identify
the most decisive developments that enabled the emergence of industrial civilization. Of course, societal complexity (defined by the variety of tools, artifacts, and social roles) depends on humans' ability to capture increasing amounts of energy from their environment, and so the 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, language 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 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 the printing press, 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.

“In the beginning was the Word,” proclaims 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 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 explain —
who, what, where, when,
and
why?
Once the ability to pose and answer such questions was in place, it 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
).

German orientalist Max Müller (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. We 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 must have meaning in order 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 which, in their most basic forms, appear to be genetically coded. 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 coded, 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 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.

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 verifiable 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.