A Tower of Babel
The Deterioration in Public Discourse
In my previous posts on this theme, I pondered whether we have culturally adopted a television lawyer’s way of wielding the English language as a weapon against each other, and whether this has contributed to the decline in tone of public discourse in the UK and US, which is undoubtedly negatively impacting all our Nervous Systems:
I then began to wonder if there is something peculiar about the English language, that makes it particularly prone to these kinds of problems, and to being left brain hemisphere over-activating, or defensive Nervous System provoking.
Prof. Lisa Feldman Barrett in her book "How Emotions are Made" argues that conceptualization and categorization through language and words is completely integral to our human experiences, perception and emotional lives. Accordingly, different cultures with different languages, including having words which just don't exist in English, experience the world radically differently, even the feeling of different emotions. Likewise, according to Barrett, folks who have a richer vocabulary for emotions, have a richer emotional life.
She often illustrates her point with an anecdote that Russian, Chinese and English languages all have a different number of words for the colours of the rainbow, and that native speakers of these languages actually see rainbows differently, with all and only the colours they have words for apparent to them.
Conversely, according to Dr Iain McGilchrist and others, our experiences of right hemisphere ascendant states, when we connect with each other or nature on a deep level, and maybe also psychedelic healing experiences, are actually ineffable and indescribable through words. This is because the right hemisphere's way of attending contributes metaphor, poetry and prosody (melodic quality of voice) to language, but just doesn't have the words that the left can muster, yet the left can't know what the right knows.
Bodyworker Michael Hamm has pointed out that much of our use of English language when applied to ourselves, is in terms of machines, especially steam engines from the Industrial Revolution: "outburst", "triggered", "pressured", "release", "drive", "repression", "expression". This has been elevated to pathological levels in the minds of the technocrats and the trans-humanists, who actually now see people only as machines.
I took part in a quiz on the different words used for the same thing, and the same words used for different things, in British and American English, such as “pants” meaning underpants in British English, but meaning what Brits call “trousers” in American parlance.
We also looked at how much of our use of spoken English is made up of idioms, and how this can be very confusing for people who are not familiar with these.
idiom /ˈɪdɪəm/ noun “a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words (e.g. over the moon, see the light )”.
A friend also mentioned that her neuro-divergent child takes such metaphors and idioms very literally, in a very similar way as to what happens when someone has a right hemisphere stroke according to McGilchrist.
All these strands about language I have been hearing about lately, make me ponder that perhaps there is a tower of Babel effect at play, perhaps we are all talking past one another, perhaps we believe we are talking the same language about the same things, when we are in fact talking about radically different perceptions of the world.
Perhaps it is only in those ineffable, indescribable right hemisphere mediated states of connectedness where the only common or universal language we all share is, and this language of connection has no words? Importantly, McGilchrist has also gone to great lengths to point out that this does not mean everything is subjective, but that it is in the right hemisphere’s way of attending to the world where the objective truth lies, and that the untethered left hemisphere’s way of attending is totally and utterly delusional.
Those technocrats and transhumanists who I mentioned are prime exemplars of delusional people acting out in, and attending to, the world in rampant left-hemisphere domination, without their right hemisphere’s intercedence.
Marshall Rosenberg used to talk about this! He founded Nonviolent Communication (now called Comapssionate Communication) - that the English language is full of violence. It truly does matter.
What came first? Thoughts, emotions, experiences, or the language which has evolved and which still evolves in order to communicate and translate those experiences, thoughts and emotions? A bit of both I would suggest. One reinforces the other.
"Conversely, according to Dr Iain McGilchrist and others, our experiences of right hemisphere ascendant states, when we connect with each other or nature on a deep level, and maybe also psychedelic healing experiences, are actually ineffable and indescribable through words. This is because the right hemisphere's way of attending contributes metaphor, poetry and prosody (melodic quality of voice) to language, but just doesn't have the words that the left can muster, yet the left can't know what the right knows."
I experienced this directly once, having dined on a few psilocybe mushrooms! I spent most of the night awake in my right brain, blissfully watching 'words in bubbles' float serenely past my consciousness. They were the 'thoughts' emanating from my Left Hemisphere. The problem is, the only way we know how to communicate complex ideas efficiently and effectively is to use the spoken or written word, which is itself constrained within the cultural framework of those words, the language. So we have to burst the bubbles, and then the magic is gone. Or is it? Can the Right Brain sneakily imbue our dreary sequences of words with at least some inner magic or hidden meaning? I think so. Some written and spoken words 'speak' to us far more powerfully and eloquently than others, beyond their simplistically interpreted literal content. Great works of poetry and literature are as much products of the Right, intuitive brain as they are of the Left, rational, brain. Hell, even inspirational books on science subjects get some much needed input from the Right Hemisphere! The lines of communication between Left and Right are always open, and often powerfully expressed; it's just that we don't perceive them directly.