How did it all start - and where will it end?

 

It must appear strange that a postscript should have such a title. After all that has been discussed, however, it is reasonable to ask how it all started - how did human culture evolve? This question is unlikely to be answered here, but we can consider how language itself might have contributed to this evolution. It appears to be a question that is rarely asked. One exception is that appearing in the work of Hugh Brody, a British born anthropologist. After a lifetime study of some of the aboriginal cultures that still exist on earth and which, because of their virtual isolation, have maintained their pristine character. He concludes that it is only by considering the role of language that any satisfactory conclusions can ever be reached. In his book The Other Side of Eden he asks

 

What are the qualities by which a society is judged to be organised? Rules and conventions of behaviour, shared economic practices, common religious beliefs and customs - these things are society. To speak of society is to imply organisation. People who live without a shared set of values and rules cannot live as a people. The human condition is composed of social realities. And the central indication of this is language.

 

He continues later, quoting the words of Max Müller, amongst the first theorists of language:

 

 What then is the difference between brute and man? What is it that man can do, and of which we find no sign, no rudiments, in the whole brute world? I answer, without hesitation, this one great barrier between brute and man is language.

 

Such aboriginal societies are distinguished by their possession of, what appears to us, an extremely esoteric and mystical set of criteria, or concepts by which they order their lives. This can be highlighted when they come into conflict with present day 'colonial' cultures in which they have become embedded. A remarkable instance of this, as I hinted earlier, was a dispute of land-ownership that the hunter-gatherer Gitxsan communities in NW Canada conducted with the Canadian government. Their spokesperson, a Mary Johnson, eventually insisted that, because of the purely oral tradition, her case could only be properly stated in song! The judge expressed his opinion that he did not understand why this should be, of course. Eventually, he relented and Mary sang the song about the history of the land in dispute. Nonetheless, he decided against the Gitxsan. The case had lasted about 240 days. An appeal was granted, however, and eventually the government conceded the claim. This story resonates with a remark of Darwin in his notebooks that the origin of language may well have been in song, although I feel that language must come first before one can sing.

 

The point of this story is that such societies, the world over, evolved their rules of behaviour in ways that are virtually incomprehensible to us today. They had their roots in a sense of men, spirits and animals all sharing a common world to their mutual advantage. Possession of the land was the central idea. As Brody suggests, this is what the language available struggled to express, and in so doing became constrained to ideas that are to us today so strange and alien. All the great epic sagas illustrate these features to some degree - concepts such as song lines and dream maps were central to accepted wisdom of the time, for example, as were the mixed worlds of gods and men, which at times became virtually indistinguishable

 

Language only evolved as the need arose. The first great change happened when farmers begun to replace hunter-gatherers, and the old concepts of the 'unity' of all life on the land was superseded by the concept more of the 'exploitation' of the land by cultivation to man's advantage. This would have brought changes to language to convey new ideas more 'commercially' related. So to return to the beginning of the argument on the early pages of this site; was this arrival of farming, the first great social change, later mirrored by another which the arrival of science also brought about only a few hundred years ago, and which both reflect the evolution in language? It is interesting to reflect how many of our modern words related to capitalistic or industrial life may have existed only since the industrial revolution, say. It has been claimed that between1580 and 1623 almost 11,000 new words were added to the English language. 

There are those who tend to view the hunter-gatherer 'pastoral' cultures as rather idyllic, embracing certain fundamental truths that are transferable to the present, but are these not just ideas that are, so to speak, inevitably trapped in a past language and a past way of life? Many pre-science concepts are still so trapped for us today.

So, i  

 

 

  The nature of a language must depend on the sort of information required for the society to function successfully. So, considering the original cultures of hunter-gatherers, language supplied  the ability to 'make sense' of the world, and aiding survival within it. It seems to have been universally true that such societies naturally developed a 'world model' centering on the importance of the land, and its shared 'possession' by man, spirits and animals to their mutual advantage. They also realised that the resulting self-awareness seemed to be supported by both the direct sensual information from the outside world, and also by that which still existed when they were not in direct contact with the outside world, as when asleep. This second they saw as existing also in a permanent form as 'eternal' knowledge to which they could, under certain circumstances have access (shamanism). It never changed. Whatever this form of knowledge was called by them, when eventually it had to be described to the more modern cultures in which they eventually found themselves, it was translated, unsurprisingly, as 'dreaming'. Hence concepts like 'dream time' and 'dream maps'. It is less easy to identify how song became so important to the communication of knowledge, as described above. Singing requires language, but the innateness and origins of musical awareness as a variation of the purely oral nature of a culture, are far more difficult to understand, although some would say that it is just as much in evidence today as it ever was, as shown by the vitality of popular music.

.

 

  As farming begun to offer an alternative to survival, language would need to evolve to accommodate new social and commercial concepts. Such linguistic evolution occurs continually still. Science certainly brought new concepts such as those of 'force' or 'energy', amongst many others

 

 

  We use these words today without question, but for Newton to declare that things fell to the ground because the earth exerted a force was a revolutionary idea. Strangely, we still do not know what gravitational force really is. For any force to be exerted on an object it was necessary to hit it with a piece of wood or pull it with a piece of rope. But Newton asked that we believe there was, 'out there', the means of exerting a force across empty space. In recent times this has been modified to the idea that space itself is distorted by the presence of matter in it, and that things move in space like trains on a railway line, constrained by the 'shape' of space itself, which is  even more difficult to conceive or imagine!. Yet despite our ignorance of the 'nature' of gravity we know enough to put a space vehicle on the moon, or to orbit Saturn.

 

 

  But just as science made demands on language so does every new 'subject' - even the playing of poker which has its own arcane language to describe the way the poker player needs to think. So it is with the law, or with medicine and mathematics. In these cases the language evolves to facilitate the passage of information between 'experts' or within the 'brotherhood', at the cost of it becoming impenetrable to those uninitiated. 

 

  However, when the 'brotherhood' is a rather loosely bound group with fewer common or agreed concepts, as say with artists, poets or musicians, language is unable to converge so easily, if at all, on consensual concepts, and as a result, becomes more metaphorical and difficult to interpret. Clearly we use words like 'art' or 'beauty' without qualification, except by circular 'definitions'. This 'flexibility' is even endowed with a coveted nature which is considered eternal and transcendental by critics and commentators. It becomes 'art' itself. This is not a plea for the abolition of art but only of 'art-speak'. We know what moves us but know not why.

 

 

© Frank Evans 2010

28 January 2010