Words

If you look up what makes humans different from other animals, the world will rush to tell you.

Religious speakers and writers like to make the point that "We alone . . . etc", that the human race is distinct from and elevated above the rest of the animal kingdom.

The Age of Enlightenment (should really be called the Age of "Enlightenment") ushered in the mechanistic world view that still plagues the scientific and therapeutic community to this day. It strongly influenced Christian thinking away from the biblical understanding that all creation is in a covenant relationship with the living God, depends on God, responds to God and lives according to the commands of God. Instead we got the idea of absolutely everything that is not ourselves being "natural resources" — a giant store cupboard/playground for us to use in any way we please. Which has gone badly, as we are discovering.

I do think there's a difference between humans and other beings, but I don't agree with the modern development in Christian thinking that says humans have souls and nothing else does. This is why animals are called animals, of course — they are alive, by the same breath of God that enlivens us, they have souls. That's what "animal" means; ensouled.

In relating with other living beings (animals, plants, birds, fish, etc), I find that they usually know what I mean and what I'm thinking, but I typically struggle to understand what's on their minds. I'm not the exalted, clever one; on the contrary, in their company I appear rather dim. I do sometimes hear them loud and clear, because I've practised a lot, but often I fail completely.

And yet they do speak — just as the bible says, for example in Psalm 19.

After a great deal of thinking about it, my perspective on the matter is that what divides humans from the rest of creation is words. Not language, because there are many different kinds of language, and plants, animals, birds, fish — and even rocks — all certainly have language and will speak to you if you listen. They are surprised and interested when you hear them. But, apart from some primates and birds (parrots, corvids, etc) and dolphins, they don't generally have words.

The acquisition of words as a form of communication is a two-edged sword, of course. It both empowers and disempowers, especially if we include the written word. If you can't read, if you don't know the spoken language (or even the lingo), you are disenfranchised and made vulnerable. A friend was telling me the other day of Chinese people taking advantage of the Western fashion for putting Chinese words on objets d'art and clothing — leading to manufacturers producing garments with Chinese characters translating as "I'm too stupid to know what this says." Apart from feeling mildly irritated at the usual tendency to misidentify lack of knowledge as lack of intelligence, I also felt sad that Chinese manufacturers should respond in this way to Western celebration of the beauty of their logograms. That someone should buy a t-shirt they thought said "Peace and Kindness", and discover it said "I am stupid", seems a very hollow victory to me. Each to his own.

My friend Julia Bolton Holloway has an Alphabet School for the Roma in Florence, because their traditional illiteracy is one of many barriers to social acceptance. Words are currency as well as communication in the human race.

Oliver Sacks did some interesting work, written up in his book Seeing Voices (well worth reading) about verbal language, sign language, deaf communities, and deaf people I hearing communities. Nora Groce also wrote a wonderful book on Martha's Vineyard, studying this, Everyone Here Spoke Sign. At the time of the early settlers in America, a whole lot of people from one small area in the Weald of Kent settled in the fishing territory of Martha's Vineyard. They came from one separate and isolated situation to another very similar one, bringing with them a gene for deafness which developed into a significant feature as this isolated community intermarried. They relied heavily on signing, which proved very handy on the fishing boats where they earned their living.

In Seeing Voices, Oliver Sacks writes about the importance of language (verbal or sign) for the development of abstract thought. Words do not merely allow us to express our theology, philosophy and ideology, but are prerequisite for their development. People without words are found to have a peculiar immediacy  to their thinking, dealing with what is concrete and at hand, not what is speculative.

This can be important in changing people's thinking. I found it most interesting to see in action what Sacks described, back in the 1990s when inclusive language (in respect of gender) was becoming a thing. Again and again I encountered people who, as they told me, couldn't see the problem. Tellingly, a friend of mine more open-minded than some, described how she had never been able to "see the problem", until on one occasion she attended an act of worship where she felt uncommonly welcome and loved, accepted. As a social worker, her first reaction was to try and analyse why. Eventually she realised, the officiant at the service was using inclusive language; for the first time, as a woman, she felt welcomed in from the margins to belong. She became enthusiastic about inclusive language from that moment on. Our ideas change after, not before, we put the words in place.

So words can be both powerful and unifying. Words create beauty ad take us on voyages of the imagination, and there are may advantages to them.

One of the severe disadvantages, though, and this is a great loss to our species and sets us apart, is that we have become so heavily reliant on words that we have lost the ability to communicate with other species — apart from impoverished variants, like saying "Sit!" and "Heel!" and "Walkies!" to a dog.

Not only has enclosure in our world of words lost communication with other species from our experience, it has also lost from our awareness that communication is happening that we don't understand.

In all kinds of ways, bodily, telepathically, by sounds and movement, by smells, myriad means, creation intercommunicates. By and large the human race remains deaf to the conversation. 

That's what sets us apart.