…in which Uncle Duke decries the hum of
voices.
I’m not sure communication is all it’s cracked up to be. I mean it drives a huge industry and allows us
to talk to each other at any hour of the day or night and provides us with
mountains of information, but I can’t figure out what it really gains us. We send up communication satellites and
build tremendous transmission towers to provide us with instantaneous news,
unlimited scores and up-to-the-minute weather and stock prices. But I’m not convinced our lives are really
any better on account of it. To the
contrary, my position is that life has pretty much gone steadily down hill
since the development of language.
Language by the way is a fairly recent skill. There is some argument between the
archeologists and the anthropologists, but they do agree that we’ve only
learned to speak within the last 10,000 generations or so. Some argue that we began to develop language
around 250,000 years ago. That’s about
the time our brains began to expand, or rather certain parts of it began to
expand differentially, including the part that controls language. Others argue that we didn’t develop language
until the Upper Paleolithic, as recently as 50,000 years ago. That date corresponds to a drastic change in
our tool making capabilities. They
reason that only language would have precipitated these refinements. I’m not sure I care. In any case it was not that long ago. We have not been giving sermons and speeches
and seminars since we became a species.
We walked, hunted, gathered, cooked with fire and raised offsprings for
thousands and thousands of years without the benefit of language.
Prior to that we used gestural communication. Our postures defined our moods. Our facial expressions described our
disposition. We expressed all manners
of emotions without speech. We spoke
with our bodies and we listened with our eyes.
We also listened with our noses.
Our bodies smell differently when we are in different emotional
states. There are chemical
changes. It used to be that we could
distinguish subtle mood changes and shifts in attitude with our sense of
smell. It was the ultimate lie detector. You’ve no doubt heard that wild animals can
smell fear? So could we. Also anger, resentment, envy, affection and
a willingness to mate. Our glands
don’t lie. They still don’t, but we
can’t smell them anymore. We’re lucky
if we can still smell burnt toast. Our
acute sense of smell was the first victim of language.
Primates, our closest relative in the
animal world, do not speak. Or at least
they have limited vocabularies. Yet
they have elaborate social structures and lead rich, full lives. They forage, migrate, couple, squabble and
even have some pretty acceptable little wars.
All without the benefit of language.
Primates spend about 20% of
their waking hours in the business of grooming and being groomed. It is a process of cleaning, de-licing,
removing dead skin, picking nits and fleas.
More importantly, it is a process of forming bonds and communicating
affection and trust. When we are being
groomed, it triggers the release of endogenous opiates. These are the chemicals which spur all of
our addictions. This is the bliss we
seek in obscure and mostly destructive ways.
This is why women fall in love with their hairdressers.
Twenty percent! Let’s say they’re awake 12 hours. That’s about 2 1/2 hours being touched,
stroked, coddled, attended to. Imagine
2 1/2 hours a day giving and receiving sensual massage. I cannot imagine such a world. It is a world of contentment and subjective
well-being. It is a world
to-die-for. If this was the price for
language, we were ripped off. It was a
raw deal. I’ll take the body hair and
the fleas any day. I’d live in a cave,
drink muddy water and eat snails. It is
a vastly better world than the one we have created. You can have the fiber optics and the faxes. Just give me a woman who’ll pick ticks off
me.
We do certainly have a tremendous impulse to converse with each
other, to stay in touch. We have
learned to use the technology. People
in crowded stores surrounded by people are on phones speaking to people in
other crowded stores somewhere. Wealth
seems to be a factor here. The more
expensive the car, the more likely that the driver will be on the phone. Apparently these individuals are chock-full
of information and are needed to dispense it on a full-time basis. There is a certain implied arrogance about
people on car phones, a certain signal that they are indispensable. Even beepers signify that that person has
the answers to someone else’s questions and must always be accessible. I am glad for them, I guess. Even a little envious. No one is waiting to hear what I have to
say. I do not have underlings in line
for my direction. I do not need call
waiting. I have never even been
e-mailed. Most of the calls I get
begin: “Hello, William. And how are you this evening?”
Which is fine with me actually.
I confess I was raised in the less-is-more tradition of
communication. My father was not an
overly communicative man. He practiced
a form of economy which held on to his nickels and words pretty tightly. It was the standard male model of the
time. He always told my mother: “Listen to what I do, not what I say.” She came from the same tradition and
understood that. She had the patience
to listen between the lines, and it was enough for her.
I know he never told me out loud that he loved me. Yet I never doubted it. It was obvious to me. Though I am more verbal than he was and tell
my family that I love them on a regular basis, I’m not sure that they feel any
more loved than we did.
In the end there are many levels of communication. So I suppose I should not say that I am
opposed to communication. Communication
is a good thing. You can quote me. I should rather say that I’m not sure that
speech and electronics do much to enhance our communication on the most
fundamental levels. The sound of our
own voices may in fact be a terrible distraction to hearing what we or anyone
else have to say to each other. Amidst
the digital hum of trillions of bits of information, it is difficult to
distinguish the trivial from the important.
Among the questions about how to manipulate the numbers and maneuver the
information highways, we lose track of the more profound questions. A keyboard and the entire body of world
knowledge are worthless without self-worth.
Communication systems, or cultures, that overlook this are missing the
point.