Owning Our Words: Sounding the Depths of Language

The Convivial Society: Vol. 7, No. 2

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. I understand both of those terms quite capaciously, which is another way of saying that I tend to write about technology as a way of getting at what I take to be fundamentally human questions. There are many such questions worth pursuing these days, one of which might be expressed this way: What does language have to do with human flourishing? This installment seeks to encourage our thinking about this question through a series of interrelated fragments drawn from a variety of sources. And, of course, such reflection is undertaken in the shadow of the rise of language machines in the form of large language models and their chat interfaces. The fragments can each stand alone and will, I trust, sustain a measure of reflection, but I’ve also attempted to arrange them along an arc so that they hang together meaningfully. In any case, I trust you’ll find something here worth contemplating. Read at your leisure.

Cheers,

Michael

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“Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them. The living and radical nature of language is something which we forget at our peril.”

— Iris Murdoch, “The Idea of Perfection”

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1. I initially conceived of this post as a relatively brief reflection on the gift of language, and the responsibilities entailed by this gift. As the earliest draft took shape in my mind, these reflections were to be anchored by something the 20th-century philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch wrote in a lecture titled “The Idea of Perfection.” “Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them,” Murdoch argued. “The living and radical nature of language is something which we forget at our peril.”

This warning has echoed in my mind for some time now, particularly in light of the rise of LLMs and chatbots over the past few years. Whatever else we might say about these technologies and however varied their capabilities, they operate on language as their raw material, language ordinarily constitutes their interface with users, and what they produce in many if not most cases is language. And because one of the foundational principles guiding my thinking is that technology cannot be understood merely as a neutral tool by which we enhance our capacity or secure a measure of convenience, then it seems that with patient urgency we should consider how these technologies will reshape our relationship with, as Murdoch expressed it, these most subtle symbols upon which our human fabric depends.

As I considered what shape these reflections should take, and as I pressed into an array of possible paths and sources, I decided to revive a form this newsletter has occasionally taken, which is that of a numbered list of loosely associated fragments and excerpts all circling around a common theme in a manner which, I hope, proves illuminating—fragments, which when taken together, encourage and sustain meaningful reflection.

2. There are two ways of responding to the rise of language generating machines, or simply “language machines” as Leif Weatherby puts it in the title of his recent influential book, subtitled “Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism.”¹ The first is to critically examine their capabilities, their promise and their perils, as well as their actual and potential consequences across a variety of domains (the economy, schools, medicine, politics, etc.) This is an important and necessary response. The second response, no less vital, is to think deeply about language itself and its role in human affairs. The critical impulse often stems from the justifiable intuition that we must weigh the risks, consider the losses, and quite possibly say “no.” But we cannot live by this “no.” We must live by and for that to which we say “yes.” We will be on better footing, all things considered, if we know the good we ought to pursue, affirm, and possibly defend. Conversely, we will be more likely to surrender, unwittingly perhaps, that which we have not learned to properly value or that which we take for granted.

Language is, of course, one of, perhaps chief among, those realities that are so ubiquitous, so woven into the fabric of our existence, nearly coterminous with the fabric itself, that we can barely see it for what it is. So what follows here is an attempt to explore various dimensions of language in a way that might inoculate us against the temptation to readily and unthinkingly outsource our use of language.

3. The poet and teacher Marilyn Chandler McIntyre has reflected eloquently and at length on the need to steward the gift of language. In Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, McIntyre observed that “if language is to retain its power to nourish and sustain our common life, we have to care for it in something like the way good farmers care for the life of the soil.”

4. What might it look like to care for language? McIntyre gives three general prescriptions: “(1) to deepen and sharpen our reading skills, (2) to cultivate habits of speaking and listening that foster precision and clarity, and (3) to practice poesis — to be makers and doers of the word.”

More specifically, she urges readers “regularly to exercise the tongue and the ear: to indulge in word play, to delight in metaphor, to practice specificity and accuracy, to listen critically and refuse clichés and sound bites that substitute for authentic analysis.”

5. “Delight in metaphor,” but only if it’s a good metaphor. In this brief exchange during an interview, J.R.R. Tolkien models one form care for language can take by showing us how to refuse a pernicious metaphor.

Reporter: “What makes you tick?”

Tolkien: “I don’t tick. I am not a machine. If I did tick, I should have no views on it, and you had better ask the winder.”²

While Tolkien might appear a touch cantankerous in this exchange, he is, in principle, right to contest such metaphors because they have a tendency to mediate our self-understanding and shape the way we imagine who we are and what we’re about.

On the matter of metaphor, Iris Murdoch opened another lecture, “The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts,” with the following claim about metaphor: “The development of consciousness in human beings is inseparably connected with the use of metaphor.” “Metaphors are not merely peripheral decorations or even useful models,” she went on to argue, “they are fundamental forms of our awareness of our condition: metaphors of space, metaphors of movement, metaphors of vision.”³

6. Not surprisingly given the analogy to farming noted above, McIntyre draws a good deal on Wendell Berry, particularly a short essay titled “Standing By Words.” In that essay, written over 40 years ago, Berry commented on the “two epidemic illnesses” of the time: “the disintegration of communities and the disintegration of persons.” “That these two are related (that private loneliness, for instance, will necessarily accompany public confusion) is clear enough,” Berry added.

But there was something that was not so well understood in his view, and that was “the relation between these disintegrations and the disintegration of language.” “My impression,” Berry writes, “is that we have seen, for perhaps a hundred and fifty years, a gradual increase in language that is either meaningless or destructive of meaning. And I believe that this increasing unreliability of language parallels the increasing disintegration, over the same period, of persons and communities.”

Notably, Berry also stated that his concern was “for the accountability of language—hence, for the accountability of the users of language.” This is a vital note to strike.

In thinking about the human predicament, I find myself returning to three key ideas: the importance of human judgment, responsibility, and language. These are quite evidently interrelated, and they provide, separately and together, a useful set of lenses through which to consider the impact of artificial intelligence as it takes the form of a language machine to the degree that it undermines our capacity to judge well, encourages the evasion of responsibility, and outsources the vital labor of articulation.

7. Berry also addressed the specialization of language in a later lecture, “The Loss of the University.” Written in the late 1980s, this lecture remains relevant today with regards to its principle subject matter, but, for our purposes, here is Berry commenting on what it means for professors to profess:

“To profess, after all, is ‘to confess before’ [….] But to confess before one’s neighbors and clients in a language that few of them can understand is not to confess at all. The specialized professional language is thus not merely a contradiction in terms; it is a cheat and a hiding place; it may, indeed, be an ambush.”

8. In Berry’s “Standing By Words,” you will find him dissecting the published proceedings of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as experts attempted to discuss how to communicate the risks of a nuclear meltdown to the public. Of this exchange, Berry observes the following:

What is remarkable, and frightening, about this language is its inability to admit what it is talking about. Because these specialists have routinely eliminated themselves, as such and as representative human beings, from consideration, according to the prescribed “objectivity” of their discipline, they cannot bring themselves to acknowledge to each other, much less to the public, that their problem involves an extreme danger to a lot of people. Their subject, as bearers of a public trust, is this danger, and it can be nothing else. It is a technical problem least of all. And yet when their language approaches this subject, it either diminishes it, or dissolves into confusions of both syntax and purpose.

After some further dissection, Berry adds:

And the two commissioners, struggling with their obligation to inform the public of the possibility of a disaster, find themselves virtually languageless—without the necessary words and with only the shambles of a syntax. They cannot say what they are talking about. And so their obligation to inform becomes a tongue-tied—and therefore surely futile—effort to reassure. Public responsibility becomes public relations, apparently, for want of a language adequately responsive to its subject.

So inept is the speech of these commissioners that we must deliberately remind ourselves that they are not stupid and are probably not amoral.

One hears in that last admonition, that we must assure ourselves that they are not stupid or amoral, echoes of Hannah Arendt’s discussion of Eichmann, the banality of evil, and the distinction between stupidity and an inability (or unwillingness) to think, which carries disastrous moral consequences.

9. In an essay titled “Abuse of Language—Abuse of Power,” the 20th-century German philosopher Josef Pieper reflected poignantly on the corruption of language, and his words resonate clearly and distinctly today.

[Plato’s objection to the sophists] could tentatively be summed up in these brief terms: corruption of the word—you are corrupting the language! Still, the core of the matter is not yet identified with this. The specific threat, for Plato, comes from the sophists’ way of cultivating the word with exceptional awareness of linguistic nuances and utmost formal intelligence, from their way of pushing and perfecting the employment of verbal constructions to crafty limits, thereby—and precisely in this—corrupting the meaning and dignity of the very same words.

Word and language, in essence, do not constitute a specific or specialized area; they are not a particular discipline or field. No, word and language form the medium that sustains the common existence of the human spirit as such. The reality of the word in eminent ways makes existential interaction happen. And so, if the word becomes corrupted, human existence itself will not remain unaffected and untainted.

[…]

Corruption of the relationship to reality, and corruption of communication—these evidently are the two possible forms in which the corruption of the word manifests itself.”

10. Pieper, as the title of his essay already tells us, correlated the corruption of language to the corruption of political power:

“… the abuse of political power is fundamentally connected with the sophistic abuse of the word, indeed, finds in it the fertile soil in which to hide and grow and get ready, so much so that the latent potential of the totalitarian poison can be ascertained, as it were, by observing the symptom of the public abuse of language. The degradation, too, of man through man, alarmingly evident in the acts of physical violence committed by all tyrannies (concentration camps, torture), has its beginning, certainly much less alarmingly, at the almost imperceptible moment when the word loses its dignity.”

11. In Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman, Pieper’s younger contemporary, the eminent critic George Steiner, similarly commented on the plight of a language made to bear the weight of unspeakable atrocities:

“Languages have great reserves of life. They can absorb masses of hysteria, illiteracy, and cheapness … But there comes a breaking point. Use a language to conceive, organize, and justify Belsen; use it to make out specifications for gas ovens; use it to dehumanize man during twelve years of calculated bestiality. Something will happen to it …. Something of the lies and the sadism will settle in the marrow of the language. Imperceptibly at first, like the poisons of radiation sifting silently into the bone. But the cancer will begin, and the deep-set destruction. The language will no longer grow and freshen. It will no longer perform, quite as well as it used to, its two principal functions: the conveyance of humane order which we call law, and the communication of the quick of the human spirit which we call grace.”

12. In The Edge of Words, the theologian and former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams discusses what he considers to be the under-appreciated musings on language by the 20th-century physician turned novelist and amateur semiotician, Walker Percy, who was in turn channeling the work of the 19th-century American pragmatist, Charles Pearce.

Williams, building on Percy, argues that language transforms the field of our experience from a dyadic environment based on stimuli and response into a triadic world constituted the interposition of linguistic symbols between minds and objects, a world characterized by a measure of freedom and elaboration.

According to Williams, “we cannot easily imagine human speaking without the risk of metaphor, without the possibility of error and misprision, without the possibility of fiction, whether simple lying or cooperative fantasy. In other words, the human speaker takes the world as itself a project: the environment is there not as a fixed object for describing and managing but as a tantalizing set of invitations, material offered for reworking and enlarging.”⁴

To avail oneself of the power to outsource articulation to a language machine makes a certain sense under particular conditions, that is to say the conditions that constitute efficiency, optimization, and productivity as the highest human goods. Under such conditions, the labor of articulation, which is simply another way of talking about the act of thinking and judging, is reduced to the status of a commodity and its relative value measured under the sign “time is money.” What is lost in this accounting is precisely the experience of the world as a “tantalizing set of invitations” eliciting nothing less than a free relation to the world and an experience of what Ivan Illich, following Aquinas, designated by the Greek word eutrapelia, or “graceful playfulness.”

13. Much of Williams’ analysis builds on the experience of “frustration and bafflement” when we attempt to articulate ourselves before others and how even in this frustration we disclose something of consequence, or perhaps elicit some uncomfortable realization in the other. It recalled Arendt’s observations about the “revelatory quality of speech and action” which “comes to the fore where people are with others and neither for nor against them — that is, in sheer human togetherness.” “Although nobody knows whom he reveals when he discloses himself in deed or word,” Arendt urges, “he must be willing to risk the disclosure.” Of course, much of our willingness to take such a risk depends on the degree of trust we have in the community among which we venture the risk. Although it is also true that, absent such trust, courage must at times carry the day.

14. There is one more portion of Williams’s discussion worth mentioning. In discussing frustration and bafflement and what this tells us about language and speaking. Williams writes of an “ethical ‘default setting’ in our exchange of words which prompts me to regard the other’s speaking as something I must treat as other, as making certain demands and having a certain hinterland ... The person I speak with must be assumed to own their words as I do mine.”

That’s an arresting formulation: “The person I speak with must be assumed to own their words as I do mine.”

The ordinary, good faith use of language presumes the fidelity of those who speak and those who listen. It presumes that they have a stake in what is said and will assume responsibility for it. How might we be said to own the words produced by language machines on our behalf? I would venture to suggest that it is the subtle absence of these non-linguistic qualities, qualities perhaps conveyed chiefly by the eloquence of the body, that can produce the experience of the textual uncanny when one encounters artificially generated text, text which no one can be said to own.

15. Wendell Berry’s wife, Tanya, can also teach us something about our use of words. In a recent talk, Grace Olmstead related the following exchange with Tanya Berry.

“Having to commute to work sounds like it could be ‘drudgery,’” Tanya said. “Practicing scales on the piano—that could be seen as drudgery, too.” But then she observed, “The use of a decent language can change your whole idea of what something is.” It is worth repeating. The use of a decent language can change your whole idea of what something is. That transformative sentence has not left me since. Tanya suggested that the right words could change one’s mind. No, more than that—that the right words could change one’s entire perception and experience of a thing. The right language reanimates our work. But to reanimate our work, we must apply a new habit of naming to the things we do.

16. Stanley Hauerwas: “You can only act in the world you can see, but you can only see by learning to say.”⁵

17. From Eliot’s “Little Gidding”:

“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.”

1. Weatherby’s book has been on my desk for sometime, but regrettably I have not yet had the chance to read it in earnest. So I’ll reserve any further comments, although I will say that it has been widely and positively reviewed and I’m certain I will learn much from it.

2. J.R.R. Tolkien to Harvey Breit, New York Times Book Review, June 5, 1955, quoted in Letters, 217-181. (h/t Tessa Carman)

3. A similar point is elaborated at length in George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s classic text, Metaphors We Live By. Arendt has a stimulating discussion of metaphor in the posthumously published Life of the Mind, which I’ve long intended to write about here. Perhaps I’ll find my way there this year.

4. Here is a bit more from Williams: “The unceasing effort to re-work perceptions as our means of exploring what it is for something to be there for us is both free, in the sense that it is never accounted for by an energy-exchange model, and deeply constrained, in the sense that we are always trying to allow what is there to show itself - an ethical and not only an epistemological point, as it requires a systematic questioning of our own starting point, our own interest.”

5. From Beginnings: Interrogating Hauerwas by Hauerwas and Brian Brock (T&T Clark, 2017).