When it came to matters like hunting, some important knowledge could be transmitted using words—like where one might find some diamphidia larvae to poison an arrowhead, or which animal sinews made the best bowstrings. But the most important forms of knowledge could not. This kind of knowledge, they insisted, could not be taught because it resided not just in their minds but also in their bodies, and because it found expression in skills that could never be reduced to mere words.
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But while knowledge can sometimes be a blessing, it can also be a curse. Because once people know a lot about something, it can be difficult for them to remember what it’s like not to know that much. To imagine what it’s like not having that depth of understanding.
My bewitchment with information is different. It is with the mind’s hunger to understand, ‘its desire to know’ as Aristotle said. And that kind of knowing seems to require three things: 1) supplying the facts, 2) seeing the social collective context and 3) dismantling denial.
*Beyond Words: for Robert Fraser
“We began before words, and we will end beyond them. It sometimes seems to me that our days are poisoned with too many words. Words said and not meant. Words said and meant. Words divorced from feeling. Wounding words. Words that conceal. Words that reduce. Dead words.
If only words were a kind of fluid that collects in the ears, if only they turned into the visible chemical equivalent of their true value, an acid, or something curative — then we might be more careful. Words do collect in us anyway. They collect in the blood, in the soul, and either transform or poison people’s lives. Bitter or thoughtless words poured into the ears of the young have blighted many lives in advance. We all know people whose unhappy lives twist on a set of words uttered to them on a certain unforgotten day at school, in childhood, or at university.
We seem to think that words aren’t things. A bump on the head may pass away, but a cutting remark grows with the mind. But then it is possible that we know all too well the awesome power of words — which is why we use them with such deadly and accurate cruelty. We are all wounded inside in some way or other. We all carry unhappiness within us for some reason or other. Which is why we need a little gentleness and healing from one another. Healing in words, and healing beyond words. Like gestures. Warm gestures. Like friendship, which will always be a mystery. Like a smile, which someone described as the shortest distance between two people.
Yes, the highest things are beyond words.
It’s hard to fully convey the tragedy of losing a language. For the same reasons AI researchers first gravitated toward language to build their technologies, the loss of a language extends far beyond the loss of a form of communication. Each language encodes within it rich histories, cultures, knowledge; it is the collective product of millions of people across time grasping for the sounds and written forms to capture the subtlest observations about the universe, about life, about the human experience; to share with one another stunning beauty and painful failure; to teach a child, to learn from an elder; to express love.
Here we need to make a distinction between education and knowledge. Knowledge is a question of continuously adding to what we already know in a dialectical play of mutual impact and illumination. The normal cognitive process starts from the known and heads toward the unknown. Every new step makes more of the unknown known and therefore adds to what is already known. The new known enriches the already known, and so on, in a continuous journey of making dialectically related connections. Knowledge of the world begins where one is.
Education, on the other hand, is a mode of conditioning people to make them fit into, and function in, a given society. It may involve transference of knowledge, but it is conditioned knowledge, branded by the world outlook of the educator and the education system.