ran in parallel with the full emergence of a certain version of politics (liberal democracy). This inclusiveness (all in, no one left outside the tent) is the basis of broadcasting. And like the love of God, it is one-way or one-to-many, and nonreciprocal. In what follows, I hold to Peters’s line that there are two kinds of love, divine and human, agape and eros. And each is a different kind of communication. They come together in the end, but the start of the journey lies elsewhere. It reminds me of the old joke about the Englishman lost in the back of beyond in Ireland, trying to find his way to Dublin. He asks a local for help. There is a pause, while the local thinks it over before saying, finally, “Well I wouldn’t start from here.” The local was right, but you have to start from somewhere, and I must clear up some motifs that run through what follows before finally reaching my Dublin. I kick off with human and nonhuman interaction, followed by speech and writing. My goal is the love of God, and everything that follows is working toward this.
II
God, whoever or whatever that may be, is not some kind of Übermensch or super human. The everlasting virtue of this placeholder word is that it prevents me from falling into human hubris. Man is just not (even allowing for its sexist implications) the measure of all things. “God” is the placeholder for a power that far surpasses my limited, fallible, human, understanding. For purely human reasons, I will think of Him as some kind of “almighty father,” because I cannot imagine any other way of thinking about Him and His world. But put this way, it draws attention to two quite distinct worlds: the divine and the human. With this in mind, I follow the Genesis narrative in which our first parents were cast out of the Edenic garden where they were naked and unashamed, and lived directly in the presence of God, and spoke with Him. Their expulsion from God’s presence was, as the story goes, because Eve and Adam “were tempted” by the fruit of the tree of knowledge. For the sake of knowledge, they were willing to lose paradise, or heavenly bliss. I don’t mean this literally, but neither do I mean it metaphorically. I simply take it as expressing essential human truth. Whether it is fact or fiction is, for me, neither here nor there. Leaving Eden was a deliberate choice by our “first parents” to live in a human world, rather than in God’s. It was the original sin, in which human beings began to take responsibility for the world, rather than leaving it to God. What followed from this, over many, many centuries, was the evolution into history of the totally human world in which we live today. And this is the point of the distinction. Today’s world (and we take it utterly for granted) was made by human beings, for exclusive human use. God was thought of once as the Creator of all life, of the living world in all its parts, including us. But now, we who live in our human world have no time for the rest of the living world and its Creator. We no longer share it with other nonhuman living creatures. We think of this “external” world as Nature, and it belongs to the natural sciences, if it belongs to us at all. We talk of the external world as external to inner mental life, but really the external world belongs to God and His creation. Leaving that world for our own was the original sin.
III
These two worlds, the human and the divine, are quite simply separate, and the Genesis story is an ancient tale of how this separation began. And this original sin (the human desire for knowledge) was realized in the original technology of writing. Again, I’m not saying it was the original technology. (Perhaps that was Adam and Eve’s fig leaf girdles.) But the truth is that our world is wholly underpinned by writing, a very old technology whose origins are lost in time, like other ancient, yet still living, technologies – the production of bread, beer, and wine for instance. By writing, I mean the alphabetic system, but not just that. There are two written “languages”: that of literacy and that of numeracy. Writing, with letters or numerals, has a long history to it. But it is clearly a human invention in all its stages, from the emergence of written inscription long ago, to the invention of the printing press, and the breakthrough into modern times and today’s world. I do not mean to privilege alphabetic script (there are a number of them; this is Roman) over other systems of inscription, Chinese for instance.
These two systems of inscription (letter and number) developed separately, but together. We think of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle as giants of philosophy because their works are still alive and well today, thanks to having been somehow salvaged, down through the centuries, by writing. And we tend to forget about Archimedes, Euclid, and Pythagoras whose work was also saved. Literacy has until today been the dominant system of inscription. Now, as the internet is taking over our world, numeracy is becoming dominant. Binary digitalization underpins the computer whose analogue interface I use. Writing divided the world into literates and illiterates, minorities and majorities. To be “unable” to read and write became a social stigma, and literacy became the highway out of this state; men of humble origin, like Thomas Cromwell, became powerful because they had literate skills. But today this has changed, and numeracy rather than literacy is the greasy pole to power and wealth. To be a functioning member of today’s world, you need to be numerate because binary language underpins the internet, the horizon of the online world, and its various mediated forms of connectivity. Algorithms rule, ok.
I have had to rethink the relationship between speech and writing (Scannell 2019), and this for a number of reasons, but basically because writing comes before speech, and only with writing does language appear as such. I am not saying that writing comes before language. It comes before speech, which depends on language (but not completely or necessarily, and certainly not in the first place). If learning to talk is the human way of learning to communicate, we should remember that species other than our own communicate with each other perfectly well, to the best of our knowledge, and some even communicate with us, and we respond to their communicative implicatures. (When the cat rubs itself against my legs and makes purring noises, I put some cat food out.) But without writing, language is not apparent. Writing made it visible, available, analyzable. We all know that writing came after speech. Can you imagine language without writing? I can’t, and I have tried. The very ideas of “oral culture” or “oral poetry,” for instance, are literate back-projections (McLuhan’s rear-view mirror) that came retrospectively with writing-as-printing.
Jacques Derrida argued, in Grammatology (1976), that writing came before language. As he put it (at some considerable length) it appeared paradoxical. But it isn’t really. It is, for me at least, the expression of a fundamental truth. My dictionary defines grammatology thus: “The worship of letters; spec[ifically] rigid adherence to the letter of Scripture.” Religions of the book are grammatologies, and Marshall McLuhan is a grammatologist, whose Gutenberg Galaxy (2011 [1962]) is a grammatology of the Roman alphabet. Instead of writing before language, try writing before speech. The origins of language are connected with child development, ab ovo. A child must learn its language, otherwise it will remain dumb. At present, language acquisition is mainly studied in the hinterlands of medicine (psychology, psychiatry, child development), where it is taken as read that language acquisition is passed down from mother to child. Unless a baby is taught by an adult, it will not learn to speak the language of its parents, Muttersprache, the language of the speech community into which any child is born. Without this, the usual child will remain speechless, or what some call feral (see the truly tragic story of Genie Wiley on Wikipedia). Linguists are prone to believe that every baby has an inbuilt LAD, or language acquisition device. I’m not sure I’d go along with this. I’d rather say we all have an inbuilt CAD, or communication acquisition device, and LAD is part of CAD. The point I’m struggling toward is the claim that speech, or preferably talk, is a universal thing that any child, anywhere, anytime must learn if it is to become human. And this is not primarily a linguistic process, although as the usual child acquires its Muttersprache, language (as talk) becomes increasingly important.
Any neonate, or proto-human, is inhuman. It is a tiny bundle of immediate needs that must be met (at least usual adults think so) by those who are its carers. It is learning stuff from day one. But what is it learning, if not how eventually to become a usual adult,1 like everyone else? Learning this is not
