Page 122 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

EtheRealization

With the advent of a common global language, Hollywood
English (surfers, Valley girls, Dust Bowl migrants and pachucos
in the mix, as well as the destruction of all other regional styles
in a race to the lowest common mutually-intelligible meme),
there also arrived its counterpart: universal glossolalia. This
event affords evolutionary psycholinguistics the unprecedented
opportunity (as its swan song, for this represents the end of
language) to uncover at last the roots of nonsense in the human
psyche.

Invoking the Tower of Babel as mythological antecedent for the
worldwide confusion of tongues driving the contemporary
computerized dissolution of millennia-old processes of linguistic
fractionation, diffusion and hybridization, Knox asserted that this
next-to-last replacement of human capability would slide seamlessly
into the ultimate obsolescence of our species. Just as wheels, chairs,
domesticated beasts of traction and burden—themselves displaced by
mechanical versions as fast as they could be invented; every tool and
technology he could name, it seemed—just as they weakened
functions honed by prior eons of physiological and neurological
evolution, so would the surrender of individuated language lead to
the final degradation and trivialization of our crowning glory, thought
itself. Already the digital machine mediated almost every significant
transaction of daily life, standardizing meaning into finite sets of
encoded values. Those values determined the sphere of the possible;
all else was the babble of infants, full of sound and fury, signifying
nothing but “self-expression.”
The reduction of articulation into system-driven multiple choices,
on one hand, and what Knox tagged as glossolalia, on the other,
meant that we could be easily removed from all decision-making by
intelligent machines and left to bounce noises off each other to no
useful end other than satisfaction of pre-linguistic unconscious needs.
Research had already shown that the brains of speakers in tongues
displayed reduced activity in the language centers as their emotional
centers gained in activity. Returning to the Old Testament, Knox
analogized the expulsion from Eden as punishment for eating from
the tree of knowledge with the multifarious activities of science
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