ABSTRACT
Previous chapters have claimed that the most dogmatic forms of fundamentalism somehow derive from the invention of writing. On the other hand, our society would not have survived in its present form without a system of writing or discourse that can make assertions that appear to be axiomatic. However, it is hard to imagine an equivalent to the written axiom in the way that ecosystems work (Bateson, 1973). Nor are written axioms equally important within all human cultures. What are the salient features of language that de-sensitise us, and induce us to ‘dumb down’ our sense of reality? More importantly, in order to understand what we are doing to the world, would it be possible to re-design language in order to see things more sensitively, lucidly, sympathetically, or adaptively? Many academics would probably argue that existing modes of writing already do this. Whoever is right, the principle itself is an ancient one. The idea that language sets the boundaries for thought probably came into Western thought from Indian writings of the sixth century (Bhartrihari, 450−510). It led, via von Humboldt (1767−1835), and others, to the famous socalled ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’, or the concept of ‘linguistic relativity’ (Whorf and Ikegami, 1956). This argues that the grammatical categories of a given language have a guiding influence over the way its users understand the world, and therefore behave in it.
