Language, Detachment, and Children In Cages

At age four I was hell-bent on besting my sister, then eight-years-old, at reading. She had a blackboard easel and an alphabet chart. Somehow (and maybe this is apocryphal) I poured myself into learning to read from her chalked efforts and studying the headline of the Detroit News. I know it worked because in first grade I was placed alone at a table in the back of the classroom while the rest of the class sat up front learning to read. I was left to draw and illustrate the work they were reading. I felt snubbed spending the year back there and especially when the other kids went home with index cards bearing the word of the day. I was never given such a card and I complained to my mother who came to the school to straighten the matter out. Being six-years-old I did not comprehend what set me apart. That gift, alas, did not push me far enough to set me on some prodigious life course. I became just plain reader me.Few of us stop to realize that reading is not, like spoken language acquisition, a natural, inherited, universally human ability. Written language only first appeared some 10,000 years ago. By then the language modern humans brought from Africa to the Levant and then all over the rest of the world had morphed, differentiated, evolved into the thousands we now have. The rapidity of this linguistic process is astonishing - compare Beowulf, Chaucer and Shakespeare to American English. Or merely watch a British TV series and notice how many words and expressions they use that are unknown to Americans. And check out how many radically different written forms of languages there are.Why does this matter today?When I learned the computer language Cobol in the 1960s I was introduced to a binary digital language that has since rapidly—exponenetially—evolved so that coding is now its essence. The internet has produced a virtual universe that communicates, in multiple kinds of dimensions, all via coded languages.This is coding essentially different from standard, written words, sentences, etc. Writing originally may have developed as an accompaniment to numerical notation, to record-keeping: the ancient original form of data collection. And data is the forme fruste of digital language, ready to be rendered into transmissible, translatable, transformable languages "spoken" on that new universe, the internet.Out of this massive array of coding systems have arisen apps and social media forms (still proliferating) that force the keyboard use of standard language into stripped down, agrammatical, acronym-formed, emoji represented languages that quicken the pace of correspondence.Not that this is a bad thing. It's evolutionary. It's what is happening..

"Detachment is floating behind all this messaging like plastic bags spreading through our oceans"

.But from a psychiatrist's perspective, I'm seeing people becoming intolerable of reading articles and books, preferring the boilerplate renderings of news or opinions. But more than that is the problem of context: communicating through text messaging or email removes the nuance of vocal expression and gesture. This flattens the conversations into telegraphic, meaning-poor communications. It creates a cliff-notes version of language. Hence the need for images (Instagram for example) for insertions in messages and emails. These illustrate a possible subtext, but one detached or often unrelated to the message that cannot be conveyed digitally.Detachment is floating behind all this messaging, like plastic bags spreading through our oceans. Like viruses learning to mutate themselves in order to resist antiviral attack. Like music soundtracks churning along frightful or lubricous movie footage.Detachment can lead to a loss of caring. Humans have evolved with an intense capacity for attachment, for feeling and expressing love, for anxiety over the possible loss of someone close, for the fear of death as ultimate aloneness. Detachment weakens that bonding process. We also are inherently distrustful and envious of, as well as territorially competitive with people we view as not one of ours; that natural xenophobia is serviced by detachment. All war propaganda aims to inflate such detachment. Political parties play a similar war game.So why does this matter?Consider the separation of children from immigrants attempting to enter the U.S. illegally. Despite the law, formulated to be a disincentive to prevent such entry attempts, Americans have refused to implement such an inhumane practice. It reeks of Nazi-like treatment of people regarded as alien and unwelcome, even innately toxic. But today we have enacted that law. We have stepped over a boundary that is leading toward crimes against humanity."Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."