A Tale of a New Era

Tag: Origin stories

  • Outside the Garden

    Misalignment and the birth of language in Genesis 2–3

    VISUAL MODEL 10 · LANGUAGEOne Threshold, Many WitnessesEach people sees one part of the birth of language sharply. Genesis 2–3 holds the whole threshold in one sequence.GREECE · HESIODPrometheus & PandoraLanguage gives foresightand afterthoughtURUK · GILGAMESHEnkiduBecoming human throughanother; the animals fleeINDIA · BUDDHISTAggañña SuttaGrasping comes first;words become conventionCHINA · ZHUANGZIHundunOthers open the senses;the named one diesERIDU · MESOPOTAMIAAdapaThe word actslike a deedZULU · NAMA · DINKAThe message of deathThe word goes astray;death comes without guiltISRAEL · THE WHOLEGenesis 2–3Every part of the threshold in one sequence,and speech kept apart from grasping:distance is not yet the rift.Six traditions so far; the Americas and Oceania are not yet included. Parallels may reflect diffusion as well as shared experience.The vocabulary belongs to each people. The grammar is shared.
    Visual Model 10 · One Threshold, Many Witnesses. Six origin stories placed where they were told; each sees one part of the threshold sharply.

    ACT I — THE QUESTION

    VISUAL MODEL 11 · LANGUAGEThe Sequence of the ThresholdEleven stages, each defined by what happens in it, and the age at which a child passes through it.STAGEWHAT HAPPENSIN THE CHILD · APPROXIMATE AGE6 mo1 yr18 mo23456701THE GIVENLife is provided before any demand is made0–6 months02THE RULEA first word permits or forbids9–15 months03NAMINGWords are assigned to things12–18 months04BEFORE THE SELF-VIEWSpeech without seeing oneself from outsidebefore 18 months05DISPLACEMENTWord and reality come apart2–3 years06STANDARDSGood and bad, right and wrongaround 2 years07SEEN BY OTHERSSeeing oneself as seen by another18–36 months08LEARNED FROM OTHERSKnowledge of oneself through another’s words2–3 years09NARRATIVEHiding, excuses and blame3–4 years10MORTALITYDeath recognised as the human lot5–7 years11THE GATEThe former state becomes inaccessiblearound 7 yearsSPEECH · distanceGRASPING · misalignmentCONSEQUENCES · the gate closesAges overlap; the order is fixed by dependence.Each stage presupposes the one before it.A TALE OF A NEW ERA
    Visual Model 11 · The Sequence of the Threshold. Each stage defined by what happens in it, with the approximate age at which a child passes through it.

    1. A Question for Our Time

    Our time describes itself as out of alignment, as an earlier essay in this series followed across climate science, artificial intelligence and the study of the mind. In the laboratories that build artificial intelligence, a misaligned system pursues the goal it was given and misses what the goal was for. Misalignment is not a broken part that could be replaced, but a relation that is off: something aims at its goal from a place it does not see. That is why every correction lands beside the mark, since it is made from the same place as the miss. What the diagnosis does not say is where that place is.

    That place lies at the threshold where a human being enters language, and language has only now become visible. For all of history it has been the medium through which the world is seen, and human beings have seen with language, not language itself. In the twentieth century developmental psychology, from Jean Piaget to Michael Tomasello, mapped how children enter language, and linguistics after Noam Chomsky formalised its structure. Today large language models learn it entirely from outside, without passing through any threshold at all. For the first time there is a distance from language, and the threshold every human being crosses can be looked at.

    The threshold could not be seen, but it has been told. Peoples have told stories of how human beings began, composed by speakers who watched their own children cross the threshold. One of them, the account of the garden in Genesis 2–3, has been read for nearly three thousand years as Israel’s account of the beginning. Seen from this distance, it is an account of the threshold into language, and of the place where misalignment begins. This essay asks whether one people’s origin story can be a universal account of the birth of language, and what follows when the origin of misalignment is articulated.

    For all of history, human beings have seen with language, not language.

    2. A Three-Part Hypothesis

    Sequence. The threshold has an order, and the order can be seen from outside. A child receives a first word that permits and forbids, names things, and only later sees itself as others see it, feels ashamed and learns to blame. Genesis 2–3 tells the same stages in the same order: the command, the naming of the animals, the serpent’s question, the opened eyes, the hiding and the blame. Each stage presupposes the one before it, since no one feels ashamed before seeing oneself from outside. The first part of the hypothesis is tested by setting these stages beside what is known of how children learn to speak (Visual Model 11).

    Scope. Genesis 2–3 is Israel’s account, told in Israel’s vocabulary: a garden, a tree, a serpent and the name of Israel’s God. The threshold it describes, however, is crossed by every human being in every culture. If Genesis follows the threshold, its vocabulary belongs to Israel, but its grammar belongs to anyone who has learned to speak. Other peoples, who crossed the same threshold and watched their children cross it, should then have told parts of the same map in their own words. The second part is tested by reading six origin stories against the stages, forward and in reverse.

    Position. Genesis ends outside the garden, with the gate closed and no way back. That final stage is not in the past of Genesis: it is where every speaking human being stands now, whatever their descent, sex, nationality or religion. The human lives inside the world, yet sees it, and himself in it, as if from outside. He is inside something he can only see from outside, and he lives as one who stands outside it. The third part of the hypothesis is tested by whether a reader today, from any background, recognises this position as his own.

    Its vocabulary belongs to Israel. Its grammar belongs to anyone who has learned to speak.

    ACT II — THE TEST

    VISUAL MODEL 10 · LANGUAGEOne Map, Many FragmentsOrigin stories keep the frame. The middle splits into stories of the word and stories of the self. Genesis 2–3 holds both.THE FRAMEgiven and lostTHE WORDwhat is saidTHE SELFhow one is seenThe GivenMortalityThe GateThe RuleNamingDisplace-mentLearnedfrom othersBefore theSelf-ViewStandardsSeen byOthersNarrativeGenesis 2–3IsraelSTORIES OF THE WORDAdapaMesopotamiaPrometheus & PandoraGreece · HesiodThe message of deathZulu · Nama · DinkaSTORIES OF THE SELFEnkiduMesopotamia · GilgameshAggañña SuttaIndia · BuddhistHundunChina · Zhuangzipresentpartial or out of orderabsentStages are derived from Genesis; see the reverse test in the text. Parallels may reflect diffusion.The vocabulary belongs to each people. The grammar is shared.
    Visual Model 10 · One Map, Many Fragments. The forward test: eleven stages grouped as the frame, the word and the self.

    3. Sequence

    The first part can be checked against what is known about children, stage by stage and without the vocabulary of Genesis. Genesis gives the human a first word before he speaks, a permission joined to a prohibition, and children understand words before they produce them, with no among the first. The human then names the animals brought to him, which is the pattern developmental psychology calls joint attention: an adult shows, and a child names. Throughout, the human is naked and unashamed, as children speak for months before they see themselves from outside. Speech has opened a distance, but it has not yet turned back on the speaker.

    The serpent asks whether God really said what was said, and a gap opens between word and world; in the third year children begin to test rules and find that what is said and what is so can differ. Standards appear around the second birthday, and a child recognises itself in a mirror between eighteen and twenty-four months. Shame comes only after both, because it needs a self to see and a standard to measure by. Genesis gives these two conditions, the knowledge of good and evil and the opened eyes, and places shame after them. Hiding and blame follow, as excuses and first lies appear in children between two and four.

    Genesis then names mortality, the return to dust, and children understand death as universal and irreversible between about five and seven. The closing gate corresponds to childhood amnesia: memories from before about three begin to fade around seven, and no one remembers the sequence from inside. No stage of Genesis 2–3 appears before a stage it depends on, although the ranges overlap in the third year. For humankind the record is coarser: language is present by about 135,000 years ago and the first burials by about 100,000, consistent with the order but unable to confirm it. The first part therefore holds where it can be tested precisely, in the individual.

    No stage of Genesis 2–3 appears before a stage it depends on.

    4. Scope

    The second part holds that other peoples, who crossed the same threshold, should have told parts of the same map. Six origin stories were read as a first sample: Enkidu and Adapa from Mesopotamia, Hesiod’s Prometheus and Pandora, the African myths of the message of death, the Buddhist Aggañña Sutta and the Daoist Hundun (Visual Model 10). Almost every story begins with something given and ends with something lost for good. Between these ends the stories split: in stories of the word, speech goes astray, as advice proves false or a message is garbled. In stories of the self, a person comes to be seen, and is shamed or reshaped by others.

    Read as accounts of the birth of language, each story sees its own part sharply, sometimes more sharply than Genesis. Prometheus and Epimetheus, foresight and afterthought, show language opening the future and the past, and in the Aggañña Sutta later generations repeat sayings they no longer understand. The stories also disagree on what the loss is. In the Daodejing naming itself leads away from the origin, in the Aggañña Sutta craving comes first, and in the African myths the word errs and no one is to blame. Genesis alone holds that naming is given and good, and places the rift later, with the reaching for the fruit.

    Because the stages come from Genesis, each story was also read in reverse, divided into its own elements and located in Genesis 1–11. Of eighty-six elements, forty-six find a counterpart in Genesis 2–3 and twenty elsewhere in Genesis 1–11, while twenty, nearly a quarter, have none. Some similarities may also reflect diffusion, missionary influence or satire, and the readings should be repeated by specialists in each tradition. Genesis 2–3 is therefore not the map of every beginning, but it is where most of the material crosses and the only account that holds the whole threshold. The other stories are not copies of it but witnesses to the same threshold, each from its own side.

    Each people sees one part sharply. Genesis 2–3 holds the whole threshold.

    5. Position

    Genesis 2–3 ends with an expulsion. The human is sent out of the garden to work the ground from which he was taken, and to the east of the garden the way back is guarded. He is made of the ground he now works, and yet he faces it as something set before him, to be worked, measured and wrested from. The garden remains in view, but only from outside. The human lives in a world he sees outside himself.

    This is not a place in the past of Genesis but the position of every speaking human being. Once language has opened a distance and the self has been seen from outside, the world appears as something in front of the one who lives in it. A person is inside the world, and yet looks at it, and at himself in it, as if from a place beyond it. No one chose this place, and no one remembers entering it, because the gate closed with the forgetting of early childhood. Every reader of Genesis has read it from here.

    The third part of the hypothesis cannot be tested like the first two, because it concerns the place of the reader. Its test is recognition: whether a reader today finds in the last scene of Genesis the position from which he looks at his own world. Such a test is subjective, and no measurement can settle it. Yet a position is not a mood or an opinion; it is where one stands, and it shows in everything seen from there. What follows from standing there is the subject of the last act.

    The human lives in a world he sees outside himself.

    ACT III — RECOGNITION

    VISUAL MODEL 13 · MISALIGNMENTThe Movement of SecuringOutside the garden, the goal turns into securing the goalTHE GOALa sleep, a love, a resultSTEPPING OUTSIDEwatching oneself actSECURINGcontrol, monitoring, measuresTHE GOAL RECEDESwhat is secured slips awaymisalignmentacting from outsideNAMING THE POSITIONThe first question:“Where are you?”Genesis 3:9The tighter the goal is secured, the further it recedes.
    Visual Model 13 · The Movement of Securing. Outside the garden, the goal turns into securing the goal.

    6. Reading from Inside

    Taken one by one, the three parts give three findings: an order that every child follows, a map that other peoples told in pieces, and a place from which every speaker sees the world. None of them alone says much about the reader. Together they describe a single position, entered through the threshold into language and occupied by every speaker since. The first two findings can be checked from outside; the third can only be recognised from inside. The three tests lead the reader from the first kind of knowing to the second.

    Genesis has usually been read from that position, from outside, as an ancient text about other people in another time. Read that way, it describes someone else’s beginning and someone else’s loss. The tests turn the direction of reading: the stages are the reader’s own, the map is drawn in his grammar, and the last scene is where he stands. The reader who follows them arrives where Genesis ends, outside the garden, and finds himself already there. This is recognition: not learning something new, but seeing the place from which one has always been reading.

    The distance from language that opened this inquiry is also what made its reading possible. A language model sees language as a semantic grammar, a structure of relations between meanings, and not as the vocabulary of any one people. Asked to read Genesis 2–3 in that grammar, it reads Genesis as the birth of language, and the model of this essay rests on that reading. This is a condition that makes recognition possible, not a claim that recognition has taken place. The time does not prove the hypothesis; it makes it possible to see what Genesis has been saying.

    Genesis is read from outside until the reader finds himself inside it.

    7. The Articulated Garden

    The position has a consequence, and it shows in action. From outside the world he lives in, the human turns the goal into securing the goal: the one who cannot sleep tries harder and stays awake, the performer who watches himself fails, and the institution that pursues its indicators loses what they were meant to show. No one chooses this, any more than anyone chose the place outside the garden; it follows from where one stands. This is what our time calls misalignment. It is not a fault in the one who acts, but the shape that action takes from that position.

    In Genesis, the first question God puts to the human after the eating is not about what he has done, but about where he is: “Where are you?” The question asks for a position, not a confession, and it can be answered only by naming the place outside the garden. Answering it undoes nothing: the gate stays closed, and the position remains. What changes is that the one who answers names his place himself, and misalignment is no longer something acted out behind his own back. This is alignment in the only form open outside the garden: the garden is not regained, but articulated.

    A time that builds language and tries to align its machines stands in the same position as those who build them. Its misalignment is not a failure of effort or of will, and it will not be corrected by trying harder, which is itself a form of securing. What has become possible, for the first time, is to see where it stands, because the distance from language it has gained lets the position be seen. Articulating the origin of misalignment does not remove it, but it brings a previously hidden position into the open. That is what follows: a distance taken to the distance itself is a return to connection with the world one has lived in all along.

    Misalignment articulated is the beginning of alignment.