The Kingdom of Speech

by Tom Wolfe

  And no student of the mnemonic arts is likely to leave out the one that turns the mile-long electrochemical series “potassium>sodium>calcium>magnesium>aluminum>zinc>iron>tin>lead>hydrogen>copper>silver>gold” into a mini poem: “Paddy Still Could Marry A Zulu In The Lovely Honolulu, Causing Strange Gazes.”

  Language itself, the mother of all mnemonics, is precisely the same sort of device that chemistry employs. Words are elemental mnemonics, sequences of sounds (the alphabet) used to remember everything in the world, from the smallest to the greatest. Speech, language, is a matter of using these mnemonics, i.e., words, to create meaning.

  And that is all that speech is, a mnemonic system—one that has enabled Homo sapiens to take control of the entire world. It is language, and only language and its mnemonics, that creates memory as Homo sapiens experiences it. Even the smartest apes don’t have thoughts so much as conditioned responses to certain primal pressures, chiefly, the need for food and the fear of physical threats.

  But in point of fact mnemonics isn’t just in the service of language. Mnemonics is language. Throughout the history of language—and it’s quite irrelevant to try to make the usual paleontological guesses as to when that was—man has converted objects, actions, thoughts, concepts, and emotions into codes, conventionally known as words. No one now knows…and there is no reason why anyone is likely to ever know…when it occurred to Homo sapiens to use words as mnemonics. But there are now between six thousand and seven thousand different mnemonic systems, better known as languages, covering the world today. They, and they alone, are language…they are simple and clear. Perhaps it can be amusing to watch otherwise bright people banging their brainpans into the same firewall, herds of them, schools of them, generations of them, whole Eras and Ages of them, an entire bright universe of them, endlessly—but for how long?

  Bango! One bright night it dawned on me—not as a profound revelation, not as any sort of analysis at all, but as something so perfectly obvious, I could hardly believe that no licensed savant had ever pointed it out before. There is a cardinal distinction between man and animal, a sheerly dividing line as abrupt and immovable as a cliff: namely, speech.

  “Speech,” I said to myself, “gave the human beast far more than an ingenious tool for communication. Speech was a veritable nuclear weapon!”

  Speech was the first artifact, the first instance in which a creature, man, had removed elements from nature…in this case, sounds…and turned them into something entirely new and man-made…strings of sounds that formed codes, codes called words. Not only is speech an artifact, it is the primal artifact. Without speech the human beast couldn’t have created any other artifacts, not the crudest club or the simplest hoe, not the wheel or the Atlas rocket, not dance, not music, not even hummed tunes, in fact not tunes at all, not even drumbeats, not rhythm of any kind, not even keeping time with his hands.

  Speech, and only speech, gives the human beast the ability to make plans…not just long-term but any plans, even for something to do five minutes from now. Speech, and only speech, gives the human beast the power of accurate memory and the means to preserve it in his thoughts for now or indefinitely in print, in photographs, on film, or in the form of engineering and architectural diagrams. Speech, and only speech, enables man to use mathematics. (Doubters need only try to count from one to ten without words.) Speech, and only speech, gives the human beast the power to enlarge his food supply through an artifice called farming. Speech ended not only the evolution of man, by making it no longer necessary for survival, but also the evolution of animals.

  Today the so-called animal kingdom is an animal colony, and we own it. It exists only at our sufferance. If we were foolish enough and could get the cooperation of people all over the earth, in six months we could exterminate every animal that sticks up more than a half inch above the ground. Already all cattle, chickens, and sheep in the world and the vast majority of pigs, horses, and turkeys—we hold the whole huge gaggle of them captive, all of them…to do with as we wish.

  In short, speech, and only speech, has enabled us, we human beasts, to conquer every square inch of land in the world, subjugate every creature big enough to lay eyes on, and eat up half the population of the sea.

  And this, the power to conquer the entire planet for our own species, is the minor achievement of speech’s great might. The great achievement has been the creation of an internal self, an ego. Speech, and only speech, gives man the power to ask questions about his own life—and take his own life. No animal ever commits suicide. Speech, and only speech, gives us the urge to kill others on a massive scale, whether in war or other campaigns of terror. Speech, and only speech, gives us the power to exterminate ourselves and render the planet uninhabitable just like that in a matter of thirty-five or forty nuclear minutes. Only speech gives man the power to dream up religions and gods to animate them…and in six extraordinary cases to change history—for centuries—with words alone, without money or political backing. The names of the six are Jesus, Muhammad (whose military power came only after twenty years of preaching), John Calvin, Marx, Freud—and Darwin. And this, rather than any theory, is what makes Darwin the monumental figure that he is.

  The human beast does not require that the explanation offer hope. He will believe whatever is convincing. Jesus offered great hope. The last shall be first and the first shall be last. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The meek shall inherit the earth and ascend to the right hand of God. This, from the Sermon on the Mount, is the most radical social and political doctrine ever promulgated. Its soldiers were thousands, millions, of the meek, and it took the better part of three centuries for the Word to build up such a following that the Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. Calvin offered less hope than Jesus; Muhammad, more and less; Marx, more and more. The meek—“the proletariat” he called them—shall inherit the earth now!…here!…and never mind waiting for Heavenly pie in the sky. Freud offered more sex. Darwin offered nothing at all. Each, however, has left an enduring influence.

  Jesus is the Rock of Ages for both Marxism and its less vulgar child, Political Correctness in American colleges and universities, today, even though Jesus’s latter-day ducklings would gag on the very thought. There was a seventy-two-year-old field experiment in Marxism, 1917–1989, that failed gruesomely. But Marx’s idea of one social class dominating another may remain with us forever. In medical terms, Freud is now considered an utter quack and a dotty old professor. But his notion of sex as an energy like the steam in a boiler, which must be released in an orderly fashion or the boiler will blow up, remains with us, too. At this moment, as you gaze upon these pages, you can be sure that there are literally millions of loin spasms and convulsions taking place throughout the world that would not be occurring were it not for the words of Sigmund Freud.

  And this, the power of one person to control millions of his fellow humans—for centuries—is a power the Theory of Evolution cannot even begin to account for…or abide. Muhammad’s words have enthralled and ruled the daily lives of 35 percent of the people on earth since the eighth century. And that rule has only grown stronger in our time. Jesus’s words held sway over a comparable percentage of the world’s population for one and a half millennia before weakening in Europe during the last half of the twentieth century.

  Words are artifacts, and until man had speech, he couldn’t create any other artifacts, whether it was a slingshot or an iPhone or the tango. But speech, the font of all artifacts, had a life no other artifact would ever come close to. You could lay aside a slingshot or an iPhone and forget about it. You could stop dancing the tango and it would vanish forever…or until you deigned to dance again. But you couldn’t make speech lie down once it left your lips. The same remark could make your nieces and nephews crack up with mirth and laughter and make your brothers and sisters loathe you forever. Mighty men could say the wrong thing, and tens of thousands of litt
le men might lose their lives in the war that followed right after the words came out of his mouth. Or a weak man might get drunk one night and say something romantic to a pretty girl. He wakes up in the morning with a terrible hangover, kneading his forehead and consumed with guilt because of the sweet possessive looks she’s giving him. She has no trouble putting him in a box and tying it with a ribbon and giving him to herself as a wedding gift…the kickoff of sixty-two years during which he has a chance to find out just how stupid she is and how lovely she isn’t—all of it the result of a little drunk speech he uttered back in another century.

  Soon speech will be recognized as the Fourth Kingdom of Earth. We have regnum animalia, regnum vegetabile, regnum lapideum (animal, vegetable, mineral)—and now regnum loquax, the kingdom of speech, inhabited solely by Homo loquax. Or is “kingdom” too small a word for the eminence of speech, which can do whatever it feels like doing with the other three—physically and in every other way? Should it be Imperium loquax, making speech an empire the equal of Imperium naturae, the empire of Nature? Or Universum loquax, the Spoken Universe…this “superior intelligence,” this “new power of a definite character”?

  Last night I was riffling through the pages of a textbook on Evolution. I came upon a two-page spread with a picture on the left-hand page of a chimpanzee and her baby settling in for the night upon a three-pronged fork in a tree. On the right-hand page was a picture of a troop of gorillas stamping down a stretch of underbrush into crude nests for the night.

  I looked up from the book and out the window upon two rather swell hotels, just a few blocks from where I live in New York City, the Mark and the Carlyle, which is thirty-five stories high…two air-conditioned, centrally heated, room-serviced, DUX-mattressed, turned-down-quilted, down-lighter-lit, Wi-Fi-wired, flat-screen-the-size-of-Colorado’d, two-basin-bathroomed, debouched-silk-draped, combination-safed, School-of-David-Hicks-carpeted, Bose-Sound-systematic, German-brass-fixture-showered hotels…full of God knows how many humans who expect at least that much for their $750 per night and up…and in the distance the peaks of the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, the Citicorp Building, and the very tip of the top of the new Freedom Tower…and in between, a steel field of towers 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 stories high.

  It occurred to me that the two bedtime scenes, Apeland’s on the one hand and Manhattan’s on the other, were a perfect graph of what speech hath wrought. Speech! To say that animals evolved into man is like saying that Carrara marble evolved in to Michelangelo’s David. Speech is what man pays homage to in every moment he can imagine.

  a According to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, the word “primitive” can be defined as: “of, belonging to, or seeming to come from an early time in the very ancient past; not having a written language, advanced technology, etc.;…of, relating to, or produced by a people or culture that is nonindustrial and often nonliterate and tribal.”

  Notes

  Chapter I: The Beast Who Talked

  1 Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (London: J. Johnson, 1798), chapter 2.

  2 Ibid., chapter 1.

  3 James Hutton, An Investigation of the Principles of Knowledge, and of the Progress of Reason, from Sense to Science and Philosophy, (Edinburgh: Strahan and Cadell, 1794).

  4 Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or, the Laws of Organic Life, (London: J. Johnson, 1794).

  5 Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Recherches sur l’organisation des corps vivants (Paris: Maillard, 1802). The book was based on Lamarck’s 1800 lecture at Paris’s National Museum of Natural History, where he was a professor.

  6 James Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 20–21.

  7 Adam Sedgwick, “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation,” Edinburgh Review (July 1845), 1–85.

  8 Adam Sedgwick to Charles Lyell, April 9, 1845, in The Life and Letters of the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, ed. John Willis Clark and Thomas McKenny Hughes (London: C. J. Clay and Sons, 1890), 83.

  9 Quoted in John M. Lynch, ed., Selected Periodical Reviews, 1844–54, vol. 1 of “Vestiges” and the Debate Before Darwin (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 2000).

  10 Ibid., 10.

  11 Ben Waggoner, “Robert Chambers,” University of California Museum of Paleontology, http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/chambers.html.

  12 Thomas Henry Huxley, review of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, 10th ed., The British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review 13 (January–April 1854), 438.

  13 Ibid., 427.

  14 Alfred Russel Wallace, My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions (London: Chapman & Hall, 1905), 361–63.

  15 Alfred Russel Wallace, “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type,” Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society: Zoology 3, no. 9 (August 20, 1858). Initially read at the July 1, 1858, meeting of the Linnean Society.

  16 Darwin writes that Lyell had praised Wallace’s work in a letter to Wallace dated December 22, 1857, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-2192.xml.

  17 Mark Rothery, “The Wealth of the English Landed Gentry, 1870–1935,” Agricultural History Review 55, no. 2 (2007), 251–68.

  18 A record of Charles Lyell I purchasing the estate was published in the December 9, 1887, edition of the Scottish Law Reporter, which included his and his successors’ professions.

  19 See the Darwin family tree prepared by Charles Darwin in his book The Life of Erasmus Darwin, ed. Desmond King-Hele (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 141–143.

  20 Ibid., 25.

  21 Michael Shermer, In Darwin’s Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace; A Biographical Study on the Psychology of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 14–15.

  22 Charles Darwin, Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty’s Ships Adventure and Beagle, 1832–1836, vol. 3 (London: Henry Colburn, 1839), 95–96.

  23 These stories have been communicated orally for generations, so there are no definitive versions. For more on these creation myths and others, see: www.powhatanmuseum.com.

  24 George Thornton Emmons, The Tlingit Indians, ed. Frederica de Laguna (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 34.

  25 David Adams Leeming, A Dictionary of Creation Myths (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 44–46.

  26 Ibid., 252–53.

  27 George Hart, The Routledge Dictionary of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses (New York: Routledge, 2002), 3.

  28 Molefi Kete Asante and Abu S. Abarry, eds., African Intellectual Heritage: A Book of Sources (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 35–37.

  29 On April 1, 1838, Darwin wrote to his sister Susan about his trip to the zoo. For more on Jenny the orangutan, see Jonathan Weiner, “Darwin at the Zoo,” Scientific American, November 5, 2006.

  30 Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–1882, ed. Nora Barlow (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1958), 144.

  Chapter II: Gentlemen and Old Pals

  31 Ibid., 2.

  32 Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 40.

  33 Thomas Bell, quoted in Brian Gardiner’s editorial in The Linnean 13, no. 4, 1997.

  34 Charles R. Darwin and Alfred R. Wallace, “Proceedings of the Meeting of the Linnean Society held on July 1st, 1858,” Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society: Zoology 3. The printed publication is available at Wallace Online (wallace-online.org). The entire paper used Wallace’s title (without crediting him specifically), but because Darwin was the first author, his name appears first on the title page and in all running heads.

  35 The letter is missing, but Wallace summarizes his thoughts in his autobiography, My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions (London: Chapman & Hall, 1905).

  36 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859), 488.


  37 Richard Owen, “Darwin on the Origin of Species,” Edinburgh Review (April 1860).

  38 Thomas Henry Huxley, “Darwin’s Origin of Species,” the Times (London), December 26, 1859.

  39 For more on the X Club, see Ruth Barton, “‘An Influential Set of Chaps’: The X-Club and Royal Society Politics, 1864–85,” British Journal for the History of Science 23, no. 1 (1990); and Browne, Charles Darwin, 2002.

  40 See Leon Wieseltier, “A Darwinist Mob Goes After a Serious Philosopher,” New Republic (March 8, 2013), and Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

  41 For Huxley’s complete 1889 essay “Agnosticism,” see Thomas Henry Huxley, Collected Essays, vol. 5, Science and Christian Tradition (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1902).

  42 For more information, see Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).

  43 See Browne, Charles Darwin (2002), 104.

  44 Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language (New York: Charles Scribner, 1862), 354. The lectures were delivered in April, May, and June of 1861.

  45 Max Müller, “On the Results of the Science of Language,” in Essays Chiefly on the Science of Language, vol. 4 of Chips from a German Workshop (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1881), 449. This was originally delivered as a lecture at the Imperial University of Strasbourg, May 23, 1872.

  46 Quoted in John van Wyhe and Peter C. Kjaergaard, “Going the Whole Orang: Darwin, Wallace and the Natural History of Orangutans,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 51 (June 2015), 53–63.

  47 Alfred Russel Wallace, “The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man,” Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1871), 370.