What if I told you cows do not give us milk? What if I told you trees do not give us oxygen? What if I told you that we have lied to ourselves right from the beginning of civilization? My name is Vijayendra Mohanty and this is Radio Wemo, a podcast that wants to make you think. Today's topic is the language that we use to define and describe ourselves and our place in the universe. In the beginning, there was the word.

That's what we tell ourselves because frankly, it seems unbearable to even consider a time before there was the word. Before there were words that we use to communicate and describe and define the world. Because before there was the word, man was an animal.

This, to a great extent, is the fundamental conflict between science and religion. Religion has always sought to define man's origin as beginning with the word. I could be wrong, but I think most creation myths show man as capable of speech from the moment of his creation.

Not only does man hit the ground speaking, he also understands speech. In the religious worldview, man comes pre-installed with that kind of software. Our scientific understanding of man's origin, however, takes us back to times before the word.

This is a time when man was not even man. He was an ape. And before that, a fish.

And before that, a single cell. The word came much later, science tells us. And before it came, there were entire eras of existence untouched by the word.

I think that this might actually be a nice way of reconciling scientific and religious worldviews. But only if some of the more fundamentalist devotees stop insisting that the religious version of man's origin has to be the only way of looking at our past. Because in many ways, the history of religion is the history of language.

It was only after the advent of the word that man became what he is today. Yuval Noah Harari, in his book Sapiens, calls this the cognitive revolution. It was only after human beings became capable of communicating with each other using language that large tribes began to form.

Tribes that were larger than packs of wolves. Tribes that could cooperate on a scale that no herd of buffalo could. By talking to each other, human beings complemented each other's skills and built societies that were more than the sum of their parts.

These societies were held together by common ideals. Things like gods and spirits and codes of law. Things that man had created for the sake of order.

Two individuals who believed in the same god will cooperate with each other even if they have nothing else in common. And when they emerge from the same land, having heard the same stories about the same heroes and villains, they might even literally die for each other. Later on, legal frameworks were removed from religious contexts and things like secular morality came to be emphasized.

But the reason behind it remained the same. Keeping human societies together by making sure that people behaved in more or less the same way and didn't destroy each other completely. Of course, there were different rules for people from other tribes and other religions, but that is perhaps a topic for another episode.

Religion is fiction in much the same way as the law is. They both seek to define what it means to be human and tell us how to behave. In many places, the law and religion are intertwined.

There are religious laws. And these religious laws enter into a conflict with non-religious laws, creating doubt in the mind of the individual. Who is he? Where does he belong? Should he buy the definition of a human being that was written down in the constitution by a bunch of old men a long time ago? Or should he live his life according to the principles laid down in the religious book that his parents and grandparents read to him when he was a child? What's the answer? How the duck would I know? Please lower your expectations from this podcast.

I just want to make you think. I'm not here to give you answers. At the end of the day, what an individual decides will differ from person to person.

But here's the point. Though the two choices seem diametrically opposed to each other, there is a fundamental element of commonality between the two. Both are human-centric.

Both prioritize human beings. Both tell us the story of human exceptionalism. In the eyes of both worldviews, the human being holds a special place.

Religion says human beings were created and are loved by a god who looks suspiciously similar to human beings. The law is more direct. It says that human beings need to be good to each other because such behavior is what holds societies together.

Now, a short break. When I return, I will explain that bit about cows and trees. I started this episode by saying that cows do not give us milk and that trees do not give us oxygen.

It's true. No cow has ever given us anything. We have taken the milk.

And trees could not care less about what happens to us. They're doing their own thing. We just happen to benefit from the oxygen that they inevitably exhale.

It's not as if you don't know these things. In fact, it is very likely that you do. But a strange thing happens when we put these truths into words.

We flip the natural order around and we put ourselves on top. We make it sound as if we are important enough for cows to care about. As if we have importance in the eyes of trees.

Cows give us milk. Trees give us oxygen. We behave as if we matter more than everything else.

And what's more, we behave as if cows and trees are aware of this. And that they agree with us on this matter. But who decides this order of things? We do, of course.

When it comes to the value of humanity in general, there is no authority that can pass judgment. There is no higher power. There is no council of animals that got together and voted us into this top spot.

It was all just us. The only people who think people are important are people themselves. It seems kind of vain, no? Now, I am not saying that this is a bad thing.

In fact, it is only natural that we do this. We are human beings and we see the world through human eyes. These are the only eyes we have.

It is not possible for us to see the world from any other perspective. Our subjectivity is our prison. A prison that we cannot escape.

But we need at least to be aware that we are in that prison. Perhaps a better way to exist might be to at least acknowledge the fact that in life, literature and science, we are not always being objective. Or at least not as objective as we think.

The human point of view is not some kind of default value. Take Hollywood whitewashing for example. You know, that thing where white actors are cast as characters who belong to other races? On more than one occasion, when asked why a character was cast as a white man, they say the source material did not specify the race of the character.

So he could have belonged to any race. The problem is that this any race always ends up being white. As if white is some sort of default racial value that they have to fall back upon in the absence of any data.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that much like the calls for racial representation, perhaps we might consider some manner of non-human representation in the way we use language to define ourselves. Again, I don't know what can be done to affect this, to open language up to be a vessel for a beyond human perspective. But I do know that it is not perhaps impossible.

A few years ago, I started using she instead of he as the undefined pronoun in sentences. For example, instead of saying the user might find that he does not understand the interface, I started saying the user might find that she does not understand the interface. Why do I do this? I do this because nobody will ask you why I use he.

He is a default value. Apparently, it is assumed that the unnamed user will be a he. Language shapes the way we think about the world, and we need to be aware of the way we think.

That is primarily what I am arguing for, awareness. Awareness that human beings are not some kind of superior quantity. That human beings are just another link in the chain.

That even though we no longer think the earth is the center of the universe, the illusion of our centrality still persists. Because of the kind of language that we use to describe ourselves. And that brings me to the end of this episode.

I wanted to recommend two books before I signed off.

One was, of course, Yuval Harari's book Sapiens, which is an extraordinary account of human history. If it's a it's a great thing, it's a great vessel for the mind that takes pride in ancient cultures. If you thought your society, your culture, your religion has ancient roots, wait till you hear about the ancient roots of the human species itself.

And Yuval Harari does an excellent job of bringing all that forward. The other book that I would want to recommend is by philosopher Nick Bostrom. N-I-C-K-B-O-S-T-R-O-M, if you want to Google him up.

He's written a book called Anthropic Bias. And I think the entire book is available online to read. The complete text of it can be read at anthropic-principle.com. It's a great book that brings you face to face with the limitations of the human experience as far as evaluating things is concerned.

It's written primarily for researchers and scientists to help them avoid bias in their work. But I think it's a great work of philosophy in and of itself. So those were my book recommendations.

Also, if you like this episode, I request that you share it with one person, just one person that you like. That's all I ask. Just one person who you think will like it.

Send it to them. And until next time, keep thinking. Bye-bye.