Darwin, Bureaucratese, and the Decline of Poetry

I want to begin by asking a simple question: Why has poetry descended from being a great delight to a miserable bore for the majority of the populace? This was not always the case. Poet Magaret Randall helps us to see:

Poems have been smuggled out of prisons, shared on battlefields, passed from hand to hand and generation to generation, scratched on walls, written in diaries and recipe books, distributed on street corners, and carried cross-county by hobos riding the freight trains of the 1930s. They have inhabited public spaces and been whispered in ears, bringing otherwise indescribable events and people to life in stunning ways. Their humor makes us laugh. Their truth can take our breath away. Their concise complexity may transmit more, and more powerfully, than any piece of prose.

Poetry, both oral and written, was once a cherished pastime for so many. But its movement to the fringes of society has long been a trend. And while a new populist emergence can be seen in some larger fringes, it is still the case, as Anthony Esolen said, that “poets have almost no purchase upon the popular mind.”

Prestigious poet Dana Gioia argued in his widely-circulated essay “Can Poetry Matter?” that much of the decline can be attributed to an elite group of academics and publishers hijacking the whole enterprise of poetry and keeping it in-house so-to-speak, writing poetry for and to one another, most of it never making a public appearance. Gioia also contended that they were fundamentally changing the rules and quality of poetry, such that much of the poetry being written in these elite circles was about as poetic as Marcel Duschamp’s famous urinal was artistic.

To be sure, Gioia appears to be correct on both accounts. The decline of poetry has been hastened by the disappearance of poetry in popular media and by its turn toward relativism and meaningless chatter. But I don’t think that’s all there is to it. Writing in his autobiography, Charles Darwin presents us with a hint: “I have as much difficulty as ever in expressing myself clearly and concisely; and this difficulty has caused me a very great loss of time.” As Darwin is writing this in his elder years, it is possible that this is simply the natural process of dementia. But Darwin continues:

My mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond, poetry of many kinds… gave me great pleasure…. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry…. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive…. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness.

By Darwin’s own account he has simultaneously lost the ability to clearly articulate his thoughts and to enjoy poetry. Is it possible that the two are connected, such that the loss of one prefigures the loss of the other?

The clue might actually be found in Darwin’s suggestion that his mind had “become a kind of machine.” So methodically scientific was his life that, after his first child was born, he wrote, “I at once commenced to make notes on the first dawn of the various expressions which he exhibited.” He further confessed that, “whenever I had leisure, I pursued my experiments.” Darwin was so obsessed with the empirical method that he lived most of his life in a sort of detached, artificial kind of way. He didn’t so much as experience life as he observed it. And his observations were of the “mechanics” of life, not the substance.

But the experiential side of life is the substance of life. And poetry is the language of experience. In his book Chance or Dance, Thomas Howard captures this idea:

It is in poetry that we try to speak the language that is suggested to us by our imagination as the real language of things…. In other words, poetic language tends toward the way things are…the faculty in us that shouts at us… that something is there, and that it is as full of texture and flavor and knobbiness as we wish it were—this faculty is imagination…. And the language of this awareness that is in us all is the language called poetry…. For it is the language that takes a serious view of experience.

And it is this ability of poetic language to capture the imagination that also allows it to be the language of spiritual revelation. In her essay “Toward a Christian Aesthetic,” Dorothy Sayers explains:

When we read the poem… it is as though a light were turned on inside us. We say: “Ah! I recognize that! That is something that I obscurely felt to be going on in and about me, but I didn’t know what it was and couldn’t express it. But now that the artist has made its image—imaged it forth—for me, I can possess and take hold of it and make it my own and turn it into a source of knowledge and strength.”

This is like the Platonic concept in which all true spiritual knowledge is something that is already inside our soul but must be retrieved by our memory, as if the Fall has hidden our knowledge of the Imago Dei within us and poetry pulls the cover away.

Unfortunately, Darwin spent decades reading, not poetry, but scientific prose, which is far detached from the realm of human experience and spiritual revelation. Take, as an example, an imaginative, poetic piece of prose versus a rewritten version in scientific prose:

1. A child kicks his leg rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. —G.K. Chesterton

2. Repetitive movement of the leg by a child is best explained by the high metabolic rate at which the child burns energy. Further, due to the fact that adolescents are typified by unregulated and inquisitive desires, the outcome permits a preference for cyclical and repetitive activity. In contrast, the metabolic rate at which adults burn energy is comparatively less. This difference can account for the lack of preference given for similar cyclical and repetitive activity by adults. —Aaron Ames

What seems immediately evident in the second paragraph is that it is “lifeless,” dare I say machine-like. The purpose of scientific prose is to be impersonal and objective, two things that the experiential life is definitely not. Chesterton’s poetic prose brings life and the scientific reinterpretation dulls it. It is this second kind of prose that Darwin spent his life reading, writing, and thinking. So Darwin’s case might give us a clue as to what is going on elsewhere.

The last century or so appears to be a long exercise, not in the stewardship of language, but in its abuse. As George Orwell observed in 1946 that “the English language is in a bad way,” then we can only concur that today “the English language is, like, in a way more bad way,” and it’s about to take a steep nosedive. If it is true, according to scholar Joseph Pearce, that we only write as well as we read, then it is no wonder that both our writing and our speaking is as inarticulate and ugly as ever when the majority of what we read is empty jargon on a screen.

Orwell complained of his time:

Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house…it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.

Anyone who has spent much time perusing academic and political literature feels Orwell’s pain. Nowhere is the devolution of language into meaningless chatter more evident than in the overwhelming adoption of bureaucratic language, or, what Neil Postman calls “Eichmannism” that “cool, orderly, cynical language of the bureaucratic mentality alienated from human interest”.

The lifeless, inarticulate, mechanistic language of bureaucracy is what all of society is being trained to value and regurgitate. Its imprint is found in every discipline of the academy. And it is most at home in the political and corporate world. It has become the very style of formal communication. One might even argue that it is our highest style of language, or, to be more precise, it is our sacred language. After all, the gods of today are mammon and machines, and what language is better suited to such inhumane idols? Where poetry once reigned, now bureaucratese!

Bureaucratese pretends to be articulate when it is otherwise ambiguous. In the atrocities of the last century, it pretended to be humane when it was beastly. In government, it pretends to tell the truth, when it obscures it. In the business world, it pretends to be something of great value to society, when it is often something that robs it of value. In science, it pretends to be the language of reality and knowledge when that is reserved for poetry and spiritual revelation. .

What scientific thought and prose did to Darwin, bureaucratese is doing to the rest of us. While scientific writing might not be as meaningless as bureaucratic language, it prefers the cold, detached, sub-human, yet formal, style that mirrors bureaucratese. As Postman noted in Technopoloy: The Surrender of Culture to Technology: “Language itself is a kind of technique—an invisible technology—and through it we achieve more than clarity and efficiency. We achieve humanity—or inhumanity.” Neither scientific nor bureaucratic language is helping us in this pursuit.

When the thing about us that makes us most human and by which we reach for the Heavens together is reduced to an instrument of mere efficiency, as in texting, or, worse, an instrument of deception, as in bureaucratese, then we become the kinds of beings that are fit for this kind of language, and it is a language fit neither for heaven nor for earth, for it is sub-human, fit for a machine.

And along comes Chat GPT and all the other AI languaging programs ready for us to further outsource our language, I mean our souls, to machines. On February 8, 2023, the Pentagon published a press release generated by Chat GPT, which read in part:

Task Force 39 is an empowered, collaborative group of soldiers dedicated to fostering an innovative culture and pursuing regional and industry partnerships in order to generate future combat efficiency. The team is focused on countering the threat of small Unmanned Aerial Systems and developing innovative solutions to other security challenges.

Due to our penchant for bureaucratese, there is no way to tell whether this statement was written by a person or a computer program. We have been prepped to mistake our own human language for that of a robot, or a robot for that of a human, or, is there any longer a difference? To be sure, AI is going to fool us with its best versions of narrative and poetry, but bureaucratese is going to be its modus operandi, if for no other reason than that it is going to be resourcing so much of this already present in our human language.

It would seem that the most difficult kind of language for AI to imitate would be of the most poetic, most artistic, and most original, the kind of speech we make only in the midst of great inspiration or great tribulation, the kind of speech that is most alive. For, as impressive as Chat GPT might be, it knows nothing of unrequited love and has experienced nothing of those “tantalizing glimpses” of Heaven. In this way, the sort of cold, disinterested, lifeless language of bureaucratese would seem to suit it best. Thus it would be naive to think that Chat GPT is not going to further proliferate the already proliferative use of bureaucratese.

While Chat GPT will certainly be used in the political, corporate, and academic world, consider that some are already pushing for its use as a program for childhood education in grammar and English, among other things. And while we can imagine some of its actual benefits, we must especially warn of the danger of further reducing our languaging capacities.

Darwin’s difficulty in “expressing” himself clearly is undoubtedly a loss of the imaginative sense, which is the mental medium by which we express reality itself. His loss of taste for poetry was a result of a reductive mode of thought and language that had incapacitated his imagination, resulting in what Darwin himself said was a loss of happiness. Thus, as we reduce our language, we reduce our imagination, losing our appreciation for poetic language, the language of experience and spiritual reality. Thus, our imaginative capacity can literally atrophy. And when it does, our human and spiritual nature go with it.

The remedy? Maybe take Darwin’s advice: “If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry… at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use.”

An abbreviated version of this essay was first published by the CiRCE Institute.

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The featured image is “Poetry” (1606) by Alessandro Turchi, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.