Imagine a band of ancient foragers in a forest in Asia. The people have a language, but they use it infrequently. People speak less as they get older. By the time people turn 40, they are silent. If an older person speaks, people know something’s wrong. If an old person speaks routinely, the presumption is that something is wrong with him.
We — especially those of who are older — can barely imagine it. We don’t recognize the form of life.
But consider that these people were hunter-gathers. They did not send their kids to college. The kids did not need help with homework or advice on careers. The children needed instructions on basic survival techniques, and they learned early. They went through rites of passage at 8. They were independent by 13.
Parents and other adults talked to children to teach them. But it was considered bad form to tell another person what to do. Children heard much less from adults when they turned 8. They heard hardly anything when they turned 13.
Older people, like everyone else, had to hunt and gather. But when the kids were out of the nest there was no need for them to say anything, so they didn’t.
This is not the outline of a science fiction story. It’s a comment on a line from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations:
And so to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.
How hard is it to imagine a different form of life?
As hard as it for an old guy like me to imagine shutting up.
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