Exogenesis, Alexandria, and the Renewal of Language

Peco Gaskovski’s 2023 novel Exogenesis (Ignatius Press) is set in Lantua, a Huxleyan city where drones patrol night and day, and people earn credit points; if they’re lucky they enter a higher echelon (only in the fifth echelon does one have the privilege of living without being bugged by the nearly ubiquitous Eyes). Everyone carries a smartphone-like device called an omni (a more apropos term than “phone” for our seemingly omnicompetent pocket bugs). Virtual reality headsets are the primary way information is deposited into the sacks that are the city’s children, and grown-ups regularly take a soma-like pill or therapy to keep them happy. The title refers to the city’s practice of growing babies exclusively in bags outside the womb. Natural childbirth has been outlawed, the word “parent” banned; instead, “guardians” choose a child from the profiles of developing fetuses, swiping until they find one that’s just right.

But the city cannot live on plastic alone. Outside Lantua are the renegade Benedites, Amish-like outliers who maintain human practices like childbirth and what Lantuans would call “cultural propaganda of the Old World”—such as the reading of books (Homer to Dante), writing with ink, and speaking Latin—while also doing essential work for the city, such as growing food. The protagonist, Maelin Kivela, a “population consultant,” and her task force are charged with controlling the population of the Benedites—which means forcibly sterilizing all those chosen to be “non-breeders.” It’s easier, Maelin reflects, to “control the seed of their lands and their bodies,” but “harder to control the seed of their minds.”

Maelin is good at her job, but she harbors a secret, and she suffers from recurring nightmares of looking for a lost child in the snow.

It’s hard not to reveal Maelin’s wake-up moment: When she goes to the place where she and her partner are to decide which of the hundreds of babies (each with their own genetic profile and set of personality predictors) they will choose, she accidentally finds out what happens to all the babies who are unchosen. We know the horror that’s coming; and as Maelin realizes, it’s been obvious all the while what happens to them—she’d just never thought of it before, until she becomes a witness.

Exogenesis is a fast-paced read, a well-spun adventure. But the thing that struck me the most about the tale was not how eerily similar Lantua is to many parts of our world; it was the unevenly eroded language of the Lantuans.

Early on, we hear one of Maelin’s underlings call her “Ma’am.” This particular fellow is an ex-Benedite, so he is more cultured (knowing Latin and such) and trained in hierarchical modes than the average Lantuan. Even so, it seemed strange that in such a revolutionized society, so given over to the Machine, a female superior is allowed to be called “ma’am.” I thought this intriguing. In a world where Progress (i.e., the Machine, or whatever label want to affix to it) is leveling all distinctions in human beings, including sex and gender—perhaps the thorniest and yet most important distinction to level—it seems the language would be more carefully policed, for people to call each other something more like Comrade 1 and Comrade 2. Of course, “mother” and “father” are outlawed; there are only “guardians.” But the leveling of the human being through language and naming didn’t seem to go far enough.

I also was struck by Maelin being so, well, normal. Given how she has been raised, I would have expected her to be more like the shallow Lenina from Brave New World. But Maelin is not on the lowest echelon; if she were, she might very well have been more like Lenina, and so her formation seems accordingly to have been more human. And if a Lenina had been our protagonist, it’s not clear she would have been able to think for herself at all, let alone be able to have her own wake-up moment as Truman does in The Truman Show, as Neo does in The Matrix. But if the story had been told from Lenina’s witless perspective, I doubt we’d have any sort of ordered narrative. We could have had a very dark book indeed, but also perhaps an unreadable one.

If there were a population of people entirely produced by exogenesis and raised entirely in state daycare centers, with VR headsets providing information downloads—in a word, being raised by computers and by computer-like people—it seems likely that the humanity of these people would be so truncated that it would be a nature-rending miracle for one of them to be able to do anything for himself, let alone think. And to tell the story of such a place would require one to have an outsider’s perspective.

I think there’s a reason within Gaskovski’s world that Maelin is as relatable as she is (how then could she be trained to be persuasive to the Benedites?), and yet I keep thinking about the Leninas. How would one wake up from a subhuman sleep?

We get a taste of this problem when looking at the examples of real-life feral children, monstrously abused sex slaves like Jaycee Dugar (who lived in a trashy tent for eighteen years), the emotionally pruned ex-soldiers like Alex, who escaped the El Salvadoran military because he realized his “superior officers” had “taken his soul away,” or any number of horrific cases of human beings being starved of basic human needs, such as loving touch, familial identity, the gaze of a mother’s eyes.

“Men do not long continue to think what they have forgotten how to say,” wrote C.S. Lewis in “The Death of Words.” What if a child never knew what a mother, father, or love was in the first place, let alone their names? How could a child remember what he has never known? Is not the control of language to “control of the seed their minds”?

Paul Kingsnorth’s Buccmaster trilogy experiments with just these ideas: how language shapes us, and how a totalitarian control of language—machine thinking, we might call it—affects our humanity. The first novel, The Wake, is notable for being written in an Old English-ish—not Old English itself, but in what Kingsnorth calls a “shadow language,” with the spelling and terminology being close enough to Anglo-Saxon to give us the feel of Anglo-Saxon while still being readable to a contemporary English speaker (after a little bit of time to get settled into the dialect):

what is this fugol i saes to my wifman

i cnaw naht of fugols she saes why does thu asc me of these things

wifman i saes lysten this is sum scucca glidan ofer us what does thu mac of this

naht she nefer saes naht

i tell thu sum thing is cuman

It’s an exciting experiment, and an illustration of how language makes a world.

The second novel, Beast, has a contemporary setting, but it also stretches language in order to portray the inner wanderings and (near?) madness (or is it mysticism?) of a man living alone:

From the east I came, from the dead fens, because of everything that grew there, because of what was lodged in the dark waters. I walked the streets, I sat on the couches, I passed through the sliding doors, I talked but never listened, I sold but never gave away. Everywhere there were voices and I added my voice to them and we spoke out together and said nothing at all.

And later on, after much isolation, the narration breaks up, breaks down, but still flows manically:

the pinpricks of light are like yellow eyes looking at me from the outside. i should not be in here i can’t look at the eyes i can’t look at the shafts of light coming through they are like lasers they come through the windows….

The fragmenting prose reflects the inner intensity, brokenness, and eventual epiphany that make up the narrator’s inner life.

The final novel, Alexandria, is set in the future, a post-apocalyptic world where the only people who have not left Earth to join the great computer-in-the-sky of Alexandria—a painless, deathless city where virtual reality is the only reality—are a non-literary people who live close to the land. The language of the earth-bound people reflects their indigenous state: they live in what Walter Ong would call primary orality, wherein words live in community, and are themselves indigenous. Like the other two, the story is in first-person, but unlike the other two, the narrators change section by section, interspersed with song and prophecy.

Near the very beginning, a young woman goes through a coming-into-womanhood ritual. She speaks thus:

i held his hand on me and he said he loved me but it was not me he loved, it was this moment of lovin. he loves what burns, his world is shaped from his seein of it, all his world is shape of inside of his hart. his love is that shape bendin in to sudden ungiven pattern. then he sees world outside his seein, world which moves without and beyond, and then he soars like Birds.

And the Father of the Order:

three hundred years ago, we are taught, first folk from our Order comin to this place, to this long island in fenns that was called Edg by folk of Atlantis before Waters risin. our folk come and settled and plantin here great Cloyster, hedge of Yoo and Horn and Bow as is done in our Order. plant great Cloyster in circle, within it place Chappel to Lady and Long Hall for gathrin and sleepin. within Cloyster, followin its green circle, raise Poles, one every year in shape of Bird seen by he who is chosen as Dreamer. in this way does our Order live in all places in this green world. body, Erth, skin, Clay, feet, roots, all in circle. in service to Her.

The family whose lives we follow eventually cross paths with a man known as K, a spokesman for Alexandria whose business it is to lure the remaining people on earth to join Alexandria.

It’s K who speaks a flattened, contemporary English—that is, a bloodless jargon. The indigenous family, by contrast, speak of the Waters and the Birds; Kingsnorth spells their words slightly differently to reflect this, such as Cnoo for canoe. The world is mythic again for them, alive with its own spirits, its own stories.

Indeed, K speaks more like a chatbot than a human being, a robot endeavoring to be understanding to its human interlocutors. (We become our machines.) His narration comes mostly in the form of Transcripts with his Targets—the people whom he endeavors to persuade to go to Alexandria (here he is our Maelin parallel):

K: Do you know who I am?

T [Target]: You work for Wayland.

K: Correct. I am one of his retainers. You may call me K. Sit down. You look uncomfortable. We’ll both sit, on the ground here. See? Now: do you know what I do?

T: You send people to Alexandria.

K: I help people who choose, freely and of their own informed volition, to leave their bodies and join the immortals in Wayland’s city. Do you know why I am here?

[Target does not respond.]

K: I am here because you want to join them.

How, then, is K awakened? How does he become more human? He does, indeed, become so, or at least begins to, but I will not spoil the hopeful ending.

The question of how to awaken a deeply sleeping soul—like K, like Maelin, like Lenina—in our own world is pressing. I doubt it can happen without a renewal of language.

“Language is the storehouse of imagination,” wrote Owen Barfield in Poetic Diction, and he argued also that imagination is the organ of meaning; it orders our logical side, ideally acting, as Ian McGilchrist might put it, as the master, whereas logic is its emissary. Language is one of the crucial ways in which we participate in the world.

Barfield argues that the desire to make all things flat and controllable, “to reduce the specifically human to a mechanical or animal regularity,” will always conflict with “the nature of the mother tongue.” “Of all devices for dragooning the human spirit,” he writes, “the least clumsy is to procure its abortion in the womb of language.” This, indeed, is where to begin to “control the seed” of the mind, the spirit. So, then, if those “who mistake efficiency for meaning” are successful in “expunging from language all the substance of its past, in which it is naturally so rich, and finally converting it into the species of algebra that is best adapted to the uses of indoctrination and empirical science, a long and important step forward will have been taken in the selfless cause of the liquidation of the human spirit.” He wrote that in 1951.

But if language has already been emptied of deep, mythic meaning and of vernacular variety—if, say, there are no more dialects, no more accents, no more neighborhood- and village- and county-specific turns of phrase and ways of living life, then it’s far easier for the industrial version of language—for machine thinking—to take over. The homogenizing effects of mass culture—from radio to TV—precede the flattening of AI-generated words. It’s worth noting this striking passage from Helen Andrews’s Boomers, on the difference between folk culture and mass culture:

Yet [the British teacher Hoggart] could not help noticing that those unschooled slum dwellers were mentally independent in a way that his postwar students were not. His grandmother’s range of cultural reference was narrow and unimpressive, consisting mainly of homespun aphorisms and the Bible, but at least her mind had not been colonized by pulp novels and Hollywood movies. The difference between the old culture and mass culture was like the difference between preparing a meal and microwaving one, and Hoggart’s students had been rendered helpless in the same way as someone who has never been taught how to cook. The colonial aspect of mass culture was easier for Hoggart to spot because he was British. Mass culture, for England and Europe, was a foreign takeover. But “Americanization” homogenized the home country as much as it did the rest of the globe, sapping the life out of regional subcultures. Before the 1950s, music, theater, magazines, and even radio were all local, to one degree or another. Hollywood movies were not.

One suspects that a mass culture composed of AI slop will be as beneficial to the human mind as reconstituted pulverized Lunchables would be to the body.

In Ivan Illich’s controversial, under-read, badly read, and misunderstood book Gender, he opens by mentioning the idea of “key words”—these make up the web of “the ordinary speech of the industrial age.” They are industrial terms, terms that are, in Illich’s intriguing formulation, “genderless and sexist” (The unpacking of such a formulation cannot be performed here; I direct the reader to a careful reading of the book itself for the full, though admittedly lapidary, argument). They are therefore easily translatable from one language to another. They are efficient, even economic and scientific, we might say, in the reductionistic sense of economics and science that has prevailed in our left-hemisphere-dominated era.

Now, there’s no problem with key words necessarily (or not yet), unless they overwhelm vernacular vocabulary such that key words mean more than they are able to carry: Illich’s prime example is how the assumption of a genderless human undergirds the speech of the dreams of disparate groups: “the feminist dream of a genderless economy without compulsory sex roles” as well as “the leftist dream of a political economy whose subjects would be equally human [he means something like classless here, and even gives human its own substantial footnote: a brief discussion of the term’s history and its movement from specific to more abstract applications]” and “the futurist dream of a modern society where people are plastic, their choices of being a dentist, a male, a Protestant, or a gene-manipulator deserving the same respect.”

But, says Illich, “an industrial society cannot exist unless it imposes certain unisex assumptions: the assumptions that both sexes are made for the same work, perceive the same reality, and have, with some minor cosmetic variations, the same needs.” But because humans are not genderless—are not faceless, bodiless, placeless—our modern theories of economics fail, and it is why Illich calls economics as such “sexist”—that is, in every reductionist measurement that counts in such a view of economics, women are nearly always lesser. And instead of arguing for equality according to genderless theories, Illich challenges the assumptions of such theories. When given a choice between an “equal” society in which there’s no difference between one human or another, or a society in which every human in every place is arbitrarily given a top-down designation irrespective of human culture or human need, Illich says, “Neither.”

The modern theory of economics, argues Illich, is based on an “assumption of scarcity,” which itself is based on the unisex assumption: “There could be no competition for ‘work’ between men and women, unless ‘work’ had been redefined as an activity that befits humans irrespective of their sex. The subject on which economic theory is based is just such a genderless human.” This has extended to all modern institutions, says Illich: education, union, courtroom, and business. “Education” itself becomes a scarce good for which genderless humans compete. Disembedded sex is what remains, and hence “economic sexism.” Instead of traditional pathways of becoming mothers and fathers, elders and teachers, an inheritance of a rich cultural dance, each person is treated like a stick to be made into a spoke and fit into a wheel—except there are only so many spots to fill. It’s notable that the indigenous people of Alexandria have the gendered society (recall the early scene of the young woman undergoing a ritual of womanhood) and it is K who has been made genderless on the way to becoming less human and more machine.

So what does Illich mean by “gender” if he doesn’t mean quite what Judith Butler, Abigail Favale, or John Paul II mean by it?

Think of the Latin root gens, “people” but also “produce, beget.” By vernacular gender, he means the ways in which a traditional culture lives out distinctions between persons: “It distinguishes places, times, tools, tasks, forms of speech, gestures, and perceptions that are associated with men from those associated with women.” It is “social” because “it is specific to a time and place.” The vernacular gender—the living out of the particular dance of a small society—can be different from neighborhood to neighborhood, as startling as such an idea may seem in our homogenized world.

Food provides a clear analogy. The preparation and harvesting of food will differ from place to place simply because of the different places themselves. For example, you most likely won’t have a culture around the harvesting of wild rice if you don’t live in northern Minnesota, and Scandinavians will have no rituals that involve the joys of curing olives.

Vernacular gender is like a food tradition: In economics, numbers are translated into more numbers. But numbers only give us part of the picture, and though they’re immensely useful, if read without a bigger picture and better philosophy of the human being and awareness of local realities and needs and traditions, we’re going to lose indigenous (one could say unmachined) ways of being, of speaking, of living. Just so: We’re not going to be healthier people if we simply count calories, or if we treat food as fuel, or if we treat horses as horsepower and humans as units of labor.

And this brings us back to Exogenesis: the idea of disembedding a child from the womb of its mother has its parallel in disembedding words from the soil in which they live. Indeed, words are seeds. And to control the seeds of language is to control people.

To plant and cultivate good seed is perhaps the best response to this reality; to raise our children amidst real culture and ordinary churchgoing community, with old stories and particular songs and amongst people who know and love them by name.

What if a child has been effectively raised by machines? There is no answer that will serve for all cases. But beginning to respond to such a tragedy must entail those of us who do not wish to live as machines, first, to pursue full humanity—in all its tangibility and particularity and local, not digital, reality, amidst the grass and cement and streets and forests and children and neighbors we’re given. We ought to be able to stand by our words, and to know the literal ground upon which we stand. This includes, I would suggest, resisting barbaric attempts to brutalize or obfuscate language (and therefore to misuse people), such as using “birthing person” instead of “mother.”

Second, we must pursue the life of the spirit, what Chesterton would call real mysticism. The real mystic is alive to all of Reality, not merely the reality that the materialist says counts. Then we may be better able to aid the Ks and the Leninas we may encounter.

Both the pursuit of full humanity and the life of the spirit are involved in Ivan Illich’s own answer to the challenge of our fragmented age: the way of conviviality, of friendship. Illich himself was known for keeping a candle lit in his living room as he hosted many gatherings of convivial conversation livened by wine.

He would surely have nodded to Chesterton’s words from What’s Wrong with the World; “All true friendliness begins with fire and food and drink and the recognition of rain or frost. Those who will not begin at the bodily end of things are already prigs…. Each human soul has in a sense to enact for itself the gigantic humility of the Incarnation. Every man must descend into the flesh to meet mankind.” Illich himself averred that, “Whoever loves another loves [Christ] in the person of that other.”

In his Outline of Sanity, G.K. Chesterton averred that “Before we begin any talk of the practical problem of machinery, it is necessary to leave off thinking like machines.” Rather, we must think within the soil of a living culture and of true myth.

And there is hope, for Maelin, and for K, if someone alive with the fire of charity reaches out, in flesh and spirit. I do not think it is coincidence that Gaskovski’s Exogenesis was formed by an imagination shaped by Christian hope, nor that Kingsnorth’s writing of Alexandria came very close in time to his own spiritual awakening into Christianity, into the Song of Resurrection itself, the Great Story of the God-Man who became flesh and blood in order to transfigure His people into living flame.

Image Credit: James Brade Sword, “The Angler”