In the Beginning was the Spoken Word

For many years, the written word represented the pinnacle of human achievement. It's time to rethink that.

In the beginning was the word. Not the written word, not the typed word, but the spoken word. From cro-magnons around prehistoric fires to Periclean orators on ancient Agoras, the spoken word dominated human history as the primary tool for knowledge propagation, crowd persuasion, and personal drama.

For at least 30,000 years, the spoken word was the best option to communicate with other humans by virtue of being the only option. It wasn’t until 3000 B.C. that writing arrived, picking up steam among the sort of people who like to be in charge of money or religion [1].

Despite the undeniable convenience of writing (no need to memorise who paid or prayed what to whom and when), the wisest of our ancestors remained suspicious of this flashy technology. In the Old Testament, the prophet Elijah experiences God through “a gentle whisper” instead of a letter or email (1 Kings 19:12). Plato far preferred the “living and breathing word of him who knows“, arguing that “[writing] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it“ [2]. The New Testament Apostle Paul wrote that “the letter kills” (2 Corinthians 3:6) but “it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved” (Romans 10:10). Of course, the irony is that we only know of these wise sages through someone who wasn’t wise enough to adhere to their advice.

Maybe aided by this initial hesitation towards writing, the spoken word retained its hegemony over human communication for the next couple thousand years. Throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages, the “good stuff“ was still found in memorised recitals of Cicero’s speeches, choral performances of Hildegard von Bingen’s chants, and the sort of stories people tell when they’ve had too much to drink and it’s dark outside. The written word was mostly confined to either the noblest or basest of pursuits, namely religion and whatever it is that lawyers do.

But then we changed. As literacy rates slowly and then explosively spread, thinkers like Voltaire and Diderot started emphasising mind over matter, brain over brawn, wit over will, reason over the illiterate traditions of the poor huddled masses. Unlike the spoken word, reason needed to be fastidiously reproducible. Small errors could catastrophically undermine the logical progression from if to then in an otherwise coherent argument. Reason also needed to be retraceable. Assumptions early in the argument should be able to be revisited again and again to ensure that link in the chain of claims was justified. The alchemy of repetition, cadence, and pantomime that smooths over contradictions and fallacies in the spoken word would not suffice for reason. As Francis Bacon wrote, “[only] writing makes an exact man“ [3].

It wasn’t long until the written word and the reason it conveyed (or the pretense of it) were elevated beyond a mere tool and became the classification boundary between man and beast. Descartes astutely noted that animals can’t write (true!) but from there extrapolated a relation between writing, reason, and our humanity itself (true?): “Beasts have no words or other signs, which relate to thought [...] this not only shows that beasts have less reason than men, but that they have none at all“ [4]. This conflation of humanity and the written word remained remarkably persistent over time, from Modernist poets like Hermann Hesse (“without writing and without books there could be no concept of humanity” [5]), to Hollywood actors like Robin Williams (“we read and write because we are members of the human race” [6]). After all, in the unbiased words of the Pulitzer Prize winning writerer David McCullough, “writing is thinking“, and only humans know how to think.

Pockets of resistance remained of course. Reverends revived, politicians prattled, and movie stars monologued. However, the bastions of the „living and breathing“ unscripted spoken word were relegated to the lower tiers of modern culture: daytime TV, door-to-door salesmen, and cavemen around podcast mics.

Enter the deus ex machina: 2017’s “Attention is all You Need” and the AI revolution that followed [7]. Ironically, those who should have been the most human of all (by the logic of Descartes), the writers of pure unadulterated rational thought in the form of for loops and if statements, were the ones to undermine our special place in the taxonomy of existence. Large Language Models and their lightly modified successors, Reasoning Models, can now write and reason faster (and sometimes better) than most humans [8]. Yes, their outputs are trite and cliche — but is my or your writing much better? Yes, they struggle with real world physics — but so do Marvel screenwriters. Yes, they get confused when they are given too much information — but so do I when trying to pick my next Netflix show. We made reason and writing our thing, and then built a thing that can do it just as well.

So, if the machines write, reason, and certainly smell better than the average human, then what’s the point of the average human? I suspect that the answer to what we were made for, our purpose and point, has more to do with what we were made from than we previously imagined. As of yet, bodies of blood and bone differentiate even the most average human from smart silicon – that must be meaningful.

If embodiment becomes our moat against the ever increasing abilities of virtual intelligences, then the spoken word will be our sword (Ephesians 6:17). Unlike the written word, the spoken word makes man more beast than machine. It forces us to use exactly those fleshy capabilities that are out of reach for chatbots and AI girlfriends, the “living and breathing“, the “gentle whisper“, the “Spirit [giving] life”, the sheer physicality of humanness. A chatbot cannot be mistrusted because it’s sweaty, it cannot surprise by inhaling sharply at just the right time, it cannot be booed off stage because it’s mumbling too much, it cannot brainwash by gesticulating maniacally. What makes the spoken word so human is what the written word abstracts away: our hands, lungs, sweat glands, and tongues. Instead of papers, self-help books, and leaflets, the future belongs to lectures, panels, and speeches, because the performative “irl” humanity of these is exactly what LLMs cannot provide.

There are dangers in this restoration of the spoken word. Mostly because Francis Bacon and David McCullough were right! Writing forces us to distill the chaotic jumble of vague impressions in our head into a coherent point and filter the high frequency fluctuations of feeling in our heart into a measured narrative. This doesn’t just make for better writers, it makes for better speakers, and better humans too. Relegating this method to machines risks plunging us into superstition and susceptibility. The anti-human ideologies of the 20th century (e.g., Fascism, Stalinism, and Co.) deployed the spoken word to whip up mass hysteria and brush over internal contradictions with all-pervasive propaganda. Social media’s “content” is increasingly packaged in videos, showing how easily spoken word formats can be hijacked by staged “authenticity“ for profit, politics, or plain stupidity.

However, I also have hope. Live debates and discussions could produce better politics and science by forcing the human passion and pettiness into the open that is so often hidden under carefully worded jargon and euphemism. More importantly, the „living and breathing“ of the spoken word is what human relationships subsist on. Talking with others, gesticulating at others, breathing at others may free us from the hyper-individualistic navel gazing that pervades modern society.

Most of my life, I have stayed in the safe harbor of the written word. It protected me from the risk of stuttering awkwardly, messing up my pronunciation, or even just sneezing at the wrong moment. To some extent, writing let me separate my ideas from my personal fallibility at any particular moment. This helped me build stronger scaffoldings for the thoughts I was trying to express but it obscured the experience, temperament, and physical body that had crafted those same thoughts.

Many years ago I came across a passage of Latter-day Saint scripture that records God’s words to us: “You shall ever open your mouth in my cause, not fearing what man can do, for I am with you“ (Doctrine & Covenants 30:11). Opening our mouth and embracing the spoken word means overcoming the fear of what our own human weakness can do in the moment of speaking. It requires trusting that what makes us special, what makes us both human and divine, will be with us – in every stutter, mispronunciation, and sneeze. In the beginning was the spoken word; I’d wager that it will be there in the end as well.

[1] “Linguistics 001: Writing Lecture.” University of Pennsylvania. Accessed April 8, 2026. https://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_1998/ling001/Writinglect.html.

[2] Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1995, 62.

[3] Bacon, Francis. 1597. “Of Studies.” In Essayes.

[4] Descartes, René. 1637. Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences.

[5] Hesse, Hermann. 1974. My Belief: Essays on Life and Art. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

[6] Dead Poets Society. 1989. Directed by Peter Weir, written by Tom Schulman. Touchstone Pictures/Sterling Pictures.

[7] Murgia, Madhumita. 2023. “Transformers: the Google scientists who pioneered an AI revolution.” Financial Times, July 23.

[8] See for example, Luo, Xiaoliang, Akilles Rechardt, Guangzhi Sun, Kevin K. Nejad, Felipe Yáñez, and Bati Yilmaz. 2024. “Large language models surpass human experts in predicting neuroscience results.” Nature Human Behaviour (November 27).