Technocratic speech and technocratic consciousness

We do not speak in a spontaneous, everyday speech but in a speech that has gone through the matrix of formal education. In the past, our speech was modelled by the primary and secondary schooling (mathematics, geometry, physics, chemistry, literature, including poetry and drama). Nowadays, however, that knowledge is topped by other academic disciplines. I am thinking about science (including environmental sciences, medicine, evolutionary science), technology, the social sciences in general (especially politics), history and, since Freud, psychology.

A year ago I read 'Saturday' by Ian McEwan. The novel tells the story of two days in the life of Henry Perone, an English neurosurgeon whose life is dramatically changed in the aftermath of 9/11. I was very impressed by its narrative, although for me, a Latin American, the exercise seemed too cold at times. Aesthetically, the novel presents a world in blue, like inside a bubble that can only be constructed by an English mind, the same collective mind that created the individual mind of Charles Darwin, the mind of the collector who realises a novel truth after putting the pieces of the puzzle together. It was extraordinarily precise, but at the same time absolutely contemporary.

The narrator created Perone with an evolutionary consciousness. It obviously reflects the fact that McEwan is completely sold to Darwin and evolutionary theory. The key here is that it would be impossible for a pre-Darwinian person to truly understand that novel. You simply do not understand it in its complexity if you don't get to know the basics of Darwinian thought. Moreover, the narrator appropriates the speech of brain surgeons with no compromises. One really believes Perone is what the narrator says he is. Life and death depend upon Perone's scientific knowledge and neurosurgery skills, as every human life on this planet depends upon the mastery of language and technology, from small or large-scale ways to co-ordinate work and provide food and shelter, to systems of representations that shape our identities and motivate the way we behave.

But at the end, the novel leaves you in a moody state. Blue. Longing for another more primitive world where gods exist.

What kind of identities are being shaped by our speech? Technocratic identities where the old languages of philosophy and religion are dead? Who are we nowadays? Who can understand us apart from ourselves?