| Summary: | We are narrative beings. We have a story for everything. Our dominant language narrative, the one found in all disciplines, including communication studies, claims that language is a tool born of evolutionary necessity. In other words, evolutionary pressures supposedly made for the invention of language. The evolutionary origins supposedly reflect the fact humans are, in the words of Richard Dawkins (1976), nothing but "survival machines," doing the business of "selfish genes." In being a tool, what language supposedly demands of us is mastery. We are to learn how to use it skillfully, effectively, and efficiently. We should aspire to become eloquent. We hear often in communication studies that rhetoric is the art of speaking well. In this essay, I challenge this dominant narrative. I contend that this narrative, besides promoting and sustaining all kinds of racism, diminishes our understanding of the human condition and ultimately threatens our prosperity. In short, it puts us on the wrong side of God. I contend that language is a blessing and that achieving any kind of enduring prosperity resides in us putting forth a new narrative that showcases the many ways that language is so.
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