Today I was going to use Sarah Palin as a vehicle to bash the current state of the Republican party, but I quickly had the unpleasant feeling of beating a dead horse. Luckily, something else caught my eye.
As a polyglot living in a foreign country and studying spontaneous social order, it's hard to get around language. Language is the original spontaneous social order. There's a well-worn debate about how the EU should manage the fact that it has 23 official languages and should arguably have more. Leaving the technical, short-term efficiency arguments aside (i.e. how much easier would it make communication in the EU, and how much money would be saved, if there were a single language or a lingua franca), I'm torn between two longer term arguments for and against a single European language.
The long-term argument in favour relates to the potential to build a common identity. Showing cavalier disregard for standards of semantic rectitude, Americans would probably call this the "more perfect Union" argument, and it goes something like this. Most people, if they were sitting on a bus in Belgium, couldn't tell the Flemish from the Walloons. Ditto Catalans, Castellians, Basques. The same even applies across countries, which is clear if you've ever been to a big European tourist event (e.g. Oktoberfest, Love Parade, Bastille Day) and have heard the variety of languages spoken by spectators/participants. Similarly, many Europeans have pretty similar palettes with variation at the margins. Not everyone in Europe will enjoy regional delicacies like Swabian sour tripe or Czech fried cheese, but spaghetti, baguettes, schnitzel, kielbasa, and paella are welcome pretty much everywhere. Europeans used to fight about money, religion, borders, and ideology. Now they have a common currency, secularism (more or less), Schengen, and trans-European political parties. One of the few elements of European identity that still serves to create "otherness" and let Europeans make scapegoats of each other is language. Serbo-croatian is, for all intents and purposes, one language for everyone who doesn't speak it or is only learning. This is a very controversial statement, however, for native speakers. Greeks worry about Macedonian and Bulgarian migrants, but they would be hard pressed to identify these Balkan bugaboos if they all spoke a common tongue. In short, you can't understand people unless you understand people; a common language would unify European identity and induce greater social harmony. And if you agree that a common language would be a good thing, choosing which one should be a simple coordination problem.
The other side has banal and interesting variants. The banal form rails against monoculture and wishes to celebrate diversity. This is often accompanied by vapid sentiments amounting to a desire to use tie-dye as a social Leitmotif. The more interesting argument is pretty evolutionary. The Slovaks have a fantastic saying that, "With every language you learn, you gain a new soul." This is true in many ways. Every language seems to be able to express things that are ineffable in others. "Transitoriness" totally misses "Vergänglichkeit". "Whimsical" is not even a poor man's "rigolo". Thinking about words as organisms and semantic meaning as genes, you would want a certain amount of diversity to maintain a healthy population. Harmonizing language would restrict the number of possible ideas and their combinations. If you've ever tried to read Goethe or Rimbaud in English (never mind Shakespeare in German), you'll know what I mean. For much business and government, this is likely to be splitting hairs. A health care mandate is close enough to a Gesundheitsvorsorgeverpflichtung as to make no odds, but there's a lot of humanity that exists outside the technical categories. If we encourage politicians to harmonize their communication in the interest of harmony or efficiency, they might be inspired to encourage everyone else to do the same. Would this be the ideational equivalent of burning down rain forests or letting the Great Barrier Reef die?
And though I'm not concerned with being 'a good liberal' in anybody else's eyes, I can't for the life of me decide which is the better liberal argument.
As a polyglot living in a foreign country and studying spontaneous social order, it's hard to get around language. Language is the original spontaneous social order. There's a well-worn debate about how the EU should manage the fact that it has 23 official languages and should arguably have more. Leaving the technical, short-term efficiency arguments aside (i.e. how much easier would it make communication in the EU, and how much money would be saved, if there were a single language or a lingua franca), I'm torn between two longer term arguments for and against a single European language.
The long-term argument in favour relates to the potential to build a common identity. Showing cavalier disregard for standards of semantic rectitude, Americans would probably call this the "more perfect Union" argument, and it goes something like this. Most people, if they were sitting on a bus in Belgium, couldn't tell the Flemish from the Walloons. Ditto Catalans, Castellians, Basques. The same even applies across countries, which is clear if you've ever been to a big European tourist event (e.g. Oktoberfest, Love Parade, Bastille Day) and have heard the variety of languages spoken by spectators/participants. Similarly, many Europeans have pretty similar palettes with variation at the margins. Not everyone in Europe will enjoy regional delicacies like Swabian sour tripe or Czech fried cheese, but spaghetti, baguettes, schnitzel, kielbasa, and paella are welcome pretty much everywhere. Europeans used to fight about money, religion, borders, and ideology. Now they have a common currency, secularism (more or less), Schengen, and trans-European political parties. One of the few elements of European identity that still serves to create "otherness" and let Europeans make scapegoats of each other is language. Serbo-croatian is, for all intents and purposes, one language for everyone who doesn't speak it or is only learning. This is a very controversial statement, however, for native speakers. Greeks worry about Macedonian and Bulgarian migrants, but they would be hard pressed to identify these Balkan bugaboos if they all spoke a common tongue. In short, you can't understand people unless you understand people; a common language would unify European identity and induce greater social harmony. And if you agree that a common language would be a good thing, choosing which one should be a simple coordination problem.
The other side has banal and interesting variants. The banal form rails against monoculture and wishes to celebrate diversity. This is often accompanied by vapid sentiments amounting to a desire to use tie-dye as a social Leitmotif. The more interesting argument is pretty evolutionary. The Slovaks have a fantastic saying that, "With every language you learn, you gain a new soul." This is true in many ways. Every language seems to be able to express things that are ineffable in others. "Transitoriness" totally misses "Vergänglichkeit". "Whimsical" is not even a poor man's "rigolo". Thinking about words as organisms and semantic meaning as genes, you would want a certain amount of diversity to maintain a healthy population. Harmonizing language would restrict the number of possible ideas and their combinations. If you've ever tried to read Goethe or Rimbaud in English (never mind Shakespeare in German), you'll know what I mean. For much business and government, this is likely to be splitting hairs. A health care mandate is close enough to a Gesundheitsvorsorgeverpflichtung as to make no odds, but there's a lot of humanity that exists outside the technical categories. If we encourage politicians to harmonize their communication in the interest of harmony or efficiency, they might be inspired to encourage everyone else to do the same. Would this be the ideational equivalent of burning down rain forests or letting the Great Barrier Reef die?
And though I'm not concerned with being 'a good liberal' in anybody else's eyes, I can't for the life of me decide which is the better liberal argument.
