Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteAnother of my Facebook comments:
This is not only about anti-Semitism, for a look at the systems from which the rhetoric springs may tell about that. This line of battle in "intellectual battlespace" is about power and language, and we are due an international dialogue on the meaning of integrity in culture and language, its competition with loyalty (perhaps) and its role, most certainly, in the development of license making way for barbarism.
In that evil, so I have come to believe, starts with a lie, and in that we have wrapped around the earth a common global communicating system, this well may be the time to launch a "great conversation" about the natural invention of language as a cultural technology and within that construct assumptions about cultural behaviors favoring or disfavoring the possession within each person of good conscience.
We might also delve into what makes deceit possible, probable, or even imperative in human social relationships and focus on that until we have a clear picture of how "The Emperor's New Clothes" works as a kind of psychological thriller involving its little bit of social drama.
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Along these lines, I cannot too highly recommend reading linguist Dan Everett's observations in Don't Sleep, There are Snakes. Click here for a review in Time and go on to Amazon to get it.
What I've latched on to in Everett's story is how wildly chancey the creation of the basis for language may be as well as the launch of cultural customs that become inseparable from it and also fixed or suspended in time by it.
Earth, the life on it, and humanity may be the only cosmic jokes going in the overwhelmingly inorganic universe, but even so, my fellow travelers, let's make the most of it and set to work on getting a good and kind grip on our cross-cultural, interlingual communicating and related purposes.
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