Why Speak English?

Thursday, 31. October 2013

Much Ado About Nothing?

Etude.

Sans les mathématiques on ne pénètre point au fond de la philosophie.

Sans la philosophie on ne pénètre point au fond des mathématiques.

Sans les deux on ne pénètre au fond de rien. — G.W. Leibniz

Since I have become aware of the undeniable fact, that the internet world uses in praxi the 'lingua franca' of the English language, with whatever flavor, mixed with the colors of the local vernaculars of the 'native speakers' of the fading sociocultural heritage of the ages, and such creating a language in the long run, that does not belong any more to any type of 'native speakers', it came to my mind, that it might be best to go with the times and to make use of the fact, that not only I have grown up with not only the local vernacular, which in fact was a sub-dialect of the language that is coded as the on the nation cherishes as the language of the nation above the dialects, which are still spoken here and there, while the broadcasting media and the papers or the books are coded in a language, that is held to be the standard for the written products or the spoken communication, but with the English, that more or less in the meantime everybody who went to a high school or college of a local equivalent of a school level, and even a vast number of people who get in contact with native speakers of English who in turn are not capable to speak or understand the local vernacular, have learned to handle the English language in a more or less acceptable practical manner, since it is present all over the globe, for whatever reason.

There are two examples at least – and other people wherever in the world might find more of it in their history beyond Europa, for instance in India, China, in the Islamic world or in South America – in history for the diffusion of a certain local language, that became a 'lingua franca' in the wake of a people that imposed its own 'culture' upon a more or less great variety of other people, who spoke other languages and who became more or less voluntary an 'integrated community, where introduced in a communication net for the exchange of goods, money, technology etc., and began to communicate using the language that came with the 'influence' of the people who took control of the organization of life, where in advance in some way of the culture upon which they imposed their 'potentials'. Greek and Latin became, in European antiquity languages in use for far more people than the Greeks or the Romans, as in ancient India Sanskrit became an overreaching importance as the integrating language, and you can observe processes similar to that in ancient China.

In Europe the English, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, stem from the influence of Latin, as Indian modern 'dialects', as Hindi and Urdu and others, are offspring of Sanskrit, while English is the language that connects the whole country while the native speakers of English in the strict sense have been replaced by native speakers of a 'second hand' habit to use it for an overriding understanding, that fits well with the necessity for or the curiosity to get in touch with the technologies, that are explained best in the language of the people who developed them and teach them at their own schools, and in South America Spanish and Portuguese have become dominant spoken languages.

The spreading of the dominant language, as far as it spreads out to be used in a wider realm follows dominant 'technological or political trends', and whatever the remaining sentiments or resentments may be with regard to the circumstances that are reasons to be occupied with the task to learn the all pervading language of the time, in the end it is the fact that it becomes a utility that has its value in itself, because it comprises the means to get in touch or to communicate with more and far more people than just those who speak a certain local dialect, so to say.

The Internet World is de facto a world ‘dominated’ by English. Since not everybody speaks fluently English, the internet communication seems to be more and more to be the language that is most widely used, with whatever 'competence'. De facto English is no longer situated in a certain country and so to say property and privilege of a definable group of citizens of a certain nation, but has spread over the world and is a language that is at home at least as much in Britain or the USA as in India, and becomes shaped by different linguistic surroundings, not to speak of the scientific literature and people who de facto publish in English, and communicate in English in scientific communities which communicate using English as the common language.

English has become the property of all the people who decide to use it as a means of communication, and who might care to master the language more or less, and always as far as their need to do so or the attempt makes it necessary to come to grips with the medium of communication to be understood. The context of the usage of a language to communicate something is always the same, though not always adequate in the same way, but one can work on it while using it, learning by doing.

It's not so difficult to give up the dialect you were risen with. In fact everybody does it at the age when he/she starts to attend school in the public education system, 'because the times they are a changing'.

That might be enough to make the attempt reasonable to switch, with whatever competence to the use of English to get in touch with more people especially in the internet community which is a community only if communication has a common denominator, that binds communication together in a common medium, although there are examples of turns in the opposite direction: Marcus Aurelius, a Roman Emperor, a modest Soldier who spent most of his lifetime in the field, and a Stoic, like many of his social class of the time, studied Greek and he wrote in Greek.

So why not to try to write in English, though I am not sure if I will be able to express exactly what I want to say. It might be a question of practice. And there is no possibility to find out if I do not try. So aboard ship and anchors up. May the winds be with me. The tide is high. And after all, if I take a look at the thoughts and expression of many native speakers and compare it with English literature as I can take it from my bookshelf or from the Project Gutenberg electronic library, I can well assess myself as one of the more or less capable pupils of English in the same way others should, who were born to be 'native speakers'.

There is no need for a native speaker of English to perform a gangsta rap hit returning a million dollars than about 1000 words. And that is the all overriding 'picture' of the English world the mass media project over the world. If you do not read books in scientific English or literature, you might think, that there is not more than 'communicative competence' than the one you might find in 'Star Wars' – where a camel cry is sufficient communication for one of the heroes - or any Superhero Comix or soap opera. And that's not so very demanding, compared with, let's say,

Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, Harcourt, Brace and Co. Inc.New York 1927/1930,

or

Alexander F. Mayer, On the geometry of time in physics and cosmology and the fall of the canonical cosmological model, Jay Pritzker Fellow in Theoretical Physics (Scientia vincere tenebras). 2008, pdf-document: (This monograph is available as an unabridged electronic document at: www.jaypritzker.org/cosmology
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/

And who else has read them both?

That's why I am confident to be sufficiently equipped.

Why people seem to be so relaxed with regard to the NSA-Snowden-scandal.

Pervading control not avoidable because of growth of number of people.

Because of the ever tighter networks that have to be maintained to keep things running.

Because of the growing passivity of people resigning with respect to the monstrous powers reigning them recklessly.

Because a 'sense' for a meaning or 'freedom' shrinks progressively to mere consumer habits.

Because de facto value of a 'human life' as a commodity shrinks progressively with growing number. The loss of a quarter million in a disaster of one or two million in a massacre leaves almost nobody thinking that there is someone missing. The real numbers of the dead in s 'conflict' are not really counted at all. They are disputed, and that is the communication about the value of a human life.

Because everybody in the 'informed community' knows that especially Germany is unaltered an occupied country under military rule of the USA.  To turn it the other way: Because the USA are a global Imperium, armed incomparably with regard to anything in history. Only people of narrow education, induced by propaganda are not aware of it. In fact everybody somehow knows it. Only the Russians (the communists) have retreated from German soil and the buffer states that have now (re-)emerged between 'the west' and Russia. The USA did not! They have stationed army personnel in 'exterritorial', that is areas, which are US-territory, and they can in praxi act as they like, as a military power and garrison, though this is covered by 'agreements', like Guantanamo in Cuba. The country can be ruined over night, whenever the imperial power comes to the result, that it makes sense for its maintenance.

Not that I complain. It is a simple fact and one should be aware of it, for instance as the inhabitants of Palestine should have been at the dawn of he end of the Res Publica Romana, transforming into the Imperium Romanum and its Ceasars. The history of the genesis of the USA is the history of an Imperium, it is imperial history if not from the outset, then from the date of the Constitution on. And its leaders were more or less aware of it. It was the political intention.

The continental ‘revolutions’ were reactions with regard to The American Revolution, the war for Independence. The American Revolution was and still is the World Revolution. It has already happened and is going on, as a permanent revolution in the making. The same is true in a sense for social theory. Especially the radical types were only reflexes to surpass the experience of the American revolution. That’s why there never was a socialist party in the USA. It’s not only that everybody went West instead becoming socialist.

Russian communism and China wanted or still want to surpass the success of this historic experience. They wanted to make it still better, with more success of the kind. That is why they are still following in the wake of it: Because they always were behind! And that is correct for the countries of the old continent as well, and for all the more or less emerging or declining ‘rest’. So to speak there is no right or left, as far as it is all ‘reactionary’, however pitted against each other. So when they ask each other: “Isn’t there a third way?” the answer is always, that it is already there, and its name is: the USA.

So there is no way to be Anti-American so far. It would be just another way to be pro-American. It’s simply got to be admitted. We are all dependent of what is going to happen there. And that’s it. Nobody in the USA who doesn’t agree with politics of ‘the USA’ as it is, would say or be called anti-American. In fact every so called anti-Americanism is fascinated by ‘America’. It is just to agree or to disagree with a course of politics, that is contingent, so to say: possible in a different way, on a different course. All in all ‘we’ are all heading in one and the same direction with respect to time, things and relations. And we all pull on one rope and in the same direction, not even because but while we might be against how things actually run. It is a question of the big numbers making the resulting forces and directions in a parallelogram of pulling of powers acting or resisting, which are only different ways to act.

The Internet has been compared with a global village. Well, if this is so, then nobody who does not agree in some respect with the other can be called a villain from the other village while and if there is only one village. It is just that s/he does not agree, that there is no consensus. And that’s not enough reason to expel anybody into exile. In the end it would have to be exile from earth. And Mars has not yet been terraformed, while other inhabitable planets for new Pilgrim Fathers on brand new Mayflowers are out of reach so far. So there can be no new Tea Party for a while, to shake of Tyranny claiming to be from Heaven. Maybe is is worth to start thinking as if we really are living in one village, with the so far closed area of the surface of the globe. It could be a start.

Everywhere on this earth, wherever you go you can find somebody to respond and help you on if you ask, in English, for the road to take to get somewhere. We should start to realize what in fact this really means. And it is enough to look back at the overreaching structures that have, in a more or less regional extent, formed big sociopolitical overreaching structures that excluded interior antagonisms, if we do not look at the power structures that, no doubt, made the divide between the ruling and the ruled, which structured everyday-life. And the tendency to built ever more overreaching structures is at least one empirical fact nobody can deny, a fact that is an indicator for a tendency of development and a Telos of human history, if there is no other. And there was always a leading ‘koiné’, a ‘lingua franca’ everybody started to use which indicated a broadening of ‘integration’. And no doubt that things were always ambiguous.

That’s no complete catalog of course. Go ahead: Built your own.

The losers must agree to everything. Hegel has spoken about this in the terms of the fight for life or death between master and slave, sovereign and servant, where the slave, the servant accepts his defeat in exchange for the preservation of his sheer life, and his only possibility to become free again is labor, while his Master provides for the endless continuity of the relationship between master and slave. which will not allow for his freedom.

That's the legitimate quest for supremacy, where the master tries to keep things under control while the slave strives for his freedom, always observed and controlled by the master, who tries with all his powers to maintain his control over the slaves work force. So there is no difference between the occupation of a foreign country or the control of a population by a state. The difference is something for the Brahmins, not to speak of JÜRGEN HABERMAS, the postmodern neototalitarian (or is it the Totalitarian ‘NEO’ from The Matrix?) Master Thinker par excellence, or for ‘ competent specialists’ with a specialist ‘licence’ (for their ‘competence’, their elbows, of course) signed by the masters, who explain to the 'people', the biomass of the individuals of the species homo sapiens to be controlled, 'what everything means', as

The masters of meaning

who arranged everything for you before you awake in the early morning of your existence.

That the US-'Intelligence' services are occupied with a global surveillance and spying program, which includes everything, that runs through the machinery of the signal processing industries, would have been an object of mockery, and disqualified to be one of the conspiracies, that are dreamed of by people that are suffering from more or less harmless 'mental disorder', and who talk of being abducted by aliens etc., until it was disclosed!

That in turn qualifies the refutation theories that prove the conspiracy theories to be nonsense, while they constantly ignore the rationale that all the conspiracy theories have in common as their correct core, whatever the strange festoons might be, that are woven around this core. It is the repeated confession that the power elites cannot be trusted, that they are not only capable to commit simply every crime, any betrayal, and any kind of intrigue, but that they indeed do it whenever they come to the result that is in line with the vested interests whose servants the functionaries of organized violence are.

What about the research in Space with robots and the attractiveness of electromagnetic field theory and spectroscopy in space?

Robotic science has its final applications not in space, but down here, in industry and warfare and controlling of people by power and politics.

The drones are the homecoming queens from Mars to bring US peace.

And the Hubble telescope is turned around for surveillance down here.

“Now what have you seen my blue eyed son?” – “It’s a hard rain that’s a gonna fall.”

Anyway: Let’s make politics together. To begin with, we disagree, and that’s a start.

As an intelligence General just recently put it: We need your capabilities and intelligence. So if you agree with what we do, join us, and if you disagree join us the more you disagree.

That was not so stupid. It was intelligent and that because it spoke to an intelligence.  It did not try to insult an intelligence. It did not try to bring an idiot at bay shouting commandos.  And it was an invitation, wasn’t it? Correct words spoken in the right way can reach as far as the platonic dialogs, at least. That is far more far than internet-communication, which only has to cross not more that one of the greatest circles on the surface of the globe (coming from ‘behind’). And is is no matter who speaks them. I never met Plato. But I can always understand what the words of his dialogs try to tell me. Every reader has this kind of incorporeal experience with the WORD, that really speaks to you while there seems nobody to be there beside you. The model for communication is sketched in reading books, incorporated in logic, in the capability to read and understand arguments, its logic, which in turn can be implemented in machines, bound back to the capability of a living being capable to understand an argument, not in internet pornography. And all this needs no corporeal presence. That is what the internet is all about. It is a huge spiritual machine encompassing the globe, uniting all intelligent individuals to build one intelligence in ever ongoing exchange with itself. Everything that is short of this edge of possibility will fall off in the long run, or be left to those who want to amuse themselves to death, as an intelligent observer remarked. And all this can go on in the deep silence of the exchange between spirits in a huge library with the addendum that everybody can exchange thoughts and arguments with everybody else in the deep silence of thought and  concentration. This wonderful invention of a marvelous genius, reaching back to the works of Aristoteles and the discovery of what is called the Apophansis (the proposition, ‘the sentence that can be true or false’, as Heidegger puts it in his lecture from winter 1925/26 in Marburg in Germany, on: Logik, Die Frage nach der Wahrheit, Frankfurt 1976, vor allem: B. Erstes Hauptstück, Das Wahrheitsproblem im entscheidenden Anfang der philosophischen Logik und die Wurzeln der traditionellen Logik, where he explains the place (den Ort) of truth in ‘Logos’, understood as the sentence of the form of the proposition with respect to Aristoteles’ works, that is: the sentence which can be true or false) has not at all yet been perceived at all not to say understood and estimated in the way is deserves to be valued, having been ingeniously implemented in a global machine. Of all this is made a mockery because of sheer impotence and the noise and fuss, and the noise pollution cramming the Internet up to now is a symptom of a huge retardation or decompensation finally coming out underneath the thin finish of a narcissistic high-culture-propaganda that was its own advertisement and the product for which it stood, namely only for itself, ignoring the real estate of the constitution of consciousness en masse and the reality of what Kant meant when he spoke von den ‘Vermögen’ des Menschen, the ‘riches and the potentials of man’, namely the Erkenntnis-Vermögen (the capability to know and experience), and about the powers of man, namely the Einbildungs-Kraft (imagination).

The fuss going on in the disco next door can be tolerated because it can be ignored, elided, deleted. It is something for the multiheaded multitude (the boucephaloi), in desperate clinch clinging to the ‘concrete’ to numb their inquietude and unrest.