Religion, language, and the state

Globalization is already threatening to extinguish many of the world's thousands of religions. That would be a tragic loss to humanity and our understanding of it, if only because knowledge and culture are inescapably intertwined with the religions within which they evolved. [...]

Regional and minority religions, like endangered species, merit protection. Religions that aren't revitalized through constant exercise die out.

I have taken these excerpts from this Nature magazine's editorial and replaced "language" with "religion." Nature thinks that governments should have an active role in the preservation of minority languages. The case of Spain exemplifies how government sponsorship of languages is as bad as government sponsorship of religions.

It was already bad when Franco repressed the regional languages and sponsored Spanish. And it is bad, and equally unsuccessful, now that the regional governments promote regional languages and try to repress Spanish. In my region, Galicia, where the government has more or less forbidden teaching in Spanish, many children have to speak Galician with their teachers while they keep speaking Spanish with their peers. We adults read newspapers and books in Spanish but all official documents are written only in Galician. Books published in Galician thanks to government subsidies pile unsold inside storehouses. Private radio and tv stations broadcast in Spanish; public ones, which we are forced to pay with our taxes, broadcast in Galician. When you apply for a job in the administration a four-week course in Galician - but not in Spanish - often counts more than a four-year PhD.

The government-sponsored language, which government forces down people's throats and on which it pours taxpayers' money, becomes a liturgical language. When a language requires the protection of government to survive, it at most becomes the language of government - the language of idiocy.

Running out of resources - this time is different

Jeffrey Sachs writes:

Better technologies have allowed the world economy to continue to grow despite tough resource constraints in the past. But simplistic free-market optimism is misplaced for at least four reasons.

First, history has already shown how resource constraints can hinder global economic growth. After the upward jump in energy prices in 1973, annual global growth fell from roughly 5% between 1960 and 1973 to around 3% between 1973 and 1989.

Second, the world economy is vastly larger than in the past, so that demand for key commodities and energy inputs is also vastly larger.

Third, we have already used up many of the low-cost options that were once available. Low-cost oil is rapidly being depleted. The same is true for ground water. Land is also increasingly scarce.

Finally, our past technological triumphs did not actually conserve natural resources, but instead enabled humanity to mine and use these resources at a lower overall cost, thereby hastening their depletion.

Resource pessimists have given those same four reasons for many years, and reality has always proven them wrong. Of course now the world is different. It always is. So what?

White Man's ideas

Last week's editorial in Science puts forward a couple of ideas for Africa. The authors, Calestous Juma and Elisabeth Moyer, are not white men but reason like the legendary ones whose not-so-brilliant ideas have helped Africa become the not-so-prosperous continent that it is.

Juma and Moyer want "to bring affordable [Internet] connectivity to Africa in general, and to its universities in particular."

[L]ow-cost university access should be secured by making subsidized rates for universities a condition of any license granted to new cable operators.

This, while being good for universities, would result in less "affordable connectivity" to Africa in general.

[H]elping to underwrite the costs of infrastructure should be a central goal of international development cooperation.

This will be as successful as previous "central goals of international development cooperation" have been.

Juma and Moyer address their pleas to next month's G8 summit. Instead I would ask the G8 to let the citizens of rich countries buy African products and hire African workers without the hindrance of tariffs and immigration barriers.

The Civilization Grand Prix

I have just learned that there is a competition of civilizations going on, and that if we don't rise up to the challenge the price will go to the Classical Period Of Greece And Rome - posthumously. Winning the competition should be our most important goal - individual happiness is secondary. We must get the price for the Modern World even if this means living as miserably as the Greek and the Romans did two thousand years ago. Geoffrey P. Glasby has more:

Living Up to Ancient Civilizations

The Classical Period Of Greece And Rome lasted more than a thousand years (from about 750 BCE to about 400 AD). By contrast, the modern world, beginning with Columbus's discovery of America, has lasted just over 500 years.

As a result of overpopulation, overconsumption, global warming, and environmental degradation, it now looks increasingly likely that there will be a major societal collapse within the next 200 years. How ironic that a civilization capable of tracing the origin of the universe from 10^-43 seconds after its formation and putting a lander on Titan does not have the rigor and self-discipline to sustain itself for as long as the ancients managed to do.

Biostinginess

While the most technologically advanced citizens of the world move towards open source and the free sharing of information, some people want traditional societies to move in the opposite direction. According to the Westerners who speak in the name of so-called "indigenous" peoples, the latter must keep their knowledge to themselves, or try to sell it at astronomical prices, and must refrain from acquiring new knowledge from other people, lest they become culturally polluted. And not only that. People not of the right race and religion must not learn by themselves about stuff related to the "indigenous heritage," because that would be "piracy."

For example, according to some proponents of the biostinginess movement, people that belong to the non-indigenous race must not take plant samples from South American tepuis in order to find out their evolutionary relationships (in biological parlance, to conduct a phylogenetic analysis). The "indigenous" people that live in the surrounding lowlands do not use the tepui plants, and probably know little or nothing about their phylogeny. But they apparently have the right to deny others the knowledge of plant phylogeny because tepuis are "sacred."

My words do not make justice to the original text. If you subscribe to Nature you can read it here. If not, you can read it on the website of one of the authors, Stuart Pimm, who decided to share his knowledge and arguments with all of us for free.

Sexism in the labor market

A recent news item in Nature about sexism among physicists sparked a lively debate in its comments section - with nasty words such as "male chauvinist pig", "fool", "idiot", and worse flying around. One of the participants, Christine Nattrass, argued convincingly that "graduate admissions committees, people hiring post docs, and people on faculty search committees are, on average, not hiring the most qualified applicants" but are male-biased. She then asks "how are we going to fix this?" Maybe there is no cost-effective way to "fix" this bias. If there is, I have the most straightforward mechanism to achieve it. Turn universities into private for-profit enterprises. Greed rules over bias.

Personal traits and resilience

Buzz Holling says in an interview (found via Resilience Science) that 10-yr old children are more apt to embrace resilience than adults. Resilience has something to do with sustainability and postmodern socialism, but don't ask for a better definition because resilientists haven't come up with one. In any case, I disagree with Holling. Ten-year olds embrace change and dangerous experimentation and abhor long-term planning, communal work and giving away their property.

Holling adds that speaking a Latin language and not being a religious fundamentalist make it easier to embrace resilience. Being Spanish and atheist I belong to both high risk groups. But so far I am successfully resisting.