It would seem as if large corporations, in their quest to spread around the world, are functioning as the engine for a more powerful effect than their mundane mission: they are forcing the convergence of centuries of customs and cultural manifestations within the economic hubs they require, creating a new global culture. All the participants will have no remedy but to confront each other and transform themselves in the process.
This is how I started this blog over two years ago. Since then the idea of a global culture has continued to evolve and I admit the 180 posts have taken me in directions I didn’t suspect. The understanding of cosmopolitanism has more recently taken this blog through an upbeat phase that aligns better with the events of my life. This month, my job got a little bit easier…
This is the theme of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. For a few weeks the whole world will be going oriental as McLuhan once said. Tourists impressed by the sights of a transformed Beijing, spectators bombarded by hours of “place branding” or Chinese not used to the sudden attention. Everyone should have a better understanding of China’s place in the world after the games.
I was told by an influential writer that science fiction is the literature of possibilities. Beyond all the laser beams, inter-galactic trips and aliens there are ideas explored that deserve full consideration. One such idea inspired me to start writing this blog: a society in which language had evolved to a point where the boundaries between English and Chinese had been blurred by centuries of integration. Forgotten the days when each nation would have its own language, everyone was able to communicate with each other using this lingua franca.
Spanish being my mother tongue, migrating to Canada implied using English on a daily basis to conduct business. Over the years I noticed how my brain “rewired” and started playing interesting tricks, creating concepts that could only be represented in one or another language forcing me to mix words at times. Most people would assume this to be a sign of lost cultural identity, but embracing the possibility that one day our children would have to play similar tricks to communicate with an increasingly diverse society I let it happen hoping I would be better equipped for the inevitable.
In 2006 I wrote the post déjà vu forecasting the growth of the Chinese influence on the evolution of the web. I may have been too conservative in my estimates as I realize their culture is about to take a giant leap forward propelled by the Olympic Games. China has invested heavily on the infrastructure required, but the dividends are likely going to be plenty when their culture decides to venture out of “Chinatown” to establish itself as an important component of global culture.
The question of whether a lingua franca should or should not supplant national, ethnic languages at some time in the future has been a perennial issue among speakers of Esperanto. That language, as readers may know, has long been promoted as an easy-to-learn and neutral world lingua franca – even though many of its users have now edged away from advocacy of this audacious political aim, the realization of which is presently difficult to envisage. Yet although the question of the likely and/or desirable effects of a world lingua franca has cropped up regularly and for a long time in this particular community, consensus has never been achieved. Fearing the consequences of even appearing to desire substitution of ethnic languages, a large number of Esperanto-speakers now insist on calling for their preservation, advancing some very corny (in my eyes) identitarian arguments in the process. That occurs despite the fact that many Esperanto-speakers have migrated from one country to another, and are frequently bilingual or multilingual in everyday life. It goes to show how people are quite able to hold ethnicistic beliefs that are at odds with their cosmopolitan practices. In a world of universally pervasive nationalism, it is hard for many people to move from an ethnic to a postethnic vantagepoint, even for people whose experiences should predestine them to embrace cosmopolitanism.
I hasten to mention, however, that there is a cosmopolitan and radically antinationalist minority among Esperanto-speakers (called “anationalists”), to which I belong.