John Stuart Mill on Homogeneity

June 19, 2007

In my reading today I came across an interesting quotation from John Stuart Mill.

The longer our species lasts, and the more civilized it becomes, the more, as Comte remarks, does the influence of past generations over the present, and of mankind en masse over every individual in it, predominate over other forces; and though the course of affairs never ceases to be susceptible of alteration both by accidents and by personal qualities, the increasing preponderance of the collective agency of the species over all minor causes, is constantly bringing the general evolution of the race into something which deviates less from a certain and preappointed track. [from A System of Logic]

What I would like to add is an argument for the linguistic mechanism that is largely bringing about this general evolution toward conformity. Despite the wide appeal of "diversity", we live in an era in which there is less and less genuine diversity. Languages are going extinct at a record rate and the languages that are surviving are doing so by expanding to allow for the inclusion of globalized discourse. What made ancient Egyptian unique (to use just one example) is that it was a complete system for referencing and understanding the world. It was filled with ideas and beliefs that we now would classify as crazy, but it also was a system that worked. If ancient Egyptian scribes everyday had to transcribe the New York Times into their own language, they might preserve their language as a grammatical system, but they would soon lose it as a conceptual frame for understanding the world.. and that would be a great loss. My predilection for studying dead languages comes from my sense that it is more fun to study a language before it has been transformed into a carrier for the New York Times.

(BTW On Liberty would be a great Freshman Studies book.)