The last time I checked, the linguists were pretty certain that there's no such thing as 'patois'. I seem to recall a consensus that all the accents and dialects are valid. I'm not begging, I'm just differing.
I'm a champion of the concept of modernity which says that all men are created equal - that what we know, even down to our natural ability to speak, can determine who we are in society. What we know. Identity can be tricky of course; you can decide that who you are has nothing to do with what you know, but what you look like, or what you feel like or where you are or who you know or what you hope. All those are tangents off modernity, and we properly call them post-modern. The modern man is what he knows and he comports himself so.
The automobile is an example of an item created in the modern world for the modern man. It is transportation. What matters is that you know how to drive it. A post-modern automobile might be endowed with an artificial intelligence to ask who you know. If you cannot prove that you know the right people, the car won't start. The same is the case, more or less, with the pre-modern horse. Beggers were not allowed to ride, and could be challenged by nobles and knights. But a modern automobile made in Germany doesn't care that you are anything other than a driver. That is because the ideal of modernity rules the automobile industry in Germany and everywhere else. They want to sell as many automobiles as possible to modern person. If you live in a tribe in Borneo, there is not a car marketed to you or your values or suitable to your way of life.
I go into this somewhat silly level of detail because I am reminded on the daily that many people don't quite respect the idea of modernity. There are obvious multicultural excesses, obsessions with gender definitions, sexual preferences, ethnic proclivities and religious affliations that dominate the humanities in America now. I am brought to mind, however, of the broader picture which was underscored to me the other day via a Gapminder 'ignorance' quiz.
It turns out that right now the global life expectancy is 70 years. The global literacy rate is 80%. Both of these phenomena are, according to the authors, unprecedented in human history. I believe them. I've finally answered for myself what to do for 20 years after the age of 60, but I suspect that most people have not. It's interesting that I intend, for many of those years, to continue writing books and software.
I choose to count myself amongst the worlds most literate. I cannot prove it at the moment, but my fluency in computer languages and in English counts for quite a lot in my estimation. There is no grammarian quite as strict as a compiler and chunking that sort of information for a living makes me quite the editor. Having read > 500 books is not inconsequential either. But the content and quality of those books and software and data are important too.
What will .8 * 7.131 billion literate people going to want to read? If we hadn't invented the Internet that would have been a quite serious logistical problem, even for modern German automobiles. Right now, wags are telling us that it's porno, the most compelling subject of our contemporary media. I would believe that as well. But Aldous Huxley reminds us that an intellectual is someone who has discovered something more interesting than sex. This is one reason why I take a dim view of multiculturalism's epistemological blow jobs which literally inflate the value of gender and sexual preference. Race, ethnicity, regionalism and religion don't offer much sophistication over the prior qualities, but at least they are associated with more sophiticated and higher order discriminations and bigotry. The multiculturalists have, in more recent years, progressed towards more and more crippling features in their press for equalities. We shall soon entertain more reasons why autistics should follow the pioneering spirit of Temple Grandin. We shall soon forget Geroge Washington find more and more holidays for even more fractional minorities, until such time, one imgines, that Mercedes does indeed make a limited run special edition sedan for the gay autistic albino outcast from Irian Jaya. Between now and then, we've got to get the poor blighter some reading material.
One of the more interesting phenomenon I recognize is the number of times some small news outfit mistakes a story from The Onion, a parody news organization, for a real story. The decline of journalism and American media is old news, and it calculates well from my point of view that this kind of error takes place all the time all over the world in every language. Dissonance and Ignorance are the two great generators of errors of cognition and understanding. Both are cured by intellectuality, by study, by the independent reasoning and discovery that attends serious reading and writing. Pardon me for not saying 'education', a term that bears too much lightweight freight as of late. How can it be avoided if not by referencing intellectual authority? It cannot. Well, it cannot in a modern world. In a primative world, intellectual authority is always provincial, accented, particular, tribal. And of course the mulitculturalists would have most of us look no further than our pudenda for the authority of our agenda.
But even beyond that are the hopeless games and charades played for no good reason in the kindergartens of literacy. Not to mention sheer dishonesty and fraud. If I remember correctly, the most crucial reason for public education is to enable self-rule. But if that takes place in an environment that will not make qualitative discriminations, or will not assert modernity, then such projects are doomed to failure. When the laws of the land are written with an arcane artificial intelligence that asks who you know, the car of civilization won't start for the common man. Likewise of the common man speaks an impenetrable patois legitimized by cultural relativists, no subtantial populations can benefit (without the interventions of the Gay Autistic Albino Societies of Greater Borneo). Also disabling self-rule. The business of protecting liberty is not for the weak-minded or the lollygagging spirit. It is the central conflict of humanity.
So since I have last looked, I would hope that there may have arisen some controversy about the absence of patois among linguists. When everyone has their own books, reprinted to match their own preferences - well there's the real filter bubble problem. There becomes no world and exchange becomes impossible. What allows computers to instantly communicate across the globe is the discipline of standards, which are so exacting that dumb machines perform them regularly without error. Literacy requires standards as well. There must be, I find myself having to assert to my own chagrin, better and worse. Hope is not a strategy, so despite my intentions that linguists do the right thing, I must do some work of my own. Maybe an essay or two. Maybe publish it on the Internet.
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