Philosophical essay on language, empire, and a vague 'New Caste' without concrete allegations

new, scientific view of history in the 18" Century, once observed approvingly, “The Egyptians reduced all preceding world time to three ages, namely, the age of the gods, the age of the heroes and the age of men,” he wrote. “During these three ages, three languages had been spoken....Namely the hieroglyphic language, the symbolic language and the vulgar language of men.” It’s hard not to feel the new age now arrives with its own baffling and incomprehensible modes of communication. A whole freshly demanded language. In all of human history only a few languages ever evolve to become honestly global in reach and influence - English now, French in the European centuries or Chinese in the Asian imperial era. But why English? Why not more decades of French? German? “Why a language becomes a global language has little to do with the number of people who speak it,” the British linguist and historian David Crystal has written. “It is much more to do with who those speakers are.” What made Latina global influential language wasn’t that millions of people spoke it, rather it was who did: The elites at the very peak of 1,000 years of European power. What Latin had, in a sense, was the ears and tongues of some of history’s most influential men.1°3 The private, technical language that connects the New Caste to their machines, to each other and to us is one of the sources of their power. Their code marks, like a trail, the path to the cores of a vast and modern power apparatus. You could, if you wanted, compare the New Caste a bit to an earlier generation of empire-deciding figures: Ocean explorers. Columbus, de Gama, Magellan. Backed by a primitive version of venture capital, the “risk finance” of trading houses, these discovery captains had a hunger to test their certain masteries - navigation, sailing, trade - against the uncertanties of geography, weather and luck. There was as much sheer nerve in these adventures as there was real knowledge. What lay five weeks’ sailing time away from Cadiz? If you were willing to endure the difficulties, to believe in what might be out there - and your own ability to handle it - then fortune awaited. “Early intercontinental travelers not infrequently had to pay for access to distant shores by enduring bitter asceticism,” the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk has written.!©* Months at sea, risks of ocean turmoil, starvation, endless boredom - all these sacrifices marked sailing adventure. But they knew the rewards for areal mastery of the sea: Fame, riches, knowledge, adventure. Sloterdijk cites Goethe, who reflecting on the power of nautical life in 1787, defined the edgy advantage of that ocean-mapping caste in his age: They had perspective. “No one who has never seen himself surrounded on all sides by nothing but sea,” he wrote, “can have a true conception of the world and his own relation to it.” 162 “The Egyptians”: Giambattista Vico, The New Science, (Cornell Press, 1948) 69 163 What Latin had: David Crystal, English as a Global Language. (2nd ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 7 also Shahar Ronen, Bruno Goncalves, Kevin Z. Hu, Alessandro Vespignani, Steven Pinker, and César A. Hidalgo. 2014. “Links That Speak: The Global Language Network and Its Association with Global Fame.” Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 111 (52) (December 15): E5616-E5622 164 “Early intercontinental travelers”: Peter Sloterdijk, In The World of Interior Capital, Polity 2013, Ch. 13 114 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018346