Language Diversity Quotes

Keep your language. Love its sounds, its modulation, its rhythm. But try to march together with men of different languages, remote from your own, who wish like you for a more just and human world.

I remember one night at Muzdalifa with nothing but the sky overhead I lay awake amid sleeping Muslim brothers and I learned that pilgrims from every land--every color, and class, and rank; high officials and the beggar alike--all snored in the same language.

Be sure to enjoy language, experiment with ways of talking, be exuberant even when you don't feel like it because language can make your world a better place to live.

I have for a long time felt that our society is becoming more and more fractured and divisive and that you could go a whole day without really talking to another person. If you give people a good book to talk about, you can build a community out of a diverse group. A common language grows out of it.

If diversity is a source of wonder, its opposite - the ubiquitous condensation to some blandly amorphous and singulary generic modern culture that takes for granted an impoverished environment - is a source of dismay. There is, indeed, a fire burning over the earth, taking with it plants and animals, cultures, languages, ancient skills and visionary wisdom. Quelling this flame, and re-inventing the poetry of diversity is perhaps the most importent challenge of our times.

People need to see that, far from being an obstacle, the world's diversity of languages, religions and traditions is a great treasure, affording us precious opportunities to recognize ourselves in others.

The geniuses of all ages and of all lands speak different languages but the same flame burns in them all. Oh, if you only knew what unearthly happiness my soul feels now from being able to understand them.

Results are nothing; the energies which produce them and which again spring from them are everything.

One of the surest tests of the superiority or inferiority of a poet is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate mature poets steal bad poets deface what they take and good poets make it into something better or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique utterly different than that from which it is torn the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time or alien in language or diverse in interest.

When we reject the truth of someone’s story—the ultimate failure of story stewardship—it’s often because we’ve stealthily centered ourselves in their story, and the narrative takeover is about protecting our ego, behavior, or privilege. The less diverse our lived experiences, the more likely we are to find ourselves struggling with narrative takeover or narrative tap-out.

To expand our minds and to become more fully civilized members of the human race, we should learn as many different languages as we can. The diversity of tongues is a treasure and a resource for thinking new thoughts.

There is no religion better than love, no color better than the color of happiness and no language better than the language of compassion.

Hamilton touched me because it reflected the kind of history I'd lived myself. It told a story about America that allowed the diversity in. I thought about this afterward: So many of us go through life with our stories hidden, feeling ashamed or afraid when our whole truth doesn't live up to some established ideal. We grow up with messages that tell us that there's only one way to be American - that if our skin is dark or our hips are wide, if we don't experience love in a particular way, if we speak another language or come from another country, then we don't belong. That is, until someone dares to start telling that story differently.

Furniture or gold can be taken away from you, but knowledge and a new language can easily be taken from one place to the other, and nobody can take them away from you.

It is better described as simple-mindedness: people are often attracted to authoritarian ideas because they are bothered by complexity. They dislike divisiveness. They prefer unity. A sudden onslaught of diversity—diversity of opinions, diversity of experiences—therefore makes them angry. They seek solutions in new political language that makes them feel safer and more secure.

Maybe the word hasn’t been invented yet – that thing beyond diversity. We often define movements by what they’re against, but the final goal is greater than the powers it dismantles, deeper than any statistic. It’s something like equity – a commitment to harvesting a narrative language so broad it has no face, no name.

I tried to think the same thought in as many different religions as possible, so the thought itself wouldn't be limited by any particular way of reasoning, the way words restrict -- the whole eskimo-seventeen-words-for-snow idea.

The issue here revolves around the "right to be different (Mattos 1994:16). People have difficulty living harmoniously with those who are different. Because of this, they discriminate against anyone who has any distinctive characteristic whether of belief, religion, language, thought or color. ~ Valmor Da Silva p. 124 in Reading Other-Wise

The fantastically wasteful prodigality of human tongues, the Babel enigman, points to a vital multiplication of mortal liberties. Each language speaks the world in its own ways. Each edifies worlds and counter-worlds in its own mode. The polyglot is a freer man.

Beneath the uniformity that unites us in communication there is a chaotic personal diversity of connections, and, for each of us, the connections continue to evolve. No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

Homer, in the second book of the Iliad says with fine enthusiasm, "Give me masturbation or give me death." Caesar, in his Commentaries, says, "To the lonely it is company; to the forsaken it is a friend; to the aged and to the impotent it is a benefactor. They that are penniless are yet rich, in that they still have this majestic diversion." In another place this experienced observer has said, "There are times when I prefer it to sodomy." Robinson Crusoe says, "I cannot describe what I owe to this gentle art." Queen Elizabeth said, "It is the bulwark of virginity." Cetewayo, the Zulu hero, remarked, "A jerk in the hand is worth two in the bush." The immortal Franklin has said, "Masturbation is the best policy." Michelangelo and all of the other old masters--"old masters," I will remark, is an abbreviation, a contraction--have used similar language. Michelangelo said to Pope Julius II, "Self-negation is noble, self-culture beneficent, self-possession is manly, but to the truly great and inspiring soul they are poor and tame compared with self-abuse." Mr. Brown, here, in one of his latest and most graceful poems, refers to it in an eloquent line which is destined to live to the end of time--"None knows it but to love it; none name it but to praise.

The principles of Islam teach us to be messengers of peace—to be like water, gentle enough to wash away tears and strong enough to drown hatred. To be Muslim is to protect the weak, the orphan, the beggar, the disabled of all races and cultures. To be Muslim is not to be color-blind, but to see the differences between people and to celebrate that diversity as a product of the free will that God chose to give us. As the Qur’an says, “And of His signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth and the diversity of your languages and your colors. Indeed, in that are signs for those of knowledge” (30:22)

Great is language . . . . it is the mightiest of the sciences, It is the fulness and color and form and diversity of the earth . . . . and of men and women . . . . and of all qualities and processes; It is greater than wealth . . . . it is greater than buildings or ships or religions or paintings or music.

One has to put aside the popular notion that language and culture are endlessly passed on from generation to generation, rather as if ‘Scottishness’ or ‘Englishness’ were essential constituents of some national genetic code. If this were so, it would never be possible to forge new nations – like the United States of America or Australia – from diverse ethnic elements.

O Heavenly Children, God's messengers are as limitless as the fish in the sea. They come in all colors, regions, languages and creeds. But their message is one and the same, don't you see? He only wishes to unite all His children under one family tree.

William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564 – died 23 April 1616) was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "The Bard"). His surviving works consist of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language, and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway, who bore him three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592 he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of the playing company the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1590 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the sixteenth century. Next he wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest examples in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime, and in 1623 two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the nineteenth century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians hero-worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry". In the twentieth century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are consistently performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. Source: Wikipedia

India's linguistic diversity surprises many Westerners, but there are nearly thirty languages in India with at least a million native speakers. There are more native speakers of Tamil on our planet than of Italian. Likewise, more people speak Punjabi than German, Marathi than French, and Bengali than Russian. There are more Telugu speakers than Czech, Dutch, Danish, Finnish, Greek, Slovak, and Swedish speakers combined.

As technological civilization diminishes the biotic diversity of the earth, language itself is diminished. As there are fewer and fewer songbirds in the air, due to the destruction of their forests and wetlands, human speech loses more and more of its evocative power. For when we no longer hear the voices of warbler and wren, our own speaking can no longer be nourished by their cadences. As the splashing speech of the rivers is silenced by more and more dams, as we drive more and more of the land’s wild voices into the oblivion of extinction, our own languages become increasingly impoverished and weightless, progressively emptied of their earthly resonance.17

Can we reconcile indefinitely these two imperatives: the desire to preserve every individual's special identity and the need for Europeans to be able to communicate with one another all the time and as freely as possible? We cannot leave it to time to solve the dilemma and prevent people from engaging, a few years hence, in bitter and fruitless linguistic conflicts. We know all too well what time will do. The only possible answer is a voluntary policy aimed at strengthening linguistic diversity and based on a simple idea: nowadays everybody obviously needs three languages. The first is his language of identity; the third is English. Between the two we have to promote a third language, freely chosen, which will often but not always be another European language. This will be for everyone the main foreign language taught at school, but it will also be much more than that--the language of the heart, the adopted language, the language you have married, the language you love.

Language is deeply entwined in the intellectual development of humanity itself, it accompanies the latter upon every step of its localized progression or regression; moreover, the pertinent cultural level in each case is recognizable in it. ... Language is, as it were, the external manifestation of the minds of peoples. Their language is their soul, and their soul is their language. It is impossible to conceive them ever sufficiently identical... . The creation of language is an innate necessity of humanity. It is not a mere external vehicle, designed to sustain social intercourse, but an indispensable factor for the development of human intellectual powers, culminating in the formulation of philosophical doctrine.

A great thinker does not necessary have to discover a master idea but has to rediscover and to affirm a true but forgotten, ignored or misunderstood master idea and interpret it in all the diverse aspect of thought not previously done, in a powerful and consistent way, despite surrounding ignorance and opposition.

Many people of our time reason along the following lines: The religions—or the differing spiritual perspectives within a given religion—contradict one another, therefore they cannot all be right; consequently none is true. This is exactly as if one said: Every individual claims to be "I," thus they cannot all be right; consequently none is "I." This example shows up the absurdity of the antireligious argument, by recalling the real analogy between the inevitable external limitation of religious language and the no less inevitable limitation of the human ego. To reach this conclusion, as do the rationalists who use the above argument, amounts in practice to denying the diversity of the knowing subjects as also the diversity of aspects in the object to be known. It amounts to pretending that there are neither points of view nor aspects; that is to say, that there is but a single man to see a mountain and that the mountain has but a single side to be seen. The error of the subjectivist and relativist philosophers is a contrary one. According to them, the mountain would alter its nature according to whoever viewed it; at one time it might be a tree and at another a stream. [No activity without Truth] - Studies in Comparative Religion, Vol. 3, No. 4. (Autumn 1969)

As polytheism is in religious belief reflected in the recognition of moral complexity, so henotheism in religious practice is reflected in the recognition of moral diversity. To worship different gods is to align oneself with different ideals, and to embrace different moral standards. The example of the mother and the judge shows one way in which this works out in practice. The mother places parental love above impartial justice, while the judge does the opposite. In the language of Greek Paganism, the mother bows to Hera, the judge to Zeus Dikaios, and both are right to do so.

What is the bedrock on which all of our diverse trans populations can build solidarity? The commitment to be the best fighters against each other's oppression. As our activist network grows into marches and rallies of hundreds of thousands, we will hammer out language that demonstrates the sum total of our movement as well as its component communities. Unity depends on respect for diversity, no matter what tools of language are ultimately used. This is a very early stage for trans peoples with such diverse histories and blends of cultures to form community. Perhaps we don't have to strive to be one community. In reality, there isn't one women's, or lesbian, gay, bi community. What is realistic is the goal to build a coalition between our many strong communities in order to form a movement capable of defending all our lives.

There are many subtle variants of theistic evolution, but a typical version rests upon the following premises: The universe came into being out of nothingness, approximately 14 billion years ago. Despite massive improbabilities, the properties of the universe appear to have been precisely tuned for life. While the precise mechanism of the origin of life on earth remains unknown, once life arose, the process of evolution and natural selection permitted the development of biological diversity and complexity over very long periods of time. Once evolution got under way, no special supernatural intervention was required. Humans are part of this process, sharing a common ancestor with the great apes. But humans are also unique in ways that defy evolutionary explanation and point to our spiritual nature. This includes the existence of the Moral Law (the knowledge of right and wrong) and the search for God that characterizes all human cultures throughout history.

the “authoritarian predisposition” she has identified is not exactly the same thing as closed-mindedness. It is better described as simple-mindedness: people are often attracted to authoritarian ideas because they are bothered by complexity. They dislike divisiveness. They prefer unity. A sudden onslaught of diversity—diversity of opinions, diversity of experiences—therefore makes them angry. They seek solutions in new political language that makes them feel safer and more secure.

The term “humanities” includes, but is not limited to, the study of the following: language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy; archaeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism, and theory of the arts; those aspects of social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods; and the study and application of the humanities to the human environment with particular attention to reflecting our diverse heritage, traditions, and history and to the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of national life.

Jonathan Sacks; “One way is just to think, for instance, of biodiversity. The extraordinary thing we now know, thanks to Crick and Watson’s discovery of DNA and the decoding of the human and other genomes, is that all life, everything, all the three million species of life and plant life—all have the same source. We all come from a single source. Everything that lives has its genetic code written in the same alphabet. Unity creates diversity. So don’t think of one God, one truth, one way. Think of one God creating this extraordinary number of ways, the 6,800 languages that are actually spoken. Don’t think there’s only one language within which we can speak to God. The Bible is saying to us the whole time: Don’t think that God is as simple as you are. He’s in places you would never expect him to be. And you know, we lose a bit of that in English translation. When Moses at the burning bush says to God, “Who are you?” God says to him three words: “Hayah asher hayah.”Those words are mistranslated in English as “I am that which I am.” But in Hebrew, it means “I will be who or how or where I will be,” meaning, Don’t think you can predict me. I am a God who is going to surprise you. One of the ways God surprises us is by letting a Jew or a Christian discover the trace of God’s presence in a Buddhist monk or a Sikh tradition of hospitality or the graciousness of Hindu life. Don’t think we can confine God into our categories. God is bigger than religion.

The crowd is the same everywhere, in all periods and cultures; it remains essentially the same among men of the most diverse origin, education and language. Once in being, it spreads with the utmost violence. Few can resist its contagion; it always wants to go on growing and there are no inherent limits to its growth. It can arise wherever people are together, and its spontaneity and suddenness are uncanny.

And this leads us to a further consideration: if there are different religions — each of them by definition speaking an absolute and hence exclusive language — this is because the difference between the religions corresponds exactly, by analogy, to the differences between human individuals. In other words, if the religions are true it is because each time it is God who has spoken, and if they are different, it is because God has spoken in different “languages” in conformity with the diversity of the receptacles. Finally, if they are absolute and exclusive, it is because in each of them God has said “I.

In the spirit of being a reflective practitioner of ourselves we must notice your own behavior as an educator and realize how it influences other. Recognize your privileges: race, gender, ability, career, citizenship, language is all privilege. Imagine how you feel in the visitors shoes and adjust to best help them process and contextualize.

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless. OSCAR WILDE

Our planet's beauty lies in its diversity; let us protect it so that future generations can experience its wonders.

I don't do drugs, languages are my LSD.

Poetry is a diverse art form that exists in countless languages and reflects the rich tapestry of global cultures.

languages as Asians, who outnumber them nearly four to one.121 Linguistic diversity is not only a sign of cultural isolation and fragmentation, it contributes to the barriers

the differences between the countries of Europe were much smaller than those between the ‘countries’ of India. ‘Scotland is more like Spain than Bengal is like the Punjab.’ In India the diversities of race, language and religion were far greater. Unlike in Europe, these ‘countries’ were not nations; they did not have a distinct political or social identity. This, Strachey told his Cambridge audience, ‘is the first and most essential thing to learn about India – that there is not, and never was an India, or even any country of India possessing, according to any European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political, social or religious’. There was no Indian nation or country in the past; nor would there be one in the future.

Over a crackly video link between Australia and Poland, she reminded me that the “authoritarian predisposition” she has identified is not exactly the same thing as closed-mindedness. It is better described as simple-mindedness: people are often attracted to authoritarian ideas because they are bothered by complexity. They dislike divisiveness. They prefer unity. A sudden onslaught of diversity—diversity of opinions, diversity of experiences—therefore makes them angry. They seek solutions in new political language that makes them feel safer and more secure.

If you wanna know about a culture, you can read about it in any language - but if you want to experience that culture like your own, you gotta do it as one of their own - through their own native language.

United We Stand” has never been the secret to America’s success. We are an amalgam of all the peoples of the world. “Divided We Stand” is our strength. With all our diversity, in all our languages and cultures, we should agree on one big idea—each of us belongs, each of us contributes and each of us must be heard. We are all woven into the tapestry of stars. That is a fight worth winning. And a truth worth telling.

The academic obsession with identity is ironic, since its roots lie in a philosophy that denied the very existence of the self. In the 1970s, the literary theory of deconstruction took over humanities departments with a curious set of propositions about language. Because linguistic signs were arbitrary, successful communication was said to be impossible. Most surprisingly, the human subject was declared to be a fiction, a mere play of rhetorical tropes. In the 1980s, however, the self came roaring back with a vengeance as feminists and race theorists took the mannered jargon of deconstruction and turned it into a political weapon. The key deconstructive concept of linguistic “différance” became identity difference between the oppressed and their oppressors; the prime object of study became one’s own self and its victimization

The Incas’ genius— like that of the Romans—lay in their masterful organizational abilities. Amazingly, an ethnic group that probably never exceeded 100,000 individuals was able to regulate the activities of roughly ten million people. This was in spite of the fact that the empire’s citizens spoke more than seven hundred local languages and were distributed among 2,500 miles of some of the most rugged and diverse terrain on earth.

God is triune, and all reality is structured in terms of Him. A brief definition of the Trinity might be this: One God without division in a plurality of Persons, and three Persons without confusion in a unity of essence. God is not 'basically' One, with the individual Persons being derived from the oneness; nor is God 'basically' Three, with the unity of the Persons being secondary. God is One, and God is Three. There are not three Gods; there is only one God. Yet each of the Persons is Himself God — and They are distinct, individual Persons. But there is only one God. "To put it in more philosophical language, God’s unity (oneness) and diversity (threeness, individuality) are equally ultimate. God is 'basically' One and 'basically' Three at the same time. And the same goes for all of creation. Both unity and diversity are important – equally important. Neither aspect of reality has priority over the other.

The wording does not come naturally in this bastard language of Sabir, but Moseh’s plan was to synergistically leverage the value-added of diverse core competencies into a virtual entity whose whole was more than the sum of its parts…

By saying that human issues are more important than non-human issues, that violence to humans is more relevant than violence to animals, one forgets that the animal liberation movement implies a message of peace for every being on earth and the opposition against the mindset of oppression. To make a distinction between one violence and another is exactly the root of all violence: Some wouldn't do any harm to those who share with them a flag, a religion, a language, etc. but would easily condemn to suffering and death those who are different. This tragic use of diversity as an excuse to inflict pain on others for a matter of profit and convenience is the cause of suffering for both human and non-human animals.

If the novelist loses touch with this linguistic ground of prose style, if he is unable to attain the heights of a relativized, Galilean linguistic consciousness, if he is deaf to organic double-voicedness and to the internal dialogization of living and evolving discourse, then he will never comprehend, or even realize, the actual possibilities and tasks of the novel as a genre. He may, of course, crete an artistic work that compositionally and thematically will be similar to a novel, will be “made” exactly as a novel is made, but he will not thereby have created a novel. The style will always give him away. We will recognize the naively self-confident or obtusely stubborn unity of a smooth, pure single-voiced language (perhaps accompanied by a primitive, artificial, worked-up double-voicedness). We quickly sense that such an author finds it easy to purge his work of speech diversity: he simply does not listen to the fundamental heteroglossia inherent in actual language; he mistakes social overtones, which create the timbres of words, for irritating noises that it is his task to eliminate. The novel, when torn out of authentic linguistic speech diversity, emerges in most cases as a “closet drama,” with detailed, fully developed and “artistically worked out” stage directions (it is, of course, bad drama). In such a novel, divested of its language diversity, authorial language inevitably ends up in the awkward and absurd position of the language of stage directions in plays [327].

The language of cancer is grammatical, methodical, and even—I hesitate to write—quite beautiful. Genes talk to genes and pathways to pathways in perfect pitch, producing a familiar yet foreign music that rolls faster and faster into a lethal rhythm. Underneath what might seem like overwhelming diversity is a deep genetic unity. Cancers that look vastly unlike each other superficially often have the same or similar pathways unhinged. “Cancer,” as one scientist recently put it, “really is a pathway disease.

As business people today, it's important to realize that from one perspective, we live in a global society. As executives and entrepreneurs and employees, we should embrace and cherish both diversity and unity. We should embrace the diversity of language from Spanish to English to Mandarin to Japanese... We should embrace the diversity of race and ethnicity.... We should embrace the diversity of philosophy and religion... Embracing the diversity opens up more business opportunities and it also allows you to cultivate more meaningful connections.

Chaucer's world in The Canterbury Tales brings together, for the first time, a diversity of characters, social levels, attitudes, and ways of life. The tales themselves make use of a similarly wide range of forms and styles, which show the diversity of cultural influences which the author had at his disposal. Literature, with Chaucer, has taken on a new role: as well as affirming a developing language, it is a mirror of its times - but a mirror which teases as it reveals, which questions while it narrates, and which opens up a range of issues and questions, instead of providing simple, easy answers.

In contrast, Europe has never come remotely close to political unification: it was still splintered into 1,000 independent statelets in the 14th century, into 500 statelets in A.D. 1500, got down to a minimum of 25 states in the 1980s, and is now up again to nearly 40 at the moment that I write this sentence. Europe still has 45 languages, each with its own modified alphabet, and even greater cultural diversity. The disagreements that continue today to frustrate even modest attempts at European unification through the European Economic Community (EEC) are symptomatic of Europe’s ingrained commitment to disunity.

The current catchwords—diversity, compassion, empowerment, entitlement—express the wistful hope that deep divisions in American society can be bridged by goodwill and sanitized speech. We are called on to recognize that all minorities are entitled to respect not by virtue of their achievements but by virtue of their sufferings in the past. Compassionate attention, we are told, will somehow raise their opinion of themselves; banning racial epithets and other forms of hateful speech will do wonders for their morale. In our preoccupation with words, we have lost sight of the tough realities that cannot be softened simply by flattering people's self-image. What does it profit the residents of the South Bronx to enforce speech codes at elite universities?

no one defined my role as a Pigeon more eloquently that President Reagan during the course of Operation Carrier Pigeon. The cryptic "pigeon language" utilized by all participants in the operation was intermixed with Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, and “Genie in the Bottle” cryptic programming themes. While Pigeon meant messenger, "Carrier Pigeon" referred to the U.S. Air Force aircraft that actually transported the arms and drugs. "Pigeon Droppings" included the sometimes multi-national dispersal of the arms and drugs after they reached their destination. "Pigeon Holing" meant covering up the criminal activity. These definitions, as I understood them then and understand them now, may well include deeper, more diverse meanings than I have perceived.

A truly multicultural nation ruled by multiculturalists would not have Christianity as its unofficial standard religion. It would not have suits as its standard professional attire. English would not be its standard language or be assessed by standardized tests. Ethnic Studies would not be looked upon as superfluous to educational curricula. Afrocentric scholars and other multicultural theorists, lecturing on multiple cultural perspectives, would not be looked upon as controversial. No cultural group would be directly and indirectly asked to learn and conform to any other group’s cultural norms in public in order to get ahead. A nation of different-looking people is not automatically multicultural or diverse if most of them practice or are learning to practice the same culture.

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an im- perfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an un- pardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the Type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really Mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

educators, we have to recognize that we help maintain the achievement gap when we don’t teach advance cognitive skills to students we label as “disadvantaged” because of their language, gender, race, or socioeconomic status. Many children start school with small learning gaps, but as they progress through school, the gap between African American and Latino and White students grows because we don’t teach them how to be independent learners. Based on these labels, we usually do the following (Mean & Knapp, 1991): Underestimate what disadvantaged students are intellectually capable of doing As a result, we postpone more challenging and interesting work until we believe they have mastered “the basics” By focusing only on low-level basics, we deprive students of a meaningful or motivating context for learning and practicing higher order thinking processes

The problem with racial discrimination, though, is not the inference of a person's race from their genetic characteristics. It is quite the opposite: it is the inference of a person's characteristics from their race. The question is not, can you, given an individual's skin color, hair texture, or language, infer something about their ancestry or origin. That is a question of biological systematics -- of lineage, taxonomy, of racial geography, of biological discrimination. Of course you can -- and genomics as vastly refined that inference. You can scan any individual genome and infer rather deep insights about a person's ancestry, or place of origin. But the vastly more controversial question is the converse: Given a racial identity -- African or Asian, say -- can you infer anything about an individual's characteristics: not just skin or hair color, but more complex features, such as intelligence, habits, personality, and aptitude? /I/ Genes can certainly tell us about race, but can race tell us anything about genes? /i/ To answer this question, we need to measure how genetic variation is distributed across various racial categories. Is there more diversity _within_ races or _between_ races? Does knowing that someone is of African versus European descent, say, allow us to refine our understanding of their genetic traits, or their personal, physical, or intellectual attributes in a meaningful manner? Or is there so much variation within Africans and Europeans that _intraracial_ diversity dominates the comparison, thereby making the category "African" or "European" moot? We now know precise and quantitative answers to these questions. A number of studies have tried to quantify the level of genetic diversity of the human genome. The most recent estimates suggest that the vast proportion of genetic diversity (85 to 90 percent) occurs _within_ so-called races (i.e., within Asians or Africans) and only a minor proportion (7 percent) within racial groups (the geneticist Richard Lewontin had estimated a similar distribution as early as 1972). Some genes certainly vary sharply between racial or ethnic groups -- sickle-cell anemia is an Afro-Caribbean and Indian disease, and Tay-Sachs disease has a much higher frequency in Ashkenazi Jews -- but for the most part, the genetic diversity within any racial group dominates the diversity between racial groups -- not marginally, but by an enormous amount. The degree of interracial variability makes "race" a poor surrogate for nearly any feature: in a genetic sense, an African man from Nigria is so "different" from another man from Namibia that it makes little sense to lump them into the same category.

We may now briefly enumerate the elements of style.  We have, peculiar to the prose writer, the task of keeping his phrases large, rhythmical, and pleasing to the ear, without ever allowing them to fall into the strictly metrical: peculiar to the versifier, the task of combining and contrasting his double, treble, and quadruple pattern, feet and groups, logic and metre—harmonious in diversity: common to both, the task of artfully combining the prime elements of language into phrases that shall be musical in the mouth; the task of weaving their argument into a texture of committed phrases and of rounded periods—but this particularly binding in the case of prose: and, again common to both, the task of choosing apt, explicit, and communicative words.  We begin to see now what an intricate affair is any perfect passage; how many faculties, whether of taste or pure reason, must be held upon the stretch to make it; and why, when it is made, it should afford us so complete a pleasure.  From the arrangement of according letters, which is altogether arabesque and sensual, up to the architecture of the elegant and pregnant sentence, which is a vigorous act of the pure intellect, there is scarce a faculty in man but has been exercised.  We need not wonder, then, if perfect sentences are rare, and perfect pages rarer. -ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE

..technological breakthroughs, such as the Internet, have made international communications not just possible but commonplace. However, for most Americans, these international conversations are viable only if the other side speaks English. In this new international era, Americans find themselves locked in a monolingual society. How strange that, instead of viewing those who speak other languages as welcome assets to our nation, some seem eager to erase linguistic diversity.

For if the Absolute has predicates, then there are predicates; but the proposition “there are predicates” is not one which the present theory can admit. We cannot escape by saying that the predicates merely qualify the Absolute; for the Absolute cannot be qualified by nothing, so that the proposition “there are predicates” is logically prior to the proposition “the Absolute has predicates”. Thus the theory itself demands, as its logical prius, a proposition without a subject and a predicate; moreover this proposition involves diversity, for even if there be only one predicate, this must be different from the one subject. Again, since there is a predicate, the predicate is an entity, and its predicability of the Absolute is a relation between it and the Absolute. Thus the very proposition which was to be non-relational turns out to be, after all, relational, and to express a relation which current philosophical language would describe as purely external.

In estimating what amount of power would be requisite to secure the objects of government, we must take into the reckoning, what would be necessary to defend the community against external, as well as internal dangers. Government must be able to repel assaults from abroad, as well as to repress violence and disorders within. It must not be overlooked, that the human race is not comprehended in a single society or community. The limited reason and faculties of man, the great diversity of language, customs, pursuits, situation and complexion, and the difficulty of intercourse, with various other causes, have, by their operation, formed a great many separate communities, acting independently of each other. Between these there is the same tendency to conflict—and from the same constitution of our nature—as between men individually; and even stronger—because the sympathetic or social feelings are not so strong between different communities, as between individuals of the same community.

The reason we haven’t solved the race problem in America after hundreds of years is that people apart from God are trying to create unity, while people under God who already have unity are not living out the unity we possess. The result of both of these conditions is disastrous for America. Our failure to find cultural unity as a nation is directly related to the church’s failure to preserve our spiritual unity. The church has already been given unity because we’ve been made part of the same family. An interesting point to note about family is that you don’t have to get family to be family. A family already is a family. But sometimes you do have to get family to act like family. In the family of God, this is done through the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. A perfect example of spiritual unity came on the Day of Pentecost when God’s people spoke with other tongues (Acts 2:4). When the Holy Spirit showed up, people spoke in languages they didn’t know so that people from a variety of backgrounds could unite under the cross of Jesus Christ. The people who heard the apostles speak on the Day of Pentecost were from all over the world, representing at least sixteen different geographical areas, racial categories, or ethnic groups (Acts 2:8–11). But in spite of the great diversity, they found true oneness in the presence of the Holy Spirit. Spiritual oneness always and only comes to those who are under God’s authority because in that reality He enables them with the power of His Spirit.

in the age of white guilt, white blindness has been driven not by racism but by the white need to dissociate from racism. Whites are blind to blacks as human beings today not out of bigotry but out of their obsession with achieving the dissociation they need to restore their moral authority. And when they find a way to dissociate from racism—“diversity,” politically correct language, political liberalism itself—there is little incentive to understand blacks as human beings. Dissociation makes whites human again.

In this section I have tried to demonstrate that Darwinian thinking does live up to its billing as universal acid: it turns the whole traditional world upside down, challenging the top-down image of designs flowing from that genius of geniuses, the Intelligent Designer, and replacing it with the bubble-up image of mindless, motiveless cyclical processes churning out ever-more robust combinations until they start replicating on their own, speeding up the design process by reusing all the best bits over and over. Some of these earliest offspring eventually join forces (one major crane, symbiosis), which leads to multicellularity (another major crane), which leads to the more effective exploration vehicles made possible by sexual reproduction (another major crane), which eventually leads in one species to language and cultural evolution (cranes again), which provide the medium for literature and science and engineering, the latest cranes to emerge, which in turn permits us to “go meta” in a way no other life form can do, reflecting in many ways on who and what we are and how we got here, modeling these processes in plays and novels, theories and computer simulations, and ever-more thinking tools to add to our impressive toolbox. This perspective is so widely unifying and at the same time so generous with detailed insights that one might say it’s a power tool, all on its own. Those who are still strangely repelled by Darwinian thinking must consider the likelihood that if they try to go it alone with only the hand tools of tradition, they will find themselves laboring far from the cutting edge of research on important phenomena as diverse as epidemics and epistemology, biofuels and brain architecture, molecular genetics, music, and morality.

To make way for more resorts with spectacular views, developers destroy native habitats and ignore local concerns. Preservationists decry the growing propensity to bulldoze old hotels and buildings in favor of constructing new resorts, water holes and entertainment spots that look identical whether in Singapore, Dubai or Johannesburg; a world where diversity is replaced with homogeneity. Another catastrophe for countries betting on tourism has come from wealthy vacationers who fall in love with a country and buy so many second houses that locals can no longer afford to live in their own towns and villages. Among the more thoughtful questions is how mass tourism has changed cultures. African children told anthropologists that they want to grow up to be tourists so they could spend the day doing nothing but eating. The tourists who do not speak the local language and rely on guides to tell them what they are seeing and what to think marvel at countries like China with its new wealth and appearance of democracy. Environmentalists wonder how long the globe can continue to support 1 billion people racing around the world for a long weekend on a beach or a ten-day tour of an African game park.

Looking at the works of art that are considered worthy of preservation in our Museums, and that were once the common objects of the market place, I could not but realise that a society can only be considered truly civilised when it is possible for every man to earn his living by the very work he would rather be doing than anything else in the world, a condition that has only been attained in social orders integrated on the basis of vocation, "svadharma". At the same time I should like to emphasis that I have never built up a philosophy of my own or wished to establish a new school of thought. Perhaps the greatest thing I have learnt is never to think for myself; I fully agree with Andre Gide that "Toutes choses sont dites deja", and what I have sought is to understand what has been said, while taking no account of the "inferior philosophers". Holding with Heraclitus that the Word is common to all, and that Wisdom is to know the Will whereby all things are steered, I am convinced with Jeremias that the human cultures in all their apparent diversity are but the dialects of one and the same language of the spirit, that there is a "common universe of discourse" transcending the differences of tongues".

was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "The Bard"). His surviving works consist of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language, and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway, who bore him three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592 he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of the playing company the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1590 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the sixteenth century. Next he wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest examples in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime, and in 1623 two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the nineteenth century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians hero-worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry". In the twentieth century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are consistently performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. Source: Wikipedia

Jürgen Habermas currently ranks as one of the most influential philosophers in the world. Bridging continental and Anglo-American traditions of thought, he has engaged in debates with thinkers as diverse as Gadamer and Putnam, Foucault and Rawls, Derrida and Brandom. His extensive written work addresses topics stretching from social-political theory to aesthetics, epistemology and language to philosophy of religion, and his ideas have significantly influenced not only philosophy but also political-legal thought, sociology, communication studies, argumentation theory and rhetoric, developmental psychology and theology.

By the end of the nineteenth century, seventy-eight thousand souls were packed into this quarter of common lodging houses, “furnished rooms,” warehouses, factories, sweatshops, abattoirs, pubs, cheap music halls, and markets. Its overcrowded population represented diverse cultures, religions, and languages. For at least two centuries, Whitechapel had been a destination for immigrants from many parts of Europe. In the late nineteenth century, a large number of Irish, desperate to escape the rural poverty of the mother country, had arrived. By the 1880s an exodus of Jews, fleeing the pogroms of eastern Europe, joined them.

The killing of mature members of any species leads to a reduction not only in biomass and species density and diversity but also in that species’ accumulated knowledge of how to most efficiently fill its ecological niche and interact with the rest of the ecosystem around it. The accumulated wisdom of the species is severely reduced or, sometimes, even lost in the process. Thus the tremendous loss of human languages around the globe that were generated out of thousands of generations of human interaction with specific habitats by unique groups and which encode unique understandings of ecosystem functioning is a tragedy greater than we yet know.

One way to sum up the new scholarship is to say that it has begun, at last, to fill in one of the biggest blanks in history: the Western Hemisphere before 1492. It was, in the current view, a thriving, stunning diverse place, a tumult of languages, trade, and culture, a regiin where tens of millions of people loved and hated and worshipped as people do everywhere. Much of this world vanished after Columbus, swept away by disease and subjugation. So thorough was the erasure that within a few generations neither conqueror nor conquered knew that this world had existed. Now, though, it is returning to view. It seems incumbent on us to take a look.

Project managers operate in a global environment and work on projects characterized by cultural diversity. Team members often have diverse industry experience, know multiple languages, and sometimes operate in the “team language” that may be a different language or norm than their native one. The project management team should capitalize on cultural differences, focus on developing and sustaining the project team throughout the project life cycle, and promote working together interdependently in a climate of mutual trust. Developing the project team improves the people skills, technical competencies, and overall team environment and project performance.

Without doubt, images of comfort and wealth, of technological sophistication, have a magnetic allure. Any job in the city may seem better than back-breaking labour in sun-scorched fields. Entranced by the promise of the new, people throughout the world have in many instances voluntarily and in great earnest turned their backs on the old. The consequences, as we have seen in Kenya, can be profoundly disappointing. The fate of the vast majority of those who sever their ties with their traditions will not be to attain the prosperity of the West, but to join the legions of urban poor, trapped in squalor, struggling to survive. As cultures wither away, individuals remain, often shadows of their former selves, caught in time, unable to return to the past, yet denied any real possibility of securing a place in a world whose values they seek to emulate and whose wealth they long to acquire. This creates a dangerous and explosive situation, which is precisely why the plight of diverse cultures is not a simple matter of nostalgia or even of human rights alone, but a serious issue of geopolitical stability and survival. [..] Outside of the major industrial nations, globalization has not brought integration and harmony, but rather a firestorm of change that has swept away languages and cultures, ancient skills and visionary wisdom.

Heidegger considers the human condition coldly and announces that existence is humiliated. The only reality is "anxiety" in the whole chain of being. To the man lost in the world and its diversions this anxiety is a brief, fleeting fear. But if that fear becomes conscious of itself, it becomes anguish, the perpetual climate of the lucid man "in whom existence is concentrated." This professor of philosophy writes without trembling and in the most abstract language in the world that "the finite and limited character of human existence is more primordial than man himself." His interest in Kant extends only to recognizing the restricted character of his "pure Reason." This is to conclude at the end of his analyses that "the world can no longer offer anything to the man filled with anguish." This anxiety seems to him so much more important than all the categories in the world that he thinks and talks only of it. He enumerates its aspects: boredom when the ordinary man strives to quash it in him and benumb it; terror when the mind contemplates death. He too does not separate consciousness from the absurd. The consciousness of death is the call of anxiety and "existence then delivers itself its own summons through the intermediary of consciousness." It is the very voice of anguish and it adjures existence "to return from its loss in the anonymous They." For him, too, one must not sleep, but must keep alert until the consummation. He stands in this absurd world and points out its ephemeral character. He seeks his way amid these ruins.

The local cultures around the world that are carried by today’s immigrant poor have been eroded by centuries of colonialism and are in danger of being extinguished by the onslaught of global capitalism’s drive for commodified homogeneity. The church must reassert the Genesis wisdom of a “scattered” human family by nurturing diversity, and must reaffirm the Pentecostal vocation of native-language empowerment. For in the great narrative of the Bible, God’s intervention is always subversive of the centralizing project of empire and always on the side of the excluded and outcast, the refugee and immigrant. The Spirit has busted out and busted up business as usual many times since Babel and Jerusalem, and she is waiting to do the same in our own time—if our tongues would but dare to loosen.

1. Decrease current human population below five hundred million and keep it in perpetual balance with nature. 2. Guide reproduction wisely—improving fitness and diversity. 3. Unite humanity with a “living” new language. 4. Redistribute global wealth under the more acceptable term “global public goods.” 5. Rebalance personal rights with “social duties.” 6. Replace passion, faith, and tradition with reason. 7. Make clever use of new technologies to go around national governments and establish direct ties with citizens. 8. Rebrand global governance as equitable, efficient, and the logical next step in human evolution. 9. Discredit, delegitimize, and dismantle the idea of the nation state/national sovereignty. 10. Prepare a mechanism to neutralize any challenges to United Nations’ authority.

Among the world's full adult languages, there are no simple languages, or languages simpler than others. Even rudimentary pidgin codes that serve as linguae francae turn almost immediately into creole languages of great complexity if there are any children around learning those codes as native languages. We also see that many species have vocal skills but no language, and we see that human language can come in different modalities-spoken or signed-with equal levels of grammatical comlexity. Moreover, there are very many separate human languages, not just one, and they accomplish their tasks in ways that often seem surprisingly different. Human languages change over cultural time but do not as a result acquire increased complexity. Indeed, it seems that, at any given time, languages present the same kind of diversity and have the same degree of complexity.

Archaeological studies have documented how beginning around four thousand years ago, a new culture spread out of the region at the border of Nigeria and Cameroon in west-central Africa. People from this culture lived at the boundary of the forest and expanding savanna and developed a highly productive set of crops that was capable of supporting dense populations.15 By about twenty-five hundred years ago they had spread as far as Lake Victoria in eastern Africa and mastered iron toolmaking technology,16 and by around seventeen hundred years ago they had reached southern Africa.17 The consequence of this expansion is that the great majority of people in eastern, central, and southern Africa speak Bantu languages, which are most diverse today in present-day Cameroon, consistent with the theory that proto-Bantu languages originated there and were spread by the culture that also

We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep on humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information. But being physically infected with a virulent strain of the Asherah virus makes you a whole lot more susceptible. The only thing that keeps these things from taking over the world is the Babel factor - the walls of mutual incomprehension that compartmentalize the human race and stop the spread of viruses. Babel led to an explosion in the number of languages. That was part of Enki's plan. Monocultures, like a field of corn, are susceptible to infections, but genetically diverse cultures, like a prairie, are extremely robust.

The fashion now is to think of universities as industries or businesses. University presidents, evidently thinking of themselves as CEO's, talk of "business plans" and "return on investment," as if the industrial economy could provide an aim and a critical standard appropriate either to education or to research. But this is not possible. No economy, industrial or otherwise, can supply an appropriate aim or standard. Any economy must be either true or false to the world and to our life in it. If it is to be true, then it must be made true, according to a standard that is not economic. To regard the economy as an end or as the measure of success is merely to reduce students, teachers, researchers, and all they know or learn to merchandise. It reduces knowledge to "property" and education to training for the "job market." If, on the contrary, [Sir Albert] Howard was right in his belief that health is the "one great subject," then a unifying aim and a common critical standard are clearly implied. Health is at once quantitative and qualitative; it requires both sufficiency and goodness. It is comprehensive (it is synonymous with "wholeness"), for it must leave nothing out. And it is uncompromisingly local and particular; it has to do with the sustenance of particular places, creatures, human bodies, and human minds. If a university began to assume responsibility for the health of its place and its local constituents, then all of its departments would have a common aim, and they would have to judge their place and themselves and one another by a common standard. They would need one another's knowledge. They would have to communicate with one another; the diversity of specialists would have to speak to one another in a common language. And here again Howard is exemplary, for he wrote, and presumably spoke, a plain, vigorous, forthright English-- no jargon, no condescension, no ostentation, no fooling around.

A curious colony of mountaineers has long been enclosed within that small flat London district of Soho.  Swiss watchmakers, Swiss silver-chasers, Swiss jewellers, Swiss importers of Swiss musical boxes and Swiss toys of various kinds, draw close together there.  Swiss professors of music, painting, and languages; Swiss artificers in steady work; Swiss couriers, and other Swiss servants chronically out of place; industrious Swiss laundresses and clear-starchers; mysteriously existing Swiss of both sexes; Swiss creditable and Swiss discreditable; Swiss to be trusted by all means, and Swiss to be trusted by no means; these diverse Swiss particles are attracted to a centre in the district of Soho.  Shabby Swiss eating-houses, coffee-houses, and lodging-houses, Swiss drinks and dishes, Swiss service for Sundays, and Swiss schools for week-days, are all to be found there.  Even the native-born English taverns drive a sort of broken-English trade; announcing in their windows Swiss whets and drams, and sheltering in their bars Swiss skirmishes of love and animosity on most nights in the year.

For primordial man Revelation and intellection coincided: contingency was still transparent so that there were as yet neither “points of view” nor "perspectives”; whereas in later times Revelation is multiple because geometrically speaking the circumference implies many radii, the “point of view” of primordial man corresponded to the entire circle; the center was everywhere. In the same way the unavoidably limiting aspect of expressions, forms, or symbols did not yet imprison minds; there was therefore no place for a diversity of forms, each expressing the same Truth in the name of the impersonal Self while excluding each other in the name of this or that particular manifestation of the personal God. Now that these diverse manifestations exist, what matters is knowing that intrinsically they speak in an absolute mode since it is the Absolute which is speaking, but that extrinsically they are clothed in the language of a particular mental coloring and a particular system of contingencies since they are addressed to man; now the man to whom they are addressed in this manner is already cut off from the inward Revelation that is direct and “supernaturally natural” intellection.

Lovelace defined as an ‘operation’ the control of material and symbolic entities beyond the second-order language of mathematics (like the idea, discussed in chapter 1, of an algorithmic thinking beyond the boundary of computer science). In a visionary way, Lovelace seemed to suggest that mathematics is not the universal theory par excellence but a particular case of the science of operations. Following this insight, she envisioned the capacity of numerical computers qua universal machines to represent and manipulate numerical relations in the most diverse disciplines and generate, among other things, complex musical artefacts: [The Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine … Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.

It was common knowledge at one prominent women’s brand I worked for that the reason they didn’t have more women of color, specifically Black women, on their legacy magazine covers was because they didn’t sell as well. For a business enterprise, and a financially struggling one at that, the editorial strategy to routinely flood the covers with normatively sized straight white women was presented as necessary business, and not a deeply racist lens. But this is where I’ve encountered capitalism to be at its most damaging: it provides an all-encompassing language to code racism, heterosexism, and classism as something else—to establish distance between these deeply coursing prejudices and the unavoidable realities of running a business. This distance insulates. It establishes an alternative reality in which testimonials, diversity reports, investigations, and data analysis on representation don’t resonate because making money is the ultimate objective above all else. But that’s all the more reason why the impetus to drive profits also needs to be aligned and analyzed in endeavors against oppression. Because the drive to make money, more money, more money than your competitors, more money than you made last year, more money than projected for the following year is an enduring vehicle for suppression.

Even if there is no connection between diversity and international influence, some people would argue that immigration brings cultural enrichment. This may seem to be an attractive argument, but the culture of Americans remains almost completely untouched by millions of Hispanic and Asian immigrants. They may have heard of Cinco de Mayo or Chinese New Year, but unless they have lived abroad or have studied foreign affairs, the white inhabitants of Los Angeles are likely to have only the most superficial knowledge of Mexico or China despite the presence of many foreigners. Nor is it immigrants who introduce us to Cervantes, Puccini, Alexander Dumas, or Octavio Paz. Real high culture crosses borders by itself, not in the back pockets of tomato pickers, refugees, or even the most accomplished immigrants. What has Yo-Yo Ma taught Americans about China? What have we learned from Seiji Ozawa or Ichiro about Japan? Immigration and the transmission of culture are hardly the same thing. Nearly every good-sized American city has an opera company, but that does not require Italian immigrants. Miami is now nearly 70 percent Hispanic, but what, in the way of authentic culture enrichment, has this brought the city? Are the art galleries, concerts, museums, and literature of Los Angeles improved by diversity? Has the culture of Detroit benefited from a majority-black population? If immigration and diversity bring cultural enrichment, why do whites move out of those very parts of the country that are being “enriched”? It is true that Latin American immigration has inspired more American school children to study Spanish, but fewer now study French, German, or Latin. If anything, Hispanic immigration reduces what little linguistic diversity is to be found among native-born Americans. [...] [M]any people study Spanish, not because they love Hispanic culture or Spanish literature but for fear they may not be able to work in America unless they speak the language of Mexico. Another argument in favor of diversity is that it is good for people—especially young people —to come into contact with people unlike themselves because they will come to understand and appreciate each other. Stereotyped and uncomplimentary views about other races or cultures are supposed to crumble upon contact. This, of course, is just another version of the “contact theory” that was supposed to justify school integration. Do ex-cons and the graduates—and numerous dropouts—of Los Angeles high schools come away with a deep appreciation of people of other races? More than half a century ago, George Orwell noted that: 'During the war of 1914-18 the English working class were in contact with foreigners to an extent that is rarely possible. The sole result was that they brought back a hatred of all Europeans, except the Germans, whose courage they admired.

What is it that makes a person the very person that she is, herself alone and not another, an integrity of identity that persists over time, undergoing changes and yet still continuing to be—until she does not continue any longer, at least not unproblematically? I stare at the picture of a small child at a summer’s picnic, clutching her big sister’s hand with one tiny hand while in the other she has a precarious hold on a big slice of watermelon that she appears to be struggling to have intersect with the small o of her mouth. That child is me. But why is she me? I have no memory at all of that summer’s day, no privileged knowledge of whether that child succeeded in getting the watermelon into her mouth. It’s true that a smooth series of contiguous physical events can be traced from her body to mine, so that we would want to say that her body is mine; and perhaps bodily identity is all that our personal identity consists in. But bodily persistence over time, too, presents philosophical dilemmas. The series of contiguous physical events has rendered the child’s body so different from the one I glance down on at this moment; the very atoms that composed her body no longer compose mine. And if our bodies are dissimilar, our points of view are even more so. Mine would be as inaccessible to her—just let her try to figure out [Spinoza’s] Ethics—as hers is now to me. Her thought processes, prelinguistic, would largely elude me. Yet she is me, that tiny determined thing in the frilly white pinafore. She has continued to exist, survived her childhood illnesses, the near-drowning in a rip current on Rockaway Beach at the age of twelve, other dramas. There are presumably adventures that she—that is that I—can’t undergo and still continue to be herself. Would I then be someone else or would I just no longer be? Were I to lose all sense of myself—were schizophrenia or demonic possession, a coma or progressive dementia to remove me from myself—would it be I who would be undergoing those trials, or would I have quit the premises? Would there then be someone else, or would there be no one? Is death one of those adventures from which I can’t emerge as myself? The sister whose hand I am clutching in the picture is dead. I wonder every day whether she still exists. A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether? But if my sister does exist, then what is she, and what makes that thing that she now is identical with the beautiful girl laughing at her little sister on that forgotten day? In this passage from Betraying Spinoza, the philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (to whom I am married) explains the philosophical puzzle of personal identity, one of the problems that engaged the Dutch-Jewish thinker who is the subject of her book.5 Like her fellow humanist Dawkins, Goldstein analyzes the vertiginous enigma of existence and death, but their styles could not be more different—a reminder of the diverse ways that the resources of language can be deployed to illuminate a topic.

Legacy items. That’s the term we used to describe these golden moments. Sometimes we even knew what it meant. Taking out bin Laden was a legacy item. So was rescuing the auto industry, bringing troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, or repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” But just as often, we imagined our legacy with the starry eyes of a hobo describing the Big Rock Candy Mountain. We dreamed of a distant utopia, a sunny political paradise, where the credit flows like a waterfall and approvals stay sky-high. We weren’t there yet. With twenty months to go until POTUS left office, our place in history was far from certain. But inside the building, something had undoubtedly changed. President Obama’s jaunty, let’s-go-for-it attitude was infectious. We no longer felt like turtles in our shells. Our growing confidence was matched by growing competence as well. That’s not to disparage the early days: as White Houses go, Obama’s functioned fairly smoothly from the start. Still, the longer POTUS ran the institution, the more we learned from our mistakes. After the Healthcare.gov disaster, we began “red-teaming” a growing number of big decisions, assigning designated cynics to guard against undiluted hope. Confronted with its lack of diversity, Obamaworld gradually became a place where rooms full of white guys were the exception and not the rule. Baby steps, I know. But these baby steps made us a unicorn among bureaucracies—we improved over time. Somewhat to my astonishment, so did I. At the risk of sounding boastful, I had now gone two full years without angering a sovereign nation. Even better, the White House finally felt like home. There was no one moment when the transformation happened. I didn’t burst forth from a cocoon. It was more like learning a language. You study, you practice, you embarrass yourself. And then one day someone cuts you off in traffic and you call them a motherfucker in perfect Portuguese. Whoa, you think. I guess I’m learning.

The outcome of colonialism has been a controlling or blocking of interconnectivity and interdependence in related arenas: the environment (where rivers are dammed, channeled, or drained and natural geographies replaced by grids), in societies (where communities are divided in a pseudologic of superiority/inferiority), in economies (where resources like trees, coal, or oil are extracted as rapidly and brutally as possible without regard for surrounding destruction and pollution), and thought (where knowledge is organized under the rubrics of specialization, expertise, and compartmentalization, affected by racism and Eurocentrism). Colonialism, globalization, and development planning are ways of thinking as well as ways of life, and we need to find their alternatives, islands where other ways of life are explored through the resurgence of interconnectivity at local levels, creating dialogue among diverse points of view and projects of counter-development and liberation. When we take the idea of colonialism out of its location in history texts as a period of conquest located in the past, and begin to think of it as a metaphor for a way to live in the environment, certain general patterns appear. Before colonialism, there were environments of interpenetrating local biodiversities with cyclic retreats and advances, in which human groups integrated and competed; after colonialism, there was a large-scale monoculture, control of land and resources by distant privileged elites who exploit and fragment local communities while polluting and destroying ecosystems. Before colonialism, there were many diverse cultural worlds, each its own center of meaning-making and language arts, with Europe at the periphery. After colonialism, cultures were ranked on a kind of "great chain of being" according to European notions of culture and development, with Europe at the center. As a corollary, individual subjectivities were ranked as to how completely they could think through decontextualized universals in European languages. One way to think about liberation psychologies is as an evolving and multiple set of projects of decolonization.

A word of explanation about how the information in this book was obtained, evaluated and used. This book is designed to present, as best my reporting could determine, what really happened. The core of this book comes from the written record—National Security Council meeting notes, personal notes, memos, chronologies, letters, PowerPoint slides, e-mails, reports, government cables, calendars, transcripts, diaries and maps. Information in the book was supplied by more than 100 people involved in the Afghanistan War and national security during the first 18 months of President Barack Obama’s administration. Interviews were conducted on “background,” meaning the information could be used but the sources would not be identified by name. Many sources were interviewed five or more times. Most allowed me to record the interviews, which were then transcribed. For several sources, the combined interview transcripts run more than 300 pages. I have attempted to preserve the language of the main characters and sources as much as possible, using their words even when they are not directly quoted, reflecting the flavor of their speech and attitudes. Many key White House aides were interviewed in-depth. They shared meeting notes, important documents, recollections of what happened before, during and after meetings, and assisted extensively with their interpretations. Senior and well-placed military, intelligence and diplomatic officials also provided detailed recollections, read from notes or assisted with documents. Since the reporting was done over 18 months, many interviews were conducted within days or even hours after critical discussions. This often provided a fresher and less-calculated account. Dialogue comes mostly from the written record, but also from participants, usually more than one. Any attribution of thoughts, conclusions or feelings to a person was obtained directly from that person, from notes or from a colleague whom the person told. Occasionally, a source said mid-conversation that something was “off-the-record,” meaning it could not be used unless the information was obtained elsewhere. In many cases, I was able to get the information elsewhere so that it could be included in this book. Some people think they can lock up and prevent publication of information by declaring it “off-the-record” or that they don’t want to see it in the book. But inside any White House, nearly everyone’s business and attitudes become known to others. And in the course of multiple, extensive interviews with firsthand sources about key decision points in the war, the role of the players became clear. Given the diversity of sources, stakes and the lives involved, there is no way I could write a sterilized or laundered version of this story. I interviewed President Obama on-the-record in the Oval Office for one hour and 15 minutes on Saturday, July 10, 2

Babel led to an explosion in the number of languages. That was part of Enki's plan. Monocultures, like a field of corn, are susceptible to infections, but genetically diverse cultures, like a prairie, are extremely robust. After a few thousand years, one new language developed - Hebrew - that possessed exceptional flexibility and power. The deuteronomists, a group of radical monotheists in the sixth and seventh centuries B.C., were the first to take advantage of it. They lived in a time of extreme nationalism and xenophobia, which made it easier for them to reject foreign ideas like Asherah worship. They formalized their old stories into the Torah and implanted within it a law that insured its propagation throughout history - a law that said, in effect, 'make an exact copy of me and read it every day.' And they encouraged a sort of informational hygiene, a belief in copying things strictly and taking great care with information, which as they understood, is potentially dangerous. They made data a controlled substance... [and] gone beyond that. There is evidence of carefully planned biological warfare against the army of Sennacherib when he tried to conquer Jerusalem. So the deuteronomists may have had an en of their very own. Or maybe they just understood viruses well enough that they knew how to take advantage of naturally occurring strains. The skills cultivated by these people were passed down in secret from one generation to the next and manifested themselves two thousand years later, in Europe, among the Kabbalistic sorcerers, ba'al shems, masters of the divine name. In any case, this was the birth of rational religion. All of the subsequent monotheistic religions - known by Muslims, appropriately, as religions of the Book - incorporated those ideas to some extent. For example, the Koran states over and over again that it is a transcript, an exact copy, of a book in Heaven. Naturally, anyone who believes that will not dare to alter the text in any way! Ideas such as these were so effective in preventing the spread of Asherah that, eventually, every square inch of the territory where the viral cult had once thrived was under the sway of Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. But because of its latency - coiled about the brainstem of those it infects, passed from one generation to the next - it always finds ways to resurface. In the case of Judaism, it came in the form of the Pharisees, who imposed a rigid legalistic theocracy on the Hebrews. With its rigid adherence to laws stored in a temple, administered by priestly types vested with civil authority, it resembled the old Sumerian system, and was just as stifling. The ministry of Jesus Christ was an effort to break Judaism out of this condition... an echo of what Enki did. Christ's gospel is a new namshub, an attempt to take religion out of the temple, out of the hands of the priesthood, and bring the Kingdom of God to everyone. That is the message explicitly spelled out by his sermons, and it is the message symbolically embodied in the empty tomb. After the crucifixion, the apostles went to his tomb hoping to find his body and instead found nothing. The message was clear enough; We are not to idolize Jesus, because his ideas stand alone, his church is no longer centralized in one person but dispersed among all the people.