A Commonplace Book

In the past 50 years, by one reckoning, the working vocabulary of the average 14-year old has declined from 25,000 words to 10,000. This is a decline not merely in words, but also in the capacity to think.

Of the roughly 6,000 languages now spoken, linguists predict that less than half are expected to survive to the year 2050.

[L]anguage reflects the range and depth of our experience. But our experience is being impoverished to the extent that it is rendered artificial and prepackaged. Most of us no longer experience skilled physical work on farms or in forests. Consequently, words and metaphors based on intimate knowledge of soils, plants, trees, animals, landscapes, and rivers have all but vanished. Recreation and software industries are engineering and shrink-wrapping our experience of an increasingly uniform and ugly world and peddling it back to us as "fun" or "information."

The new class of corporate chiefs, global managers, genetic engineers, and money speculators will reduce language to the level of utility, function, and management. Evil begins not only with words used with malice, but also with words that diminish people, land and life. The prospects of evil grow as those for language decline.

[W]e need to protect local culture from domination by national media, markets, and power. Language grows from the outside in, from periphery to center. It is renewed in the vernacular, where human intentions intersect places and circumstances, and by everyday acts of authentic living and speaking. It is corrupted by contrivance, pretense, and fakery. We need to protect the independence of local newspapers and local radio stations, as well as those parts of our culture where memory, tradition and devotion to place still exist.

In terms of volume, this is surely an information age. But in terms of understanding, wisdom, spiritual clarity, and civility, we have entered a darker age.