But Shariatmadari's position may be a little overstated. We learn much by tracing, say, the word 'tragedy', as Nietzsche did, back to its Dionysian goat beginning. And, as another example, it's important that, say, the root of the N-word, which literally means black, and goes a long way toward demonizing a quality a human cannot change, even if he wanted to.
This discussion seems to lead naturally into Shariatmadari's somewhat jocular section of the alleged demise of language proposed by certain elements of the upper establishment. Shariatmadari spends a chapter discussing the popular highbrow notion that "language is going to the dogs." What does he mean? Prudes, pedants and English teachers, other than Robin Williams (RIP), worry that postmodernism, the replacement of critical thinking skills with standardized testing, the clickety-cluckety noise of the Internet, have led to an Anything Goes approach to language as a conveyor of 'deeper meaning'. I profess a fondness for sonnets, so I can understand the thinking here.
As an example of such prudery, Shariatmadari trots in a British organization to have their imperial say:
[The decline of the English language] is something the Queen's English Society...has been trying to prevent. 'Some changes would be wholly unacceptable,' the Society says, 'as they would cause confusion and the language would lose shades of meaning.' With a reduced expressive capacity, English would no longer be up to the task of describing the world around us, or the world inside our heads.
Again, to a certain degree I concur. One frightening thing for a literate person is the prospect the author raises of a future world that no longer even comprehends Shakespeare's "old" English.
First, it was going to the groundlings -- to the feisty little Falstaffs in the crowd -- but now, according to the haughty culture, English is going to the mad dogs. But Shariatmadari says implicitly 'phooey' and that degeneration is a sentiment that has been common throughout the evolution of language. Like a latter-day Will Rogers, he agrees that 'nothing is the way it used to be -- and never was.' As far as he's concerned, language is alive and well:
Most democratic freedoms have been preserved and intellectual achievement intensified. Information has become far more accessible, news media have proliferated and the technological advances have come thick and fast.
If it comes down to it, f*ck Shakespeare is a development he seems okay with.
But I'm not sure I agree with Shariatmadari's oblique (o bleak!) optimism. Look at the state of the mainstream media he describes as conduits of productive information. No, for me, it recalls a Nietzsche nugget regarding Gutenberg's invention of the printing press -- that's great, he said, but then the Germans went ahead and threw it all away by inventing the dirty noisy newspaper. Things kind of got out of hand from there, just as they did with poor ol' Tim Berners-Lee and the WWW in our time. Pearls before swine. The road to good intentions turns out to be the road of excess, with neither leading to any real wisdom. As newspapers have been in the past, the Internet today is largely only good for wrapping up fish, or kindling a small fire to cook it on.
The prudery Shariatmadari refers to is further expanded in a section that discusses Race, Class, and Cultural differences. He who controls the narrative arc controls what happens to the characters. Thus we get spin cycles in the news; attempts to control how information is processed by hearts and minds. Shariatmadari provides examples of how these motifs are played out in the social milieu.
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