Babel and the nation

The curse of Babel – as Joan-Lluís Lluís reminds us in a magnificent essay, Balla amb Babel– is based on the mistake of supposing that linguistic variety is a divine curse, a punishment, when, in fact, it is quite the opposite: a gift from God, or from a Humanity that enriches itself when it addresses the problem of communication and memory and personal and collective knowledge from thousands of different perspectives.It was the monolingualism of the biblical myth that led to the idea of building the tower. A single language means a single way of understanding the world, a single narrative, a single culture, a single authority. And it is precisely then that the imperial project appears. We live, not in the ruins of the tower, but in the continuous project of building new ones and eliminating the other thousands of ways of representing life and the world. Call it a tower or a nation-state. Call it whatever you want. Each language deposits not only grammatical categories, but metaphors, classifications of nature, conceptions of time and forms of courtesy, relationships between the individual and the community. It is the linguistic uniformization of the planet that makes it a more violent and uninhabitable place. It is the desire to erase languages that leads to the desire to erase the people who speak them and who still insist on wanting to speak them and pass them on to their children. J.M. Coetzee says that while we kill animals we will kill people, and that slaughterhouses are the antechambers of mass exterminations among humans. It is not slaughterhouses, however, but linguicides. Policies and attitudes of cultural assimilation that lead to linguistic marginalization are the antechamber of genocides. This is historically documented: the examples of this assertion are innumerable. There are no superior languages to others; there are no languages that fail to express love and knowledge and abstractions.Each language could offer us a redemptive, winning concept, an illumination of meaning that we lose forever. Because just as Greek shed light on the concepts that still feed a large part of our philosophy; Latin, the legal categories; medieval Arabic, scientific vocabulary, and now English gives us technological language, the other languages of the world could make their contribution, if we do not let them die in ignorance and silence.