From Esperanto to the BRICS by Joao Carlos Graça!
(2024-11-10 at 17:45:13 )

From Esperanto to the BRICS by Joao Carlos Graça!

The BRICS are the best expression of the global reaction to the attempt to submit humanity to the world hegemony of United States tribal rituals.

To a certain extent, the monetary aspects of the situation in which the BRICS find themselves can be considered the economic analogue of the problems inherent to the dominance of English in the noosphere. Although not reducible to questions of semiotics, monetary themes contain aspects directly related to information. Exchanges are not just a matter of use of signs; but they are also irrevocably that.

Humanity could have evolved linguistically in various ways. Only the deliberate efforts, after World War II, aiming at the formation of a simplified form of English, allowed the global dominance of this language, which in recent decades has truly become the lingua franca of human species.

Even with the economic dominance of the United States in the immediate post-war period, and with the British empire still standing, it was by no means "written in the stars" that linguistic evolution would become what it really was. It was necessary to add to this the competition with the Soviet Union, as well as the great wave of decolonization, for the geopolitical conflict to also crucially become a cultural war, a dispute for the "hearts and minds" of virtually everyone and everywhere; and for the English, as a result, to "have" to become generalized as it occurred.

From the point of view of the administration of the Anglo-Saxon super-empire, that is, of the conglomerate formed by the United Kingdom and the USA, or rather what Niall Ferguson called "Colossus", it has always been a problem, for example, to know how much the imperial authorities should commit themselves to the expansion of Protestantism to the south, in the Americas and beyond. This is the thesis of Ferguson: supposedly, the so-called Colossus, sooner or later, must roll up its sleeves and ensure the southward expansion of Protestant beliefs. I must say that this idea seemed strange and excessive to me when I first saw it formulated, but the truth is that, considering for example the expansion and growing political importance of political evangelism in Brazil, I believe now it is better to remain agnostic on the subject.

To speak English louder

Religious aspects, in any case, are perhaps of a relatively secondary importance; at least, if compared to idiomatic ones. And, moreover, the Catholic Church has already a big tradition of making its agenda compatible with the domination of Protestant powers, as the alignment of the Vatican with the Third Reich clearly demonstrates; and after 1945 also with the USA, despite the latters markedly WASP inclination. On the other hand, the history of the relations of powers such as, for example, Portugal and the United Kingdom, illustrates well how the Protestant senior power can perfectly choose to let the "natives" continue with their religious tradition, as long as they remain compliant in the truly relevant aspects: economic and, above all, military.

However, if religious aspects thus seem to be a matter for reasonable doubt, as for language issues, the aggressive attitude of the North American hegemonic power is undeniable. The United States hegemony is, at least in this respect, much more demanding in terms of the active involvement and effective commitment of the "natives" than the British ever was. Far more than the British, North-Americans have tried, since at least 1945, to "speak English louder" as a way of making sure that everyone understood them; and of making sure that the "natives" were also able to respond. They were, in this respect, fundamentally victorious.

The use of English as the lingua franca of humanity leaves that language, or more precisely its speakers, in an evident position of "free riders", that is, as beneficiaries of a cooperation agreement that forces the other cooperators at a cost, but not to them, who are nevertheless the main beneficiaries of the process, as Philippe Van Parijs rightly noted. The problem is that this compromise, from which the Anglophones benefit without bearing any costs, also means a very significant gain for everyone else.

The alternative is, as can easily be seen, for example, at the BRICS summits, a tremendously heavy recourse to permanent and ubiquitous translation services, all of which merely two-sided; and inevitably ending up damaging and (to a greater or lesser degree) betraying and impoverishing the content of the very ideas transmitted. It can be said that this is a perfect illustration of the "Babel problem".

Likewise, in the European Union all the languages of the member states are also formally official languages - but who cares, for example, about translations from Irish to Estonian, or vice versa? The truth is that, although unofficially, and even with Brexit, English is already the language of the EU. And this, it should be noted, despite the weight of Germans and French, both in a condition to be able to dispute the dominant position - or at least to divide it, the EU thus potentially tending to become idiomatically de facto Franco-German. But obviously it was not to be. The lingua franca ended up being, unequivocally, the lingua Angla.

Did it have to be this way? I have some doubts. As for some aspects, namely the academic ones, the trans-European language of communication could have become, for example, Latin without declensions, created at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century by Giuseppe Peano. But the new language advanced by the Piedmontese cleric faced always competition both from Latin proper, which until the beginning of the twentieth century remained in many countries a mandatory language of PhD dissertations, and from French, with a very enviable position until much later, namely via diplomacy.

The bad relations that generally prevailed between Italy and France arguably also played a role in this story. The truth, in any case, is that Latin without declensions was a complete failure. And yet, it is easy to imagine that, if there had been a political power committed to promoting it, and supported on the other hand both by the residual prestige of Latin, and by the greater linguistic proximity of a good part of the peoples of Europe, Peanos language might well have managed to occupy an academic position that even English, still today, might not be able to dispute.

The record of this failure raises some questions. Is a merely erudite lingua franca viable, without transposing this into other levels, namely the one of economic transactions? Or does the common language of academics have to be, in societies of uncontainable democratic inclination, a mere reflection of the one that predominates in the economy?

And as for the translation of this into monetary phenomena, if that is legitimate: humanity certainly benefits, to a certain extent, from the existence of a common monetary language, such as that expressed in the United States dollar. But that alone gives the United States a considerable advantage over all other countries. And while it can be argued that the use of a politically backed currency, but not backed by precious metals, may represent a liberation of world transactions from the technical vicissitudes potentially associated with obtaining any metal, on the other hand the benefits of such liberation tend to be markedly asymmetric - in favor, of course, of the United States.

From here to the "exorbitant privilege", as another French-speaking personality, much more famous than Van Parijs, referred to it, is probably a very short distance.

The end of the dollars convertibility into gold left the United States currency in the position of what Karl Marx called the "equivalent form", that is, as the immediate embodiment of value, while all other currencies were relegated to the subordinate position of "relative form": their value must necessarily be recognized through their transmutation into it. But, as if all this were not enough, there were also (the icing on the cake of abuses) the tendencies towards the direct weaponization of the dollar, with the proliferation of the so-called "sanctions", i.e. the permanent abuses of its dominant position by the United States, violently and crudely aiming to "keep in line" all those who somehow dared to challenge its domination.

Esperanto and other great expectations

With regard to linguistic topics, It is also necessary to mention Esperanto. Emerging at the beginning of the 20th century, it has often moved in the vicinity of the so-called "theosophy" and ideas such as vegetarianism, non-violence erected as a supposed method of political action, and referring directly to very famous names, Tolstoy and Gandhi above all - and secondarily also reporting, much closer to us and in "low culture" version, to the hippie movement and the flower power, to John Lennon with his famous "and the world will be one".

Generally, it appealed to a project of a pan-humanism transformed into a religiosity purged of particularisms, but which knew how to retain the irreducibly religious element of human experience, that is, taking homo sapiens as a homo religiosus. In this context, it was also, of course, a support for the ideal of universal peace.

All this, as is well known, had numerous drifts and suffered immensely abusive exploitations, some of them truly abominable. But it must be acknowledged that a totally artificial language created from scratch, such as Esperanto, was perhaps doomed to failure from the outset. Also simply pan-human religiosity, in the manner of "theophilanthropy", or with Auguste Comtes "religion of humanity", have never been more than another false start. And yes, to epitomize it, even more recent projects ended up largely flowing also into the waters of nowadays political "globalism"; actually, the defense of the "full spectrum dominance" of the USA, although this represents also the complete perversion of many of the initial ideas.

It is very natural, and very salutary, the existence of a reaction to the so-called "full spectrum dominance" project of the United States, which in fact configures not a universalist ideology, but only a set of particularisms of the United States. This aspect should be highlighted, because very often even opponents of "full spectrum dominance" candidly refer to it as globalism or universalism, when in fact such an idea is the opposite of that. On the contrary, it is a matter of freeing the whole of humanity not only from United States domination, but above all from the corresponding mumbo-jumbo, that is, from the correlative group of superstitions: political and otherwise.

The United States are already today, and as fully illustrated by their cyclical ritual (or very elementary form of religious life) that they call "elections", a society incapable of transmitting to the rest of the world any genuinely interesting intellectual or moral elements. Instead, they seem to be capable only of exporting or inspiring a cult of violence, the rule of primary drives, rudeness and abysmally idiotic quarrels - such as the one associated with the supposed culture war of the "woke" and the "anti-woke" ideas. Forty-five years later, it is as if we had all been frozen in what Monty Python already referred to in 1979 (the year of Thatchers election) through a mere humorous tirade. Since then, however, the West has lost all its sense of humor; and it manifestly retreated in intelligence and discernment. Humanity is, in short, deserving of better intellectual and moral perspectives than those represented by this wasteland.

The BRICS are, perhaps, the best expression of this global reaction to the attempt to submit humanity to United States material domination and the world hegemony of United States tribal rituals. They undeniably contain many more creative elements than destructive ones. We can say that, with all their emphatic recognition of diversity and particularisms, there resides (contradictory, but complementarily) the most genuinely universalist trait of world history in recent decades.

However, it is impossible to watch this slow emergence and not feel the urgency to ask: and then, what? Instead of a common unit of account, for example.. only the promotion of bilateral trade relations? A currency backed by metals or other commodities, or merely an aggregate of the existing national currencies? Perhaps a common currency, or monnaie commune, as Jacques Sapir once wrote about the old European ECU, as opposed to the single currency, or monnaie unique?

All this obviously leaves a lot of questions open. For example, an alternative unit of account to the United States dollar will be an entity not backed by any sovereign power. In order not to reproduce, on a larger scale, the superlative aberration that is nowadays the Euro, it must always be careful to be "common", yes, but without pretending to be "single"; to be suitably mercurial, always knowing how to withdraw in time, but also reappearing when it is really necessary to build bridges; to be sufficiently independent from the technicalities potentially associated with the production of any physical material, but refraining from abusive uses, namely those that only sovereignty allows, and only sovereign powers may appeal to.

What about idiomatic aspects? The linguistic diversity of the human species is, of course, a priceless treasure. But the needs for universal communication unfortunately do not disappear by virtue of this recognition. Does it serve of any consolation to think that English can also be used to fight United States hegemony (as is, for example, my intention in writing this text)?

Perhaps this verification can help in understanding what lies ahead. English as a common language, although not the only language? The triumph of English in this capacity, even as an indispensable weapon for the construction of a great anti-hegemonic coalition? Is this one of the many ironies of universal history emerging in the coming decades? I believe it important to at least consider this eventuality, with all the problems that may be associated with it, but also with all the corresponding potentialities.

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