Let them eat "cakewalk".

• Author: Ayres, Ed
• Position: Note From A Worldwatcher

So, we are in an age of fear. Fear can be healthy (when it inhibits our teenagers from drag-racing 110 miles an hour into bridge abutments, for example), but as a chronic state of mind it is debilitating. In recent years, liberal environmentalists have begun to realize that their practice of issuing dire warnings about "a planet in trouble" may arouse enough fear and resentment to push people into precisely the kinds of in-your-face consumption the environmentalists have been warning against--buying bigger cars, bigger portions of French fries, and of course bigger pants, TV screens, and guns.

Against this background, the U.S. government has pursued its own set of dire warnings--first of attack from Al Qaeda, the Taliban, or Islamic Jihad; then from Muslim terrorists at large, then from young men who look Middle Eastern and buy their plane tickets with cash; then just "global terrorism." People watching the news shake their heads and say things like, "You can't win--if the pollution doesn't kill you, the terrorists will!" When George W. Bush then requests another $87 billion to escalate his war on the "global center of terrorism in Iraq" (which only became such a center after the U.S. invaded), people are too frightened to stop and question whether this enormous sum might better be spent on other needs.

In this respect, the conservatives and liberals have something in common: they both exploit a very basic human fear of physical threats. From the environmentalist perspective, these are the well substantiated threats of incipient climate disruption, water scarcity, plagues, and ecological decline brought on by rising human population and consumption on a planet of finite resources. From the conservative standpoint, the threats are those of nukes, car-bombs, and blownup buildings or bridges. But whatever your political bent, the threats evoked are physical. They arouse visceral, fightor-flight reactions that have been trained into our nervous systems over hundreds of millennia.

Now, though, a very different kind of threat--a threat to language--may be proving even more dangerous than any physical risk we know. It is only through language that any human individual can benefit from the cumulative knowledge of a hundred previous generations--and can engage in the kinds of social transaction and cooperation that make up a viable civilization. It's only by having linguistic structures that mean the same thing to different people (even if...