Racism And Astronomy

I am of course incredibly White, so the immediate question here is why a White non-astronomer is qualified to talk about racism in astronomy. Well, strictly speaking of course I can’t really, or rather, I am unlikely to be able to wade into it in enough depth to swim knowledgeably. Nonetheless I can give a kind of overview of it and comment on some of the active racism involved.

Photo by Faik Akmd on Pexels.com

This is a time lapse picture of the night sky. The main reason we can know it was taken here on Earth, apart from the fact that astronomical pictures taken from other celestial bodies are rare and poor quality (in fact I only know of one body they have been taken from, and that’s Mars) is the colour of the sky and the presence of liquid and solid on the surface at the bottom of the picture. It also seems to have been taken from the northern hemisphere because of the relatively stable and bright streak at the centre, which is presumably Polaris. Had it been taken from the south, the much dimmer Sigma Octantis would be at the centre of the swirl.

The sky seems non-specific and impassive to us, and also very little influenced by conflict or politics going on here on Earth among humans, and that is one reason I’m so keen on astronomy. Contemplating the Universe makes the problems we have here seem less important and seems to put them in perspective. I would personally say the stars are something to aspire to. I so want there to be humans out there among them one day. Of course, we are already among the stars but apparently only one of them hosts us. Nevertheless, there are cultural dominances and biasses in how we view the Universe and also very clear and overt racism exists among the astronomical community.

This sounds like an accusation, as the words “racism”, “sexism”, “ableism” and others often do, but that would imply that people are consciously and deliberately reserving much of the academic world to White people. That may happen as well, but it’s more important to look at the issue as a structural thing. As a White person, I have the privilege of firstly being unaware of racial bias among astronomers and secondly of being able to contemplate astronomy in a meaningful way. There are other ways in which I am trivially disadvantaged to do with my situation. For instance, I can’t see objects in the night sky very easily because of my poor eyesight, so the best I can usually manage to do is to view maybe first magnitude stars such as Antares, and basically nothing else. This is more on the disability side than ethnicity of course, but there is another set of issues which is fairly obvious to me regarding gender, namely that a man may feel much more confident to go out at night to a park or remote area to look at the sky in a place without light pollution than a woman might, and beyond that the kind of systemic biasses which prefer able-bodied middle-aged WASP men work against women, the disabled and ethnic minorities. Hence in the richer parts of the world, Black people are likely to live in places with more light pollution and less likely to be able to afford a good telescope. Ironically, much of Afrika, for example, would be very suitable indeed for telescopic astronomy. Here’s a map of the continent showing lighting at night:

(would’ve been better without the labels). And here’s Europe:

This means that treating every location as equally likely, which is not so because of lack of population, one stands a much better chance of seeing the night sky well in Afrika than in Europe. Also, along the Equator one can see both celestial hemispheres, so one can see more of it in Afrika than Europe.

There will inevitably be systemic racism in who becomes an astronomer in Europe and North America, although I’m guessing this isn’t any worse than who becomes a palaeontologist. The latter presents a rather different problem as there are issues regarding the plunder of resources by colonialists and the treatment of indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities in the field, which may not be so big a problem with astronomy. However, there can be problems with the siting of observatories in a similar sense, the most well-known one at the moment being the positioning of the Thirty Metre Array in Hawai’i, which was to be situated on Mauna Kea, a sacred site to the people of that archipelago. The issue here is that the planned observatory is one of several near that site, and in the past the excavation of the site has desecrated the graves of ancient high chiefs. In the past, promises regarding the building of telescopes have been broken, with insistence that this would be the last development, followed by more of the same. The northern hemisphere is low in such observatories, and a possible alternate site in La Palma in the Canary Islands is less suitable for infrared astronomy due to the warmer climate and lower elevation. Mauna Kea is the highest mountain on Earth measured from its base, so there’s less atmosphere to look through. There is a peaceful protest ongoing there. Some of the indigenous people view the idea of looking for other habitable planets as encouraging an attitude that Earth is disposable. Despite losing their case in the courts, the actions taken to build the observatory seem to meet the legal definition of desecration. Elders in their seventies and eighties have been arrested for peaceful protests, and because the site is sacred all protestors are committed to non-violence. This has also divided the community as the police officers are sometimes related to the protestors. Beyond that is the issue of how the United States government acquired the islands in the first place, on the grounds that the White businessmen were more fit to run the island than the recently independent natives. The federal government also had no legal jurisdiction over the country.

This story makes me wonder about whether there are other observatories with similar histories. There is also a separate issue regarding the Arecibo Telescope, which is an enormous radio telescope built in a basin in Puerto Rico. This was used to send the first message into interstellar space for detection by aliens, although it was only a semi-serious attempt for publicity purposes. In 2020 CE, the telescope collapsed, primarily due to lack of funding making maintenance unaffordable. Like Hawai’i, part of the rhetoric for siting the telescope there is that it brings money into the local economy, but that money is no longer forthcoming. Elsewhere on the planet, the Karoo Square Kilometre Array in South Africa requires a 13 000 hectare “quiet zone” which minimises electromagnetic transmissions to enable the telescopes to detect signals from the sky more easily. The San used to live in this region and were forced to move north by the colonial government in the century before last, and there’s the issue of purchase of the land from White farmers to prevent radio interference. Employment is low and deprivation high in the area, and it’s possible that building the extra telescopes may lead to jobs. The San were, however, displaced when the government brought Black farmers to the area some time ago. The SKA is situated where it is thanks to a government bidding process which brought it into the area.

Then there’s the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array. This was afflicted in 2013 by a workers’ contract dispute between the Washington CD-based organisation which runs the facility and the four-fifths of employees at the site who are Chilean. All of these things taken together look like a process where scientific institutions in the wealthy and light-polluted (and also electromagnetic radiation more generally) North of the planet uses places with colonial histories to site its astronomical facilities, without much respect being paid to the people who actually live there. As I say, I don’t know much about these things but it seems to be a clear example of racism in astronomy. The Polynesian people and the San do of course also have their own astronomical traditions. Western astronomers were not the first.

In 2017, only nine percent of US STEM academics were POC. The Black population of the US is 13.6%. As for Black women, only sixty-six of them got doctorates in physics compared to 27 000 White men. This is not about problematising STEM departments or the scientific community in particular, but in a racist society this kind of disparity can be expected if nothing is done to address it. In general, diversity is an asset because new perspectives can be brought to bear on research, so this is not simply about justice for ethnic minorities but about having a well-functioning scientific discipline. Problems encountered in physics and astronomy for POC include microaggressions from White students, not feeling welcomed or included, imposter syndrome, a lack of role models, financial struggles and an absence of academic support. There is a second problem with examining racism specifically in astronomy caused by the tendency for physics and astronomy to be lumped together, perhaps because physics is perceived as a more “useful” subject, and it may also be that astronomers are less aware of the need to combat racism in their discipline than physicists. Researchers into the issue have not managed to visit astronomy departments as easily as physics ones, meaning that no firm conclusions can be drawn about the relative differences.

The White Florida emeritus astronomy professor Haywood Smith has state

d that he does not believe systemic racism exists at a time when only two percent of American astronomers are Black. His own department had had one Black employee, in admin, hired in the early 1990s. On the positive side, Black students report that the environment in the department is generally very positive and supportive. However, I can’t help but be reminded of Patrick Moore, who was chair of the right wing United Country Party, which opposed immigration. He was also an admirer of Enoch Powell, condemned the Race Relations Act and regarded the absolute monarchy of Liechtenstein as the “best political system in the world”. This last point is more complex, mainly because Liechtenstein is a microstate, but it still means that, like Britain, Liechtenstein’s head of state is very likely always to be White.

It would be unfair to use both of these astronomers as typical of their profession. Even so, it does remind me of the interesting phenomenon of right wing animal liberationists. There are people whom I might describe as “animal lovers” who look at the world very differently than I do, and whose veganism, if that’s an accurate description, is also very different to mine. For instance, there are some animal liberationists who are anti-abortion and see that as consistent, and there’s also an attitude that whereas humans are terrible, and behave terribly towards each other, other species do not perpetrate deliberate cruelty but simply try to survive and thrive, and take care of their offspring. For such people, other species seem to constitute a similar escape from the woeful interaction of human beings with each other as astronomy does for me. Maybe actively racist White astronomers are similar. I don’t feel I’ve exactly captured the issue, but I can see the sense in this apparently incongruous juxtaposition.

The way it might work for White astronomers is that they want to rise above this morass of apparent nonsense that infests the world, but their nonsense is not the same as my nonsense. Mine is the endless grind of global capitalism, greed and hatred between groups to ensure divided opposition to oppression. Theirs is a reflection of the privilege which enabled them to become astronomers in the first place. It could also be a kind of innocence. They may be so focussed on the stars that they’re oblivious of what’s happening on the ground. But it’s been said that not taking a position in a dispute about oppression is taking the side of the oppressor. Some might also say that there’s an issue with even having astronomy departments “when the world’s in such a mess”. I completely disagree with this though, because awareness of the existence of the rest of the cosmos has a function similar to spirituality and art in allowing one to continue and cope in order to continue fighting for a better world. Being a science, astronomy also has the usual function of science in training people in critical thinking. This is how astronomy graduates will be coming out the other end of the degree machine, whether or not they use their qualification vocationally. Astronomy is also just plain useful, for instance in detecting asteroids hurtling towards the planet and wiping out all life as we know it.

Another aspect of astronomy and racism is the question of sky cultures and names for objects. I’ve already mentioned the Square Kilometre Array and the observatories on Mauna Kea. Both of these are unsurprisingly both associated with indigenous communities, namely the San and Polynesians respectively. A sky culture is how a particular culture sees the sky. There are several Polynesian sky cultures just as there are many Polyesian languages. It could be expected that a set of people who have settled in various places across the Pacific and Indian Oceans would have a highly disparate set of cultures. The Austronesian language family had the largest geographical range of any language family before colonialism: Hawai’i and Madagascar both speak Austronesian languages and are 17 000 kilometres apart. Their broad distribution is a factor in their astronomy, as it was important to have some understanding of constellations in order to navigate. In order to record the positions of the stars, some Polynesians used “stick charts”, made from palm fronds, cowries and plant cordage:

By Sterilgutassistentin – This file has been extracted from another file, GPL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51775534

Curved links indicate ocean currents and winds and the charts are effectively maps of the ocean. Pacific Islands tend to be around one to three hundred kilometres apart with the exception of such outliers as Hawai’i. The information was memorised and navigators were also spiritual and political leaders, navigation being a spiritual and religious act. Astronomy was part of this. Guiding stars were used when low in the sky, with imaginary vertical lines projected onto the horizon to indicate direction, but these move as the night goes on due to the rotation of the planet. The direction indicated by the star is maintained until another star rises. The paths between these stars are referred to as “kavenga” – “star paths” – named after the brightest star and all stars are referred to by the name of the brightest. However, these are not applicable all year round, so the year is divided into four unequal seasons with different kavenga. These are Ke Ka O Makali’i (the northern winter – Hawai’i has no seasons of course), Ka Iwikuamo’o (northern spring), Manaiakalani (northern summer) and the overlapping Ka Lupu O Kawelo (northern autumn into winter, including some of Ke Ka O Makali’i). Kavenga could also be kept on one side or other of the boat, or the boat could be aimed between two kavenga. There is also the star compass, which uses the presence of Polaris and Crux Australis, as we in the West call them, and the stars around them as they rise and set, to locate the north and south celestial poles. They also picked out a number of other asterisms (star patterns), including what we call Orion’s Belt, Scorpio, and the Pleiades, and used their rising and setting to mark another six points on the horizon and construct the directions in which other stars were since their positions would then be known. This enables the navigator to find out where the boat is when the sky is partly cloudy. There are also, unsurprisingly, stories associated with the star paths and asterisms. Apart from being meaningful in other ways, these serve as mnemonics for the location of the star paths.

There isn’t time to cover all Polynesian sky cultures here, so I will now move on to the San. Although it must be remembered that the biological construction of ethnicity as race is distinctly dubious, politically speaking, it’s also worth noting the identity of the San, whose genetic profiles are highly unusual. The San appear to be the group genetically closest to the earliest examples of Homo sapiens. Both their Y-chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA branched off early from the rest of the species and they seem to have diverged from about two hundred millennia in the past. They’re also the most diverse group of humans genetically. Two San can be as different generically from each other as two randomly chosen people from anywhere on Earth. Besides this, albinos are unusually common among them. I mention all this to indicate that they are very much not simply Black people even though Europeans might lump all Afrikans who are not fair-skinned together. They have a very distinct identity. Afrikans generally are more genetically diverse than the rest of the human race, so as I’ve said previously, if you want a construction of race based on genetics, and I don’t really know why you would, it makes sense to see Afrika as including about ten ethnicities and the rest of the world about fourteen, but with entire continents in some cases only having a couple, so the human race basically consists of a series of genetic groups which often vary in skin tone and other features within those groups plus a large number of mainly dark-skinned groups all of whom originate recently from Afrika. The idea of skin tone as a major feature distinguishing ethnicities makes no genetic sense, and of course people don’t just “breed” within their own hermetically sealed racial units.

One tantalising possibility exists regarding San sky lore, which is that it may be directly descended from early human mythology. On the other hand, behavioural modernity seems to have appeared after the split between them and the rest of the species, so maybe not. One difficulty with recovering it is that Christian missionaries have obscured and suppressed the content, but one story is that a woman was baking a root vegetable on a fire and wouldn’t let her daughter eat it, so the daughter kicked at the fire and scattered the ashes across the night sky, forming the Milky Way, and the red embers formed the red stars in the sky. Kham (the Moon, Cynthia) is a man who has angered the Sun, gains weight each month and then is cut away by the Sun until only the backbone is left, and he pleads that this crescent he has become be left for his children, who then repeat the cycle. The Sun, in a possibly different tribal tradition, becomes a rhino at sunset, is eaten by a different tribe who then throw her scapula over to the east, where it becomes a new animal and rises again. The celestial bodies are the elder race and all personified. The Sun, and again this seems to be a different tradition, is a man with luminous armpits, armpits being considered a source of sweat which contains supernatural power, who refused to share his light to dry out the termites for eating, so the first San threw him into the sky so that his armpits could illuminate the world. The “Moon”, is the shoe of a male trickster deity, /kaggen, the name literally meaning “mantis”, who threw it into the sky, and an alternate theory is that it’s an ostrich feather also throw into the sky by /kaggen, who commanded it to become that celestial body. All of /kaggen his possessions are magically intelligent and the “Moon” alone speaks using a retroflex click. Like many other cultures, there is an association between a lagomorph, this time a hare, and this luminary. The spirits of the dead are carried by the dark side, so the full phase is considered good luck for hunting, as is a blood moon. The stars are named after various animals such as lions, antelopes and tortoises, and a stone used for digging. For them, the sky was a stone dome with holes in it through which the Sun shone. The three stars of Orion’s belt are zebras, the Pleiades the daughters of the deity of the dawn and sky, Tsui. Her unnamed husband is Aldebaran. Betelgeuse is a lion who is also stalking the zebras, so Aldebaran can’t get them without getting killed, so he’s slowly starving to death.

There’s quite a contrast, then, between the sky cultures of the Polynesians and those of the San, and of course there are plenty of others, but the dominant one, used by Western astronomers, is of course the Greco-Roman and more widely European eighty-eight classical constellations with stars named using Greek letters, numbers and often Arabic names. The presence of Arabic in this system demonstrates how the Arab world didn’t go into the Dark Ages like Christendom and for a long time their astronomy was more advanced than ours. There is a clear division in the names of the constellations between north and south because of what was visible from the Med at the time, so the zodiacal and the more prominent northern constellations were given names by the Greeks and Romans, but there are also fainter northern constellations with newer names and the southern names, also given by Westerners, tend to be very different. Some are neutral and uncontroversial, such as Crux Australis and Triangulum Australe, and the southern polar constellation is called Octans due to its obvious association with navigation. Several others have nautical or navigational names, such as Sextans, Quadrans (which is obsolete), Pyxis (the Compass), and some more are named after birds such as Tucana and Apus. The rather dim Indus was named by a Dutch astronomer and is clearly supposed to represent an individual of non-European origin, but their exact ethnicity is unclear due to the practice of referring to native Americans as “Indians”. There are also some obsolete constellations, one of which, Quandrans, has already been mentioned. Unfortunately one of these is Antinous, the homosexual lover of the Roman Emperor Hadrian. There was also a pangolin, and some others whose names seem perfectly normal and acceptable, such as the Cat, the Bee and the Sundial. Others used to be nationalistic or partisan, such as Sobieskii’s Shield, now known simply as the Shield, and Charles’s Oak. Also, in the seventeenth century, an attempt was made by one astronomer to give all the constellations Christian designations, replacing the northern constellations with New Testament names, the southern with Old Testament ones and the zodiac with the twelve apostles. This is a diffeent kind of cultural bias.

I’m sure there’s plenty more to be said about racism and astronomy, but I want to finish by mentioning the recent renaming of certain celestial objects such as NGC 2392, formerly known as “The Eskimo Nebula”. The name “Esquimau” is considered racist because it isn’t what the Inuit call themselves and it was widely believed to mean “eater of raw flesh”. In fact, it may not do but instead may be derived from “Ayeshkimu”, meaning “netters of snow shoes”. However, whatever its origin it’s considered as a colonial term with a racist origin by the Inuit, so the colloquial name has now been replaced by the New General Catalogue number. Similarly NGC 4567 and 4568, twin galaxies, were formerly referred to as the “Siamese Twin Galaxies”, which has again now been dropped. NASA also has an Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity which addresses issues affecting marginalised groups.

As I said at the start of this post, I am not really the right person to be talking about racism in astronomy as I am White and not an astronomer, but I hope I’ve been able to provide some kind of sketchy survey of some of the issues involved. There’s bound to be a lot more.

Veganism And Racism

Jamaican curried tofu with chickpeas. From here . Will be removed on request.

I knew it’d come in handy!

I went vegan nearly three dozen years ago. Things have changed a lot in the intervening time, as might be expected, and the popularity of plant-based diets has grown considerably. Another trend which seems to be almost a universal law of human behaviour, or perhaps society, is that as movements become more popular they also tend to get watered-down and corrupted. Maybe it’s a form of entropy. It should probably also be borne in mind that as individual organisms, we also age, and there’s a tendency for us to think things were better in the old days, when we were younger, and since then it’s all gone wrong. I wouldn’t say this was entirely true. For instance, racism is less socially acceptable, people recognise sexual harassment as a bad thing, the police get involved in domestic violence cases and homosexuality is almost generally accepted nowadays. In that particular area, which might be described as identity politics, things are usually better.

Conceptually speaking, veganism is kind of on the edge of identity politics for a couple of reasons. One is that veganism can be legally seen as a protected characteristic, in that people are not supposed to be marginalised because of their veganism, although it isn’t quite the same as an immutable property such as disability or sexual orientation. It’s closer to political affiliation or religion. Another is that veganism is an attempt to support a group, actually the largest of all by far and not in any way a minority, which doesn’t have its own voice. People just do speak on behalf of other species because it’s impossible for most of them to speak for themselves. Unlike anti-racism and feminism, veganism could be said (although it isn’t entirely true) to consist entirely of allies, and as such it’s probably worth considering what people in the other movements regard as being a good ally.

The way veganism is constructed nowadays is influenced by commodification, recuperation and capitalism more generally, and we should therefore be wary of this. There’s a strong tendency to think of veganism as simply plant-based, and this can have undesirable consequences in, for example, the production of plant-based meat substitutes which are extensively tested on non-human animals during their development, and it can turn veganism into slacktivism, because you can end up feeling that all it takes to be vegan is to change your diet, use different cosmetics and toiletries and so forth, without, for example, thinking of the perhaps very distant and unsustainably grown sources of your food or other ingredients. Another consequence of this restriction on veganism’s scope is that it can lead us to ignore the treatment of the animal most of us have the most to do with socially – human beings. There is a sense in which nothing developed or produced under capitalism is vegan because it involves capitalist exploitation, and therefore exploitation of the animal known as Homo sapiens. To be fair, I can remember so-called “vegan” groups in the 1980s CE celebrating a coach crash because it meant the death of carnists. This is not veganism, although it is consequentialist because the idea is that the meat eaters dying would result in the deaths of fewer cows, chicken, sheep, pigs and others, something which could equally be achieved by persuading the same number of people do go vegan as crash victims. Hence it doesn’t even work from a consequentialist angle. This, then, is not veganism.

It’s true that mass media tends to present veganism as primarily White, and many people’s images of a vegan will be of a White person. In fact, Afro-Americans are twice as likely to be vegan as White people in the US and RastafarIan diets tend towards veganism. It also makes sense physiologically for most of the world’s human population not to eat dairy as adults due to the fact that White people are unusual in being able to digest dairy as adults, but this has no influence on carnism.

Some manifestations of so-called “veganism” have also been overtly racist. Two White people in Los Angeles started a blog originally called ‘Thug Kitchen’ in the ‘noughties which appropriated Afrikan-American Vernacular English, and there’s also the question of the word “thug”, which apparently has a controversial history due to having become associated with Black people. I can’t tell if this is a primarily American usage or not, but I would expect it to filter over if not. My understanding of the word “thug” is that it was originally an Indian word for a member of a gang of assassins who used to garrotte their victims, then became associated with people, regardless of ethnicity, in organised crime who commit acts of violence to the end of promoting and maintaining the reputation of the organisation or to extort money from victims. This meaning seems either to have changed or to have been different in American culture. It took several years for it to become clear to the general public that the people responsible for the site, and also apparently a book, were White people in California, after which they were accused of “digital blackface”. I would, however, say that all of this went on without me every becoming aware of it, and this makes me wonder if it’s symptomatic of commodification of a relatively ineffective and diluted version of “veganism” which is based on people hopping onto a trend, which perhaps also explains the use of something else which might be perceived as “cool” without thinking much about either.

PETA are, unsurprisingly, another offender, appropriating the notion of slavery without having any recent heritage of that form of oppression. In an ad said to have been banned by the NFL but which was supposèdly intended for the Superbowl, various animals were shown taking the knee in an attempt to draw comparisons between speciesism and racism. Although I don’t understand why this would be considered offensive, people took issue with the idea that Black people were being compared to members of other species. Now as I said, there’s a sense in which the vegan movement consists entirely of allies, so there’s a problem with understanding the nature of that comparison. Species are equal, but there is a history of denigrating humans in general and ethnic minorities in particular with non-human animals whose connotation is extremely negative, and this is a typically hamfisted and crass attempt by PETA to make a point regarding animal liberation which is not informed by this perception, or at least comes across in this way. Alternatively, maybe PETA’s strategy is to generate publicity in a Benneton kind of way by getting people to talk about their ads without regard to how it reflects on them, and more importantly on the animal liberation movement. However, I hope we can agree that PETA is not a good ally in the animal liberation movement due to other activities, which I won’t go into here.

Then there’s the question of the likes of quinoa, chia seeds and avocados. I first heard of chia seeds about seven or eight years ago and they have never been part of my diet. I’m not aware of ever having eaten them, although I may have inadvertantly done so chez someone or in a restaurant or café. The lauding of particular plant species in this way as superfoods reminds me strongly of the distortion of value in herbal medicine where more “exotic” remedies are perceived as more effective than local or indigenous species, which like so many other things is created by the alienation of use and exchange values in capitalism. It’s extremely harmful to any community which is not rich and relies on one or more of these species as a staple, because it can inflate the price out of their financial reach.

Chia seeds are from two species of Salvia, the genus containing sage and also the psychotropic Salvia divinorum. The Lamiaceæ (grrr, Labiatæ!), their family, probably contains the majority of culinary herbs such as mint and rosemary, and it’s unusual for a species in that taxon to be used for its seeds. I would imagine therefore that the process of harvesting chia seeds is quite labour-intensive compared to cereal harvesting, for example. They’re native to Central America and southern Mexico. The concern with cultivation of plant foods novel to the market in the developed world is that they may be grown unsustainably and raise the price of the food for the people who traditionally eat them. There’s also a kind of sense of exoticism about them which is fickle and rather like cultural appropriation, or may actually be cultural appropriation.

Quinoa I did used to eat. This is in the Amaranthaceæ, along, unsurprisingly, with amaranth itself. Unsurprisingly, its price has been forced up in Bolivia as a result of its popularity in the developed world, and is now less affordable to the poorer people of that country. In Perú the price is now higher than chicken, meaning of course that it has probably increased meat consumption in that country. But in both these cases, there is an issue of it bringing money into the countries in question as well, although economic diversification is also important because the problem with trends is that they can change rapidly. However, looking into this in more detail, quinoa is not a staple in the Andes, so it isn’t necessarily as big a problem as has been thought in the past.

I could continue to list questionable plant foods, but I’ll mention just two more. One is the avocado. These are, incidentally, remarkable in having been preserved by early agriculture and used to rely on giant ground sloths for their distribution, so they’d probably be extinct were it not for us. The same price increase as seen with the other species has affected avocados for the same reason, but in their case drug cartels are also involved, meaning that there’s a fair bit of violence in their production, although perhaps similar violence occurs with the cultivation of the other two plants. They apparently are a staple.

The final, notorious, species is unsurprisingly soya. My own consumption of soya is not negligible because I eat tofu although I don’t drink soya milk. There is what I regard as an unsupported rumour that the phytoestrogens in soya reduce male fertility which I can’t accept as true because of its long history of traditional consumption in East Asia. Another issue with soya is that it is largely fed to farm animals, which offsets its environmental impact considerably because it means that carnists will sometimes be contributing to any problems more than vegans who eat a lot of soya are. However, it has a significant rôle in the deforestation of South America although there has been a soya moratorium in Brazil which banned export of soya grown on newly deforested land, which, again however, may simply have meant that cows are now grazing on newly deforested land instead while the soya is grown on the older land, and Bolsonaro will presumably have done a lot of damage in that area. This may sound vague and dismissive, but here’s my point: if you eat distantly-grown food, it introduces ethical complications which you may not have the energy or access to accurate information about.

You might also object that this is not to do with racism, but when you consider that most of the countries involved are subject to colonialism, there is a historical legacy of racism here, although since the European countries took many of their resources it could also be argued that this is partly returning the money to the people affected, assuming some kind of economic equity between ethnicities now exists there.

The trouble is, of course, that to me and many other people this is not “veganism as we know it”, but some kind of trendy convenience thing which may be about image. It feels like some other lifestyle which has been taken away from what I know as veganism, and is in fact very similar to the commercialisation of what’s been labelled as Yoga. That doesn’t seem at all similar to what I think of as Yoga either, and there are racist tendencies in how Yoga is presented commercially in the West too.

As I mentioned above, Afrikan-Americans are more likely to be vegan than White Americans. I think it’s twice as likely. They’re also a lot more likely that White Americans to have reduced their meat consumption recently. Plant-based diets reduce the incidence of chronic conditions that disproportionately affect Black Americans such as hypertension, obesity, type II diabetes, heart disease and certain forms of cancer. However, they may not call themselves vegan, and I’m wondering if this is because the label is often associated with a White face. It is true that they may not be motivated by animal liberation, but there are many Whites with plant-based diets who do call themselves vegan when this is not what that is. On the other hand, they’re also more likely to live in food deserts. Since I lived for most of my life in a city with a particularly good open-air market, I don’t have experience of food deserts and am not commenting from an informed position, but I’m also in the process of writing a book entitled ‘Corner Shop Herbalism’, which is about using easily available and identifiable plants from, for example, corner shops, to improve and maintain well-being, and it would be interesting to know how applicable this is to the food desert problem. But food deserts are a much bigger problem for non-Whites. In the US, White majority neighbourhoods have four times as many grocery shops, and they also stock a wider variety of food. In order to make it easier for ethnic minorities to pursue veganism, this problem must be solved.

There is a claim that the word “speciesism” appropriates the term “racism” in a similar way to phrases like “the rape of the wild” do for rape. I find it difficult to accept this idea because of words like “sexism” and “ableism”. It doesn’t seem to me that the word “racism” stands out as something which can be owned as a reference to marginalised ethnicities. If a newly-recognised form of prejudice came to the fore, it would seem to make sense to add the suffix “-ism” to the end, and this also feels Quixotic in the wider context of how language change works. So, maybe I am speaking from a position of privilege, but it seems to me that not using the word “speciesism” fails to name the prejudice which dwarfs all others in our societies in its seriousness.

There is another, similar linguistic phenomenon I’ve already alluded to. Humans are of course hominids. Consequently, there is a sense in which we are apes. Cladistically we’re also monkeys, more specifically terrestrial Old World monkeys. However, the words “ape” and “monkey” have been used as racist epithets, and are therefore likely to trigger some Black people. It’s also important to erode the false distinction between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom, and this particular distinction is particularly instrumental in maintaining this false superiority. However, long before I went vegan, I used to consider great apes as human rather than the other way round, and this may go some way towards remedying that problem. However, we are then left with the problem of how to refer to our own species, and we do need to do this in the same way as we need to use the term “whiteness”. But there is a possible solution to this along the following lines. There is a plant popularly known as “Mother-In-Law’s Tongue”, which I always call Sanseviera because the Latin name comes across as more neutral. The same could be done with hominids and simians.

Another aspect of carnism in ex-patriate Afrikan communities and their descendants is that they may use meat of particular kinds and prepared in particular ways as part of their cultural identities. If a plant-based diet is perceived as substantially White, adopting it could feel like giving up part of that identity. Consequently, it’s important that we do what we can to ensure that such diets are not perceived as White. And in fact they really aren’t, for the reason stated above and also because of I-Tal, although not every Black person would want to identify with RastafarIanism. Interpretations of I-Tal diet vary. It isn’t compulsory in all mansions and it often includes fish, but the tendency is towards veganism and many people do interpret it as veganism. However, it doesn’t seem to be mentioned much in vegan circles for some reason.

There are also some areas I simply don’t know how to address, and these primarily involve indigenous people. It’s for this reason that I have in the past said that if veganism is racist, so be it. The issue is that there are some groups of hunter-gatherers whose lives intrinsically involve the killing, eating and other use of animals. It is often true that the people involved treat these animals with reverence, that they are not farmed but live in the wild for all their lives, and that their bodies are used efficiently once they’ve been killed, and also that if the communities concerned didn’t do this it would completely alter their lifestyles beyond recognition. It’s also known that these kinds of disturbances in the lives of indigenous peoples lead to major social and mental health problems including an epidemic in decisions to end their own lives. To be honest, I don’t know what to do about this. I am aware, though, that applying veganism to my own life benefits others and the biosphere, and the same applies to the lives of most or all people living in industrial societies.

To conclude, the takeaway from this is that the kind of “veganism” criticised as racist is actually heavily commodified and recuperated by capitalism. It focusses very much on the plant-based issue rather than the fact that veganism entails compassion for all and is therefore necessarily anti-racist. That is, if your version of “veganism” is racist, it isn’t pure veganism, although environmental, structural and institutional aspects of racism mean that real veganism is therefore very difficult. At the same time, even focussing entirely on other species, an attempt to look at veganism in an anti-racist way also reveals how there is not only structural racism but also structural speciesism, a word I make no apologies for using, for instance in the form of food deserts and the lie, yes, the LIE, that plant-based diets are expensive compared to carnist ones.

Modern Latin

Latin is in a sense a dead language, and in at least two other senses a living one. It’s a dead language in the sense that any children today growing up speaking Latin as their only first language are likely either to be subject to questionable parenting or have parents who have ended up speaking Latin to each other due to not being fluent in each others’ languages. There are a few people who speak Sanskrit, and a few more who speak Esperanto, as a first language, so it’s conceivable that there’s a teensy number who speak Latin that way too. I’m not one to judge such parenting decisions, but even so I’d hope that people who do opt to bring up their children speaking Latin at least make the additional decision to make them bilingual. Judging by my own experience in bringing children up speaking languages other than the dominant ones in their community, English is the language, French and Spanish (not so much Castilian) are also spoken by people around them, but German was just this funny noise I made at them which didn’t really catch on, except that it’s alleged that our daughter does speak German in her sleep.

But how is Latin alive? In at least two ways, as I said. Firstly, looking at the map above, most of the western half of the continental Eurasian portion of it still more or less speaks Latin. Every generation would have understood what the previous one was saying all the way back to the point where they would’ve been speaking Latin, or a dialect of it, at the time represented by this map, which is CCXVII ANNO DOMINI, or DCCCLXX ANNO URBIS CONDITÆ. The kind of prescriptive “correction” of pronunciation and grammar rife in probably most human communities would’ve been going on back then. In Italia and Dacia, parents would’ve been having a go at their kids for pronouncing C as “ch” before E and I or missing the S or M off certain words, and in Hispania perhaps complaining about this new trend of saying “you will be” instead of “you are”. Then eventually they would’ve given up and died, and only the church people and nobles would have noticed anything unusual about the language they were using, until eventually they were calling their languages Italiano, Português, Castellano, Français, Català, limba română and so on (not sure about capitalisation here), and couldn’t understand Latin very well at all.

Latin, though, was and is still alive. It’s still spoken fluently, for example, in the Roman Catholic Church and much Latin terminology is used in technical discourse. I always write prescriptions in Latin and British herbalists communicate with each other in the likes of Italy and Czechia in Latin. I’ve done so myself, although my attempt at talking to a herbalist in Rome using Latin didn’t work at all. I can look into the back garden and see Euphorbia helioscopia and Fragaria vesca aplenty, and don’t even bother to think what they might be called in English most of the time. The first of these, of course, is Latinised Greek and therefore possibly a poor choice but the point is I do this, as do many others, and this is the legacy of the Roman Empire.

However, the question I want to ask here is this: what would Latin be like today if it had continued to be a vernacular language? Ecclesiastical Latin survived of course, but that has some peculiar features such as the palatisation of C and G before E and I (to “ch” and “j” sounds) which even now one Romance language at least, Sardinian, doesn’t always have. This form of Latin probably doesn’t represent how it would be today as a widely spoken language as it is formally taught and frozen in some ways, although it adopts modern vocabulary such as helicopterus. It also ignores the difference between long and short vowels. Classical Latin had five long and five short vowels and some of the diphthongs, including Æ, AV and Œ, had already become single vowels by the Augustan period from which today’s academic pronunciation is derived. This was from 710 to 771 AUC, the period during which Jesus was born and ending maybe a decade before he was killed. The vowels of Latin, however, didn’t undergo this particular type of merging because the formerly long and short vowels, although they became levelled in length, also changed pronunciation while they were doing so and therefore remained distinct.

The question arises, though, of how these circumstances might arrive. It really amounts to the Empire not falling, and in order to imagine how it might persist one has to have some idea of why it fell in the first place. I personally think it was a combination of the adoption of Christianity and some kind of issue related to physical resources such as the need to continue to conquer land to retrieve food over increasing distances until it was no longer possible to transport them economically, but I’m no historian. The question also arises of what kind of world we’d be living in now if this had happened. For instance, would slavery still exist and would the Empire have continued to expand? For the sake of simplicity, I want to assume the following state of affairs:

• The Empire didn’t split in half after the death of Theodosius I in 395 CE (1148 AUC). This could mean the eastern Empire was less dominated by Greek, and the Byzantine Empire survived until 1453 CE.
• Christianity was not adopted. Perhaps it just didn’t exist.
• Slavery was abolished in any event fairly early. This is because without that, technological progress would be much slower since there would be no direct connection between the experience of people working in particular industries and “thinkers” who could pass on what they learnt from their work, and there would be more motivation to invent labour-saving devices. This would give the Empire technological and therefore military superiority over their neighbours and strengthen its prowess in the long term.
• The Empire eventually became global and there is a single state, the world ruled from Rome.

I am aware that all of this might not result in a particularly marvellous world order but I also think this world, with no European Dark or Middle Ages and the continuing innovation of the Greek part of the Imperium, would be many centuries ahead of our own technologically. I’m going to conjecture that slavery was abolished in about the year 500 CE, followed by an industrial revolution in about 600, leading to a twentieth century level of technology by 800, meaning that there would be weapons of mass destruction and the conquest of the entire planet around then. By today, Rome would have dominated the world for twelve centuries. Note that this may very well not be a utopia, although it’s worth asking whether it’s even possible for a society like this to exist without being a utopia because I am confident that anything other than a utopia-like civilisation could exist for long and still be industrialised, so I imagine that of necessity such a world would perhaps have begun as an oppressive régime, but ceased to be so after a fairly short period of time, perhaps because the level of education required is incompatible with maintaining that level of technology. All of this is interesting and worth exploring in itself, but for now I simply present you with the global official language of the 28th century AUC.

Today’s Romance languages are descended from Vulgar Latin. For example, the Castilian words calle, casa and caballo now mean “street”, “house” and “horse”, but originally meant “dirt track”, “hut” and “nag”, or rather they descend from such words. If the Empire had survived, it seems likely that some of the prestige register would have continued and the words via, domus and equus would have been the source of the modern words. In some cases these have survived anyway in some form. Italian still calls roads “via” and the Castilian word for “mare” is yegua. Domus, on the other hand, seems to have died out. Similarly, the French for “head”, tête, originally meant “pot”, but caput survives in the Castilian cabeza, and also in the French chef, where however it doesn’t mean “head” in the literal sense. Hence one major feature of 28th century Latin to my mind would probably be that the vocabulary was taken from classical rather than vulgar sources, although there would probably have been some infiltration from the lower classes, particularly if the society it was spoken in had become more egalitarian. On that matter, would there now be a communist society in which it had become routine for people to refer to each other by a word translatable as “comrade”, such as “amica”?

The purest Latin in the real Empire was said to be spoken in what is now the south of France. This may be surprising, but it was probably due to the fact that the other Italic languages, related to Latin but not descended from it, had been spoken in the rest of the Italian peninsula and influenced the way it was spoken there. Centuries later, it was agreed that the most accurate Latin was spoken in Britain, and this was because the first language spoken by the peasants here was not closely related to it and therefore didn’t influence it. In general, the further one went from Rome, the more divergent the Latin was, with the proviso that in Italy itself the language was somewhat different from the standard upper class register. One of the features of the Roman dialect of Latin was that it seems to have changed L to I in some places, as for example with “fiore” in modern Italian rather than “flos”, becoming “*flore”. And this underlines the fact that Italian is not modern Latin. The chief differences from a kind of “central” standard include its distinctive double consonants and the fact that most words end in a vowel.

Now would be an appropriate point to highlight many of the differences of today’s Romance languages from classical Latin in the sense of being actual divergences from a standard which are not present in all cases:

Italian shows the influence of other Italic languages, such as “I” replacing “L”, which I seem to recall is from Faliscan. There’s also the so-called “Tuscan throat”, which is the tendency to change /k/ to a guttural fricative, said to be inherited from Etruscan, this being however a dialectal feature. Apart from that is the doubling of consonants and the use of vowels at the ends of most words. The general rhythm of the language is similar to that of Modern Greek and may also not be original.

Spanish, by which I mean all of Castilian, the other dialects of the Spanish part of the Iberian peninsula except for Catalan/Valencian and Gallego, and the language of first-language Spanish speakers of the Americas and other former parts of the Spanish Empire, is divergent in two major ways. Firstly, it has adopted a fair bit of Arabic vocabulary due to the Moors dominating the region for much of what would be considered the Dark and Middle Ages in much of the rest of Europe. Secondly, during the second Christian millennium it became phonetically quite divergent, particularly in Castille, where J came to be pronounced “kh”, C before front vowels and Z “th”, F became H and was eventually completely dropped and so forth. In non-Castilian dialects, C in those circumstances stayed as “s” but “LL” became “y” (I’m using English spelling conventions here rather than IPA). Spanish also uses the verbs “ser” and “estar” to express what appear to be mainly necessary and contingent states, and has personal “a” for the accusative, which as far as I know is unique, and uses “haber” to express the perfect but never an existential verb.

As far as Portuguese is concerned, and here I’m including non-European varieties again, there’s again considerable divergence in pronunciation, but the spelling is conservative, making the written language look closer to Italian and Latin than Spanish does. The most distinctive features of that pronunciation are the nasalisation of vowels, the contrast in pronunciation according to whether the syllable is stressed or not, which incidentally is also present in English, and the tendency to palatise, which gives it a superficially Slavic sound. Brazilian Portuguese, which is generally more conservative than European, also has a uvular R like the French one. N’s also get turned into M’s sometimes. As far as grammar is concerned, it uses “ter”, from the Latin “tenere”, meaning “to hold”, as an auxiliary verb for past tenses and has the unique feature of the personal infinitive, where personal endings are added to the infinitive in hypothetical situations. Portuguese and Spanish are the closest national languages to each other in the group, but Portuguese also shares features with Catalan which Spanish lacks. It and Romanian are the two least similar languages of the lot. I’m not sure about this, but I get the impression that Portuguese vocabulary is almost as pure as Italian’s.

This brings me to boring old French, and I know I’m being unfair here but its ubiquity in secondary schooling for an Englander of my generation lends it a patina of tedium. French is quite divergent because it descends from Latin spoken far from its native territory, which also suggests that the extinct British Romance language which vanished without trace after the Germanic invasions would have been “even more French”, since it was spoken on an island, but since it quickly died out it probably didn’t have much chance to change that much. French is probably the language whose pronunciation is both furthest from its spelling and classical Latin pronunciation, and the grammar is extremely simplified. It seems to have been influenced in two major ways. One is that it was spoken in a formerly Celtic-speaking area and although I’m not sure I think that its tendency to run words into each other and have them influence its pronunciation may date from that stage. The other is that the Franks, who spoke a Dutch-like language, also had a major hand in its form. For instance, the French vowels “eu”, “u” and “œ” are found in no other national Romance language but are common in Germanic ones. The other notable feature of French pronunciation apart from elision and liaison is nasalisation, which is accompanied with a vowel shift. Although nasalisation wasn’t as important an element in Latin, it did exist in words which ended in M, and therefore is in a sense a conservative feature.

Romanian is generally the most divergent language of the group but is also the most conservative grammatically. It’s the outlier for two reasons. Firstly, it borrowed a lot of vocabulary from eastern European sources, and secondly it’s part of the Balkan Sprachbund, entailing that it has unusual features such as a tendency to avoid the infinitive and having suffixed definite articles. Compared to its relatives, it’s closest to French and shares with French what appears to be an original tendency to have a slower rhythm than Italian and Spanish. It still has the grammatically neuter gender and case endings, and its verb conjugation also tends to be quite conservative, but is extremely irregular.

Romanian and French, although not close to each other, share a few features. Romanian seems to have borrowed a lot of French vocabulary, and French case endings fell into the same two cases as now exist in Romanian. There’s also the tendency to use schwa (the murmured final vowel in “Sparta”) and the general prosody of the languages. Some of these features are clearly radical but the rhythm and case endings clearly are not. Romanian also preserves the way the vowels changed from Latin in the Eastern Roman Empire and Sardinia, which is different from the rest of the group.

French, Spanish and Portuguese also form a kind of block with similar features, although of the three French is closer to Italian in certain characteristics, though not the ones found in Portuguese. These include the universal noun plurals in “-s”, and incidentally in “-x” in French, which is a spelling convention.

Catalan has the distinction of being the “most central” Romance tongue. It has more in common with the other languages than any of the others have with each other. There are two fairly striking features. One is that words have a tendency to be quite short, and the other is that there is an unusually large number of personal pronouns. Incidentally, it’s the most widely spoken language in Europe which is not the official tongue of any recognised state and has more speakers than a number of other languages which are official elsewhere. Being the “central” one, it may have the best claim to being today’s version of Latin.

There are a number of other languages in the group and also some extinct ones, some of which have vanished without trace. The most conservative of these is Sardinian, which however is also influenced by Catalan. It forms the definite article in a distinctive way, from “ipso”, the reflexive pronoun “itself”, unlike all the others which got it from “ille”, meaning approximately “that”. It also still pronounces C as “k” in all positions. It’s generally considered closest to Latin of all the Romance languages but does have influences from extinct sources which have altered it somewhat. It also does things no other language in the group does, such as changing initial V to F.

I’ll just mention Ladino in passing as I already went into it in some depth here. It has more conservative pronunciation than Spanish, which is because it split off before Spanish took its foray into weirdness. Ladino is kind of more “normal” than Spanish in that respect because it’s conservative.

There are several isolated Romance languages spoken in the Alps, mainly in Switzerland, including Ladin, Rumansh and Friulian. At a cursory listen to these, about which I don’t know much, they sound rather like Spanish to me.

Dalmatian is a bit like a missing link. It was spoken in the region between Italy and Romania until rather dramatically its last speaker died in a road-building explosion. I’ll cover the rest here. Provençal is the most successful historically, and has a number of peculiar features. It used case endings for longer than any other Western Romance language, it has oddly swapped gender endings – O for feminine and A for masculine – and has no nominative personal pronouns at all. Finally there are four extinct languages of which there is little or no written record: British Romance, African Romance, Moselle Romance and Pannonian. These can be detected through placenames, words borrowed into other languages and errors made in documents.

I would like to claim that Modern Latin would, unlike other surviving Italic languages, be descended from classical rather than Vulgar Latin, and would combine features currently found in all surviving Romance languages otherwise, but that it would be more conservative. It would also have borrowed terms directly from other languages which Latin as a living language never encountered such as Australian Aboriginal or North American First Nation languages.

This, then, is what I think it would be like and why:

• A tendency to use vocabulary derived from classical Latin where surviving Romance languages have used vulgar, such as “caput” for “head”, “equus” for “horse”, “via” for “street” and “domus” for “house”.
• No definite or indefinite articles. Latin itself had no word for “the” and whereas other Italic languages now use them, they are not entirely consistent in their etymology or placement. Sardinian uses “ipso” and Romanian suffixes them.
• A future tense based on suffixing “habere” to the infinitive in most cases with the exception of “esse”. Romanian seems to be the only one which hasn’t done this and this is probably due to being in the Balkans.
• Three genders. Romanian retains the neuter gender and others have a kind of neuter pronoun. However, since the form of the masculine and neuter nouns is often similar, the distribution of those genders would seem arbitrary to someone ignorant of the history of the language. Feminine would be more definitely separate.
• Two cases for the nouns. This crops up in Old French, Provençal and modern Romanian. They’re likely to be absolute and oblique.
• C and G would be palatised before E and I, and V would be pronounced “v”, unlike in Latin.
• A nasal vowel would occur at the end of certain words but there would be no other nasalisation.
• R would be trilled.
• There would be a distinct future tense for “esse” but for no other verbs. “Stare” would not be used as an existential verb.
• The general rhythm of the language would be slower than Italian and more like French.
• The personal pronouns would include dative forms.
• Vowels would have collapsed in the Western Romance manner rather than the Eastern.
• Word order would be SVO except for pronouns.
• Past tenses would be realised using “habere” as an auxiliary verb before the past participle.

There would be a number of other deducible features, but probably the best way to approach this is to produce a passage in the actual language. Although this is a world without Christianity, the Pater Noster, or “Our Father” prayer, more commonly known in English as the Lord’s Prayer, is a reliable source of the form of most written languages, and it’s therefore worth trying to reconstruct it here. I think it would look something like this:

Padre nostro, qui es in cielo, sanctificato sia nome tuo.

Venga tuo regno, sia facta tua voluntatem, come in cielo e come in terra.

Da nobis odie nostram panem quotidianom, e pardone nos de nostras debitas, come nos pardonemos nostros debitores

E non duca nos in tentationem, ma libera nos de mal. Amen.

I’m not sure how closely I followed the recommendations here. However, I have attempted to include a number of grammatical points. The absolute case is distinct from the oblique, the subjunctive third person singular of “estre” is “sia”, possessive adjectives can occur either side of the noun. “Nobis” is the dative of “nos”. The neuter and masculine singular oblique ends in a M, but this serves to nasalise the vowel and is not pronounced as a consonant. Likewise, “GN” is a palatised N like in French and Italian. H’s are silent, if they ever occur – in fact there may simply be no letter H, except in foreign loanwords. “And” is “e”, and consequently there’s no ampersand. The penultimate line uses the same form as the English version which has “debts” and “debtors” rather than “sins” or “trespasses” and the awkward “those who trespass against us”. Finally, I’ve missed off the doxology, but it would be something like “car regno, potentia e gloria son tue, a seculas de secula.”, but I’ve just thrown that together at the last moment.

A short note on loanwords. They would have tomatlas, patatas, minuas (kangaroos), dovaques (boomerangs) and so forth. These would mainly be neuter, as the languages they were borrowed from would usually lack grammatical gender entirely.

In conclusion, I think this is an entirely feasible if somewhat arbitrary conjecture as to what Latin would look like today if it had been in continuous use since Roman times as a vernacular. The written numerals would be different as they would probably have been adopted from a different source, possibly India, but Roman numerals would doubtless have been abandoned early, and there would be no Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Baha’i or Sikh religions. Other than that, I don’t know what the world would look like today, except that it seems likely that the human race would be found on other planets and in space habitats by now. But whatever, this is how they’d be talking, or somewhere near.

Tok Pisin

Or “talk business”, that is.

The Queen’s English, General American and the various Commonwealth Englishes, along with Hiberno-English, are all dialects of English itself. All of these taken together constitute a single language in the Ingvaeonic subgroup of West Germanic, except that there’s a minority opinion that English is a Scandinavian language. This has something to recommend it. For instance, English uses “they” as a third person pronoun, apparently inherited from Danish and its syntax, at least as it is today, is unlike (other?) West Germanic languages as it sticks all its verbs in the middle of the clause. However, it also tends to have unusually Nordic words peppered about in it which are apparently not the result of loanwords, such as the word “from”, whereto similar words are found in Scandinavian languages but not Western Germanic. It is certainly true that English was influenced by the existence of the Danelaw and since modern English is descended from East Midlands English, where the Danelaw was, it’s probably even more Scandinavian, but informed opinion is on the side of English being an Ingvaeonic West Germanic language.

It could be said that the other Ingvaeonic languages are all spoken in Europe as well. They would normally include West, North and East Frisian, English, Scots, Yola and possibly Shelta. Of these, the Frisian languages, supposèdly the closest continental languages to English, are disappointingly distant, partly due to Dutch influence. Although I can understand North Frisian fairly well, it’s probably more down to the influence of Low German than its similarity to English. Shelta is meant to be impenetrable by its very design, so it’s a mix of Irish and English so far as I can tell and nobody outside the community is likely to be able to follow it easily. It’s probably also worth mentioning Romani here, which tends to bend itself according to the grammar and phonology of the speakers around it, so I’d guess that it too comes across as a fairly impenetrable mix. Since there were Roma living locally and attending my primary school though, I’ve been aware of it from an early age and it’s hard to know how it sounds to a monoglot English speaker. Then there’s Scots, which I’ve devoted an entire post to. The thing about Scots is that because English English speakers tend to live in an environment where the only widely-spoken languages are English plus a number of very different minority languages such as Urdu, we don’t appreciate that the languages we’re happy to accept as separate from outside this country such as Danish, Swedish and Norwegian are actually more similar to each other than the Queen’s English is to Scots, and with Scots there’s also a register issue, where it blurs into Scottish English. That leaves Yola, which was spoken in County Wexford and is extinct, whose written form is apparently easier for an English reader to follow than the spoken language. It’s notably similar to English, but can’t be understood straightforwardly. There is one further language in this group, Fingalian, spoken unsurprisingly in Fingal, about which I’m afraid I don’t know much.

Those, then, are the European Ingvaeonic languages. However, there is considerable racism surrounding the other offshoots of English spoken in other parts of the world, notably Bislama and of course Tok Pisin. These are referred to inaccurately as “Pidgin English”, because a pidgin is an improvised speech used between people who don’t have a common language. Tok Pisin and Bislama are creoles: languages which were formerly pidgins later learnt as first languages. It’s actually very likely that English itself is a creole of Danish and Anglo-Saxon, that is, that it was spoken originally between the Angles of the Danelaw and the Danish settlers, speaking Old Norse, who found that their languages were almost but not quite close enough for them to understand each other and had to improvise. Therefore we can’t look down our noses in a linguistically purist manner at the Papuans and the people of Vanu Atu and say that’s not a proper language but just a mish-mash, because our own language is exactly that several times over.

It should also be mentioned that although I’ve singled out Tok Pisin and Bislama, there are a number of other English-based creoles spoken elsewhere, such as in Nigeria and several different forms in the Caribbean, Cameroun, Pitcairn, Singapore and Malaysia, and these may have fewer users than Tok Pisin and Bislama but are still important. I just don’t want to get too bogged down.

I don’t know how well the actor Ken Campbell is. He appeared in the radio version of the second series of ‘The Hitch-Hikers’ Guide To The Galaxy’ and one episode of ‘Fawlty Towers’. The reason he crops up here is that he was part of a campaign to get Bislama adopted as an international auxiliary language like Esperanto. This has a kind of logic to it because the grammar and phonology of most creoles, including Bislama, is simplified through their mode of evolution, and it would therefore be relatively easy for many people to learn and use. Campbell actually translated ‘Macbeth’ into Bislama. Unsurprisingly, his plan was unsuccessful but unfortunately the reason for that is very probably that it isn’t taken seriously as a language. A lot of humour has been based on the use of Tok Pisin and Bislama, particularly the latter, and whereas linguistic humour is fine, I can’t help feeling that there’s more than a hint of racism in this particular instance.

Bislama has ten thousand native speakers plus 200 000 who speak it as a second language. For some reason I don’t understand, it’s named after the French word for sea cucumber, bêche–de–mer, which is used as another name for it. Because the name has “Islam” in it, I think it gives one the impression that it’s going to be a Semitic language like Arabic, which it absolutely is not. It’s spoken in Vanuatu, formerly the New Hebrides, an archipelago northwest of Australia which became independent in 1980 (on my thirteenth birthday in fact), and is its national language, whereas French and English are also official languages there. Vanuatu holds the record for having the highest number of languages spoken per capita in the world. With a population of only 300 000, a hundred and thirty-eight languages are spoken on it. Bislama is used mainly in urban areas, and as an auxiliary language all over the nation, and is impinging on other languages there, apparently even including English and French. There’s a map of the languages here.

Bislama arose when in the nineteenth century, people in the New Hebrides were kidnapped and enslaved in Queensland, and yes, this was decades after slavery had supposèdly been abolished in the British Empire. Since Papuans also suffered in this way, the two languages are quite close to each other. Bislama illustrates how creoles are not always simpler than their parent languages in its pronouns, as it has dual and trial numbers across the board whereas English even lost its dual first person pronouns in the eleventh century. It also has inclusive and exclusive versions of the first person non-singular pronouns, which is a serious lack in English and most other Indo-European tongues.

Tok Pisin is a more widely-spoken language, with over a hundred thousand first language speakers and four million people speaking it as a second language. It’s native to Papua, the eastern half of the island of New Guinea. Linguistically, Papua is a quite remarkable place. Characterised geographically by valleys separated by high mountains, it has tended to isolate its human populations from each other since early in the last Ice Age and has hundreds of languages and the majority of the world’s language families. Just as Afrika south of the Sahara contains the bulk of human genetic variation, so that the human world can be seen ethnically as a number of ethnicities inside Afrika plus a handful outside it, so can the human race be seen linguistically as a few hundred language families in New Guinea plus a few outside that. Melanesians as an ethnicity are perceived by White people as Black, but in fact many of them are blond and they are quite distant genetically from Afrikans, with a relatively large proportion of Denisovan DNA. It’s important to emphasise that languages spoken in Papua, which is about twice the size of Great Britain, can be as unlike each other as English is from Navajo, although there are some areal features such as a tendency to put the verb at the end of the clause. There are also some Austronesian languages spoken in Papua, i.e. the relatives of Indonesian, Malagasy and Hawaiian. It’s also worth pointing out that although I’m mainly referring to Papua here, this situation applies to the whole of New Guinea although the western half is politically part of Indonesia. The island has eight hundred languages in sixty families. There is also one Australian language spoken within the borders of the national territory.

Papua New Guinea therefore has an unsurprising need for auxiliary languages. Its official languages are English, Police Motu and Tok Pisin. Police Motu is actually Austronesian but cannot be understood by speakers of the related Motu. Austronesian languages are usually very simple and straightforward, so although the language is not officially either a pidgin or a creole, it is similarly simple. It’s called Police Motu because it was adopted by the police force in the area, but pre-dates them, and is therefore usually called Hiri Motu. While I’m talking about the southern side of the country, in the extreme east of Papuan territory on Bougainville Island (which I presume is where Bougainvillea grows but I don’t know), the Rotokas language has the shortest alphabet of any written language, with just A, E, G, I, K, O, P, R, S, T, U and V.

Tok Pisin itself has the same grim origin as Bislama. Although its vocabulary is mainly English, it’s also borrowed words from Malay, German (which also once had a creole in this area) and Austronesian languages, but apparently not Papuan ones, which I think needs some explanation. One reason German is significant is that the slaves in Queensland were later taken to German Samoa.

Listening to Tok Pisin gives me a similar impression to hearing Malay/Indonesian in that it makes me wonder why other languages bother with all that grammar stuff. That’s a sloppy use of the word of course, but there are few inflections in the language, even compared to English, whose own word-isolating nature may be connected to its creolisation back in the ninth century. For instance, Tok Pisin has only two prepositions, “bilong”, which means “of”, and “long”, which means everything else. My accent of English has twelve vowels, and in the nineteenth century the Australian English spoken in the area would probably have had more although my accent is sometimes perceived as close to Ozzie. Tok Pisin has five, and seventeen consonants. Like Bislama, it has inclusive and exclusive words for “we”, “yumitupela” (“you-me-two-fellow”) and “mitupela” for the dual inclusive and exclusive respectively along with “yumitripela” and “mitripela” and “yumi” and “mipela” for the trial and plural. It has no gender, expresses the continuous with “stap” and the past with “bin”, from “stop” and “been”, and the perfective aspect with “finis” (“finish”). It uses a small vocabulary very inventively, and tends to adopt Austronesian idioms and translate them into Tok Pisin, as with “gras bilong het” – “grass belong head” – “hair” (on the scalp). As can be seen from its name, the scope of words tends to be wider than in English, with “tok” also meaning “language”, “speech” or “word”. It probably goes without saying that no English strong verbs exist in the language at all.

One feature which Western European languages tend not to be very keen on for some reason I’ve never been able to fathom is reduplication. It used to exist in the earlier Germanic languages in verbs like “let”, “row”, “sleep”, “sow”, hey” to indicate the passive and the past, but the only modern English word which shows traces of it is “hight”, meaning “be called” and “call oneself”. Clearly it’s still widely used outside Europe, and Tok Pisin does it. For instance, the words “ship” and “sheep” have fallen together, and therefore the word for “sheep” is now “sipsip”, and “natnat”, which is clearly “gnat-gnat”, means mosquito but there is no word “nat” as far as I know. It happens with verbs as well, as in “tanim”, meaning “turn”, and “tantanim” for “spin round and round”. This particular use is a little similar to the original Germanic tendency to reduplicate verbs which express repetitive actions such as sowing and rowing, which I think emphasises that in the end there is just language, not better or worse languages. Other functions can be illustrated thus: “kala” – “colour”, “kala-kala” – “multicoloured”; “wil” – “wheel”, “wil-wil” – “bicycle”; “kain” – “sort”, “kain-kain” – “diverse”.

There’s also the question of register. The word “as”, as well as meaning “arse”, also simply means “bottom” or “basis”, so for example the constitution is called the “arse law”, which could hardly be more formal, meaning “fundamental law”. Another instance is “bagarap”, “bugger up”, which simply means “ruined” or “broken” with no overtone of obscenity.

Like some Austronesian languages, Tok Pisin also has what I’m accustomed to call the “sign of the nominative”. I think of this in the following way. There are generally prepositional ways to express cases, for instance “bilong” for the genitive, in many languages, although of course some do simply inflect the words involved. English has a very strong tendency to do this, but what it never does is use one for the nominative. Tok Pisin does, in a way, by using “i”, presumably from “he”, to express even the nominative case in some situations. This is also known as the predicate marker. Another notable feature is the use of the verbal suffix “-im”, which is used to mark transitive verbs, i.e. verbs with objects such as “I like her” – “mi laikim em”.

Regardless of the values and culture of, for example, Port Moresby, which are distinctly questionable, particularly in terms of the patriarchy (and I have to mention this because I don’t want anyone going away with the impression that this is not being acknowledged here), Tok Pisin probably represents the future of English, though the details are bound to be different. It represents a continuation of a trend which can be traced back to Proto-Indo-European through Proto-Germanic, runic texts, Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, Modern English, present-day English of continuing simplification of grammar and speech sounds, or rather, a shift from inflection to the use of invariable words to modify meaning. This trend can be seen in languages all over the world, and there’s no reason not to expect English to do the same. Few people now use the pronoun “thou”, many strong verbs have become weak, we have only two marginal cases for nouns, we use “have” to express the perfect tense universally rather than “be” in many cases, and so forth. Tok Pisin is clearly influenced by the grammar and sound of other languages, but so will English continue to be in the future.

I will close with a Tok Pisin version of the Lord’s Prayer:

Papa bilong mipela
Yu stap long heven.
Nem bilong yu i mas i stap holi.
Kingdom bilong yu i mas i kam.
Strongim mipela long bihainim laik bilong yu long graun,
olsem ol i bihainim long heven.
Givim mipela kaikai inap long tude.
Pogivim rong bilong mipela,
olsem mipela i pogivim ol arapela i mekim rong long mipela.
Sambai long mipela long taim bilong traim.
Na rausim olgeta samting nogut long mipela.
Kingdom na strong na glori, em i bilong yu tasol oltaim oltaim.
Tru.

Bolivia

I have technically owned land in Bolivia. I don’t know if I still do because of the changes the country has undergone since I bought it. It was part of a scheme to prevent the building of a bridge which has now been built, but endangered the way of life of a particular indigenous people and the ecology of a rainforest area. The total amount of land was bought by a pressure group and divided up into small parcels which were bought by people all over the world to make it harder for the development company to trace the ownership. It’s very small, at about 13.4 ares.

Bolivia itself is an interesting country. It has the world’s highest capital, includes some of the world’s driest desert and the largest salt flat, and is the only majority Native American country, the rest of the population being White or Mestizo (mixed-race). It’s also landlocked since it lost its Litoral province. The above flag is called the Wiphala, and mainly represents the non-European contingent of the country’s population, i.e. most of them. The native groups include the Guaraní, Aymara and Quechua, with 6.5 million, 1.7 million and ten million respectively, though not all in Bolivia, which has a total population of eleven and a half million. It’s also the second poorest country in Latin America (insofar as it is Latin America that is) in spite of being unusually rich in mineral resources. My main association with Bolivia is miners dying young from lung diseases. Of course, Bolivia is not unusual in being a poor country with good mineral resources. The Congo comes to mind here in particular.

Probably the thing people most think about Bolivia is that it has the world’s highest capital. This is in fact not strictly true, for two reasons. Firstly, it actually has two capitals. The highest is La Paz, also known as Chuqi Yapu Marka, four kilometres above sea level. However, there’s also the constitutional capital Sucre or Suqri, where the judiciary as opposed to the seat of government is based. Secondly, Lhasa is also very high, but since Tibet is disputed and occupied by China, it may not count, although that’s a political decision. La Paz is so high that the boiling point of water there is 88°C and plasma televisions don’t work. The latter is because there is an argon gas filled gap in plasma TVs which expands at higher altitudes, making it harder for the signal to get across, although I understand that it just makes a buzzing noise. To be honest I think plasma TVs are a huge waste of money anyway and don’t live up to their reputation, but this post is not about display technology. The low oxygen in the atmosphere means that people living in La Paz have more red blood corpuscles per unit volume than most other people, which enables them to survive healthily most of the time but also increases the viscosity of their blood and therefore also the risk of heart and lung disease.

One of the distinctive things about Bolivia is the rural women’s national dress, which involves bowler hats and multiple skirts. Some women actually wrestle while wearing these, and their opponents may even include men. The bowler hats are worn by the Aymara and indicate that the women wearing them are married. They have a strong work ethic which includes the women and they tend to keep businesses within the family, so they have large families. The bowler hat tradition dates to the mid-nineteenth century, when Mancunian bowler hats were exported to South America for British men to wear, but they turned out to be too small so they were marketed to women instead. They’re also alleged to boost fertility and tend to be very expensive – hundreds of pounds. The skirts are partly that way because the climate is cold, so they need to be multiple and ankle-length, and they can be up to eight metres long. Culturally, calves are also considered sexually attractive so they tend to be hidden. The Aymara are notable for sticking with traditional dress rather than becoming Europeanised, unless you count the hats.

The Aymara and Quechua (Runa Simi being the official name) languages are similar but may not be closely related. There is a hypothesis that the thinness of the atmosphere leads to there being only three vowels, /a/, /I/ and /u/, because they sound more distinctive, although their pronunciation varies according to where they are in the word. Both changed their spelling conventions in 1975 and 1985, and I’m used to the older orthography, which was based on Spanish, so I find them a little hard to read at times. There also used to be a Tiwanaku Empire before the arrival of the Europeans, where both Aymara and Runa Simi were spoken, so they may have extensively borrowed vocabulary from a third source. They both have aspirated and ejective consonants, which combined with the three-vowel system makes them a little like Semitic languages in sound, but grammatically they are similar to Turkish, with separate suffixes for each grammatical idea, an inflectional case system, lack of gender, evidentiality and SOV word order. I mention this because there are so many unrelated languages which have these features, which suggests to me that there is some kind of human, or perhaps logical, default grammar which our spoken languages are likely to have. This also lends weight to the idea that the two languages are not closely related but are partly coincidentally similar, simply because they both represent a common type of language. Both languages share official status with Spanish in Bolivia.

Lake Titicaca is the world’s highest navigable lake at 3.8 kilometres above sea level and shared with Peru. Since Bolivia is landlocked, its navy is also found on this lake along with some of the rivers in the country. There are forty-one islands on the lake, some of which are inhabited. There are also large rafts, populated by native Americans who escaped from the Incas by moving onto the lake, which have schools, post offices and churchs on them. The total area is over 8 000 kilometres. It’s the remnant of a larger prehistoric inland sea although it’s now freshwater. There are aquatic species unique to the lake including the Titicaca water frog, who is up to sixty centimetres in length and a kilo in mass, and a flightless species of grebe. Titicaca is in an endorheic basin – no water flows out of the basin. Elsewhere, there are also pink river dolphins, also known as boto, living in the Amazon, who are the largest of all freshwater dolphins at over two metres long, and like many freshwater dolphins has poor eyesight due to the murky water selecting echolocation over that sense, and also has the most varies diet of all whales, comprising over fifty species of fish and freshwater crabs.

14 December 2007
Source
Own work
Author
Martin St-Amant

Salar de Uyumi is the world’s largest salt flat with an area of over ten thousand square kilometres. This is of course only a tiny fraction of the 2.5 million square kilometres of what is currently the Med, but was once and one day will again be a giant salt flat. As for Uyumi itself, one of its distinctive features is that it has a hotel built entirely out of blocks of salt, including the furniture, which because of the rainy season and the salt corroding the wiring, has to be almost completely rebuilt every year. Uyumi also turns into a mirror surface under the right rainfall conditions because it’s so flat, and it’s difficult to judge distances for the same reason – no visual cues. There’s also a train graveyard there and the surface is used to calibrate satellites in orbit because it’s so flat.

And it probably goes without saying that the Atacama Desert is partly in Bolivia, in the southwest of the country, although it’s mainly in Chile and Peru, Bolivia only including its eastern edge. This is the driest area on the planet, even drier than the Antarctic, which is mainly desert. Rainfall can be as low as one millimetre a year in some parts. It’s also considered to be one of the areas on this planet most like Mars, and attempts to replicate the Viking lander experiments there came up negative for life, by contrast with the real Martian experiments, one of which was positive. It’s also used as a filming location for programmes and films set on Mars. It used to be used for mining saltpetre and nitrate and was populated back into soon after the last ice age, by the Chinchorro Culture. It also contains the largest drawing of a human in the world, the Atacama Giant, which is in the same style as the Nazca carvings and was used to point to the position of our moonrise at a particular time of year. Besides humans, the desert is by no means lifeless, but the plants subsist on fog rather than rain. The desert is so dry because of a permanent temperature inversion created by a long-lived anticyclone over the Pacific and the Humboldt Current. If that sounds vague, it’s because I don’t understand it either.

Bolivia is of course named after Simón Bolívar, a Venezuelan general who led Bolivia and five other countries to independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century. The republic of Bolivia was created on 6th August 1825, and is one of the few countries named after a person, although there’s quite a glut of these in Central and Southern America such as Nicaragua and Colombia. Before the Spanish arrived, Bolivia was the location of Tiwanaku, a settlement which existed well before the Common Era and has a famous Gate of the Sun:

This civilisation was mysterious for a very long time, but apparently it became something like an empire and collapsed about a millennium ago. They had ceramics, sculpture, architecture and farming, but don’t seem to be as well-known as the Incas.

In the southwest of Bolivia and across the continent into Paraguay live the Guaraní, whose language is with Spanish official in that country. The Bolivian representatives are somewhat different from those elsewhere, partly because their history involved resisting the Inca Empire. I don’t know much about them except that they have nasal harmony in their language, which means that if a nasal consonant or vowel occurs in a word, it nasalises the entire word. Also, like German, Danish, Hebrew and Arabic, every word which might be considered as beginning with a vowel actually begins with a glottal stop. Unlike German, glottal stops are also fully-fledged speech sounds which can occur in other parts of words.

You might have noticed that I haven’t talked much about the politics of Bolivia here. This is because not only do I not know much about it, although their alliance with Cuba and Venezuela suggests they have socialist tendencies, but also I go on about politics a lot on here and thought you might need a break.

I haven’t mentioned Coca yet. Only two percent of Bolivian land is under cultivation yet it provides a quarter of the income for the country. It’s high in cash crops, but most notably coca is grown here, i.e. the source of cocaine. I have chewed coca leaves but not taken cocaine. It has a certain appeal, but it was a very long time ago. It’s used in highland areas such as La Paz to cope with the lack of oxygen. There is a related plant in Central Afrika which as far as I know has no psychoactive action, but the family is quite small. A coca leaf looks almost like what you’d draw if someone asked you what a leaf looked like. Because it’s used as a cash crop even where it’s illegal, it has major consequences for the situations in such countries as Bolivia and Colombia. Oddly, cocaine has been found in the hair of Egyptian mummies even though there is no other source than coca and its relatives. So has nicotine, but that’s more widespread. This fact has been used to suggest a connection between Egypt and the New World. However, it’s also possible that there were cocaine-rich plants native to Afrika which have since become extinct, and cocaine has also been found in the hair of ancient non-Egyptian mummies further south in Afrika.

There are a couple of opportunities for “compare and contrast” here. One is the difference between South and North America in colonial and post-colonial terms. South American countries fought for independence a few decades after the North American colonies and at no point did they unify in the way Canada and the US have, although Brazil is of course one of the largest countries. The Native American population in South America is proportionately higher than in North America, and they have a more prominent position in the national lives of their countries. The other is to compare South America and Afrika. When I was training, I think I perceived a significant difference between Afrikan and South American parasites which might in fact be quite dubious. It seemed to me that Afrikan parasites, while not exactly being a wonderful addition to one’s body, had co-evolved with humans, whereas South American parasites were still taking advantage of a relatively new species on the continent and had therefore not yet adjusted to not killing the host as often. That said, I can’t now remember how I got that impression. South America is more linguistically homogenous in terms of imperialist languages, which consist of Spanish, Portuguese, French, English and Dutch. There is a theory that Afrikan geography prevented the formation of large empires because it didn’t have large strips of similar biomes, unlike Asia, but it isn’t clear whether this is an imperialist excuse. The Inca empire did spread in a mainly linear way though. Afrika also has the Sahara.

I get the impression that Bolivia is essentially remote. It is partly an Andean republic and in a sense consists of the parts of South America which were relatively inaccessible from without. As such it has something of the character of other mountainous territories such as Wales, Tibet and Switzerland. However, in spite of the fact that I’ve owned land over there, I’m afraid that I’m most unlikely ever to visit this fascinating country, and all of this description has been from an utterly foreign person living in Northwest Europe who has never left that region.

Astronauts Vs Computers

‘Rocket To The Renaissance’, written by Arthur C Clarke in about 1960 and expanded upon in his epilogue to ‘First On The Moon’, a book by Apollo astronauts, sets out many of his thoughts regarding the positive impact of human space travel on the human race. Since it was written in the mid-twentieth century by a White Englishman, though apparently a queer one, it unsurprisingly has its colonial biasses, though not fatally so. He focusses initially on White expansion across the globe, although he does also mention the views of non-White thinkers such as 胡適. That said, his point stands, and is paralleled by Arnold Toynbee, who once said:

Affiliated civilisations . . . produce their most striking early manifestations in places outside the area occupied by the “parent” civilisation, and even more when separated by sea.

I honestly can’t read this without thinking of the genocides committed by European powers, but there is a way of defusing this to some extent. There was a time when humans only lived in Afrika and slowly radiated out from that continent into the rest of the world, a process only completed in the twentieth century CE when we reached the South Pole, and not including the bottom of the ocean, which is of course most of the planet’s surface. Something I haven’t been able to track down is that there is supposed to be a genetic marker for the people who have spread furthest from East Afrika, which I presume means it’s found in Patagonia, Polynesia and Australia, although I suspect it actually refers to Aryans because there is indeed such a concentration in the so-called “Celtic Fringe”. Even this expansion may be problematic. It’s not clear what happened when Afrikan Homo sapiens left that continent and encountered other species of humans. Our genes are mixed with theirs, but they’re extinct and we don’t know how either of those things happened. It seems depressingly probable that we are all the descendants of children conceived by rape, within our own species, and this may have been the norm as we would understand it today, between or within our species. It seems more likely, though, that we simply outcompeted our relatives on the whole, and maybe the small portion of DNA from Neanderthals and Denisovans reflects their relatively smaller populations.

Leaving all this aside, the imperial winners of this million-year long onslaught on the planet benefitted culturally and technologically from it. 胡適 said:

Contact with foreign civilisations brings new standards of value.

And:

It is only through contact and comparison that the relative value or worthlessness of the various cultural elements can be clearly and critically seen and understood. What is sacred among one people may be ridiculous in another; and what is despised or rejected by one cultural group, may in a different environment become the cornerstone for a great edifice of strange grandeur and beauty.

Since I don’t want this to descend into some kind of patronising Orientalism, I’ll come back to Arnold Toynbee and his law of Challenge and Response. When difficult conditions are encountered, a minority of creative people respond by coming up with far-reaching solutions which transform their society. For instance, the Sumerians responded to the swamps in their area by irrigation and ended up kind of inventing civilisation as such, and the Church, having promulgated a belief system which caused the collapse of civilisation, went on to organise Christendom and invent Europe. We can of course still see the consequences of Sumer today all around us, but as I’ve mentioned before the very human geography of these isles reflects its location through the “diagonal” arrangement of cultural and economic differences we see locally due to the radial spread of change from the Fertile Crescent.

Even human expansion from East Afrika is problematic. There are clear signs that whatever it was we did led to enormous forest fires and the extinction of charismatic megafauna such as the nine metre long lizards who used to predate in Australia and the giant tortoises and birds of oceanic islands, not to mention the possibility that we helped wipe out the mammoths and woolly rhinos. Animals today tend to be nocturnal, smaller and to run away from humans because of what we’ve done in the prehistoric past. Nonetheless, there is an environment which is not problematic in this way. Actually, I should turn this round. The environments which are problematic from the viewpoint of being easily damaged and containing other sentient beings are largely confined to the thin film of air on this tiny blue speck we call Earth.

In his ‘Spaceships Of The Mind’, Nigel Calder pointed out that if we want to develop heavy industry, there’s always an environmental cost on this planet. On the other hand, if we were to do it in space, that problem goes away completely. Nothing we can do in space is ever going to make even the slightest scratch on the Cosmos in the forseeable future. Of course, it’s worth injecting a note of caution here because that attitude led to damage to our own planet, and locally even in space, that may not be true. Nonetheless, I do believe that one response to the energy crisis is orbiting solar power stations which beam their power back to remote receiving facilities on Earth which can then relay electricity globally, obviating the need for any fossil fuels or terrestrial nuclear power stations, or for that matter wind turbines or Earthbound solar arrays.

Space exploration has already yielded very positive results. These include the discovery of the possibility of nuclear winter, the Gaia Hypothesis, the Overview Effect and technological fallout. I’ll just briefly go into three of these.

• Nuclear winter. When Mariner 9 reached Mars in 1971, there were problems imaging the surface due to a global dust storm. This was studied and it was noted that the fine particles in the atmosphere were blocking solar radiation and cooling the surface. The Soviet Mars 2 probe arrived at about the same time, sent a lander into the dust and it was destroyed. Carl Sagan then sent a telegram to the Soviet team asking them to consider the global implications of this event. This led to a 1982 paper which modelled the effect of nuclear firestorms and the consequential carbon particles in our own atmosphere which appeared to show that there would be a drastic cooling effect on this planet if that happened: the nuclear winter. Even now, with more sophisticated models, scientists recommend that global nuclear arsenals should be kept below the level where this is a significant risk during a nuclear exchange, and it’s also possible that it was a factor in ending the Cold War.
• The Gaia Hypothesis. This is the belief that Earth is a homoeostatic system governed by its life. It’s still a hypothesis because many scientists still reject it or see it as only weakly supported, and it also coëxists with the Medea Hypothesis, that multicellular life will inevitably destroy itself. The roots of the hypothesis lie in Spaceship Earth and the observation that the other planets in the inner solar system, which didn’t appear to have life on them, were much less like Earth than might be expected. Up until the 1960s, life was more or less regarded as a dead cert on Mars because of the changes in appearance caused by the dust storms, which at the time were interpreted as seasonal changes in vegetation, and of course it had become popular to suppose there were canals there. On Venus, many people expected to find a swampy tropical world or a planet-wide water ocean teeming with life. When this didn’t happen, some scientists started to wonder if life had actually influenced this planet to keep it habitable rather than there already having been a hospitable environment for life which maintained itself. Viewing our whole Earth as alive is a way to engender compassion for all life, and is of course an example of hylozoism.
• The Overview Effect. This is substantially related to the inspiration for the Gaia Hypothesis. When astronauts have seen Earth hanging in space, they have tended to gather a powerful impression of the fragility of life and the unity of the planet which has constituted a life-changing experience. The Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell set up the Institute of Noetic Sciences in response to his personal reaction, which was part of the human potential movement, and there are plans to make views of Earth from space available via virtual reality.

These are just three examples of how space exploration changes human consciousness for the better, and two out of three of them only happened because there were people in space, beyond low Earth orbit. Considering that even today only a tiny proportion of our species has ever been in space, and an even tinier proportion have left cis lunar space, this is an enormous influence relative to their number. It’s evident that the more astronauts and perhaps people living permanently off Earth there are, the more positive the effect on the human race would be.

But instead, we’ve gone the other way.

The biggest recent notable change in technology from a cultural perspective is of course information technology, mainly the internet and easy access to it via relatively cheap devices. This has led to the creation of cyberspace (I was there at the birth) and a generally inward-looking culture. I would contend that up until 1972, the human race had a spatial growing point, and that this had feedback into the rest of our cultures. And yes, it absolutely was the preserve of the rich and powerful countries, and yes, Whitey was on the “Moon”:

A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arms began to swell.
(and Whitey’s on the moon)I can’t pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)
Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still.
(while Whitey’s on the moon)The man jus’ upped my rent las’ night.
(’cause Whitey’s on the moon)
No hot water, no toilets, no lights.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)I wonder why he’s uppi’ me?
(’cause Whitey’s on the moon?)
I was already payin’ ‘im fifty a week.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Taxes takin’ my whole damn check,
Junkies makin’ me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is goin’ up,
An’ as if all that shit wasn’t enough

A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face an’ arm began to swell.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)Was all that money I made las’ year
(for Whitey on the moon?)
How come there ain’t no money here?
(Hm! Whitey’s on the moon)
Y’know I jus’ ’bout had my fill
(of Whitey on the moon)
I think I’ll sen’ these doctor bills,
Airmail special
(to Whitey on the moon)

Gil Scot-Heron

The question here is of course of which America got the moon landing, and possibly which humankind. However, is there a reason to suppose that if enough people were to go into space it wouldn’t alter their consciousness enough for them to become, for instance, anti-racist and to recognise that we really are all in it together? To a Brit reading this, the reference to doctor’s bills brings the NHS to mind, and that kind of large-scale government-sponsored undertaking is pretty similar to NASA in many ways.

Apollo was also, of course, a propaganda coup, demonstrating what the so-called Free World could do that the “Communist” countries couldn’t. However, it wasn’t done via private enterprise or competition. It is at most an illustration of what a mixed economy can achieve, not capitalism. On the other hand, it could also be seen as an example of competition between the two power blocks dominating the world at the time, but is that capitalism?

As it stands, space probes even today have relatively low specifications, possibly due to long development times. In 1996, Pathfinder landed on Mars powered by an 8085 CPU running at 0.1 MHz. The Voyager probes run on a COSMAC 1802. There was eventually a problem with the Space Shuttle program because the craft used 8086 processors which became hard to find and had to be scavenged from antique PCs. The space program is startlingly primitive in this respect. As far as I know, there has only ever been one microcomputer based on the 1802 processor, the COMX 35, which came out in 1983. The Intel 8085 came out in March 1976, was a slightly upgraded version of the 8080, and was almost immediately eclipsed by the legendary Zilog Z80 which was released a month later. It had a longer life in control applications, which is presumably how it ended up in a Mars rover. The Shuttle program ended in 2011, which was thirty-three years after the 8086, a pretty conservative design in any case compared to the 68000 and Z8000, was mass-produced. Given all that primitive IT technology, the achievements of space probes are astonishing, and serve to illustrate the inefficiency of popular software used on modern devices on this planet. We have our priorities wrong.

I needn’t say much about the effect of social media on society. We all know it’s there, and it’s basically an ingrowing toenail, albeit one which has ingrown so far it’s started to pierce our brains. But we could’ve had a rocket to the renaissance, and instead we got Facebook and Trump. History has gone horribly wrong.