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Jul. 24th, 2025 08:40 amTwo things I wanted to say about the books from yesterday that I forgot about and did not remember until I woke up this morning:
1. There was a chapter in the Lynskey book about zombie apocalypses, and one thing he noted was that part of the popularity of zombie apocalypses as a particular flavor of apocalypse is that they allow for unlimited amounts of violence that can't be morally judged because zombies aren't "real" (living) people. They allow for fantasies that are as violent as anyone wants them to be, and justify the kind of stockpiling of weapons that preppers in the US do anyway.
Obviously there are other things going on, and there are people who enjoy that kind of story that aren't in it as an excuse for violence, but I think he's right that that's one reason they're so popular today.
2. My big takeaway from Proto is the reminder that people have always moved around and societies/languages have always changed. Moving around is one of the things people do. No people have a true "homeland" since all of us came from the same place originally and unless you're from a very specific part of what is now Africa, your ancestors moved around a lot in the past millennia. There are places in the world where we can say, "These were the first people who lived here" (mostly in Oceania) but for the vast majority of liveable land in the world, successive waves of people have lived there. It's a beautiful thing to have a particular and deep relationship with a specific area of land, but that land is not a given people's in any meaningful sense. At one point in time, a completely different set of people had a relationship with that land; in the future, there will almost certainly be still another set of people who have a relationship with it. Two groups of people can have a relationship with it at the same time, and both relationships are legitimate!
The same goes for language: there is no such thing as a pure language. The only way to keep a language pure is to kill it, freezing it in amber. The very act of using language changes it, which means it changes constantly. This is one of the beautiful things about language, one of the things that makes it useful--we're constantly inventing new words and grammatical constructions to describe new experiences or to explain old experiences in new ways. Languages die out all the time, and new languages are developing right now, even if we can't tell because the rate of change is beyond our lifetime.
All of this makes me more of a globalist and makes me hate nationalism even more.
Now, I'm not using this as an excuse to justify any historical atrocities. I think "Indigenous" is a very useful political category. It's obviously morally wrong to go to a new place and conquer it via violence; it's morally wrong to stop people from using their language under threat of force. Violent change is wrong. But non-violent change is just...life. It's what humans do. So I find it genuinely tragic when a language dies out, but so long as it happens naturally, it's just the way of life, like a person dying old in their bed. Always sad! But also natural! As opposed to someone being murdered or being deprived of what they need to live.
People are people are people are people and we always have been. I am a person who delights in the diversity of human experience, societies, perspectives, cultures, languages. But what we share is ultimately more important. And these ideas are not in conflict: our diversity, our specificity is one of the things we share! But it makes zero sense to me to try to draw lines between people and say that one group is inherently different (always with implications of inferiority/superiority) than another. Y'all means all y'all!
1. There was a chapter in the Lynskey book about zombie apocalypses, and one thing he noted was that part of the popularity of zombie apocalypses as a particular flavor of apocalypse is that they allow for unlimited amounts of violence that can't be morally judged because zombies aren't "real" (living) people. They allow for fantasies that are as violent as anyone wants them to be, and justify the kind of stockpiling of weapons that preppers in the US do anyway.
Obviously there are other things going on, and there are people who enjoy that kind of story that aren't in it as an excuse for violence, but I think he's right that that's one reason they're so popular today.
2. My big takeaway from Proto is the reminder that people have always moved around and societies/languages have always changed. Moving around is one of the things people do. No people have a true "homeland" since all of us came from the same place originally and unless you're from a very specific part of what is now Africa, your ancestors moved around a lot in the past millennia. There are places in the world where we can say, "These were the first people who lived here" (mostly in Oceania) but for the vast majority of liveable land in the world, successive waves of people have lived there. It's a beautiful thing to have a particular and deep relationship with a specific area of land, but that land is not a given people's in any meaningful sense. At one point in time, a completely different set of people had a relationship with that land; in the future, there will almost certainly be still another set of people who have a relationship with it. Two groups of people can have a relationship with it at the same time, and both relationships are legitimate!
The same goes for language: there is no such thing as a pure language. The only way to keep a language pure is to kill it, freezing it in amber. The very act of using language changes it, which means it changes constantly. This is one of the beautiful things about language, one of the things that makes it useful--we're constantly inventing new words and grammatical constructions to describe new experiences or to explain old experiences in new ways. Languages die out all the time, and new languages are developing right now, even if we can't tell because the rate of change is beyond our lifetime.
All of this makes me more of a globalist and makes me hate nationalism even more.
Now, I'm not using this as an excuse to justify any historical atrocities. I think "Indigenous" is a very useful political category. It's obviously morally wrong to go to a new place and conquer it via violence; it's morally wrong to stop people from using their language under threat of force. Violent change is wrong. But non-violent change is just...life. It's what humans do. So I find it genuinely tragic when a language dies out, but so long as it happens naturally, it's just the way of life, like a person dying old in their bed. Always sad! But also natural! As opposed to someone being murdered or being deprived of what they need to live.
People are people are people are people and we always have been. I am a person who delights in the diversity of human experience, societies, perspectives, cultures, languages. But what we share is ultimately more important. And these ideas are not in conflict: our diversity, our specificity is one of the things we share! But it makes zero sense to me to try to draw lines between people and say that one group is inherently different (always with implications of inferiority/superiority) than another. Y'all means all y'all!
