In part, such apprehension reflects unease about the erosion of various cultural identities. Yet many researchers find another reason to worry about the spread of English: the prospect of cognitive hegemony. Languages, they argue, influence how we perceive and respond to the world. The idiosyncrasies of English—its grammar, its concepts, its connection to Western culture—can jointly produce an arbitrary construction of reality.
In November 1911, the French banker Albert Kahn revealed his plans for an undertaking that was global in scale and utopian in its horizons: he aimed to document the whole of humanity, to “fix once and for all, the look, practices, and modes of human activity whose fatal disappearance is just a question of time.” To finance this extraordinary and ambitious project, Kahn himself would pay a team of photographers and filmmakers to crisscross the globe and document its practices, sites, and manifold ways of being. The resulting images and footage were to become the Archives de la Planète, a grand and grandiose homage to a changing world. By the time of Kahn’s death on November 14, 1940, only a few months into the occupation of France by Nazi Germany, his team had amassed more than a hundred hours of film and over 72,000 autochromes, a precursor to modern color photography.
When the German philosopher Hanno Sauer titled his ambitious new book “The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality” (Oxford), he made it clear that he sees morality as quite different from science. In his account, morality—that body of judgments about good and evil, the practices that reflect those judgments, and the blame, guilt, and punishment that sustain them—hasn’t always existed. That’s why it had to be invented, rather than discovered.
For Sauer, the story of the invention of morality is really the story of the evolution of humanity. The processes that produced our morality are simply the processes that produced us, produced us as beings who have this morality—rather than, say, the norms that govern ants in their caste-bound colonies, or wolves in their packs, or the snow leopard in its solitude. To understand ourselves as moral creatures, we have to understand that we’re built that way.
Being a rock star must be a tough gig. Achieving success, the lodestar guiding your energy, anger and muse, instantaneously puts you in the realm of the very elitism against which you’ve been rebelling – an existential pickle for sure. That irony has rarely been more pronounced than in the case of R.E.M., one of the most articulate, self-consciously progressive bands to find themselves subject to mainstream rock glory.
While a lot of their contemporaries (most obviously U2) embraced the outer extremes of their success with a due sense of entitlement – as The Name of This Band Is R.E.M. explains – the group not only wrestled with the contradictions of stardom, but to some degree made them part of their identity.