I personally benefit greatly from the global dominance of English. I’m not very good at learning languages and speak only English. If I was blogging in, say, Swedish, I’d have a very limited audience. But having the dumb luck to grow up speaking English, I still get more than a few Swedish readers.

But the rise of English as the global elite cognitive monoculture strikes me as worrisome. Relying upon a monoculture for their calories didn’t do the poor Irish much good in 1846. I’m worried that intellectual blights could get lodged in the Silicon Valley – Hollywood – Washington – New York – London axis of global cultural dominance.

In his 1979 book Disturbing the Universe, physicist Freeman Dyson (perhaps the last survivor of the Turing-Oppenheimer-Shannon-Von Braun-Korolev generation of WWII math and physics guys) wrote: