This is it: my last blog post of 2025 (barring some truly unexpected circumstances). I will probably be writing a post tomorrow, because I think we’re going to be working tomorrow, despite the fact that it will be New Year’s Day, and a stunningly large fraction of the people of the world will be hung over or otherwise exhausted from ringing in the New Year.
I suspect New Year’s Eve/Day is the most widely celebrated holiday in the world, far surpassing the numbers who celebrate any mere religious holiday. Since the world in general uses the same “Gregorian”* calendar, it’s a rare commonality for the human race, and worth celebrating.
If only they could work on finding more things in common, since after all, they have almost everything actually in common with each other. And yet, they focus on trivial cultural or superficial differences and battle viciously over them, as if they were fighting truly alien beings. Talk about your narcissism of small differences.
Humans are so stupid. The more of them there are, the stupider, somehow, as though the lowest common denominator tends always to dominate the dynamics. It’s like Tommy Lee Jones’s character said in Men In Black: a person is smart, but people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it.
That isn’t always the case, obviously. Humans have accomplished great things in large groups, interacting with mutual exchange to mutual benefit (or not so mutual benefit), but that probably only happens in rarefied circumstances, discovered or arranged by luck or by the skill of one or a few who are cleverer than average, and sustained thanks to a form of natural selection.
Because of the sheer power of such organizations of people, those rare few types of interactions can endure for tremendous lengths of time and be astonishingly effective and broadly prevalent. This can distract one from the fact that the ideas were so singular and ingenious.
Money, for instance, has been invented more than once, but it’s a relatively low-hanging and particularly nutritious fruit, allowing as it does for the far more efficient exchange of goods and services to (ideally) mutual benefit. Of course, commerce can be cheated and can thereby become nonproductive or even counterproductive, especially if one or a few entities obtain disproportionate wealth and power. This sort of selection for detrimental equilibria happens in the world of biology as well.
Imagine a football game in which, every time one team scores, that team gains an extra player and the other team loses one. Once one side takes the lead, they’re likely to keep it and increase it, making them ever more likely to maintain their dominance. It can make for a pretty boring and not very productive game. Such a situation is worth avoiding, even if you happen to be on the winning team.
Written language is, of course, the single most important human invention‒more important than even the invention of language itself, though that was a necessary prerequisite, so the argument could be made that it is more important or at least more fundamental. Thankfully, language is a different type of thing than money, so it’s not as easy to game it to secure an unreasonable advantage for any individual or group.
There is, of course, an often-used attempted strategy of discouraging or preventing literacy in some groups or one sex (always the same one, it seems) to keep them from gaining the power that written language can impart, but it can be harder to keep those systems in place than for a monopoly to maintain its economic advantage.
Still, even written language isn’t automatically self-protective. It’s possible for misinformation and disinformation to spread and even prosper, at least for a time (such situations tend to self-destruct), and it can do terrible damage, much as mutations in somatic DNA can lead to cell dysfunction, cell death, and sometimes cancer.
Analogous things can happen to whole civilizations as well, and they have happened many times, but that’s no reason to blame language or learning. One doesn’t prevent cancer by eliminating DNA itself or by killing the host organism (that does eliminate the cancer, but in an unsatisfying way). Only better, more thorough thinking and language, the equivalent of DNA proofreading, can do that without catastrophe.
And I, by writing this post, try to contribute to the good language, the useful or at least interesting language, in the world. I suspect I will continue to do so as the next year begins. I hope you enjoy whatever celebrations you have in store.
*Though Pope Gregory the Whatever Number was merely the one who commissioned it. Astronomers and mathematicians actually did the work. We have some scientifically literate Popes nowadays, at least, and a Belgian priest was among the first to do rigorous mathematics using Einstein’s new field equations (though Friedman got there a little earlier, his work was apparently not as convincing) to demonstrate that the universe could not be static** based upon them.
**Leading Einstein to introduce Λ (lambda), the cosmological constant. He later called this his biggest blunder (supposedly) but it turned out to be a useful and term and concept in describing the apparent evolution of the universe as we know it now. Like Planck before him, even Einstein’s fudges*** were deeply insightful and useful.
***Speaking of Einstein, I recently got an email from my old med school alumni association with the subject line “You are responsible for Einstein’s success”. To which I so wanted to reply, “I know, right? But did he mention me in any of his papers or even throw me a word of thanks (in German or otherwise) in his acceptance speech when he got his Nobel Prize for demonstrating that light comes in ‘packets’ which we now call photons? No! Ungrateful bastard.”
Robert Elessar 