So my wife and I were discussing Josh and Chuck’s recent podcast on our culture’s dire need for innovators, teleportation and a universal language. We both agreed on the first count, but were split on the other two. Setting aside the ethical and possibly gene-splicing issues of teleportation, I just couldn’t get behind the idea of a universal language.

Recently, I finally got around to reading Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk classic “Snow Crash” and there’s a great deal of interesting stuff in the book about human language as an operating system and how the trend toward divergence in language actually prevents and protects us from widespread harm. If a farmer grows only one crop, then his entire farm is susceptible to devastation from a single parasite.

Stephenson makes a case that destructive movements such as Nazism are cultural viruses. If more of us had the same operating system in our brains, then something like that would be much harder to contain. So in that sense, a universal language might mean that a truly dangerous idea could spread throughout human culture, largely unchecked.