Language Requires a Common Frame of Experience

The greatest is obsolescence, the meaning of something evocative changing because the players’ reality has changed since the inspiration entered it. William Gibson’s ground-breaking cyberpunk novel Neuromancer begins, “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” Supporting details make it clear that this is an industrial port at night, the sky gray from pollution and flecked with ash and other debris. But that was an image published in 1984. A decade...

 The Need for a Common Perspective

That we need a planetary ethic is so obvious that I need but list a few key words: climate, ethnic cleansing, fossil fuels, habitat preservation, human rights, hunger, infectious disease, nuclear weapons, oceans, ozone layer, pollution, population. Our global conversations on these topics are, by definition, cacophonies of national, cultural, and religious self-interest. Without a common religious orientation, we basically don't know where to begin, nor do we know what to say or how to listen...