We’re often berating ourselves in the media for overlooking important social and historical developments. Take the rise of Wahabism in Islam, for example. It appeared by stealth, you might imagine. And now read American journalist Charles Dudley Warner from 1881, on the impact of the wires on newspapers.

…consider how much space is taken up with mere trivialities and vulgarities under the name of news.

And this evil is likely to continue and increase until news-gatherers learn that more important than the reports of accidents and casualties is the intelligence of opinions and thoughts, the moral and intellectual movements of modern life.

A horrible assassination in India is instantly telegraphed; but the progress of such a vast movement as that of the Wahabee revival in Islam, which may change the destiny of great provinces, never gets itself put upon the wires.

The recurrence of themes in information is a familiar topic on this blog (my history obsession). In case you think that obsession is itself just a lazy way of repeating the line from Ecclesiastes that there is nothing new under the sun, here are the headlines of my thoughts.

Whilst in mathematics and the physical sciences we’ve seen a growing sophistication over time, I think we long ago reached a developmental dead-end in spoken and written language as a tool for describing the world in which we live. Ironically, because language functions as a social tool.

The discoveries of science (atomic, multi-dimensionality, geological time) all challenge our everyday sense of things being as they appear – the commonsense, intuitive understanding that we use so successfully to navigate the world of people and ‘normal’ life. Science challenges it, but can’t change it, because language supports us emotionally and sustains us spiritually. Its rational and intellectual shortcomings are secondary.

So language is the dead sea in which we comfortably float. Just don’t expect to find anything exciting in it.