protested. Elu wants to impose the Delus language on all of us, but he has lost the government’s support. (I mean, Lule) sanctioned the National Simple Language Policy, including the parliamentary addition of the veto to neutral language. We will all speak Portuguese, at least in government communications.
The law determines clear, direct and objective language. Simple language implies rejection of pedantic hermeticism, no renunciation of an extensive vocabulary, a tool of conceptual rigor and the recording of nuances. I suggest that judges and lawyers adopt the rule. It would also apply to academics: articles and theses written in encrypted terms fulfill the exclusive function of hiding the emptiness of ideas in a simulacrum of depth.
The initiative marks a rupture, on the eve of the election year. Back in 2023, at the inauguration ceremonies of ministers, Alexandre Padilha took great care in using neutral language. The Ministries of Management, Health and Women made it official. Poor Brazil: the National Confederation of Education Workers called for its inclusion in school curricula.
Identity activists maintain the right to speak and write in their foreign language. Sectarian practice only brings harm to themselves, who become unintelligible to others – which is probably good for others. Nothing prohibits them from continuing to define “inclusive language” as an exclusionary language, incomprehensible to the 99.9% who live outside the bubble of feverish activists. But they can no longer use state power to subordinate the nation to their doctrines and ideologies.
Democratic rulers want to govern things, that is, public goods. Rulers with authoritarian inclinations aim to reform minds, operating as citizenship pedagogues. Changing the common language through official acts reveals the temptation to shape interpersonal relationships from top to bottom. The State becomes a militant State.
“We are going to decree that from October 1st Christmas starts again in Venezuela”, announced Maduro, repeating a decree from 2020. Ideological dictatorships cultivate the habit of invading the domains of culture, in order to exercise social control.
Language occupies a more important place than traditional festivities: it is the backbone of culture. It belongs to the sphere of childhood, latent memory, family exchanges and socialization. It changes over time, but its dynamics pulse to the rhythms of countless everyday microscopic frictions. The “living language” is never the result of laws or decrees. The social diffusion of neutral language would require the exercise of merciless repression. The activists’ golden dream calls for nothing less than a totalitarian regime.
The two pioneering Marxist newspapers in the USA were founded by Germans who immigrated after the 1848 revolutions: Die Revolution and Proletarierbund, an organ of the American Workers League, a section of the First International. In an exchange of letters with the creators, Karl Marx refused to offer political guidance, warning them that, first of all, they needed to learn to speak and write in English, the country’s lingua franca.
The identitarian left follows the opposite direction, segregating itself in the cave of an exclusive language. The law sanctioned by Lula says that this is her problem, not ours.
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