ON LANGUAGE AND DIPLOMACY D. B. Timmins (FSO ret.) Background There are few, if any, professions where a knowledge of language and the limitations of translation enter more into force than that of diplomacy. Living in the People's Republic of China, one of the continual frustrations heard from junior Foreign Service Officers serving on the visa line even after months of language training at FSI plus a year in Taiwan, is their limited capacity to explain to the hundreds of Chinese whose applications are turned down each week, just why the applicant hasn't received the visa he so desperately wants. And following the Secretary's 1993 trip to Beijing, nothing was more current as a discussion topic than how Americans and Chinese seem to have talked past each other in discussing matters at issue between them. (Perhaps given the impasse in agreeing on a site for the post-Madrid continuation of the Mid-east Peace talks, Americans and Arabs and Israelis can be held to be at equal linguistic/cultural disadvantage). Language being such as essential ingredient in the work of a Foreign Service Officer, I've never understood, despite ample explanations which have been offered, why the Department long ago eliminated bonus points for language in the selection process. Every other country I'm aware of makes prior language preparation an essential element in their selection process for the Diplomatic Service. Indeed, I was initially surprised when first posted abroad at the beginning of my career some thirty-six years ago to find that most of my Swedish, Norwegian, Swiss, and Dutch colleagues had been graduated in philology. What's more, despite all the nominal requirements set forth in promotion guidelines, I've never understood how so many Senior Officers get to the top without real proficiency in a single foreign language! We are all aware of FSOs who've passed an entire career without having to negotiate seriously in more than one foreign tongue. Yet, what more essential need can a new officer have in coming to the profession than a demonstrated facility in languages. Geography? History? Political Science? More than a language?? FSI imposes a language learning test before assigning officers to training. If not bonus points for acquired languages, why not at least a reasonable score on a Foreign Language Aptitude Test as part of the initial examination process? I suppose my thinking has been strongly affected by an early posting to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris with its twenty-four nation membership and daily exchanges in at least eleven languages (of which I admittedly could deal with only four, one of these in a most limited manner). Fortunately, the OECD has excellent simultaneous translation facilities -- whose limitations however are the subject of this paper. Among my own most demanding professional accomplishments was negotiating a double taxation treaty between the United States and Morocco in 1976-77 in which the text had to be agreed in three languages: English, French, and Arabic. It was only then that I began truly to appreciate that resolving language differences is not a simple process of point to point mapping, i.e. substituting words of invariant meaning from one language to another, but closer the to twelfth-century relativism of Pierre Helie, with his belief that Babel had resulted in as many different grammars and interpretive perspectives of the world as there are languages. There is a fundamental difference between the task of linguists to reconstruct the original (or early version) of language families separated by the operation over time of loss of phonenes, sycope (loss of medial vowels), dissimulation (loss of consonants), palatalization (change of "c" to "ch"), metathesis (exchange of position of vowels and consonants), apophony (vowel gradations), and Grimm's/Verner's Law (sound/accent drift)1, and the search for basic similarities/differences in the rules of grammatical logic which control different language groups. This paper was written in the hope that it might be a source of useful professional insights for the current generation of less-experienced young officers in the uses and dangers of language. And as a cautionary word to those so busily computerizing Departmental and Foreign Service operations -- and whose next initiative is almost certain to be the introduction of Computer-aided Translation Systems. Ludwig Von Wittgensteim and Linguistic Relativism In retirement, I've found time to re-read Ludwig Wittgenstein's Blue Book and Brown Book -- (named after the colors of their covers in their mimeographed version). These books were preliminary studies for his more well-known Philosophical Investigations , and were given to Professor Wittgenstein's Cambridge University classes in 1933-35. I first became acquainted with them in 1958. Don't know whether it's age; fresh perspective after having been away from linguistics for many years; or recent belated study of Mandarin, which of all the languages I've undertaken is so superficially similar to English in its analytical grammatical structure, while being so remarkably different in its underlying logic -- but my current reading of LW has brought insights which totally eluded me thirty years ago. Wittgenstein, with Bertrand Russell, was one of the earliest and most significant contributors to modern analytical linguistics; and he has a towering reputation as one of the greatest mathematicians, philosophers, and logicians of the Twentieth Century. Among his more important non-mathematical contributions was the notion that every grammatical construction, as well as the already-at-that-time better understood differing connotations of words themselves, have various levels of meaning and understanding (which LW takes pains to elucidate are entirely different operations). His great work, in which he was joined by Russell, was to develop methods to clarify just what level of meaning was to be associated with each specific expression of language, written, spoken, or otherwise -- the beginnings of symbolic logic. He did this, in part, by introducing the notion of "language games", simplified statements which facilitate analysis of just what is being communicated, or not exactly communicated, and how meaning (or understanding) can be altered by slight grammatical modification (today we'd probably call this "language modeling"). Near the end of his short life he became convinced that one neither learns nor uses language according to strict rules of logic and that there is something highly significant in this; though, as he warned, "philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does". This he felt had led linguists to serious error in their analysis of the meaning of both words and grammar. 1 See Introduction to Historical Linguistics , Anthony Arlotta, Harvard University, Houghton Mifflin, N.Y. Regrettably, LW said little about exactly what he meant in connection with this warning, perhaps giving excuse to both linguists and the developers of the computer for their insufficiency of attention to concerns expressed nearly sixty years ago which might have avoided many errors of both analysis and application in the development of computer languages. At any event, neither linguists, nor, it seems, computer mavens devoted to developing "artificial intelligence" have paid much attention to this insight of Wittgenstein (at least until recently, and then only when they were forced to reinvent the wheel). Because of this, computer experts have given inordinate time to developing strictly logical computer languages which have proved difficult to implement both by the human mind, leading to programming errors, which have become the bane of computer users, as well as presenting barriers in seeking the solution to real world problems. To give the devil his due, however, this was perhaps an essential step in the technological evolution of computers, which in their simplest forms depend on such pure logic to make their systems operate. We now hear more and more about efforts to develop "fuzzy logic", requiring an entirely new type of computer designed to proceed with calculations on the basis of imperfect, or conflicting information, through parallel processing in which a series of computers are cross-linked to process incoming information simultaneously in a race for solutions in a manner believed to be akin to the less understandable logical way the synapses of the human mind make their decisions. This paper, elaborating on an insight which came upon re-reading LW's Blue and Brown Books, is offered in the hope of extending understanding of what I think Wittgenstein was seeking to tell us about the greater logic of the "illogic" of language and how this may be related to the new theories of "fuzzy logic". Learning, Knowing, and Understanding A noted Cambridge Professor, economist, and author of the seminal study Imperfect Competition , once asserted in a Harvard lecture I attended, a thought which has forever stuck in mind: "To understand anything, one must first know everything. But to learn anything, one must ignore a great deal of everything ". Living in a world of constant evolution and change, an organism to survive must constantly through the learning process be adapting to new conditions, and must therefore constantly ignore a great deal of the less consequential which is going on in the world about it. It must however simultaneously and selectively decide what is essential to its survival. A less imperative example of this is found in genealogical research, where an ancestor can at times be found with a given christening date, yet the marriage register show him/her to have been born exactly a year later (or earlier) while in the same parish and with the same parents and with the same month and day of christening given. At present, the researcher finds his machine treating these as completely separate individuals, necessitating a "match and merge" operation based on human judgment to resolve the issue. A successful "fuzzy logic" machine could presumably make this decision if instructed that young women often wish to appear a year or two younger when marrying, whereas young men may wish to appear a year or two older and that the exact day of christening in a small parish may be more convincing evidence of identity than a year of birth given later in life, which may be either deliberately or inadvertently misstated. Strict Logic and Levels of Meaning What Wittgenstein had to say about levels of meaning was, like every great discovery whose reality is already present in the noumenal world if not consciously noted in the phenomenal world, already present in the nature of language and grammar. And like every great discovery, once explicated, subject to the comment "So what's new? Everyone knows that." In the world of Economics, the theory of Supply and Demand was understood by merchants, long before Adam Smith, if in such rough and ready form they'd have had difficulty explaining it to anyone outside the trade. And the concepts of rent and foreign trade were being applied by landowners and tenants, and importers and exporters, even before Ricardo gave them exact content and meaning. But as a result of the work of Smith and Ricardo, now even moderately educated farmers and laborers can take into account the effects of price inflation on their personal and household interests in a more precise manner than even the most experienced merchant or banker could have ventured a hundred and fifty years ago. Language Logic and the Evolution of Science It is perhaps because of the different underlying logics of various languages that civilization, and above all science, that greatest, most glorious, rewarding, and potentially most threatening aspect of civilization, has shifted its locus of major activity across the centuries according to the stage of evolution of human understanding and the type of processing logic most useful at any given moment in bridging the next stage of scientific advance. Greek, perhaps the most sophisticated and elegant of the languages of its time -- was able by reason of its structure as well as the social organization of its City States, affording leisure to a substantial class, to permit the reflection and speculation which gave Europe its first science, theater, and literature. This is not to say that Greece did not borrow heavily from both Egypt and the Orient, but it was Greek civilization which, amalgamating the disparate elements of the world around it, made historically notable progress in mathematics, art, the theater, politics, architecture, and literature. And, it can be argued, it was the power of Greek language logic in analyzing and processing the phenomena presented to Greek minds which made this possible. Latin, with its more prosaically "here and now" processing logic, in due course eventuated in Rome's military triumph over the Mediterranean world. Results: the great engineering marvels which even today can be seen from Hadrian's Wall on the Scottish border to Volubilis in North Africa, and from Merida near the Spanish border with Portugal to Ephesus in the Eastern Mediterranean. Nor does this take into account the fact that Caesar came nearer to achieving the enduring dream of European political unity than anyone since, even taking into account Charlemagne's, Charles V's, Napoleon's, and Hitler's attempts to do so by war and conquest. Spanish and Italian, both bastardized remnants of Latin with not inconsiderable Arabic admixture, appear to have been ideal vehicles for reintroducing to Europe the ancient wisdom preserved, but not notably advanced, by the Moslems. Though one must, of course, not leave out of account the important contributions of politics, commerce -- Marco Polo's trip to China bringing back cannon, gunpowder, and printing, thus improving the technology of warfare -- as well as geographical considerations, all of which played essential roles in this regard. I make no attempt to put forward a simplistic, single cause argument for history here. Some scholars maintain that China, perhaps because of the great emphasis placed on social harmony by Confucianism, seems to have deliberately aborted -- or at least displaced -- its early scientific thrust. Despite the first invention of gunpowder, clocks, rockets, and steam engines, all were sublimated into a "toy syndrome". The rulers of the Middle Kingdom chose to eschew the potential benefits of these devices, which in the West evolved into enormously productive machinery and rapid transportation, in the interest of avoiding their more evident destructiveness as weapons of war. China, among the first countries to develop a written language, was also among the first to recognize the potential of phonetic script. But, again China aborted this advance, possibly because it had already developed an important literature and considered itself too far down the road to reverse course by changing its system of written language -- much as English has given up hope of rationalizing its spelling, unlike the Scandinavian countries, which have undertaken several spelling rectification programs over the past century, perhaps because of their less impressive accumulation of great literature. As already noted, one cannot assume a complete primacy of language, apart from geography and external events, in determining the course of history. But language, to the extent that it shapes our view of physical phenomena and historical events, certainly tilts culture and subsequent history in one direction or another. The great German scholar Wilhelm von Humboldt gave us a great insight into why different nations may react differently when confronted with the same phenomena. Humboldt became convinced from his study of languages that different tongues provide different intensities of response to life. Taking over Schlegel's concept of "higher" and "lower" grammars, Humboldt argued that different languages penetrate reality in different ways, to different depths, and from different perspectives. To Humboldt, Greek is light, playful, and highly nuanced. Latin, by contrast, is sober, grave, masculine, and laconic. In commenting on this difference, George Steiner in his well-received book After Babel , gives an evaluation of Latin script as "perfectly expressive of the linear, monumental weight of the language. Both are the active mould of the Roman way of life." The linguist Jost Trier saw things quite similarly. To Trier, every language structures and organizes reality in its own manner, thereby determining the aspects of reality peculiar to that given language. Commenting on Trier, Steiner suggests that a language will at times add to the field of potential recognition even more information than is included in this field, i.e. that language structure may intrude elements which do not exist in reality. This is perfectly consonant with the latest theories of how the human brain interprets reality when confronted by conflicting phenomena. Psychologists have constructed various types of optical illusions to demonstrate this fact. Confronted by such constructs, we visualize triangles which aren't there, our minds convert straight lines into bowed ones, and we judge one of two lines of equal length to be longer or shorter than the other. Experiments with new-born kittens show that it is possible to eliminate the recognition of straight lines, so that kittens, so conditioned, will walk right off the edge of a table, being unable to discern the edge. Adults, who have been fitted with spectacles which reverse the field of vision, report that after several weeks their brains adapt so that things no longer look upside down. It takes several weeks to readapt to the real world once the device is removed. The brain appears to be almost infinitely malleable in recognizing the world in a variety of ways. People who have lost one lobe or another of their brain can, with much time and effort, relearn what we once thought to be processes restricted to one hemisphere. Sapir, in an article dated as early as 1929, says, "The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. "The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached" (emphasis added). Thus the Hopi Indian assessment of what is going on in the world about him, Hopi inferential reasoning, and the Hopi evaluation of long ago events are susceptible of delicately nuanced grammatical analysis far beyond the indicative, imperative, and (rapidly disappearing) subjunctive modes of English. Indeed, some who are familiar with both physics and Hopi have suggested that Hopi may be a language much more adapted to explaining astro-physics and wave particle phenomena than any of the languages which led to the development of these theories in the first place. Furthermore, it is said that the shaping influence of the observer on the phenomenon observed (the Heisenberg effect) and the statistics of indeterminacy, are inherent in Hopi as they are not in English, or Russian, or German. Back to the Renaissance Returning to our brief discussion of the Renaissance: students came from all over Europe to study at Bologna and Salamanca to take advantage of the early progress of these cities following the expulsion of the Moors and the reflowering of Western Civilization based on the knowledge of antiquity preserved during the centuries long Muslim occupation. As the Renaissance progressed, the subtleties of French, its vocabulary and grammar fortified by the inventive language of the troubadours and court ceremonial in response to the early success of the French monarchy in evolving the first successful nation state in Europe, contributed to making Paris succeed both Spain and Italy as the great center of learning. Oxford and Cambridge later came into their own as scientific thinking advanced further, with the pared-down and practical logic of English resulting from the necessarily simplified structure of a language which had had to survive successive reforgings by Brits, Latinized Celts, Anglo-Saxons and Frenchified Norsemen pushing to the fore the subject-verb-predicate thought processes. This eventuated in the Newtons, Harveys, Kelvins, and Watts' who developed the calculus, created modern physics, and, along the way, invented the spinning jenney, automatic shuttle, the steamship, and the locomotive. Science's next advance was in chemistry and physics where German with its grammatical loading of all available information into the forepart of its sentence structure, then adding a powerful, highly inflected verb to synthesize what happened after all the preceding phenomena have been analyzed and processed, soon overtook and surpassed English in the forefront of science. Students were soon trekking from all over the world to study in Dresden, Heidleberg, and Berlin. In short order, perhaps because of the residual tribal mysticism which remains in the German language, Science moved beyond cause and effect into realms of probability and uncertainty. As the number of students returning from study in Europe became numerous enough to staff its universities, melting-pot America with its rapidly evolving, dynamically syncretive version of English which was borrowing heavily from the languages of all its new immigrant stocks, emerged as the great center of scholarship and learning. While America has retained this lead for the past half century, it should not be overlooked that some of the greatest conceptual breakthroughs came from Swedes and Danes such as Niels Bohr whose mother tongue and thinking logic had been formed by the Scandinavian bards whose inventiveness in developing poetic language similes to make possible the great Eddas which entertained remote households during the long, dark, arctic winters, or during the extended sea voyages of those who had gone a-viking, enriched these languages with all sorts of extraordinary quasi-logical associations. Nor was Russian with it Pavlovs and Mendeleyevs absent from the scientific contributions of the Indo-European language group. It should be well noted, that contemporaneously, and at a presumably now appropriate stage of scientific evolution, the number of orientals -- Chinese and Japanese -- who have been winning Nobel recognition for such extraordinary concepts as negative matter, quarks, bubble universes, string dimensionality, and intergalactic wormholes, has been increasing notably. I would argue that this is because the oriental thought process is, at this stage of scientific development, better equipped to deal with ambiguity and uncertainty -- given the long and respectable position of yin and yang , with the attendant concept of opposition in all things and interpenetration of forces, which has made oriental philosophy a force in contemporary science. Hopi Indians may be next in line. The time of European thought logics, based as they are essentially on straightforward cause and effect, being or non-being, logic or absurdity, which were of such enormous value at earlier stages of understanding may have passed. And, if this is true, it is precisely because other language families may be more adapted to thinking in terms of the noumenal absurdities of Chaos Theory, Fractal Mathematics, etc. which contemporary science seems to be telling us underlie phenomenal reality. Effects of the Emergence of English as the World's Second Language It cannot be without interest to American diplomats at a time when we seem to have won the Cold War, that with less acclaim we have also won the language war. Twenty-five years ago President Charles DeGaulle of France launched a last ditch effort to preserve French as the language of commerce and diplomacy it had ruled for centuries, instructing French diplomats and government officials that English was no longer to be permitted in interchanges with foreigners and that no words of English derivation were henceforward to appear in any official French document. A brief quarter century later, two of every three world leaders communicates internationally in English. English is the second language of most Europeans and Latin Americans; and even France now appears to have given up its fight against the contamination of Franglais. English is the chief second language of India, the second largest nation in the world; indeed, English is the only language which Indians have in common. Most amazing, every tenth Chinaman in the country which comprises a quarter of the world's population seems to speak at least some English. The question naturally arises whether this will mean that the underlying thought processing logic of English will eventually override, and thus eliminate competing language logics? If so, what does this portend for the evolution of science as it comes up against ever more esoteric demands for new concepts? May we be arriving not only at the "End of History" but at the "End of Science"? The question is akin to the preoccupation of environmentalists about the possible destruction of potentially valuable future medical and scientific discoveries by reason of biological extinctions. One suspects that this will be less of a problem in the realm of language. Despite the PRC's continued emphasis on social order, even the most culturally conservative among the Chinese government no longer view it as necessary to sublimate scientific thought into "toy mode" -- both because they have learned that to survive in the modern world they cannot afford to let the possible social dangers of scientific progress outweigh its benefits; and, possibly because thinking about quarks and black holes appears to hold less current danger for society or the state than thought more directly aimed at social reform. Historically, the elites of all countries from ancient Rome (where Greek was the language of culture), to Norman England and Tsarist Russia (in each of which French was the language of Court and Society), have taken care to educate their children bilingually, considering this an asset facilitating rule, commerce, travel, and cultural enjoyment. Only in contemporary America, it seems, is bilingualism confined to the underclass. Is there any reason to suppose that with the spread of democracy and prosperity to broader sections of humanity, that the new quasi-elites in Africa, Asia, India, and Latin America will adopt any different attitude towards the benefits of bilingualism than the elites of history? As former Business Manager of a large international school in Beijing, I can assure readers that the well-to-do parents of children from at least forty-four non-English speaking countries are standing in line to enroll their children in this English-language school to give them what is widely understood to be one of the best endowments for a successful adult life -- a facility in spoken English. Nevertheless, virtually all of these children speak another mother tongue in the home. With the increased possibility of travel, desktop publication and FAX distribution for specialized markets (think what samizdat was able to do in the Soviet Union even using such primitive methods as non-word-processor-produced carbon copies and hand to hand distribution), and taking into account the expansion of music, the theater, and television programming to world-scale markets, any reasonably sized language group can expect sufficient access to the media to preserve itself, however universal second languages may become. Thus, one has confidence, contrary to the widely feared elimination of species which is taking place in the ecology, that the potentially valuable, variant processing logics of the hundreds of world languages which may someday make their own contribution to breakthroughs in the social or scientific spheres will be preserved. Further Considerations Regarding the Contributions of Alternative Forms of Language Logic Twenty-eight years ago in the process of writing a graduate school seminar paper1, I undertook a comparative study of the thinking of William James, Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, James Bryant Conant, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Sometime later re-reading the paper I was quite struck by my wisdom, wondering how I'd ever come up with such impressive findings (this happens not infrequently when one forgets that one's best work usually consists primarily of the accreted wisdom of great minds one has stitched together into a new and [sometimes] novel coherency). Indeed my seminar Professor thought it worthy of publication and so suggested. Regrettably, at the time I was so centered on a non-academic career to which I was eager to return (I was on leave from the Foreign Service at the time to complete my PhD), that I took no steps towards publication. In the meantime, the paper has disappeared. I wish it were available. But I recall its main thrust and will here repeat its argument sans attributions and footnotes. Russell/Whitehead/Conant/Teilhard (and Wittgenstein) all agree that whether or not all languages have deep-wiring that predisposes all humans without the most severe mental deficiency to language acquisition (as latterly argued by Noam Chomsky), the view of Humboldt and Trier that there is nothing to predispose different languages to assume the same processing logic to resolve probability and uncertainty, i.e. that one "merge and match" logic is unambiguously superior to another, is correct. Today, it seems accepted by all that many, if not most, languages have different logic patterns in processing their inputs from the phenomenal world. And, it seems, these different logics have, as asserted above, had differential importance and value at different stages of the evolution of history and science. What is now different it that we live today in an era of world-wide broadcasting of musical, theatrical, and news events -- as typified by the fact that people in over a hundred different countries around the globe were watching the development of the Gulf War on CNN. And teen-agers everywhere dance to the same Rock hits. Does this make it more or less likely that reasonably sized language groups can expect sufficient access to the media to preserve themselves, however universal second languages may become? 1 An extended version of this paper was in fact later submitted to FSI as the product of my research in the Mid-Career Course, receiving favorable comment by the Course Director. Desk Top Publishing and Micro-Marketing In attempting to answer this question, it is important to take into account that while both radio and television are, as noted, reaching a world stage, they are simultaneously becoming increasingly micro-market oriented. Hispanic television in the United States today constitutes a major network of its own. Black television broadcasting is rapidly catching up. And CNN (in English) is now a major factor in the distribution of world news. It is said that Saddam Hussein received most of his news about what was going on in United States thinking during the Gulf Crisis by watching CNN in his office. Desk top publishing has made possible the printing of virtually anyone's scribblings at a privately affordable price. And the FAX has led not only to distribution of unwanted quantities of advertising delivered directly to one's desk (where it must at least be scanned to separate it from other time-urgent documents); but during the Tiananmen events, made possible circulation in one of the most politically controlled and repressive nations on earth of provocative political instructions and exchanges, much of it generated abroad. Think what primitively hand-typed, carbon-copy-reproduced and hand-distributed samizdat accomplished in the pre-word processor/pre-FAX USSR. It is therefore argued that, unlike previous eras where one dominant tongue often replaced another by limiting access to schools, thus monopolizing public communication, even less dominant still-existing languages of today need not disappear without trace as so many thousands of languages of the past, being able to preserve themselves through desk-top publications.. One sees examples of this modern persistence of language differences in the Catalonian and Basque regions of Spain where, despite the most rigorous efforts of the Franco Regime, these languages held on -- even without their own press, radio, schools, or television. And today, as noted with regard to Black and Hispanic television in the United States, micro-marketed television will be able to contribute to preserving the spoken form of many, if not most, of the smaller language groups around the world so that those possessed of the thought logics of these languages will at least have the chance of contributing to future generations the rich diversity of their poetry, literature, and to contribute to scientific insights where their particular forms of processing logic might provide avenues of progress. On the negative side, while yet further substantiating this view, we are contemporaneously seeing the reemergence of linguistically based political movements in the Baltics, the Ukraine, and the Southern Republics of the Soviet Union; the language-based fragmentation of the Serbian and Croatian constituents of Yugoslavia. And the old political divisions based on language sundered Czechoslovakia. More on Language and the Career of Diplomacy I have often told my Economics students, "An economist will never work himself out of a job. Because of invention and entrepreneurial innovation there will constantly be new products and processes whose effects on the national and world economies must be analyzed and understood. There will constantly be readjustments as new products enter the market and the exit of buggy-whip industries which will result in periodic economic fluctuations which must be forecast and whose effects must be dealt with. And, because of tax erosion, national tax systems must be reevaluated and reordered every decade or so. So there will always be new projects to keep Economists busy." I think much the same can be said of diplomacy. Language differences will, as I believe and have argued above, not only continue, but because of the cheapness and availability of micro-marketing, and micro-broadcasting of news and cultural events, take on new strength in the modern world. It is therefore not only likely, but probable that cultural, social, and political differences will persist, presenting conflicts for resolution by infinite generations of future diplomats. I see no early millennium nor long-enduring Brave New Worlds. I remember as Deputy Director of INR/REC some twenty years ago supervising a demographic study which concluded that before the end of the century, Russians would be a minority in the Soviet Union. The study raised the question what the future would hold for such a USSR. But none of those contributing to the paper had the courage, or perhaps even the imagination, to forecast what has transpired. The Soviet Union, with as near monopolistic control of Force, Communications, Education, and Travel as any nation has ever known, lasted only seventy-years before linguistic, regional, and cultural diversities overthrew the State. I hope others enjoy diversity as much as I do, because it seems that difference is Nature's notion of how the universe should be ordered. Why it should be so, I do not know. Occam's Razor and the principle of conservation of energy would seem to argue for more simplicity and hence uniformity; but every leaf and every snowflake is designed and created to be unique. I am satisfied with things as they are. I find the greatest beauty in an Alpine meadow with every size, color, and shape of shrub and flower; and find no greater pleasure while traveling than to observe the racial, linguistic, geographical, cultural, and architectural diversities of the world. I've often thought how boring it would be to live in a perfectly planned world where everyone wore one suit of clothing (nothing disappeared faster in reformist Deng Xiao Ping China than Mao suits!), spoke one language, associated with friends of one skin color, or listened to one tune all of one's life. When God created the world he planted diverse trees, plants, and shrubs and introduced birds, animals, and "all manner of creeping things", and seeing the variety He had created, he pronounced his work "Good". I, too, am quite pleased with the diversity of the world and have decided that appreciation of variety is probably what impelled me to spend my adult life in the Foreign Service of the United States so I could enjoy to the fullest the diversity of this wonderful world.