These
> > were the people who manipulated such structures as religion
> for their
> > own ends. One of the reasons we have developed dialect is
> to minimise
> > their influence. (This was new to me).
Diversity has immunological benefits. Monocultures are susceptible to
global takeover.
Rather as sexual difference and selection facilitates the admixture of
immunities, poets straddle dialects or interlope between them. Their
concern is not exclusively with the language of their own tribe. The
poet's idiolect ("voice", distinctive although not private language)
is an admixture of dialects (Geoffrey Hill's formula: voicing is
hearing, re-voicing).
Religion is not itself a virus, but because it creates cohesive
larger-scale social structures it is susceptible to "viral" contagion,
the subversion of symbolic power by agents whose sole purpose is to
spam their immediate environment with copies of themselves (Neal
Stephenson's phrase, from the opening page of _Cryptonomicon_). Blank
looks all round at the Christian Union.
Dominic
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