An octogenarian's manifesto for the language of youth

The 82-year-old philosopher and historian of science Michel Serres complained several years ago: "There are more English words on the walls in Paris than there were German ones during the Occupation."

Mr Serres is one of the pithiest critics of the damage done to French culture by the rise of English as a lingua franca. The fate of his latest book, Petite Poucette (Thumbelina), is evidence that the French indeed have something to complain about.

Mr Serres is a member of the Academie francaise, which may still be the most prestigious cultural body in the west. He is a professor at Stanford University. Petite Poucette came out last year and has been on the bestseller list since, selling more than 100,000 copies. People laugh over it and are moved by it. "Here is the book that will reconcile you to the age you live in," wrote the French business newspaper Les Echos. The book is surprising in many ways. One of these is that almost no one in the English-speaking world has ever heard of it.

"Thumbelina" is the affectionate nickname Mr Serres gives to people of the generation that, thanks to mobile phones, types with its thumbs. Between him and those born since the 1970s lies a civilisational rupture. Young people walk among the living ruins of a culture that makes little sense to them.

Lecture courses, libraries, department stores, national anthems - so many institutions have become obsolete without anybody seeming to realise it. How can marriage remain the same when longer life expectancy means plighting one's troth for 65 years rather than five or 10? Language itself is turned upside-down. Neologisms are emerging so fast that the French language Mr Serres grew up speaking will soon sound as antiquated and literary as that of the 12th century does to him.

Mr Serres likens all these old institutions to distant constellations from which light is still reaching us, but which actually burnt out long ago. "Army, nation, church, people, class, proletariat, family, market . . . These are abstractions, flying overhead like so many cardboard effigies."

A lot of old people talk in this vein. What is unusual about Mr Serres is that he thinks this texting, tweeting, Instagramming world is not stupid. In fact, it is better than the one it is replacing. He considers the information revolution as consequential as the invention of writing (which brought us scriptural religion) and the Gutenberg press (which liberated us from memorisation and brought us Protestantism).

Mr Serres has explained in interviews that while he can live with this technology, Thumbelina lives in it. Technology structures all her activities the way clocks did those of her forebears. She probably won't think the way everyone from Plato Geoffrey Chaucer to Winston Churchill used to. She won't need abstraction as much because information moves so quickly.

Information moves so rapidly that enumeration now does the work that abstraction once did. Consider looking for a house in a small city you are moving to. You don't have to describe it to some agent. You can scroll and bookmark until you find the one that sings to you.

Of course, considering the mess algorithms made of the world economy half a decade ago, it would be wise to bring a bit of scepticism to certain views of Mr Serres. But it is just at this point that he does something that very few of his generation have done. He plants his flag in the camp of the young. A new kind of democracy is going to grow out of the "democracy of knowledge" that younger people swim in. While he won't predict what it will look like, it can hardly be worse than the politics that brought slaughter on the battlefield in the centuries leading up to second world war.

Mr Serres is a delightful thinker, and a disruptive one. In his 2010 book Malfeasance: Appropriation Through Pollution? he asked whether our inveterate polluting is not, at some level, a way of claiming resources, rather like spitting in a bowl of soup to make it yours. He has no equivalent in English.

So where are his English readers? Perhaps the blunders the French made on the way from Minitel to the information economy have led anglophone publishers to tune France out when it comes to technology. That would be a sign of shallowness. The French may not be the best coders. But from Jacques Ellul and Michel Foucault to Gilles Lipovetsky, they have been the best describers of technological alienation.

The success of Petite Poucette in the French-speaking world demonstrates that Mr Serres has discovered a new approach to the problems of a wired civilisation. Its failure to catch on in that civilisation's English-speaking core shows that there is less consensus about what those problems are than Thumbelina might assume.

The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard

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