This was the goal of a man named L.L. Zamenhof. It was also part of his rationale for constructing the language which came to be called Esperanto.
Zamenhof’s creation occurred out of it’s maker’s belief it could help achieve world peace. It was his belief that the gap between religions could be closed with the use of philosophy.* So from this he created his language.
That belief, however well-intended, was erroneous for a few reasons.
For one, mutual understanding might be possible, but it is unlikely to be on positive terms. It seems more likely to come on the basis of events which might best be compared in history to the Bay of Pigs (and ensuing unpleasantries).
By looking at the Bay of Pigs as a case study, you see the starting point for an escalating domino effect which, for all intensive purposes, left the world in fear of self-destruction. What could be more grounding and mutual than a fear for one’s life? To have a shared fear, especially one so quickly established and far-reaching, would seemingly be the verge of peace. This works against Zamenhof’s claim in that logic says mutual understanding need be accomplished in the short-term, such as escalating events reaching a climax, rather than in the long-term, as in group and individual assimilation.
This can be supported within the same historical context in a couple of ways.
The first being the difficulty with which individuals, and large institutions specifically, have collaborating. Despite the fact they largely or entirely share a method for communication and can’t accomplish this even on a more intimate level. It is no simple trick to get people to have parallel enough ideals to connect a means to an end.
Perhaps to our detriment as much as our benefit is the phenomenon known as Groupthink. As evident from the Bay of Pigs, even when an ideal is agreed upon, it’s execution can be hindered by the effort it takes to keep the fabric woven tightly. Anything from communication to judgement can be sacrificed as a result.
So an ensuing question could be, ” Even with the sharing of a fundamental sentiment worldwide, why were the circumstances not right in the example of the Bay of Pigs?”
A logical explanation could be related to the meaning of mutual understanding, and the fact that it in all likelihood cannot be had without cultural understanding. In itself a difficult thing to define, cultural understanding is a means of gauging both what is similar and different in a culture not our own. What is similar we can embrace, while what is different can push us away.
Furthermore, from spending time overseas I can only gather cultural understanding can only be achieved on an intellectual, and therefore individual basis. For the terms that an individual has to reach for the understanding of even one culture pave an arduous road. And an open-minded one at that. To be able to do so the necessary tens or hundreds of times (while perhaps significantly easier after the first experience) might well be an inconceivable amount of learning.
So Zamenhof’s language, it seemed, might have been an attempt to circumvent such learning. For in nothing short of telepathy could we fully learn about cultures in the way we truly need to.
Complicating the problematic points attaining mutual understand brings is the nature of the desired result, world peace.
Peace, by nature, is only ever temporary. Bypassing the fact that peace is simply an absence of war, and thus without war could not exist, we must consider the prevailing concepts of peace. For starters, in much of pop culture it has a stigma of being only slightly more idealistic than communism. That is, in those cultures that choose to comprehend the idea.
For certain, inherent in the concept of peace are many other wishes, including wishing for people to have no reason to go to war. There are clear examples in history in which reasons for doing so have been virtuous. Take the instance of a genocidal Hitleresque leader coming into power. Is it worth world peace to let one man, or one regime, ravish a nation? And wouldn’t the necessary denial tarnish even the best images of peace? We should be so lucky as for these to be more than just rhetorical questions.
I mean for the reader to conclude that it would, in essence, take people having no reason to wage war to bring world peace. Even virtuous reasons must be speculated about. In this regard, world peace would seem to call for the benevolence of all mankind. Something no language can bestow.
Only to hurdle the fact the majority of malevolence is largely voluntary (personal gain, revenge, etc.), it would be impossible to wholly counteract mental illnesses which can bring about insanity and delusions, among other things, that lead to rash and harsh actions. It would be further impossible to negate the effects of them, given the x-factor of charisma in a leader-follower relationship (e.g. Hitler).
In conclusion, Zamenhof’s attempt at mutual understanding and/or world peace was a clever one. For the desired effect, it was probably even worthwhile. Peace is a hefty catch. But when you quantify the goal and contemplate the terms needed to achieve it, we are just as likely to succeed if we hope for love to win over everything. Or perhaps, even feeding everyone, everywhere daily doses of Aldous Huxley’s famed Soma**.
The Stranger's Window 