What We Can Know

by Ian McEwan

We discuss with our students the causes of this constancy in the language. There are various theories as to why we are at a virtual standstill. The department prefers the view that the past, in print and on the internet, has such accumulated weight that it holds our utterances steady, even as it comes close to crushing us. What has happened in English is also observed in Arabic and Chinese. That the past teaches us how to speak and write is the emphatic version of this view. In English, approximately 30,000 classics of literature, television and film press in on us, with more to be rediscovered. Vastly more numerous are the barely lesser works. In literature and the performing arts, the modes of transmission have changed, but most works are in the business of expressing or investigating the human lot, and these are just the fictional domain. There are even more classics of documentary, history, nature and science writing, biography, politics, anthropology, on and on, a bottomless well of treasures. Then all the highly informative trash, as well as diplomatic traffic, legislation, trade agreements, pornography, legal business, instruction manuals, industrial regulations and, beyond those, billions if not trillions of ordinary everyday digital personal exchanges, of fads and viral wonders, scandals and abuses and the torrent of each day’s news. It is hard now to regret that artificial intelligence did not add substantially to the pile before man-made disasters slowed its pro...