Scientists estimate that 95% of all species that have ever lived are now extinct. It has been argued that species are dying out at a rate 1,000 to 10,000 times faster than the normal. A similar catastrophe is happening in our midst. Languages are dying away. Ethnologue currently lists 6,809 languages, 95% of which have fewer than one million speakers. Another study adds that of all the world’s languages, some 5,000 have less than 100,000 speakers, 3,000 less than 10,000 speakers, 1,500 less than 1,000 speakers, and 500 less than 100 speakers.

Global capitalism requires unencumbered translation and thus fosters the increasing spread of English and other “mega-languages” whereby traditional languages and knowledge systems are abandoned, either willingly as a means of survival or as a result of violent coercion. The diversity of life in all its manifestations—biological, cultural, and linguistic— which are interrelated within a complex socio-ecological adaptive system is steadily decreasing and dying out. An acceleration of entropy—not just because it is a process of combustion and of the dissipation of energy, but because industrial standardization seems today to lead to the destruction of life as the burgeoning and proliferation of differences. Biodiversity, cultural diversity, and the singularity of psychic individuations as well as collective individuations are disappearing. The fact that no living being shares a world is because the earth and earthlings refuse us; earth ethics, then, is an ethics of limits, it is an ethics of remainder, what cannot be assimilated. The ethics of limits is always broken by the powerful and the mighty. Global capitalism is not only globalization of capitalism but globalization of a way of life and way of speaking. As economics becomes the master metaphor of understanding and even discourse, there is invasion of culture and language.

This process might also be called Westernization, or simply advancement and progress; it might, however, be more accurately termed the diffusion of a world culture—a world culture based on advanced technology and the spirit of science, on a rational view of life, a secular approach to social relations. At an ever accelerating rate, the direction and the volume of cross-cultural influences have become nearly a uniform pattern of the Western industrial world imposing its practices, standards, techniques, and values upon the non-Western world.

The West has something to teach India. The first is to lead a life of reasoned humanity. Man is universal notion and ideal. It is this Indian situation that is challenged by a humanism which India can find in its roots. Accepting humans as a universal ideal and human equality and human emancipation as the ideal development is of paramount importance. This inevitably calls for deconstruction of our cultural patterns. This definitely is not acceptance of foreign culture or the imposition of language alien to us and different from the vernacular. What is one’s own must be learned as well as what is foreign. Where the pleasure of dwelling in the other’s language is balanced by the pleasure of receiving the foreign word at home, in one’s own welcoming house.

The resistance of ‘traditional’ cultures to modern values and practices could be understood as an attempt to retain control over their own actions and their own environments; from this angle, whatever ‘development’ or social change takes place, will occur as the result of resistance, protest, and challenges from below, rather than from an imposition from above. Gandhi’s movement against the tradition of untouchability was the other side of his struggle against modern imperialism. Gandhi’s frame was traditional, but he was willing to criticize some traditions. He was even willing to include in his frame elements of modernity as critical vectors.

Paul Ricoeur wrote in History and Truth: “In order to get on to the road toward modernization, is it necessary to jettison the old cultural past which has been the raison d’etre of a nation? … Whence the paradox: on the one hand, it has to root itself in the soil of its past, forge a national spirit, and unfurl this spiritual and cultural revindication before the colonialist’s personality. But in order to take part in modern civilization, it is necessary at the same time to take part in scientific, technical, and political rationality, something which very often requires the pure and simple abandon of a whole cultural past. It is a fact every culture cannot sustain and absorb the shock of modern civilization. There is the paradox: how to become modern and to return to sources; how to revive an old, dormant civilization and take part in universal civilization.”