Saturday 2 June 2018

alwato

Via one of the usual suspects, we find ourselves acquainted with the life’s work of nineteenth century American abolitionist and futurist Stephen Pearl Andrews, an early advocate for a living-wage who proposed that workers receive man-hour credits in exchange for their labour—based on difficulty or repugnance of their job—rather than a salary based on how much the employer thought he could exploit the employee—with his outline and synopsis of Universology and Alwato (1871).
Similar to the idea of consilience popularised by biologist and educator E. O. Wilson, Universology’s aim was the revelation of the unity of all scientific disciplines and how everything knowable emanating from an unbroken chain of events, traceable back to the beginning of time. In as much as Andrews was a champion for workers’ rights, he was also an anarchist and rejected the interference of the church and state in human affair and established a short-lived utopian colony in New York City called the Unity Home, regulated by the idea of the Pantarchy—as opposed to the patriarchy, being one the first Americans exposed to the writings of Karl Marx whilst regrouping in England having been chased out of Texas for his anti-slavery sympathies. Though Andrews’ fundamental ideas many have been repackaged and resold with new distribution rights in various different context, it seems no one appreciated much the philosophic language Andrews found necessary to construct to disburden words the weight of past associations and etymology, called Alwato, Universal Speech—not that Interlingua, Esperanto and others didn’t have the formation of an ideal society as their raison d’รชtre, it’s just who ever heard of such a language. Learn more by visiting the links up top.