The Social Darwinist and the Priests

I was going through my stack of podcasts today and I decided to listen to a discussion between the linguist John McWhorter and the linguist Ben Zimmer, and at one point McWhorter addresses the issue of linguistic diversity, and wonders aloud if perhaps we wouldn't be better off with one world language, though more as an intellectual thought experiment than in any seriousness. His arguments are laid out in this article The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English. McWhorter recounts how the piece resulted in his cameo appearance as one of history's greatest monsters in a book by a linguist who is fighting language extinction. You can listen to Zimmer and McWhorter's exchange on the topic yourself: Over the past two months there have been many responses to my original post "Linguistic diversity = poverty". I need to reiterate something on the record: