Memes
by Joe Palmer
[ opinion - may 09 ]
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.
"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) addressed the question of how language and human thought are possible, and what the one has to do with the other. "He maintained that almost everything that is most important cannot be stated at all but only, at the very best, indicated by our use of language," according to Kimberley Cornish in The Jew of Linz, 1998, a fun book of conjecture about Wittgenstein's life and political effects, a set of guesses that leads into the Conspiracy Theory of modern history, with its Trilateral Commission, Bilderbergers, International Monetary Fund, British monarchy, Zionism, Freemasonry, New Agers, Sun Orders, and Illuminati leading us into temptation.
In Wittgenstein's day, when behaviorism was the ruling paradigm in psychology, because their minds were so set many thought that Ludwig meant that we think solely with words, the opposite of what he said. Yet still today, for many who have not thought the matter through to a reasonable conclusion, language is speech and speech is thought. Well, sure, but that's only the half of it.
The rationale goes like this: since thinking is not physical, we cannot measure it or describe it accurately, so we had better stick to what we can see and hear, and so restrict our descriptions to scientific, general laws concerning the physical world and its phenomena. Such reductionist thought leads to common and familiar generalizations that seem to be based on empirical, systematic, scientific thinking, even though they are mere impressions, for example, the concept of the meme.
According to Wikipedia, the term and concept of meme is from the 1976 book by Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. Though Dawkins defined the meme as "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation," memeticists vary in their definitions of meme. The lack of a consistent, rigorous definition of what precisely a meme is remains one of the principal criticisms leveled at memetics, the study of memes.
Memetics is the study of ideas and concepts viewed as "living" organisms, capable of reproduction and evolution in an "Ideosphere" (similar to the Biosphere) consisting of the collective of human minds. Like viruses and genes, memes reproduce by spreading to new hosts, who will spread them further (typical examples are jokes, catchphrases or political ideas). I must say I have never met a "memeticist," although Susan Blackmore will scare the pants off you with her science fiction talks about aliens from our own planet (technology memes, or temes, like toilet paper) taking over civilization.
Today's Luddites continue to raise moral and ethical arguments against the excesses of modern technology to the extent that our inventions and our technical systems have evolved to control us rather than to serve us and to the extent that such leviathans can threaten our essential humanity.
- Martin Ryder, in his terrific site - you will not be disappointed after you click on this link.
Did you hear the one about the duck that walked into a bar, and ordered a grape? "We don't have grapes here, so get out!" the bartender said. Next day the duck did the same thing. "Get out!" the bartender shouted. The third time the duck order a grape, "Get out!" the bartender yelled, "and if you come back again, I'll nail your bill to the bar." Next day the duck waddled into the bar, hopped up on a bar stool, and asked, "You got any nails?" "Nope," the bartender answered. "OK," the duck said, "I'll have a grape." No, no, I told it wrong. The duck said, "I'll have a Rusty Nail." The bartender served the duck. The duck drank his cocktail. The bartender said, "That'll be three dollars," and the duck said, "Put it on my bill."
After all that, I figure you need a break.
At present memetics is somewhat controversial. Partly this is due to misunderstandings about what it means, leading to claims that it excludes human free will, creativity and progress, and that it is bad science. This will likely not change in time, as the field matures, grows moribund, and dies. The field is afflicted with science-itis, a prevalent form of necrotizing fasciitis, a common mental infection that can destroy the soft tissues of the brain and form a firewall between the heart and mind.
Ludwig Wittgenstein incidentally was Adolph Hitler's schoolmate in the Linz Realschule (high school). He came from a rich family, and although the same age, 14, was put two years ahead of poor Hitler, which fact is an objective correlative of the causes of Nazism, whether it truly was or not. Wittgenstein talked about language being a picture of the world, brilliantly reducing his conclusions to the introspective principle that you should shut up when you are the only one to think you know what you are talking about.
The Tao reminds us that he who knows speaks not, probably because no one else can understand his take on the world because language gives us a distorted picture of the world, a pre-scientific screen for filtering experience and imagination to such an extent that nobody can agree on anything they have seen, much less on anything they have only heard or read about.
"I don't want to talk about it!" we may say because we do not want to relive the experience in memory, but that's not what Ludwig meant. He meant that philosophy is words, ordinary words, and more words full of hot air and empty of reference except to the imagination of the speaker. And, by the way, several of the Wittgenstein relatives, realizing this truth, committed suicide. It is said to be ironic that Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose family wealth coincided with that of the Rothschilds, went on to influence several notorious communist operatives of the Cambridge Spy Ring.
Let me add a thing or two: scientific linguists have always confronted the problems of meaning within and across languages by pretending the differences do not really exist, and so they have come up with some pretty poor ways of dealing with them, whether or not they call themselves memeticists, translators, English teachers, or missionaries. The only way to learn a man's language is to walk in his moccasins for years until you understand everything he hears. It may take a while. And you should never try to speak a foreign language until you don't have to try to speak it, until it comes to you by itself, which it will, if you wait.
Language teaching is a waste of time and money. Nobody has ever figured out how to do it quickly and efficiently because it cannot be done. There is no algorithm for predicting situations, that is, you never know what's going to happen or what you'll need in any language event or situation, much less in every situation. Sure, Berlitz can teach you how to say hello, and to ask how much that doggie in the window is, but having tourist French is not speaking French.
Every language, with its unique words, idioms, rhythms, and inflections, preserves specific ways of perceiving the world. There is a Papua New Guinea language that has no separate words for blue and green, but does have separate words for two shades of yellow that are virtually identical to outsiders, but critically different in that native culture. In the Thai language, if a human hair is not black, it is red. That is, the words for red hair (hair, color, red) mean not black hair. All real people have black hair in Thailand. Most ghosts, spirits, and foreigners have red hair to Thais. So what? Such examples of difference trivialize the reality that speakers of different languages live in different worlds.
Machine translation is often helpful, given the right software, but finding procedures to translate more than words alone is hard. One of the goals of scientific linguistics has been to find a theory that provides keys to translation, such as controlling the type of discourse. The problem is that we can translate only words, but what they mean together is bound up in the history and culture of the other language and the personality of the speaker. Sure, a machine can translate the words, and a clever editor can put them together so that they make sense, but their full meaning will always remain inaccessible to those who do not know how to live in the other language with the speaker or writer.
Tagmemics, for example, is a linguistic theory developed by Kenneth Pike in his book Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior, 3 vol. (1954-1960), designed to assist linguists to extract coherent descriptions out of field work notes. It is particularly associated with the Summer Institute of Linguistics, an association of missionary linguists devoted largely to Bible translations, of which Pike was one of the earliest members. The structural theory works to provide methods for reducing languages to writing, a necessary step in preserving a language before translating texts into it.
A major problem with Bible translation is that no one is ever able to say how good or bad the translation is because no one is ever fully bilingual in both the original language and the exotic language. So only God knows what those poor cannibals think about the Bible stories translated into their languages. Maybe they think the Roman soldiers should have had Jesus for supper on Friday.
Analysts heve usually started their work with the most accessible part of a strange language, its sounds. Phonetics is the study of physical speech sounds. Phonemics is the study of how sounds fit together in a langauge. Phoneticians use a precise special alphabet, the International Phonetics Association (IPA) alphabet, in which each human speech sound has a representative letter or sign. For example, the word seat is transcribed [sit], but not sit [sIt]. Spanish does not make a meaningful distinction between the similar sounds as in this pair of words - seat and sit. English does. So, a Spaniard will say "Seat down," meaning "Sit down." Every closed syllable (CVC) consonant + vowel + consonant ending in [-it] (eet) may have a contrasting syllable in another word ending in [-It]. Thus, sheet/shit, feet/fit, feat/fit, beat/bit, beet/bit, peat/pit, DEET\dit, teeter/titter, teat/tit, meet/mitt,neat/nit, seat/sit, cheat/chitÖor with other English vowels, as in sate, set, sat, suit, soot, sight, etc, or beet, bit, bait, bet bat, boot, bought, Bert, biteÖContrasting sounds, making a difference in meaning, are called "phonemes."
Sometimes the [i] sound is longer, as in "bead" [bi:d], than it is as in "beat" [bit], because it precedes a voiced consonant. Such varieties of a phoneme are called "allophones." The term allophone is taken to mean speakers of all other languages than French or English in Canada, by the booboisie.
"My nane [nen] JosÈ Jiminez"* occurs because there is no m-final syllable in Spanish after /e/. [-n] is substituted because the sound is similar to [-m].
Wouldn't it be nice if the rest of a language were as simple as phonology? Unfortunately, the system does apply to other levels of language analysis to a very minor extent. For example, we naturally use a "slot-and-filler" syntactic device when talking. Obviously, types of utterance recur in a language, and substitution classes of words are part of a speaker's repertoire. For example, "Kiss my elbow!" > "Kiss my ____."
Tagmemics tries to make the kind of distinction made between sound and phoneme in phonology, which is the study of speech sounds as communication, also at gramatical and semantic levels of linguistic analysis. For instance, contextually conditioned synonyms are considered different instances of a single tagmeme (unit of meaning), just as sounds which are (in a given language) contextually conditioned allophones of a single phoneme. Just because boy and girl have similar syntactic uses (functions), to some extent the words share meaning. Well, any kid can tell you that. A boy is more like a girl than he is like a squirrel except when he is climbing trees.
The emic and etic distinction can also be applied in other social sciences, they say, but with no more profit than common sense gives. So what is the emic/etic distinction? Etic things are physical, and emic things are mental. For example. the physical noises that Placido Domingo makes when he speaks English I can hear mostly as physical noise because his accent is so thick. He thinks he is speaking English and in some sense he is speaking English, but with Spanish sounds (or phonology). When Pete Seeger sings in Spanish, he sings Spanish with his native English phonology, so even I, a native speaker of English, can tell that he cannot make Spanish sounds: "Yoe, soy oon ammbehray sinseehrow!" A foreign accent is speaking a language with the sound system (phonology) of another.
However, if every dog were an allodog of the dogeme,our knowledge of zoology would not be improved. How does a dog know another dog is a dog? How does a huge great Dane recognize that a tiny Chihuahua is a dog? How do we? Is a fox a dog? Is a hyena a dog?
It's the old chicken, chick, hen, rooster, pullet, biddy, cock, capon, fowl, fryer, layer, broiler problem. We have several terms to choose from when we know the language, and when we do speak, we often speak nonsense, or people misunderestimate us.
A friend's little nephew was visiting us in Quebec from his home in Switzerland. Le petit Julien, precocious and cute as a bee, had never before been away from home. We took him sightseeing in the mountains.
"Look, Julien. Regardes les vaches!" A large dairy herd of black and white Holstein cows was grazing in a hillside pasture.
"Sont pas de vaches," Julien said. "Les vaches sont brunes!"
Old Mill E Snickerdoodle is considered by many as one of the best Brown Swiss to ever walk across the show ring. She was undefeated from her first show in 2003 up until the World Dairy Expo in 2007.
Little Julien had not yet learned the fact that black and white cows and brown cows are all cows in French. Pied cows, all motley, having sections or patches colored differently and brightly were for the first time in his life identified as belonging to that class of animal we call cows.
Pied Beauty, by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89)
GLORY be to God for dappled things -
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced - fold, fallow, and plough;
And àll tràdes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
The cow family, Bovidae, the bovids, consists of antelopes, cattle, gazelles, goats, sheep, and their relatives, yet we speak of a bull moose and a cow moose, confusing the categories on purpose. A bull moose is not a bull as far as a bull is a male cow, because a moose is not a cow. It is a deer. Well then, how about a doe moose, a buck moose? No?
A bull is a cow the way a rooster is a chicken.
Beef is from French, and cow from German. Baby beef is veal when we eat it. A virgin cow is a heifer. Castrated beeves are steers. Do steers grow up to become brawny oxen? The ones we don't eat do.
Chickens are poultry, swine are pork, and sheep are mutton.
The bovids, the cow family, includes such diverse forms as gazelles, African antelope, buffalo, mountain goats, and domesticated species such as cattle, sheep, and goats. The family includes 137 species in 45 genera, and its members range through Africa, much of Europe, Asia, and North America. In Africa, however, modern bovids are most diverse by far. To use the terminology of phonology, we can say that each sort of cow-like creature is an allobove of the boveme. By using such terminology, we have added nothing to knowledge or efficiency. Using pseudo-scientific procedures and terminology yields mythology, the basis of philosophy.
Classification of things is language specific, and classes may differ from language to language, leading to cultural misunderstanding.
Most speakers do not know about all the kinds of animals that can be spoken about. For example, we speak of gazelle and antelope. What's the difference? Big game hunters know, but most of us do not have the occasion to make the distinction between antelope and gazelle. [Interestingly, the words antelope and gazelle are plural in the preceding sentence. This talking about language, called "metalanguage," is hard for most people to get used to, isn't it?] A gazelle is a kind of antelope.
Linguistic, common-sense classification is the basis for zoological classification, but the two ways do not always coincide. Let's try elephants. We refer to them as cows and bulls. Are they of the cow family of animals? Elephant milk, 2% butterfat, homogenized? I think not. Elephant milk is swell, they say, but hard to get.
My teacher, Professor Kenneth Pike (1912-2000) of the University of Michigan, had it all backwards, I thought. He held to the principle that you do not really think anything unless you can say it. Until you have the words for your thought, it is only partially formed. Ideas are vague until the words for them come. Just think: a thesaurus can often help you find the right words, quickly clarifying your thoughts. To this way of thinking, thoughts do not exist until the right words are there. The mot juste, the precise word, is exactly that, and all words have different meanings, more or less. Thought and reason independent of language are impossible, according to Pike. In other words, our world is made up of words.
Where did Pike get such an idea? He thought that God's creation is first of all linguistic, inherently linguistic, made up of words, words, words, as Hamlet said. We know for a fact that philosophy is made from words, and religion is ritual made from words. Are thoughts made from words too? Partly, yes, they are. Do philosophical problems arise from linguistic confusion? Partly, yes they do.
In the beginning the Word already existed. The Word was with God, and the Word was God. John 1:1 GWT [God's Word Translation]
Maybe that's where he got the idea, from the Gospel of John. Professor Pike was a missionary who trained missionaries to reduce languages to writing at the Summer Institute of Linguistics. He specialized in the dialects of Misteco, a major language in Mexico. In fact, his wife Evelyn called him "the mistaken man." Nevertheless, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize fifteen times, so somebody thought he was doing something right. He never won the Nobel.
The word is outside of you before it is in you. You get the words you speak from other people. Those who put original twists on words are called poets, comedians, philosophers, and politicians. They work with common stuff, the property of all who use it, a language, but the world of words, language, has to stand for ideas, concepts, hunches, abstractions, categories, views, plans, designs, schemes, theories, insights, beliefs, understandings, inspirations, brainstorms, thoughts, brainchildren, impressions, conceptions, images, hypotheses, notions, conceptualizations, suppositions, propositions, assumptions, conjectures, speculations, guesses, theses, inferences, deductions, shots in the dark, and so on. Language is not mental telepathy; it is mental pathology. And sick minds are contagious.
Just because you live inside a body doesn't mean you are best capable of doctoring it. Just because you speak a language does not mean you know more about it than just the language itself. Scientists had ought to stick to superstring theory, the Higgs boson, and black holes, things we know something about.
Walt Whitman (1819-1892), from Leaves of Grass
When I heard the learn'd astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.
Memories are made of memes, maybe.
Funes the Memorious had memes in his mouth.
C'est la m'me chose, ou non.
Memento: souvenir
Memoir: Latin memoria
Memento mori
Member: akin to Gothic mimz flesh, thus membrane, limb, penis, element of a set or class
