Logos, Blogos

Over on Adventures in Irony/Bloggery I recently threw a temper tantrum that vented a long boiling pet peeve regarding an intellectual analysis of some social phenomenon or other. It may not surprise any of you that I have many, many, such pet peeves, and there are many more temper tantrums within me that I can throw.

Let's do the big one. The Mother of all intellectual analyses of all social phenomena or other. Let's throw a temper tantrum over the concept of "culture"!

My first encounter with culture, as an intellectual analysis, was in a sociology class I mistakingly took at the University of Washington. I was foolish enough to think that sociology was an "logy," therefore something you could talk about, as "logy" comes from "logos" meaning words, or talk. So when the professor said that by definition culture consisted of social institutions or artifacts that are passed from one generation to the next, I naturally asked what were the antecedents of this definition. Why was this definition chosen and not another? I was told "That's the definition we're using in this course. If you have a problem with it maybe you shouldn't be here."

At the time, I thought I was just facing a particularly stupid or surly professor. I now realize that all discussions of culture tend to end similarly because there is no such thing.

There is nothing to talk about. This fact concerning culture can not be admitted by sociologists and anthropologists who teach courses on it.

The closest sociologists and anthropologists seem able to come to acknowledging that culture doesn't exist is in courses entirely devoted to the definition of it. Such courses seem to be very popular these days, and I take this as a positive sign.

However, a really sharp thinker might figure out that if it takes an entire quarter or term to lay out all the popular definitions of culture down through the past 15 or so decades and discuss them each briefly and talk about which ones might be most suitable for basing a science of humankind and collective humankind behavior, then maybe, just maybe, this is a thing that doesn't exist at all, except as a pretty word in search of a neat definition.

The word "intelligence" comes from the idea that smart people discern well. Before discerning something, there ought to be something to discern. I call it looking for Nature's cleavage. If you see cleavage, there is something to point to. There is that which lies to the right of the cleavage and there is that which lies to the left of the cleavage.

But if there is no cleavage, then there is nothing to discern, and "intelligence" consists in moving on. [Picture: Science!]