Well. I did say tomorrowish.

Due mostly to other projects that I’ve been devoting my time to, an ample amount of backlogged e-mail, and Internal Revenue’s excellent check-losing services, the posts around here have been flowing like molasses. This will change very shortly–specifically, this weekend. Tomorrow will bring a much-delayed post of some photos from the March, along with some discussion on abortion rights, the courts, and democracy that has been sitting on the To Do list for a couple of weeks now. Also in the works: some comments on the MovableType licensing fiasco and why this site will not be using MT for much longer; information on one of the projects that has been taking up much of my time–Southern Girls Convention 2004; and some thoughts on the latest version of Opera.

Some more may be forthcoming tonight. If not tonight, tomorrow. Stay tuned!

–The Management

For those who might be concerned, I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth; I’ve just been occupied with getting back from a visit to Auburn, cleaning house after bringing a load of my things up, and working on the website for Southern Girls Convention 2004 (more on that soon!). Photos and more from the March should be coming up soon (as in, tomorrowish). Talk to you again soon!

This post is not the replication of a meme; it cannot be, because there’s no such thing as a meme. That deserves a longer argument than I’ll give it here–and it probably will get one in this space sometime in the near future–but for now the short version will have to do. The essential point is this: to give a memetic account of something you are supposed to give an account of it in terms of the replication of the memes that are most fit. Ideas (or, mutatis mutandis, slogans, habits, etc.) spread because some people have reasons to spread them, and other people have reasons to accept them. Understanding that is entirely a matter of understanding facts about people and their reasons: thus, understanding logic, rhetoric, psychology–phenomena such as giving evidence, drawing conclusions, weighing alternatives, informing, deceiving, manipulating, elucidating, misdirecting, revealing, and all the other things that people do when they talk with one another. But if memetic explanations are supposed to do anything special at all–instead of just restating the content of a logical or rhetorical (or whatever) explanation using cutesy neologisms–then it would have to give some characterization of the spread of an idea independently of these sorts of facts about their hosts. That there can be no such independent characterization puts memetic explanations in a double-bind: they must either be false or completely vacuous. (This double-bind may help explain why memetics talk rarely amounts to more than elementary folk psychology concealed under cutesy pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo: smuggling in folk psychology keeps the account from being revealed as plain nonsense; the specialized argot conceals the fact that the explanation is entirely parasitic on understanding some other field.) What meme-talk amounts to, then, is nothing more than a conceptual misdirection; we are told we are finding out something about how ideas spread, but what the explanation points out can’t be the (logical, rhetorical, psychological, …) facts that actually explain why people spread the idea. At best, it will be empty memetic terminology that stands in for whatever the real explanation happens to be. Because it is a conceptual misdirection, meme-talk is also pernicious; by directing attention away from the reasons that people have to accept or reject an idea, to spread it or to combat it, it attempts to talk about human actions and ideas in a literally dehumanized way. And we have more than enough of that already, thank you very much.

With that preface out of the way, let’s turn to the idea itself. (In the spirit of operating within the space of reasons, I might mention that it’s an idea I’m spreading because it’s a fun way to let people know something about what you’re reading; it can sometimes provoke interesting discussions about books; and because it gives me a chance to rant about why I don’t like the word meme.)

(the idea comes from everyone and their grandmother)

Here’s what you do:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

From: Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick

(Nozick is discussing the Weberian conception of the State in terms of a monopoly on the use of force in a territorial area)

Nor need everyone grant the legitimacy of the state’s claim to such monopoly [for it to count as a state], either because as pacifists they think no one has the right to use force, or because as revolutionaries they believe that a given state lacks this right, or because they believe they are entitled to join in and help out no matter what the state says.

You’re lucky, by the way, that Nozick was a couple inches closer to my hand than the other book on my couch: Modal Thinking by Alan R. White, which is an excellent book with many good passages–none of which happen to be on page 23. I checked, and what you would have gotten by the rules of the exercise is a disquisition on the ordinary language uses and implicature of could have and how it can appear in places other than counterfactual conditionals.

Welcome Pandagon readers!

Philosophers have a bad reputation when it comes to concern for empirical data. Nevertheless, I’ve decided to try out a bit of an experiment with BlogAds (after an abortive experiment with Google AdWords; I should hope that Pandagon doesn’t mind a bit of advocating against from time to time). Since I’ve enjoyed Pandagon in the past, and it is (unlike many other excellent weblogs) fairly inexpensive to advertise there, I figured I would try placing an ad there and seeing what happens. The ad went up sometime this morning and should be up for two weeks (at the low, low price of US$35). I’ll let you know once the results start coming in.

In the meantime, if you’re new to the weblog the best thing to do is just to read it; there is a bit of a blurb about the site and about me, and about the general line of my politics but most of the topics that concern me from day to day are worked out in the course of these posts. Welcome, and enjoy!

I’ve often criticized sociobiology in the past; in part because I regard it as a pseudoscientific screen for reactionary politics, and in part because I regard some of its key goals as conceptually incoherent, and as depending onthe deadly combination of a crude form of determinism and a crude form of scientistic positivism in its underlying motives, and in the typical content of the explanations that issue from sociobiological accounts.

Welcome to my neighborhood.

Indeed, I’d intended to write another post tonight ragging on sociobiology–this time, in the context of a laughable flight of fancy entitled Adam’s Curse, which I discovered through ms.musings. But I’m going to shelve that for a little while–because, while I’m certainly not entirely convinced, I’m beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, the sociobiologists are onto something. Empirical evidence has led me to wonder whether it is a productive programme after all: specifically, there seem to be an excessively high number of people in my neighborhood who sound just like howling baboons on a nature documentary.

God I hate Friday nights in a college town.