Islands of Meaning

From Avram Grumer, Internet commenting hero, a little-noticed poem that deserves to be recorded for posterity's sake:

I dreamed I saw Ken Lay last night,  Alive as you and me.  Says I "But Ken, you're six years dead"  "I never died" said he,  "I never died" said he. 

"In Colorado, Ken," says I,  Him standing by my bed,  "A coronary took you out."  Says Ken, "But I ain't dead,"  Says Ken, "But I ain't dead." 

And standing there as big as life,  His face so cool and calm,   Says Ken "What they can never kill  Went on to grease some palms,  Went on to grease some palms." 

On human cognition and its relationship to its environment:

“Bergson (1911: 172f), in his attempt to formulate the nature of intelligence in contrast to instinct, gives the example of Ammophila hirsuta, a wasp that preys on a on a Grey Worm caterpillar. Like many wasps, it stings its prey to paralyze but not kill it to provide its larvae with food. The Grey Worm has nine different nere ganglia in its body; Ammophila unerringly hits each on in turn as if it could see through the skin of the caterpillar and understand its nervous system. It can do neither, which makes this skill the object of wonder, but is it any the less wondrous that we can divide people and programs up into friends and enemies, those to be voted for and those to be voted against, with a similarly cursory overview? The actions of the wasp clearly come from its perceptions of the outside of the larvae, but it has (as Bergson says) a sensorimotor system that has coevolved with the nervous system of the worm. So too, we have an intelligence that has codeveloped with its social environment, allowing for insightful behavior. Just as the wasp can correctly orient to superficial aspects of the worm’s morphology and somehow trace these lines below the surface to effectively reach a point she cannot directly see, so we may be able, by seizing on perceivable aspects of social life, to orient ourselves correctly to problems we cannot explain.”

John Levi Martin, "Life's a Beach but You're an Ant." Poetics (2010).

"In a justly famous piece, Miller (1956) proposed that we see a common ceiling to our capacity for certain types of cognitive tasks: he argued that different streams of research all pointed to the conclusion that we could only hold around seven things in mind at a time for example, telephone numbers that have not been committed to long-term memory), or make seven reliable distinctions (we have a sensory channel capacity of around 2.5 bits) and so on. [...] More recent research does not confirm Miller’s view—it was optimistic, and most studies find that we lose the capacity to keep more than four things in mind (Cowan, 2000)."

From "Universities Seeking Out Students of Means," New York Times, Sept 21, 2011.

I would like to turn to the parables in the New Testament to suggest that when the social structure is not depicted, it is unlikely that we can perceive 'told' jokes even when the joke form is clearly present in the verbal utterance. Many of the parables have a obvious joke pattern: the kingdom of heaven likened to a mustard seed (Luke 13:19; Mark 4:31-2), the prayers of the complacent Pharisee placed second after the humble prayer of the publican (Luke 18:10-14), the guest who takes the lowest place and is brought up to the top, to cite a few.

But whereas the Gospel incidents present little difficulty in the light of the messages that 'the things that are impossible with men are possible with God' (Luke 18:27), some of the parables do. Why was the poor fellow with no wedding garment bound and cast into the place of darkness with weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matthew 22:11-14)? Why was the unjust steward commended for making friends with Mammon (Luke 16:1-9)? How does this accord with the message of love and truth? I suggest that the difficulties arise because we are lacking signals from the social situation. Suppose that the Galilee audience, as soon as it heard 'Let me tell you a parable' settled into the same expectant joking mood that we do on hearing 'Do you know the riddle about...?'

After reading this great article in The Atlantic, I was immediately reminded of what my former instructor Wayne Brekhus wrote 15 years ago in Sociological Forum. Our definition of who is a terrorist is not merely a function of current politics but has deeper cognitive roots. Here's what he had to say, six years before 9/11:

"Social markedness creates the illusion that marked categories represent deviations from a generic population while unmarked categories simply represent the generic population. When generalizing we thus tend to view the actions of unmarked members as reflecting universally on human nature or specifically on the individual but not as representing their unmarked social identity. By contrast, we view the actions of marked members as reflecting directly on their socially visible identity. When a small group of Arab Muslims set a bomb beneath the World Trade Towers in New York, for instance, many Christian non-Arabs viewed their action as representing a 'terrorist inclination' among Muslims and Arabs in general. When John Hinckley (a native-born, Christian Anglo-American) shot President Reagan in 1981, however, no one considered Hinckley's country of origin, his religion, or his ethnicity relevant. As Hinckley possessed unmarked identity traits along these dimensions, his traits remained unnoticed as potential generalizable attributes. Consequently, the general public never even considered responding to Hinckley's actions by demanding tighter security measures against 'Anglo-Americans' or suggesting that 'native-borns' be shipped overseas to protect the security and stability of the President.

"Although the contours we use to separate the marked and unmarked provide the same outline around each, our mental foregrounding gives the illusion that the border only encloses and specifies the marked. The mental act of foregrounding magnifies the significance of the social mark such that similarities of the marked category become far more important than their differences. We lump marked members together as having greater internal consistency and homogeneity than the unmarked. The taken-for-granted commonality within marked categories even allows social scientists to generalize about 'Southern culture,' 'youth culture,' 'Latino culture,' or 'gay culture' as if they were internally consistent categories. Parallel attempts to generalize to the common behavioral characteristics of 'adult culture' or 'the heterosexual community' from a small sample of adults or heterosexuals, however, would appear methodologically unsound. We typically employ the processes of 'lumping' and 'coloring' to unify the marked poles of the continuum, but not the unmarked center."

In Jill Lepore's "The Commandments," The New Yorker, Jan. 24, 2011