Bad words

Below is a guest essay from my altered-ego D.L. For more, go to Lasken's Log at https://laskenlog.blogspot.com/ All the best, Harry

Isn’t it odd that a word can be bad? Odd, that is, that the word itself is bad, not its referent. And odd that there’s no clear logic behind the bad word’s badness. For instance, “murder” and “torture” refer, in most people’s minds, to bad things, but the words are not bad. The word “fuck,” however, is bad, though it doesn’t refer to anything bad in an absolute sense.

"Fuck" is probably the most bad of the bad words, though, as noted, its referent, expressed acceptably in Latin as "copulate," ("couple together") is morally neutral.  Why is "fuck" bad and "copulate" is not?

History demonstrates the agonized process.  Christian Konrad Sprengel, 18th century German naturalist, was the first academician to suggest that flowers are sexual organs. For his pains he was hounded out of polite society and his work vilified. Today it is common knowledge that wholly female flowers are types of vaginas, that male-only flowers are types of penises, and hermaphroditic flowers are cocks with pussies attached that fuck themselves.

The point being that Sprengel turned “flower” into a bad word.

"Badness," apparently, is sexuality. That's a tough call when sexuality supports the imperative to reproduce. If sexuality is designated bad, does that make reproduction bad?

The ban against the English word for excrement is a separate puzzle. If we already abhor shit, why do we need to reinforce the abhorrence with language bans?

Teachers are expected to figure out such psychological and philosophical questions on their own, without a word of guidance from credential programs or staff development. As an elementary and high school teacher I spent a lot of time and energy in pursuit of what I thought was a societal goal: dissuading children from saying bad words that denote sexual organs, various sex acts and/or excrement. In this essay I ponder what I was trying to accomplish, and what our culture is trying to accomplish by designating certain words "bad."

I’m a crossover person who remembers bygone eras. In 1955 my family went to see the movie “Picnic” because we’d heard that William Holden said “damn." A hushed, almost worshipful audience awaited the big moment, and when the word was uttered a gasp in unison pervaded the theater. The movie producer’s gamble had paid off: box office dividends from a bad word. Few at that time realized that the dam was about to burst (sorry).

Fast forward to San Francisco State, 1969- my Chaucer professor charges breathlessly into the classroom. Instead of giving us a page number to find, he asks if we’ve heard what’s going on at U.C. Berkeley. A student named Mario Savio and an army of dedicated young people have taken a stand for free speech, he informs us. We can say “fuck” if we want to!  Add cable TV and the rest is history.

Fast forward to 1983, when, as a new elementary school teacher in south L.A., I face a demure little black girl who, standing before my desk, has just said, “fuck.” There is no context, just the word hanging understated in the air. I track down the mother’s work number and call. The mother’s response: “Let me get this straight. You called me at work to tell me my daughter said ‘fuck’?”

“Er…yes…” I stammer, and realize I need a zeitgeist upgrade.

Fast forward a few years and I'm a high school English teacher, listening all day to kids speak in linguistic abandon.

Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Thank you Mario!

Like everything else in our society, our language protocols are in a state of flux.  At times of head-spinning change, it's helpful to ponder history.  The Norman invasion of England in 1066 gives needed background. The Normans lived in France (in "Normandy") and spoke French, but they were only two generations removed from their Viking ancestry. In England they imposed their new language on the already established Anglo-Saxons. The Normans looked down on Anglo-Saxons for being Germanic (as Normans secretly were), members of a tribe that had been the most resistant to Rome, marauding around Europe's forests like savages instead of paving roads through them. The Normans despised Anglo-Saxons beyond words, especially four letter words. The Anglo-Saxons said things like “fuck” and “shit,” scum that they were, while the Normans, heirs to Latin through French, could say copuler and defequer.

Thus Savio's battle continued the thousand-year struggle to free the Anglo-Saxon mother tongue.

The "four-letter" words do of course have another property: they carry emotion.  Compare these two sentences:

 There are dog feces on the mat.

There's dog shit on the fucking mat!

The first sentence is devoid of emotion, an expression of information only; the second, identical to the first except for two bad words, a contraction and an exclamation mark, explodes with emotion.   It is their prohibition that has attached emotional power to the bad words. They are forbidden... special.  The process has given us useful words that express levels of emotion other words cannot.

Once the prohibition has been gone long enough, the words' power will diminish.

In the high school portion of my teaching career I formulated a policy on the goodness or badness of words based on their usefulness.  "Plethora" I identified as a bad word because it’s ugly and show-offy, making its common synonyms more useful.  When we read an Anglo-Saxon bad word in literature, I encouraged students to assess the word's usefulness in its context.  Words are either useful or they're not. They are useful if they carry meaning and force; they are not useful if they don’t. If I have to hear “motherfucker” all fucking day, that phrase is not useful. If it's only once in a while, well….

Programmed amnesia

[This is a guest essay by my young associate Gregory, leader of the revolutionary group Mantis, also known as the Army of the Young. To read our exclusive story about the 2044 U.S. presidential election, go to http://www.gregorysarmyoftheyoung.com/ Best, Harry]

No one remembers being in the womb, even though research indicates that fetuses have memory.  The selective amnesia seems hard-wired, suggesting that evolutionary pressure made it advantageous not to remember gestation.  

In a second programmed amnesia, no one remembers being a baby, though all the evidence indicates that babies have memory. Why are no baby memories saved?  

Could the transitions from womb to babyhood and from babyhood to toddler jump chasms too wide to translate?  Do we protect ourselves from memory? A Darwinian might surmise that proto-humans who remembered the womb went mad from grief and confusion, and toddlers who remembered babyhood did the same.  The "fittest" were those who forgot.

Researchers have discovered a third programmed amnesia at age seven, when a child's brain undergoes a culling of the previous six years of memory.  Unlike the total blockades of memory before birth and between birth and age one, this third event deletes some memory but not all.  No one knows the criteria for remembering or forgetting, why the amnesia occurs at age seven or what its purpose is.

Humanity practices adult-driven amnesia as well, spread via social groups often with conscious intent.  For example, when one culture dominates and/or destroys another, the remaining culture usually doesn't want to remember the culture that was destroyed, at least not in uncensored versions.  The state helps by programing amnesia.  In Stalinist Russia people were not allowed to tour the tsars' palaces.  They needed to forget those palaces and a culture that often dazzled.  One of the Dutch party that first explored Manhattan Island reported that the native population were clean, healthy and sane, not filthy, sick, and crazy like people the reporter had seen in European cities (Gotham, A History of New York City to 1898; Edwin G. Burrows/Mike Wallace). That report has gone missing in other U.S. histories.  No one wants to remember it.

Sometimes we rewrite society's memories of events from the recent past, giving them a spin, while individuals having the original, unspun memories are still alive.  This causes controversy among those who remember the original events, as people with different spins grapple with each other to control the rewriting of the memory narrative. Such memory battles occur, for instance, when national leaders die. We can see such battles in history, for instance there is now a post-mortem investigation of the moral standing of the Roman Emperor Caligula, who is generally presented as an insane sadist and profligate, but may have been painted that way by factions trying (unsuccessfully) to restore the Roman Republic. We can expect such memory battles as current leaders die.   

There are cycles of amnesia in our long-term evolution as well.  Before encountering long-forgotten hunter-gatherer societies in the last few centuries, Western culture had forgotten what human life was like before it adopted agriculture, only 10,000 years ago.  While we've figured out some of the basics, we cannot remember what it felt like to be human for those hundreds of thousands of years.

We can watch the process today as we drift away from life before the current machine age, when there were no cars, phones, planes, TV, internet or AI. We are forgetting what it was like to be a person then.  

The penultimate brush with amnesia occurs at what we euphemistically call "retirement." My colleague D.L., in his 77th year, says he has impulses towards "purposeful forgetting," which he consceives as a defensive buffer around the comfortable Old Manville where he resides. There are aches and pains around the edges, leading beyond to great voids of incomprehensible silence, but within the bounds of Old Manville there is residual comfort, and even a particular sort of energy. Nevertheless, through the comfort and occasional energy, he feels pressure from the memory bank in the basement of his mind, which holds all his memories stretching back to the earliest, blurry ones- enough data to fill a thousand Libraries - memories that regularly splurt forth into his conscious mind like drunken teenagers. He says, "Delete that shit!," in semi-humor, and continues, "I do want to maintain my awareness of identities, mine and important others, but why do I need to maintain all that storage space? Just to recall the time in 8th grade when a substitute teacher threw me down the steps, or how much I hated bananas? Who cares?"

Do D.L.'s thoughts arise from natural reasoning, or is he exemplifying yet another programmed amnesia designed to keep us from longing for a state from which, through biological design, we've withdrawn?   

The final programmed amnesia, of course, is the one that happens either at death or in the period leading to death. For days, weeks or months, or for a quarter-second, we will be conscious without knowing who or what we are or were. We will literally know nothing. The purpose of this final forgetting may be to disolve any remorse about departing whatever it is we're departing, and entering whatever it is we're entering.

Back to the big picture, humanity is about to undergo its first species-wide amnesia since the one induced by agriculture.  In a century or so there probably won't be more than a handful of people in the world who've heard of Shakespeare or George Washington, or any of today's nation-states, unless that data has been coded into their brain implants.  It could be the "end of history" we've been hearing about.  Genetic engineering, AI and machine/human interface will create a new humanity that will not understand much about the old one, except that it was primitive and should be discarded and forgotten.  

Today, as if to expedite the process, we are working on drugs to delete "traumatic" memories, in a bid perhaps to keep pace with our bionic offspring, whose memories will be tailored for maximum efficiency.  The current flooding of quasi-legal marijuana into all levels of Western society seems part of the trend, as the latest research on THC, the active ingredient, suggests that it acts in part by limiting short-term memory (if further research on marijuana is pursued, it should ponder why limiting short-term memory produces a "high").

How should we react to the coming mass amnesia?  We might as well fight it, don't you think?  By "fight it" I don't mean keep it from happening.  I mean let's inject some memory into the future while we can.  

That is the basic mission of my group, Mantis, a.k.a The Army of the Young.  Much thanks to Harry the Human for giving me this platform.   For more of my essays keep reading this blog. To read our report from the future on the 2044 U.S. presidential election, go to: http://www.gregorysarmyoftheyoung.com/.

Free screenplay!

The Three-Body Problem

"...the core of this man was the utter madness and coldness brought about by extreme rationality."

From "The Three Body Problem," book 1 of "The Dark Forest" trilogy by Cixin Liu

I've been up half the night engrossed in Cixin Liu's "Three Body Problem" (translated from Mandarin).  The ideas are sophisticated but the presentation gives me the kind of thrill I got from comic books in pubescent times- when I would groove on a cool idea expressed in hand-made print with a riveting image above, then an action sequence, then the next cool idea.  My parents feared I would spend my life reading comic books.  Sadly, that is exactly what I've done. Dawn approaches, and there are too many "Dark Forest" ideas spilling out of my head to fit into a "Theory of the day" format (as my altered ego D.L. calls it @ https://laskenlog.blogspot.com).  I'll just throw out this question from the book:

"Can the stability and order of the world be but a temporary dynamic equilibrium achieved in a corner of the universe, a short-lived eddy in a chaotic current?"

Isn't that what we're all wondering?

Though the novel is packed with exciting ideas, I think some of Liu's stylistic skills may not be expressed well in the English translation.  Regarding plot, it should be safe to reveal that Trisolarans, invaders from space who are fleeing a (celestial) three-body problem, have seeded earth with Sophons, super-computers made from single protons, which spy on humanity and mess up the calculations of the world's top physicists so that none of their theories can be confirmed, not unlike what is happening now with dark matter.  The physicists conclude that they don't know anything about the universe and several commit suicide.

Cixin Liu's work is trending in the West at a time when the West is trying to decide how it feels about China.  In "Three Body Problem," Liu is generous in showing how Chinese politics maligns Western scientific theory by transforming it into political dogma.  Who knew in the West that the speed of light had anything to do with distribution of wealth?  In the book, Yang Weining, childhood acquaintance of Ye Wenjie, daughter of prominent scientist Ye Zhetai -who, because he adopted Western scientific concepts, is beaten to death by 14 year old girls during the Cultural Revolution- says that he wants to pursue practical science and avoid theory because "it's easy to make ideological mistakes in theory."  In other words he does not want to be beaten to death by 14 year old girls.  Liu brings our cultures together here because, who does?

There's plenty for the West to ponder in The Three-Body Problem, written by a man who understands the West more than most Westerners understand the East.  Questions:  Will the cultures of China and the U.S. evolve to become increasingly similar, even mirror images, as they confront each other and modernize?  Will total surveillance, either via Sophon or domestic technology, cover the entire globe?  Will there be any difference between Beijing and Los Angeles when all of their inhabitants, from all racial backgrounds, live under the will of the same grid, the same AI directed master plan?

Liu makes a good point about our need for extraterrestrials:

It was impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself....To achieve moral awakening required a force outside the human race. 

Unfortunately (or fortunately), it looks like we're going to have to play the role of extraterrestrials ourselves.