cytoplasmic verbiage

Last year, I experienced Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, and experienced a phantom pain of my own.  Perhaps it can heal, perhaps it can't, but there's much left to say about the ideas espoused in the game.

The central villain of the game, who goes by the name Skull Face, has a grudge against the English language.  He views it as akin to a disease, spreading itself memetically through the normal routines of commerce and cross-cultural interaction, that wickedly stamps out diversity and causes suffering wherever it goes.  He hatches a plan to unleash an actual disease on humanity, one that will target the vocal cord resonance patterns specifically of speakers of English, killing them and ridding the world of English forever.

He's nuts, and his plan is stopped through the careful coordination and sacrifice of many players in the story.  What's fascinating to me, though, is the relevance his point of view can have for people in the real world.

This post on Reddit, written by a Mexican man who feels he's had to watch elements of his country's culture gradually erode over the last several decades, was pretty affecting.  As Americanization takes hold and, inevitably, creates distance between him and those citizens of his country who take to it more, or are too young to remember a time before, he finds there is some truth in the ideas the game introduced.  Cultures can be threatened by other cultures, without any violent conflict or conscious economic pressure.  Is that a bad thing?

My favorite blogger suggests it isn't a thing at all.  Instead of American or Western culture supplanting others, he elaborates on the idea of universal culture:

"Universal culture is the collection of the most competitive ideas and products. Coca-Cola spreads because it tastes better than whatever people were drinking before. Egalitarian gender norms spread because they’re more popular and likeable than their predecessors. If there was something that outcompeted Coca-Cola, then that would be the official soda of universal culture and Coca-Cola would be consigned to the scrapheap of history."

He makes pretty strong market-based and utilitarian arguments in favor of this idea, and couples them with a few examples of ur-Western cultures whose systems and values were hardly comparable to or even recognizable in the modern concept of the West.  America simply happens to be the biggest country where capitalism and the lionization of the pursuit of individual happiness coincide, so America is the chief source and promulgator of the products and ideas that the most people will want.

So where does language come into this?  It's hardly mentioned in the blog post, yet it's the focus of the Reddit post, and they're both talking about essentially the same thing.  Why the disconnect?

Could it be that certain languages are simply better at conveying ideas than others?  I could believe it for specific types of ideas.  I know from experience that Japanese is far better at expressing vaguely wistful ambivalence about an unexpected development than English.  And English is a much better language for describing the specific way you feel as your intestines are removed (the Japanese culture of gaman usually prevents them from whining too publicly about this process).  But for ideas in general, I can't give one or the other the nod.  This is too subjective a question to ever be answered, and until we get super-intelligent AIs, it'll be pretty hard to try without having someone who knows all the languages.

There's the possibility that America is where the money is, so its language becomes the lingua franca.  But that doesn't really explain the Mexico example, where products that are already popular are being transitioned into English from having been in Spanish, and individuals who aren't really active market participants (read:  6-year-olds) have linguistic preferences leaning away from Spanish.

So I don't think there's a qualitative difference between the usefulness of languages that favors English in spreading to other countries, and I don't think there's really an extrinsic economic reason, either, because it seems to be happening independently from market processes.

But there could be a reason aside from usefulness.  English could just be memetically superior, in the sense that it is better at spreading itself.  It could really be that English self-replicates more effectively than any other language, that many of its words are simply more palatable to the average human, regardless of initial culture or linguistic patterning.  That theory would actually support the effectiveness of these other elements of "universal culture," as any interaction that relied on this most-successful language would naturally have an advantage.  Markets would favor products that relied on English.  Six-year-olds would rather express things in English.  Nobody would know why, and it would be spreading everywhere, as fast as technology would allow it to.

This is exactly what Kojima was getting at.  How else to explain the runaway success of English than to liken it to an insidious virus?  "Meme" was the explicit theme of Metal Gear Solid 2, after all.  These have always been games about how our circumstances shape us, and how we respond to that.  You have now seen a post from a Mexican man responding to the circumstance of English predominance, and as an English speaker himself, he's likely to be on the front line of people noticing the phenomenon.  I predict, over the next 2-3 years, we will be seeing more and more of a backlash as non-English speakers begin to realize how thoroughly our language has infiltrated their cultures.

Of course, like the blogger, I don't think it's really a problem.  Why seek to control the spread of culture, which is supposed to be the natural accumulated product of billions of free choices by individuals?  But he and I are both sitting at the top of that heap, and it may be that the view looks very different from the bottom, where it's about to fall on you.