McGee in "Ideographs" suggests that nations build shared societal concepts along the lines of certain words and phrases. His examples are strikingly political: liberty, rule by law, equality, trial by jury. His comparisons of these elements juxtaposes nations, mainly the USSR and the USA, as having completely different definitions for these terms while stating that intra-national differences are just nuances. Discourses of corporations, artists, educators, criminals, entertainers, and so on are ignored or dismissed in the face of purely political concepts. The hierarchy of McGee's world comes through loud and clear.
At his point, I should note that McGee's definition of rhetoric suggests only the realm of the civic and political--his work entitled, "Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture" further establishes this belief by rejecting poetics and literature as rhetoric. This is a stance I fundamentally resist, and hope this assists in explaining, particularly because once we ban high art discourse from the realm of rhetoric, we also ban low art and its massive influence upon popular culture and its pull upon popular discourses within societies and across them.
In McGee's world humanity is divided along national societies who share set Ideographs among the citizens and those ideas are unique to each society, there can be no shared ideology across nations using his examples. I expect this might be a flaw he would refute, but the work makes its case clear: nation exist as supremely complete discourses were ruler and ruled are subject to the structure of the ideographs, but segments of nations only vary slightly upon these ideographs and do not truly divide amongst themselves except at the aforementioned level of international discourse.
Similarly, the piece acknowledges dissent, but doesn't explain how dissent can occur. If Ideographs occur due to national ideology constraining the dialogue around accepted verbiage, how do we explain dissent? McGee is happy to just claim the majority shapes the ideology and that the elite and the base are both subject to these majority themes. However, he must admit dissent occurs even though he opts not to explain it.
All that said, our world now suggests that there are global memes/ideographs/concepts.
Consider this from Wikipedia.
The Wikipedia project suffers systemic bias that
naturally grows from its contributors' demographic groups, manifesting as
imbalanced coverage of a subject. This project aims to control and
(possibly) eliminate the cultural perspective gaps made by the systemic
bias, consciously focusing upon subjects and point of view neglected by the
encyclopedia as a whole. A list of articles needing attention is in the CSB
Open Tasks list.
Wikipedia presents a collection of entries capable of being edited by anyone with Internet access to the site. The site even offers more than a dozen language options. Yet, bias rules the content along demographic lines. However, one must note that demographic does not mean nationality exclusively. In fact, Internet access lines are more likely divided along rural-urban lines and economic lines, though elements of national infrastructure do play a role. Physical infrastructure, however, does not neatly fall into McGee's construct of Ideograph.
More importantly, for all its demographic bias, Wikipedia shows that International memes (I'll stop using the term Ideograph as they seem to violate McGee's implied restraints) can and do exist. More damning might be that nationalism is a relatively recent societal construct and identifying such a prior to the Enlightenment becomes difficult. For Ideographs to contain the organic meaning McGee suggests a clearer explanation of why the USSR and USA have different Ideographs, but New York and San Marcos do not; especially if pre-national societies such as Sparta and Corinth possessed different Ideographs--or, better, Sparta and Rome. How can Sparta and Rome possess different Ideographs, but New York and San Marcos cannot? It seems unlikely that 'cost of living' invokes the same image to both societies. I doubt that even 'community' actually brings to mind the same ideology to these two American cities, especially given the split heritage of the states that produced them. I would go so far as to say that 'cost of living', 'space', and 'community' evoke closer shared views in New York, London, Hong Kong, and Moscow than they do in San Marcos and New York. I would argue also that concepts of space and community are more fundamental to the daily human experience than the political Ideographs that McGee uses, where as cost of living is on par with them.
To highlight this issue, let us focus on the clear bias of Wikipedia, and it's non-national elements, particularly regarding non-political discourse.
From the wikis own Origin of Bias in Wikipedia section:
The average Wikipedian on
English Wikipedia is (1) a man, (2) technically inclined, (3) formally educated,
(4) an English speaker (native or non-native), (5) white, (6) aged
15–49, (7) from a nominally Christian country, (8)
from an industrialized nation, (9) from the Northern Hemisphere,
and (10) likely employed as an intellectual rather than as a labourer (cf. Wikipedia:User
survey and Wikipedia:University
of Würzburg survey, 2005).
More than the bias of national doctrine, what we see is bias of access. Groups with more ability or reason to access the Net also control the direction of Wikipedia. This bias of access suggests a key to illuminating McGee's point more accurately in that access to an ideology will tend to bias one towards engagement of that ideology. However, it may not bias the engager toward acceptance or rejection. McGee makes good points about discourse controlling speaker and audience and that engagement in discourse can direct group behavior along the lines of the discourse. However, again, ignoring that is a discourse with dissent harms his case, and ignoring that it is actually thousands of discourses who overlap and obscure and omit, also harms his stance. McGee's ignoring of the systems of communication limits the effectiveness of his analysis.
If discourse using Ideographs/memes does bias you toward acceptance, then rejection must be explained to understand the full nature of the bias toward acceptance. One example is the contradictory values of personal freedom and economic dependence on slavery in the USA. Can Ideographs explain the evolution and choice between two ideological causes of prosperity and freedom? The majority of the US now sees freedom as clearly more valuable than prosperity when it comes to slavery, but we also increasingly see freedom as less useful than prosperity when it comes to national security measures such as the Patriot Act. Surely, the existence of rebellion and civil unrest suggests that national Ideography is anything but absolute and stable. To be Unstable, dissent must at some point become the majority and escape the deadlock McGee creates.
Thus McGee is undermined in his two most important claims. First, national memes are transitory, even if transitory over centuries. Secondly, memes exist with powerful influence outside of national discourses on laws and politics. The Ideography of Microsoft is a separate entity faced in the USA, Germany, and Japan. As his Bollywood, the Kyoto Treaty, and the Catholic Church.
McGee's attempts to oversimplify with national rhetoric simply fails to address the issues he attempts. He cannot explain that nature of discourse by ignoring so many discourses or ignoring those who choose to engage in discourses of dissent.
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