Friends and Enemies: Our Need to Love and Hate. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ primates communicate. He wrote,

      A light touch, a gentle caress, can convey all the meanings in the world: one moment it can be a word of consolation, an apology, a request to be groomed, an invitation to play, on another, an assertion of privilege, a demand you move elsewhere; on yet another, a calming influence, a declaration that intentions are friendly. Knowing which meaning to infer is the basis of social being, depending as it does on a close reading of another’s mind. In that brief moment of mutual understanding in a fast-moving, frenzied world, all social life is distilled in a single gesture.⁴⁷

      This reminded me of an incident that occurred when I was in Hanoi in Vietnam. I had just left a shop when I felt on my right shoulder blade a touch which was as soft as silk yet with the power to draw my immediate attention. I looked round, and there was a little old woman dressed in black, her hand cupped in supplication. A soft touch for someone she hoped was a soft touch.

      Primates spend much of their time touching one another in mutual grooming. Being groomed is very pleasant because it stimulates the body’s natural endorphins. In a group of primates grooming is one of the chief means whereby alliances are formed and hierarchies within the group established.

      However, grooming takes time. Human groups were much bigger than primate groups so required a more efficient means of grooming. Through language we can groom more people and be groomed by more people. Language makes social interaction more efficient. Hence its evolution.

      Psychologists have always unwisely divided their subject into individual psychology and social psychology, but now they are coming to understand what sociologists and anthropologists have always understood – that, as my friend and colleague David Canter said, ‘the essence of humanity is in interactions between people in groups.’ The profession of psychology virtually came into existence with society’s need to understand why some people think more quickly, accurately and creatively than most other people. Psychologists invented the notion of intelligence and claimed it was a measurable thing lodged inside each person and genetically inherited. In 1999 Ken Richardson, a psychologist who had studied intelligence for many years, demonstrated in his book The Making of Intelligence⁴⁸ that human organizations require what he calls ‘sensitivity to hyper-structural information’ – that is, knowledge of how knowledge is organized, of how knowledge of knowledge organization is organized, and so on. Professor David Canter, reviewing Richardson’s book, concluded that ‘Intelligence is a sophisticated creation of social interactions embedded in particular cultures, not the genetic endowment of any individual.’⁴⁹ Knowledge of how knowledge is organized and so on is a matter of interpreting interpretations and so on. The more quickly, accurately and creatively we can interpret other people’s interpretations the more intelligent we are.

      What are we usually doing when we are interpreting other people’s interpretations? We are gossiping. We tell one another stories. Such stories are not just for entertainment or for imparting information. They are for managing reputation, for determining the place each of us occupies in society. What better story than one which besmirches your enemy’s reputation and enhances your own? No wonder that the media thrive on gossip. No wonder the activity which combines both gossip and grooming – hairdressing – is so popular.

      However, while we use language to communicate with others, our communications are never completely accurate and unambiguous. While we might all speak the language of the society we live in, no two of us use that language in exactly the same way. We use the same language but the meanings we hold for those words are different. Two people might agree that the word ‘Christmas’ refers to 25 December, but for one person the connotations of Christmas are entirely religious while for the other person Christmas means fun and family. To discover the similarities and differences in our meaning structure we have to talk to one another.

      We are indeed peculiar people, with a language which simultaneously brings us together and pushes us apart. This is but one facet of the peculiarity which is our essence. Our physiology determines that we should live in isolation in our own world of meaning, yet our world of meaning is elicited and maintained by the presence of other people. At the same time other people can always threaten our world of meaning. To survive we have to find ways of maintaining our identity while being a member of a group.

       3 Belonging to a Group

      Meeting someone for the first time and wondering whether you are going to be friends can be stressful, but how do you manage when you meet a crowd of people and you are all going to be together for some time? I felt extremely anxious when I sat in the domestic air terminal in Athens and wondered which of the people around me were going to be the participants in the group I was to run at the Skyros Centre on the island of Skyros.

      Ten days later, when I knew and liked my group very much, I asked one of them, Janna, how she had fared in meeting all the people who would be at the centre. I had travelled to Skyros on a small plane a day early and so had met the staff and some of the participants in twos and threes, but Janna, who was travelling on her own, making the long journey by coach and ferry with those bound for either the Skyros Centre or its twin centre Atsitsa, was presented with what she saw first of all as ‘an amorphous mass of people’.

      Janna told me, ‘It was quite a stressful time because you don’t know these people, and you’re wondering who’s going to be in your group and all that. Then I ended up sharing a room with Inger, and that’s been great. But that amorphous mass I experienced mostly at breakfast and the first few meals. People seemed to talk so much. There was a heightened state of chatting. I’m not sure what that was. I think it’s because we all wanted to engage with other people. There were gales of hysterical laughter which happened a lot. It was very noisy, which, certainly at the beginning, made it seem as though there was a huge body of people.’

      I had experienced this ‘heightened state of chatting’ when I went on several game drives in the African bush with a group of American tourists. There were nine of us, including the ranger, who drove our vehicle, and the tracker, who rode shotgun. The great silence of the African bush was there to be savoured, but savour it we did not because everyone except the tracker and me talked all the time. The ranger made no idle conversation. He informed us about what we were seeing, and answered every question, no matter how inane or repeated it was, in a courteous and informative way, but around him words were being wasted at a prodigious rate. My fellow tourists bombarded the ranger with questions which might be about matters of detail but were rarely profound. One woman asked, ‘Do people ride zebras?’ and, on being told that zebras were untameable, commented, ‘What a pity. They’d be so colourful at a rodeo.’ When the questions were exhausted the tourists engaged one another in earnest chat on a wide variety of impersonal topics. I found it bizarre being driven through this magically alien bush while behind me the conversation was about the relative merits of certain e-mail servers.

      But, of course, it was the alien bush that was the problem. I might have had faith in my ranger and the game reserve’s system of constant radio communication but my companions did not. So they talked to one another to keep their fear at bay. The same thing happened when, one evening after a very hot day, a fierce but very beautiful electrical storm converged on our camp. Dinner for some twenty tourists was being served on the veranda, where the noise of conversation all but drowned out the thunder.

      One way of dealing with fear is to turn it into a story, a fantasy about what is feared and how that fear might be overcome. On the third of our game drives my companions did just this. One of them was a literary agent, and he began developing an idea for a novel about a group of people who are on a game drive in СКАЧАТЬ