The much-maligned human overemphasis on self-referencing–as far as attributing meaning is concerned–is an outgrowth of animal communications. Certain simple nonverbal communication and body movements may communicate little besides internal emotions–valuable signs as interactions with the environment–or, more consciously, as preverbal prompts for directing kin or species members’ attention. Although there may be more information conveyed in every single “caw” that comes out of a crow, every single caw basically says, “Hey!”
The social animal’s need to communicate adequately (for survival) or impressively (for status) influences our desire to understand. Since we want to survive and mate, we are not very good analogues to computers. Understanding–or at least responding correctly–shows other group members that we are capable of communicating meaning, which makes us worthwhile to communicate with, increasing our social value to the group and to individuals in the group. When the herd signals that it is running away, the member who doesn’t run with the rest will not likely survive as long. These individuals are more likely to die, but they are also less likely to be of survival benefit to the rest of the group since a herd running or a group of fish schooling is harder to attack. Individuals who cannot communicate adequately cannot share in social support to the same extent, even when communication is simple compared to symbolic human communications.
Besides individual survival, then, the need for social inclusion in social animals may have a great influence on the peculiarities of personality characteristics in any given species. The desire that events should refer to oneself (as a center of meaning) appears to be a reasonable and adaptive habit that sometimes gets out of hand–perhaps a necessary emotional motivation for the great deal of attentional control, concentration, that it takes to become an adequate homo sapien communicator. (The flexibility in human languages may grow out of and support a great flexibility in personalities. This flexibility in personalities may have influenced the development of a large variety of massive societies made up of extremely divergent individuals. An interesting discussion of similar leadership qualities is given in The Madness of Adam and Eve.)
The proliferation of words and concepts may have much less to do with controlling the environment outside of the homo sapien social milieu and more to do with: being agreeable and valuable to one’s group, satisfying emotional impulses, and (a newly developed, highly evolved need) having a meaningful life. The desire for a meaningful life is tied to the mental abilities to make meaning that developed along with the emotional motivations which seem necessary, or at least very helpful, in mammals in order to concentrate on learning communications for long enough to learn the complexities allowed by mental and social adaptability.
Compared to a computer program, humans need motivation in order to learn massive amounts of new information and then to organize and apply that information. We do this in physical bodies that have emotional impulses that help us fit within a social milieu that includes the most consciously adaptable animal species on this planet. Without the social milieu, the motivation to learn would not exist to the same extent, the specialization in human symbolism would not exist to the same extent, and so, meaning itself would not exist to the same extent that is currently possible. Chimpanzees are phenomenal creatures, but they have not developed a taste for Italian opera or Gothic cathedrals or laugh-tracks in sitcoms. We have surplus attention and surplus adaptability compared to what has been necessary for basic survival. Because attention and adaptability are tied to emotional motivations, that means we have surplus energy for play and creating what we like to call culture. There is no guarantee, though, that we will apply our surplus well. We may squander our surplus on war and laugh-tracks.
When language is seen as primarily–almost exclusively–a means of passing “information”, it is mistakenly interpreted. When we are compared to computers, this false interpretation and false model make it look like human communication is largely inefficient and that our brains are not being utilized as well as they could be for processing information in the pursuit of creating new technologies or performing repetitive tasks. But the majority of language usage serves repetitive or formulaic purposes of affirming or challenging social relationships within the social group. When language is thought to be exclusively informational instead of political and relational, we end up believing that our conscious, deliberate thoughts in an informational exchange should be largely accurate. The standard is a robotic avoidance of error, and we may begin to believe that we can improve thinking and communicating by avoiding error. But ignoring the importance of emotional input into interpretation hides our motivations involved in communicating, and allows us to confuse personal interpretation of content and context, believing too much in our thoughts about content.
This pushes social-psychological-emotional reaction biases to a new level when incorporated into abstracted-reified thought structures. (Consider that Lenin’s elitist communism may have been influenced by paranoia. If Leninism isn’t convincing, consider Hitler or Stalin or their public justifications for their actions and beliefs.) Ideologies that are removed from actual social contexts then prescribe unviable and unreasonable decisions. Ignoring the importance of emotional influence on ideology does not get quite so out of hand at a tribal level of group size, but by the time societies are organized into massive hierarchies, the effects of megalomania are as massive as the societies. The bureaucracy and hierarchical structure separate the leaders from the normal social group that would check the megalomania. Imagine Hitler as a ten-year-old holding forth at his parents’ dinner table, shouting and expecting absolute obedience as well as veneration from his audience. He’d simply get a spanking, and no one would consider him to be a great man or a monster since there would be no mob behind him and no cult of personality around him.
The idea of language as primarily informational along with belief invested in the power of one’s own concept-structures provide a sharp distinction between people based on ideological lines–ideological difference. Communicational intricacies along with the desire to understand and be understood encourage ideological simplicity. Ideological simplicity and consistency push towards simplifying and rigidifying one’s emotional responses in particular relationships. Combined with ideological difference, this produces oversimplified interpretations of the situation, polarization between people, and habituation of emotional responses.
We then feel a difference between our motivations and our interpretations of others’ actions due to a basic desire for social connectedness in a situation where it seems others are acting against us, encouraging a negative experience of humanity during adverse situations and grounding a sense of moral superiority in genuine feelings of goodwill. Because most feelings of moral superiority are grounded in genuine goodwill, once the two are bound by ideology, giving up moral superiority seems like a denial of our own genuine goodwill; this seems existentially false as well as politically foolish in a situation described by ideologically created difference. This is essentially how decent human beings talk themselves into intractable conflict. It then becomes necessary to believe in the difference; we are capable of doing so on such a large scale not due to our inherently violent, greedy, or sinful nature, but because we have not agreed on how to make sense to one another.
By believing too much in words, thoughts, and our interpretations of content (and not understanding basic motivations and purposes), we set what we see in the world (evidence of other’s iniquity) in direct comparison to what we feel as that which is best within ourselves (desire for connection, etc.) False justifications along with distorted emotions follow. We compare what we see as worst in others to what is best in ourselves. This is an excellent method of differentiating oneself from one’s sexual competition, or as seeing one’s sexual partner in a warm, imputed-status glow, but it gets overblown when armies are involved and ideologies reify the boundaries. It works for feeling better about oneself and one’s own, but it is wrong when used for aggression against others.
When the power dynamics are brought back into our interpretation of the situation, what began as normal, healthy (in a tribal-sized social world) human attempts to relate well and feel good are forced into interpretive frameworks that only see conflict and jockeying for status or competing for resources. This is the essential manner in which so much of humanity has talked itself into believing in a world where resources are scarce, humans are greedy and violent and base, and (“as much as I don’t want to, I tell myself”) it only makes sense to look out for one’s own group as best as possible and do what is necessary to stay alive. It’s very convincing cynicism, it’s plausible and the evidence for that interpretation of humanity is everywhere, but it is immature, weak, crazy, and crazy-making. To be crude but make myself clear, we have all been allowing our cocks–ladies, fill in your favorite slang here–to do too much of our thinking, with our heads being used only to justify the actions based on our sexual/status/power motivations. It’s an interesting but unnecessary conundrum since we have evolved to a point of being very capable of enjoying our sexual motivations instead of directing them into moral superiority and violence.
We make very poor binomial computations when compared to modern calculating machines, but the standard for a machine or tool (accuracy and reliability) is different than that for a social animal. Somewhere along with the necessary separation of state and science from the church, as a group, we ended up putting too much belief in empirical science. When we turned that belief back upon ourselves in order to better understand ourselves, the method backfired. Computers were not designed to enjoy, but we were. Our thinking, emoting, relating, and mating “systems” (ourselves) were not “designed” for mechanical empirical accuracy. We developed as motivated beings who are correctly–in an organic sense but not a mechanical sense–directed to value our lives and our enjoyment of living. This means that a healthy human will be slightly “inaccurate” in favoring comfort, social connection, and self-importance. We will “overrate”–but only by a mechanistic conception–the value of happiness. A machine may not appreciate congeniality and enjoyment, but not only can we, we must. Without love, many small mammals die; human babies need more support, and for longer, than any other animal in existence. When we understand the reasons for our drive for status and enjoyment, we can appreciate our motivations instead of trying to correct our motivations. We can, instead, improve our responses to how our internal reactions fit with our external situation when we recognize that we are not computers, wrenches, telescopes, mathematical diagrams, or chimpanzees. Each comparison can be helpful, but relying only on comparisons leads to an inability to recognize and appreciate uniqueness. In looking at systems or groups, we don’t see individuals, individuality, individual agency.
The cynical interpretive framework is skewed. If one accepts the utterly stupid and misguided cynicism, one seems faced with the alternatives of nasty evidence or false hope. Self-styled “realists”, then have their work cut out for them and wannabe optimists get a continual uphill struggle towards emotional burnout. I prefer to think with my head, listen to my heart, enjoy my body and my fellow humans.
Overeducation, especially with a high emphasis on reading, creates a dependence on words, an inordinate belief in words, and at the same time, an increased ability to use one’s words convincingly. Very plausible but ultimately inaccurate thought-structures and interpretations abound in a social context where people rely more on plausibility than on observation, personal relationships, and one’s own social nature.
Messages of sincerity and direct appreciation and human contact, when misinterpreted through these evil frameworks, end up feeding one’s impulsiveness, alienation, humiliation, and sense of betrayal (by the world, humanity, family, and even one’s own emotions). By these frameworks, every such attempt is seen as manipulative or weak and deluded, and we learn to guard against the humanity within ourselves. We make ourselves and others out to be evil, weak, greedy, opportunistic, immoral, etc. Then, it makes sense to “do what you gotta do” in such a world. But this “world” is not the whole of reality. It is an interpretation or perspective of the world which humans up until now have spent much too much attention on. It has shaped our language, our thinking, and our social customs. This is a large part of what we have been taught, and it is a large part of what we teach our children.
We have been spending far too much of our phenomenal internal resources on supporting this fallacious interpretation, and it is wearing us out, destroying our familiarity, destroying our home. We have been brought up in huge societies that have skewed our internal, emotional reference points. Since it takes less mental effort, less concentration and understanding, to view problems than it does to see integrity in complex structures (like our selves and our societies), the habituation towards negativity adds to the misinterpretations and assorted problems listed above. People get addicted to cynicism in basically the same manner and for the same reasons they get addicted to alcohol. If small-minded and cynical or falsely optimistic visions of deflated progress are put forth in such a situation, they are not viewed with hope for the future based on the certainty one gains from a healthy body and a healthy society, but as one views the last empty lifeboat on the sinking Titanic.
Does the integrity exist? This is an extremely personal question. Is it possible that all these people who believe that they are basically good and that their families and friends are basically good could be wrong? We can try to make sense of our views by just seeing everybody as not as good as we’d like to believe. We can put our efforts into closing our eyes to what is wrong and pretending that it will get better or it’s already fine. But we may be better off if we avoid cynicism, avoid deluded optimism, open our eyes, and rediscover this strange new world that we create as we go along. We are doing right when we face reality together. Those who are against us are those who portray humans as evil and teach our children their cynicism; their lackeys are the deluded optimists who avoid what they cannot abide. We can choose to discount and manipulate, avoid, or engage. If we look to find human goodness, it may “take one to know one”. Crows understand.
Copyright Todd Mertz