Finding niches, and snuggling around in them, seems to be in our genes. Just see how small children love playing cubbyhole, and how bigger children can’t wait until they’ve moved out of parental abodes into a flat (or equivalent-sized cubbyhole) of their own.
These sequential or simultaneous
places-to-be are what we call our homes. We begin life by finding
ourselves in someone else’s home(s), those environments in which we
are socialised as infants, and with which we naturally merge because
there’s not much we can do about it – human beginnings are rather
helpless, both physically and cognitively. We then start realising
that we can question our “belonging”. This happens at around age
3, when we develop awareness of our surroundings as independent from
ourselves, and of ourselves as just one of many actors in them. It’s
now up to us to embark on socialising journeys of our own: we will
(want to) merge with what appeals to us, from wearing the same
clothes as our little friends in school to buying the same cars as
our big friends at work. That is, we go on finding ourselves in
someone else’s home(s), only now by choice rather than by accident
– human development is rather predictable, both physically and
cognitively. Imitare humanum est,
we could say.
As we search for friendly environments,
we hone our adaptive skills by becoming acquainted with what makes us
(un)acceptable to other people, and vice versa. This is particularly
true of the ways in which we use our languages, in that language
pervades human socialisation processes.
The American linguist William Labov showed that we can vary our
uses of language to fit our wish to either identify with other
people, or to detach ourselves from them: we make our linguistic
patterns converge with theirs or diverge from theirs, respectively.
This is why many of us use motherese (a technical term for ‘baby
talk’) to accommodate small children’s budding linguistic skills,
and why many of us resort to legalese, doctorese, teacherese or
bureaucratese (rather less technical terms for ‘gobbledygook’) to
fend off inquisitive common mortals – more on which in a coming post.
We can react to our awareness that
there are differences among people and among their linguistic
resources in other ways too. One of them is aggression, actual or
potential. A number of years ago, in response to an article on
language diversity, a Scientific American
reader had this comment to offer: “Different languages are a menace
to a friendly world.” Besides mooting the intriguing issue that you
shouldn’t feel threatened in worlds where everyone around you uses
the same language because they’re all your friends, the comment draws on f(l)ight instincts which associate any deviation from what
people come to identify with their comfort zones as an actual or
potential threat. Fitting in, to like-minded people, means fitting in
with their “world”.
This reader’s comment struck me as a
perfect example of Dostoyevsky’s observation, in
Crime and Punishment, that
“what people fear most [is] whatever is contrary to their
usual habits”. We fear what we don’t understand, in other words.
Which means that we won’t ever get to understand what we don’t
understand if we go on not daring to understand it – or not wanting
to. Dealing with difference, instead of fearing it, starts with
awareness that if we, whoever we are, don’t understand them,
whoever they are, then they are as likely to not understand us
either. This is the kind of awareness that tells you that differences
are bridgeable – if we, and they, so wish. Whether we prefer to
complain about other people not adapting to us, or about our own
difficulties adapting to them, we might be well-advised to remember
that fitting in is a two-way road.
Photo: MCF |
I’ll have more to say about this,
next time.
© MCF 2012