Читать книгу Friends and Enemies: Our Need to Love and Hate - Paula Nicolson, Dorothy Rowe, Dorothy Rowe - Страница 11

Other people are essential to us because they can confirm our existence. They can break through our essential isolation and confirm our meaning structure. But they can harm and even destroy us by withholding this confirmation. Torturers and jailers the world over know this. In May 1998 Graziella Dalleo was interviewed on the BBC.

While Argentina hosted the World Cup in 1978 and celebrated its success, many of its citizens were being tortured. Graziella Dalleo was one of Argentina’s ‘disappeared’ at that time. She described the extreme situation in Radio 5’s ‘Watt in the World – a guide to footballing countries’.

She said, ‘Those of us being “re-educated” during the World Cup were allowed to watch the games on TV in the “fish tank” [where hard labour was enforced] … After watching the World Cup final in the “fish tank”, the commandant of the camp whose name still fills me with terror … came in and embraced us one by one and said, “We won! We won!” I remember feeling that if he’s won we’ve lost – if this is a victory for him, it is a defeat for us. The guards then told five or six of us to get into a car. I remember it to this day – a green Peugeot 504 – and he drove us to the centre of Buenos Aires. It was incredible.

‘There were so many people out on the street celebrating Argentina’s victory I asked the general if I could stand up and put my head through the car roof. I stood up and looked out – I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Rivers and rivers of people singing, dancing, shouting. I began to cry, because I remember thinking if I start shouting “I’ve disappeared”, no-one’s going to give a damn. This was the most concrete proof I ever had that I had ceased to exist.’⁴²

Such an experience is not uncommon in those countries where torture is the routine way of dealing with prisoners, especially those who are regarded as a threat to society. Most of us have experienced a milder but still distressing form of torture where our companions have a mental picture of us which bears little likeness to the person we know ourselves to be. When this happens we can feel very, very lonely. When my friend Ann Hocking wrote to me after her dog died she said,

The other evening when I was at a musical evening at the church I saw a man from Mosborough whom I used to know. I said, ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ He said, ‘Yes I do. You’re Martin’s mother, aren’t you?’ I said, ‘No, I’m Ann.’ He shouted across to another mutual acquaintance, a woman, ‘Look who’s here. Do you remember who she is?’ ‘Oh yes,’ the woman said, ‘It’s Sarah’s grandmother.’

I hate that. When I was little my mother would never use my name. She would say, “This is my daughter, Jim’s sister,’ as if I didn’t exist in my own right. Now I’m Martin’s mother, Ray’s wife, or Sarah’s grandma. It makes me sick. I’ve got a name. Why don’t people use it?

I guess that’s why I miss the dog so much. He would never go away from me. He would never take his eyes off me while he was awake. He didn’t care what I looked like or how old I was or that I’d got no job and no money. People want you to try to merit their love all the time. The dog never did, even when I shouted at him. He still loved me. I didn’t have to give him breakfast in bed to make up for it. He just accepted me for what I am. People have a lot to learn from dogs.⁴³

Ann as Martin’s mother, Ray’s wife and Sarah’s grandma slots her neatly into the working-class suburb of Sheffield where she lives. If her family, friends and acquaintances saw her as she really is she would be constantly confounding their expectations, thus troubling their own meaning structures. She is a mother, wife and grandma, but she is also a skilled artist, a philosopher who asks the big questions and a sharp observer of other people with a keen eye for hypocrisy and lies. I doubt if there is any society who could see her as she is and find her easy to fit in, but there would be certain societies, certain artistic societies, where her individuality would be appreciated.

Ann is a threat to her society only in so far as she does not conform exactly to her society’s expectation that she be a modest mother, wife and grandma who complains only about domestic matters and who confines her interests to gossip and television. While she does not fit that picture exactly, her existence does not threaten the image other members of that society have of themselves, as did the existence of the survivors of the Holocaust when they emigrated to Israel after the Second World War. Aaron Hass recorded,

Perhaps the fiercest blow to survivors who emigrated to this hazardous territory was the psychological distance imposed by the sabras (those born in Palestine) … Jokes deriding the victims circulated. A popular one began with the question ‘How many Jews can you fit into an ashtray?’ … Far from being perceived as heroes, they were considered reminders of all which the glorious modern Jew must shun. Even among their own, in a Jewish state, survivors were kept from speaking out. In 1949, David Ben-Gurion referred to survivors as ‘demoralizing material’ who needed to be retrained and imbued with ‘national discipline’. A few years later Moshe Sharett, the Israeli foreign minister, declared that survivors were ‘undesirable human material’…

It was not until the 1960s, spurred by the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, that education about the Holocaust was perceived as desirable by Israeli society. (It took until 1979 for the Holocaust to be introduced as a compulsory subject in Israeli school curricula.) During the Eichmann proceedings, the witnesses whose Holocaust experiences had been silenced for the preceding fifteen years were now asked to render precise account and encouraged to disclose the most horrifying details. Suddenly, the country’s leaders realized that this newly acquired consciousness of a common destiny was an invaluable asset in consolidating a national identity and promoting Israel’s case abroad.

The primary intent of the Eichmann trial was not punishment. If that were the case, he could have simply been liquidated on Garibaldi Street in Buenos Aires, where he was abducted by the Mossad. Instead, Ben-Gurion’s objectives were twofold: (1) to remind the world that the Holocaust obligated support of the State of Israel; and (2) to impress the lessons of the Holocaust, particularly upon the younger generation of Israelis. What was the most fundamental lesson of the Holocaust from Ben-Gurion’s perspective? That Israel was the only country which could guarantee the security of the Jews …

Events six years later accelerated the humbling process as immediately before the Six Days War in 1967, Israelis felt that they were in the ghetto under siege. They felt alone and isolated and spoke of the necessity ‘to prevent another Holocaust’. An identification with the Jews who had been annihilated two decades previously was now possible.⁴⁴

Perhaps, having at last been given the kind of attention they needed, some of the Holocaust survivors started to experience the opposite fear, that attention by others may be so intense that it threatens to take us over. I once overheard a woman talking about the way her family had tried to press her into an arranged marriage. Women relatives who had made arranged marriages assured her that she would have no difficulty with such a marriage. It was, they said, just a matter of adjusting. She exclaimed, ‘Just adjust! That would be to die!’

This fear of being taken over, robbed of our will, comes from our childhood, when the adults around us pressed their ideas on us, often with considerable force. We knew that if we accepted all their ideas and relinquished our own we would be annihilated. We would no longer be a person in our own right. We could not explain why but we knew that it was imperative that we had secrets and never became totally obedient.

In our fantasies these adults became figures of power whose only aim was to take us over and force us to do their bidding. We loved stories where the small hero or heroine, through cleverness, courage and daring, defeats the powerful enemy. Then we discovered that the adults around us also feared some inscrutable, powerful enemy. It might be the devil, or witches, or a force of evil, or spirits which could turn a man into a zombie. We might be told how Nazism or Communism took people over and turned them into automatons. During the Korean War of the fifties the term ‘brainwashing’ was created, as if brains could be washed clean of thoughts and new thoughts implanted. Stories about aliens from outer space abounded. Television was seen to threaten to take us over, and then computers and the Internet were expected to pose the same threat. Meanwhile popular series like Star Trek and The X-Files told stories about people who fall into the hands of some alien power and cease to be themselves. The central factor in all these scenarios is that the person cannot comprehend and relate to the thought processes of some alien power and consequently loses the power to think for himself. Survivors might have been released by the alien power, but more often have to work out the alien power’s secret before they can escape.

The fear of being taken over by an alien power is one of the disadvantages of possessing consciousness. Being conscious might allow us to create a much wider range of meanings and to be more flexible in our techniques for maintaining the coherence of our meaning structure, but it also means that we know just how alone we are. Moreover, we have some awareness that our sense of self is not a solid thing but a fragile structure entirely dependent on the accuracy of its representations of reality for its stability and permanence. This awareness of the fragility of our meaning structure reveals itself in the words we use when we feel that our meaning structure or that of someone else is in danger of collapsing. We say, ‘Get a grip on yourself,’ or, ‘Pull yourself together,’ or ‘I’m falling apart.’

As life evolved on this planet there were many forms and functions of forms which evolved and then disappeared. Evolutionary biologists and psychologists argue that those forms and functions which persist did so because they were useful. The psychologist Nicholas Humphrey suggested that we developed consciousness in order to work out what other people were thinking, and so be able to predict what they were going to do. Consciousness allows us to know what we are thinking, and so we can use our own experiences to guess what is going on in other people’s heads. But it is always a guess. We can never be sure. Consciousness is always private.

Susan Greenfield argues that consciousness in a baby comes on slowly like a dimmer switch on a light being turned on. However, the process of consciousness lighting up is also the process of being involved with other people.

Babies are born being interested in faces, human voices and what people do. The psychologist Dr D. Premack argues from his research that a baby is born with what he calls two ‘innately specified causal predicates’, one which allows the perception of ‘non-self-propelled objects’ (something has to happens to an object for it to move) and one which allows the perception of ‘self-propelled motion of biological beings’ (humans and animals choosing to move). Babies find the movements of human beings much more interesting than the movements of objects.⁴⁵ They would rather be propped up in their basket watching Mum get dinner than be lying in their cot looking at a mobile.

The ability to distinguish people from objects quickly develops into the ability to project on to objects and on to animals the characteristics of humans. For young children toys become people, and these people can comfort and support the child. They become immensely important when adults around the child fail to do so.

I watched a television programme about dolls in which one woman, Catherine, now sixty-four years old, talked about her doll Sailor Boy. She had been born into a family which did not want her. She was the youngest and her siblings all rejected her. Her mother was a distant figure and her father an authoritarian whom she feared. She was looked after by nannies and servants. The only person she could talk to was Sailor Boy. He understood her feelings. One evening she had Sailor Boy close to her while she was being given supper in the kitchen. The room was hot from the range oven and she wasn’t feeling well. Her father came into the room, and in her sudden fear she vomited over Sailor Boy. Her father, a fastidious man, immediately ordered the nanny to put Sailor Boy in the fire. The nanny took the poker, lifted the lid above the fire and thrust Sailor Boy in. He blazed up and was gone. As she told her story Catherine showed that she was still mourning Sailor Boy, but she finished her story by saying that some time later she was able to get another Sailor Boy and she has him with her to this day.

Toys and pets can listen and appear to understand, but, alas, they cannot talk. We can imagine them talking, but, because what they say is what we have imagined, they cannot surprise us as real people do. We can imagine our toys and pets saying things which support, comfort and confirm us, but only other human beings can show that our wish to be supported, comforted and confirmed has been fulfilled in reality and not just in fantasy.

Language is a social activity. Indeed, according to the psychologist Robin Dunbar, we evolved language because we wanted to gossip.⁴⁶

When we evolved language we were already communicating in the way animals do by touch and gesture. Robin Dunbar has made a special study of how 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.