Language use gives us both affirmation and information. If I call an old friend from college up and ask her for contact information of another friend, common decency requires that I spend some time with her asking how she is doing and explaining myself. She knows full well that the only reason I called her is to get in touch with another woman and yet she rightly expects to be affirmed. There are few conversations that don't include both elements.
A conversation can be mainly about one or mainly about the other. If I am calling my old friend mainly to get information from her I may well be lying when I give her affirmation and she may well be peeved about this after the conversation no matter how polite and affirming we both pretend to be. I might also call her up simply to talk. Facts will come up in that conversation too but they will serve as a pretext for the affirmation I seek just as my feigned interest in her can be only a pretext for my real interest in getting information about another woman.
The word "pretext" and its etymology are interesting here. There are necessary formalities that cannot be dispensed with. I call Mary and ask how she is feeling and how her life is going before asking for Karen's number because it is Karen I really want a relationship with. But I can also call Mary and ask her if she knows what Karen is up to as a way to re-establish contact with Mary because it is Mary I really want a relationship with.
And here we find a seemingly trivial point that has huge implications: When I am interested in information the quality of that information matters but when, as in the second case, I am calling Mary to see if she values me enough to kindle a possible relationship, the information I use as a pretext to this affirmation matters little. It can be an outright lie. I can call and say, "Do you remember that woman, I think her name was Karen, who did some outrageous thing in second year? I don't know why but I thought of her and wondered how she turned out and thought you might know." The truth is that I only picked Karen because she was someone I knew Mary would remember while the real reason for my call is that someone told me that Mary and Jim divorced a year ago and I'd like to ask her out and "chat about old times".
There is nothing particularly sinister about this. That said, no child raised on Sesame Street or Barney and Friends is going to place a lot of value on facts. Being affirming is going to trump being accurate every time. This is what happens when you take competition and struggle out of children's lives. It feels like a "nice" thing to do because it seems as if no one's feelings get hurt.
But people's feelings do get hurt in a society that values affirmation. People will notice right away who gets the most affirmation and who gets the most sincere affirmation. Any five-year-old child will figure out who the kindergarten teacher really likes most no matter how much the teacher pretends to love all her charges. You can get affirmation wrong just as you can get information wrong. I can call Mary and talk about Karen and what a wild and irresponsible woman Karen was meaning to flatter Mary and make her feel good about herself hoping to reestablish the friendship we cemented over coffee and moral discussion at university and maybe move on to something amorous. What I don't know is that the divorce from Jim has left Mary feeling very bitter. She regrets being so sensible and settling down so quickly and feels like she cheated herself out of a lot of good life experience. She politely declines my invitation and then calls Karen herself and says, "There is a bar here that has a Burlesque night and I thought of you because you're the only woman I know who'd have the courage to go to such a thing." And the two of them go out and have a great time drinking Jack Daniels and establish a great friendship based on letting loose a little that becomes central to both their lives.
A society that values affirmation would be one that cares little about information. At the same time, it would not be a society where people lived in peace and harmony. To the contrary, it would be a society that competed for affirmation and one that punished people for not affirming us even though they don't know us. It would be a society where gay men sought out bakers who didn't want to decorate cakes for gay weddings even though they had no desire to buy a cake from this particular baker in the first place. It would be a society where people are forced to use made-up pronouns. It would be a society where people harshly condemned all men as rapists while shamelessly exempting a real rapist because he was a candidate for the political party they support. It would, in short, be the society we live in.
A society that values information more than affirmation can easily tolerate different truth claims. A society that values affirmation more than information cannot.
No comments:
Post a Comment