Chapter 18 social talk

Not all social animals are social to the same degree.In some species, members are connected and dependent on each other, like loosely knit cells in a tissue.This is the case with social insects.All their lives they act and live in clusters; a hive is a spherical animal.Some species are less gregarious, and their members build families together, pool funds, travel in groups, and share food, but any individual can survive living alone.There are also species that are gregarious simply because they share more or less the same tastes, get together from time to time, and use social gatherings for special activities such as feeding and breeding.Others just nodded at each other as they walked past, without even calling them by their first names.

Determining which category we fall into is no easy task.For there are times in our lives when we try to form every kind of social organization imaginable.Especially in the city, we depend on each other like ants and bees, but we can separate from others when we want to, and we can go to live in the woods by ourselves, at least in theory.We depend on each other and take care of each other, and we have built complex systems for this, even including ice cream vending machines at gas stations.However, we also have many books that tell us how to return to the pastoral.We live together as a family, but at some point we turn our faces and fight, as if we were different species.As a collective, we are like ants hoarding food eager to accumulate the information of the entire universe and spread this information among us as if it were an indispensable food (every tiny ray of real information in science, It also has a certain pheromone effect, which can make the hair of the staff in the laboratory stand on end).But each of us has also built up our own personal repository of secret knowledge, hidden from others like an untouchable treasure.Each of us has a name as a personal marker, and we believe unreservedly that this system of classification will guarantee our actual existence and keep us distinct from each other and from other living beings.But in the heart of a crowded city, the system of classification doesn't seem to work, and essentially we all have no names, most of the time.

No one wants to think that the rapidly expanding populations that cover the face of the earth bear any important resemblance to the life of an ant's nest or a beehive.Who wants to think for a moment that three billion of us are one gigantic animal when we relate to each other?We are not mindless, nor are our day-to-day behaviors detailedly encoded by our genome.Nor do we seem compulsively connected to a single, unified, unchanging job like the building of an insect's nest.If our brains can really be brought together to produce a common thought like an ant colony, that kind of thought will be unimaginable, and it will really confuse us.

Social animals tend to be single-minded about one particular task, usually a colossal project for their size, which they work on incessantly in accordance with genetic instructions and genetic drives, using it for group housing and protection So, guarantee yourself permanence. Of course, there are superficially ant-like aspects of some of the things we do together, like building glass and plastic cities all over the land, farming the bottom of the ocean, raising armies, or sending specimens of ourselves to the moon, or Send a memo to neighboring galaxies.We do these things together without quite knowing why.However, we can stop one thing and switch to another whenever we want.We are not genetically programmed to perpetually bury ourselves in one activity, as wasps are.We are no more constrained in our conduct today than we were in the twelfth century when cities were thrown out to build cathedrals all over the continent.At the time, we believed that that thing could go on forever, that it was our way of life.But that's not it.Let’s be honest, most of us have long since forgotten what the church building boom was all about.This activity is temporary, subsocial, and we do it with coercion, with all our might, but only for a short period of time in history.These activities, then, cannot be counted as social behaviors in the biological sense.If we can do and stop at will, it is unlikely that our genes encode detailed instructions.The construction of Chartres Cathedral (Chartres, France) is certainly beneficial to people's hearts, but the world is vicissitudes, and life remains the same.Rome's plowshares have become dung, how can laser bombs, high-speed transportation, landing on Mars, solar energy, and synthetic proteins survive for a long time?Over the course of our lives, we'll of course improvise something else, but it's clear that we have the freedom to choose.

In fact, in the long run, we're probably better off not being biologically social.This is not to say that we have the final say on whether or not it will be social, and we may even hold a vote; nor does it mean that we have already figured out how to act so that it will not become social.It simply means that if we were told that intellectually we ourselves are roped together, driven by heredity, to loll about some kind of nondescript collective work, Something huge is being built, so big we'll never see its outline.Well, we're not going to take that as good news.Wouldn't it be particularly cruel and dangerous if our unique species of talking and debating should have such a burden?Such a life is better left to insects and birds, to lower mammals and fish.

However, our human language does not expect that to be exactly the case. One thing is increasingly disturbing: it seems that the gift of language is the only characteristic of humans that genetically marks us all as human and distinguishes us from other forms of life.Language, like birds making nests and bees building nests, is a universal and biologically specific behavior of human beings.The way we do this is collective, coercive, automatic.Without it we would not be human beings; if we were separated from it, our minds would be dead, like bees strayed from the hive. We are born knowing how to use language.The ability to recognize syntax, to organize and configure words into intelligible sentences, is inherent in the human brain.We identify sentence patterns and create grammar, all of which are stipulated by the program.There are some invariant and mutable constructs in languages ​​that we all have in common.Just as chickens are born to recognize flying shadows overhead and falcons among birds, we are born to recognize grammatical meaning in a string of words.According to Chomsky, who observed language as a biologist observes living tissue, language is "certainly a biological property of the human brain."These universal properties of language are genetically determined; we do not learn them, nor do we create them as we grow up.

We engage in this activity all our lives, we collectively animate it, but we have no control over it.Individuals cannot control language, nor can committees, institutes, or governments control it.Once language has life, it will act like a living and moving creature.Its components are constantly changing because of the never-ending activity in which we are all engaged.New words are coined and added, and old words change or lose their meaning.The new method of connecting words into sentences and linking sentences into chapters rises and disappears, but the internal structure is only growing, enriching, and expanding.Individual languages ​​also age and seem to die, but leave their offspring on the surrounding land.Several independent languages ​​can grow side by side, without touching each other for centuries, maintaining their own independence and integrity, and their living organizations are incompatible with each other; and sometimes, two languages ​​may come together, merge, copy, and give birth to several languages. new language.

If we say that language is at the core of our social existence, bringing us together and covering us with edifices of meaning.It may be said with equal certainty, then, that art and music are operations of the same universal mechanism of hereditary determination.It's not a bad thing to do it together.If that makes us social creatures, like ants, then at least I (or should I say at least us?) don't mind.