The road to language is a more whimsical one than we remember. Take for instance: -
a toddler waddled up to me in a Liverpudlian gallery, and said ‘Dada.
And his mama wandered round the corner, and said ‘That’s not your dada, your dada is next door
And it made me wonder: did the boy know who dada was, or what dada meant, or neither? Where was the confusion?
For language flows into us from many different sources; inside and out. And if you’re anything like me, the leaders of that tribe who taught you language are your parents. Once you master the mapping of word on world for a few words, you soak up language by the dozen daily in a profusion never again experienced.
To outsiders, the process is a magical mystery with somewhat arbitrary ebbs and flows; and even to yourself, so rapid that inevitably it is mostly forgotten. The leaders of that tribe are your parents and followed by teachers, schoolfriends, other family, books, and other word-generative technology.
(Some say language itself is technology, writing evidently so.)
And it is through language and other media of expression, you get a sharper definition of the ‘tribe’ who cultivate you – parents, siblings, peers and educators. You are likely to identify more with those you grew up (unless you led an unusual early life) than people who exist outside the contours of that group, and particularly those who shaped the contours of your expectations, such as mum and dad.
And even if you assumed a rebel identity somewhere along the road to adulthood, or struggle with verbal language and prefer the visual, kinetic or sonic, the language of those you grew up with will tint your perceptions like veiled lenses.
Some of my identities: Londoner, secular jew, liberal (aware of liberalism’s problems). I grew up with kids whose families were from many countries, many continents (for example, Somade whose parents were from Nigeria and was interested in Confusianism and Tao Buddhism; Tomik who was from Azerbaijan), as with my father’s family in the early 20thcentury. With that background, I’m more likely to reach this phrase: we are all descended from Africans; we are all part of the human family.
If humanity goes back about 300,000 years, and you average the generations out at about one every 20 years, then each of us has about 60,000 generations till we reach mitochondrial Eve and the other tribes who ultimately became the 7.5 billion or so humans currently on this planet. 60,000 historical: 7.44 billion current – a ratio that I find very hard to come to terms with. We are separated from the rest of the living by less than we think – a large town of forebears.
That’s easier to feel in London and other liberal cities: - you split the world’s population in seven, you get
one Chinese,
one Indian,
one African,
one south-east Asian,
one other Asian (about a third Indian and a third Chinese),
two-thirds of a Latin American,
two-thirds of a European,
one third of a North American,
one third of an everyone else. You can see that on a London bus.
“The true born Englishman’s a contradiction,
In speech an irony, in fact a fiction (Daniel Defoe, Londoner, inventor of Crusoe)
“Exodus – movement of ja people (Bob Marley, Rastafarian on a jewish story)
“It is the same [story] told of all. Many. Miscegenations on miscegenations. […] They lived und laughed ant loved end left (James Joyce, anti-fascist)
We are all part of the human family; but this family is not all a happy family. Culture is embedded in social structures; social structures are often embedded in geographically stable groups; and the culture of those social structures (for locals) usually dictates that locals are higher up in the social hierarchy than foreigners.
If you belong to the branch of the family that looks and acts like me, chances are that my gut instincts are going to be more comfortable with you. Even if I know that the group’s geographical stability is a result of historical forces that are well outside of my group’s control (something that Jews are particularly aware of). Take for example: -
A middle Eastern-looking woman sidled up to me during my lunch break on Holborn Viaduct and said, “I am desperately hungry. I have not had anything to eat. Please could you get me some food. Some money (but please enough for a meal) or some bread maybe?”
She looked shattered. I thought about it.
“We could go to Sainsbury’s and we could get some bread.”
“OK – I will get you some bread.” My mind had a lunchtime plan and this was not in my mental autopilot plan, but it would be easy enough to get some bread.
“And can you also get some chicken for my children.” The tone of her voice irked me, shifting from pleading to something like demanding, and I turned and I said
“I’m sorry” and walked away
“A shame on you and your people!”
And I felt a mixture of anger at her arrogance and shame at not providing for her (but was it my responsibility?) and I decided to carry on. In retrospect I could have acted better. Probably made the wrong decision. Moneyless, hungry people are known to make poor decisions precisely because they are hungry. A couple of weeks later I signed up to donate regularly to Shelter.
But I also wonder how it would have played out if she had been a born and bred Londoner, more aware of London manners and sensibilities. Perhaps it is because of our perceived coldness and (most of us) actual habit of relative coolness towards the masses of others in our city that you would rarely see such an attempt by a London woman rather than a man. It is well known among psychologists that city-dwellers tend to show a reduction in empathy when walking past the homeless – those who are perceived not to be part of a dependable social structure with family and home.
At a broader structural level, the home office makes decisions like this every day – whether to be charitable to immigrants in need or not. Personally I find the current iteration of the home office cold and unwelcoming; but I recognize that my sentiments are not shared by much of the UK populace. And there are good arguments for and against immigration, as set out in this powerful piece by Yuval Noah Harari. I recognize that there is a danger of social structures built for stability by centuries of effort, collapsing under excess pressure from other cultures that do not want to integrate and adopt the local culture. To help your own family prosper, you need to draw a line somewhere. Sadly, drawing that line firmly requires a fortress mentality of a kind that in excess produces the hideous rise in homelessness and horrible immigration decisions we’ve seen in the past eight years.
We live in an age where it is acceptable not to want to raise a family. Yet I realized that I’d never seriously questioned my desire for children until this year, the first year in which I’ve engaged with dating as an ongoing part of life. I’ve had the good fortune to date many brilliant women this year (sadly none where we’ve fallen for each other) and encountered views which challenged that mindset. For as my friend Anna points out, to choose to be a mother is to unchoose many other rewards in life. For example, the freedom to forge a career, artistic or professional, uninterrupted by the demands for a child.
When I look around at my friends, they seem to have gone down two trousers of time – the bulk have settled into long term relationships or marriages, several with kids on their way (or in tow); while the rest continue in the quest for love. Yet the primacy of love in our culture is not just a beautiful myth that encourages mutual celebration; it also functions to lead the way for the older myth that the true purpose of life is to procreate.
The chain of language in which we are immersed in our early life reinforces the sense that we too should carry on the family and build our branch of the tree. And while I still want to continue this desire, it has made me think more about alternative sources of meaning both in my life and in my potential love interests. For it is a horribly reductionist and stupid binary to put women in to say that either they are unimportant because they do not have children, or unimportant because their true importance lies in the child they raised. And there are many other sources of meaning to be found by all – whether writing books that expand people’s horizons (to name one art), founding initiatives that re-shape a portion of society or simply cherishing the present.
Whether or not we have children depends on serendipities and choices just as arbitrary as our road to language. So (where reasonable to do so) I say celebrate the strange turns and exigencies of life, the alternative ambitions and the impossibilities by today’s standards. Who knows what road will inspire you to achieve your next greatness.
