Consentin(g) Communication - ambiguity in meaning

Times are changing for how we interact. We want certainty; we want to say for sure that something is or is not meant. We parse communication as either conveying that binary information or being bad. People who give less certainty are called bad communicators. I disagree. It might seem odd that ambiguity contributes to greater understanding, not less. That attitude is part of how we see communication nowadays.

The internet and mobile telephony have integrated themselves into our lives, so that we write to more of our friends more often. Communication is immediate; people are impatient with delays and dawdling. Not responding to some of the endless stream of messages has become a social crime called ‘ghosting’; people talk freely of the anxiety they feel without instant replies, and the responsibility of others to spare them that pain.

I didn’t grow up in this world. I’m an older millennial, but my family was late in adopting technology and I didn’t have many friends to stay in touch with; I saw them at school anyway. I got a mobile phone for university because my mother and I agreed that using the payphone at college to talk to each other would be awkward and expensive. The people I met there already lived in a world of text messages, not one of popping over to the common room to meet whoever was there.

I didn’t mind the anxiety of not knowing whom I’d meet there. That was part of life: sometimes it’d be no-one, just the newspaper and then a retreat back to my room. Sometimes one person, sometimes another: acquaintances I was too shy to hunt down to say hello to, but whom it was nice to greet in person. There was no certainty; I couldn’t guarantee that someone would be waiting for me, nor how long that person would be available. People who didn’t want to talk didn’t talk, and people who changed their minds about talking left to do other things. That could mean a lot of things: that they had other things to do; that they had only been being polite; that they liked me, but not the subject of the conversation; that they were friendly but not so friendly they’d spend longer together; or that they simply had personal issues of their own. I didn’t ask. It wasn’t my business to pry into their lives. I lived with the uncertainty, content not to make windows into people’s souls.

One of my genuine friends introduced me to Messenger, a programme that gradually seeped into my life. She commented that my writing was very flat: I never used the ‘smileys’ or emoticons that nowadays are called emojis. I even avoided exclamation marks, having been brought up to think of them as a bit uncouth: a giant flashing neon signpost in the fine architecture of the written word. I’d not come across emoticons much before; they were just a strange part of a subcultural rabbit-hole that I didn’t care for.

My friend was just the first sign I saw of a trend that has stormed the world. People love emoticons, and it seems a big part of that is the ability to firmly define their emotions. Adding a smiley face to a sentence removes ambiguity; everyone knows that you mean to be pleasant or to tell a joke. They don’t really have to engage with you; to consider who you are, whether you’re a mean, taunting sort of person, to guess for the moment and bear the alternatives in mind for the future. They just take the message as it is: a short, simple snippet, shorn of all complexity and context, all bearing on future or past interactions removed. All that matters is that a message exists; that someone bothered to send them something right now.

You can tell I disapprove. Ambiguity is an essential part of language and human interaction. It allows us to smooth over our differences, and we all have differences. Relationships aren’t built on absolute over-sharing. Good people hide little things from each other: never the really big things, but little things, like whether they love that top as much as you do. Diplomacy is built on ambiguity: on building trust and friendship through pleasant interactions without rubbing each other raw about divergent interests. Tactful people leave open things that don’t need to be defined to avoid giving unwanted offence.

On top of this, sometimes there are multiple options. Rather than expressing a simple desire for one option, it might be politic to express a less defined tendency to prefer one set of those options. Not everything in life has to be binary and absolute. Our preferences themselves aren’t, so a bit of ambiguity might actually better reflect our thoughts and feelings than definitive, simple messages. That’s how we reach agreement, be it on an arms treaty or which restaurant the group wants to dine at. We start off trying to shift the focus in a probabilistic manner, gradually gauging others’ desires without anyone being so rude or gauche as to directly demand something that might prove to be irreconcilable with others’ preferences. We work out a compromise that everyone can accept without the conflict and pain of direct rejection.

Unless we’re right-wingers in the UK, in which case we make demands of the EU, or of the rest of the population, or of the ministers in power, and expect everyone to tread delicately around our emotions despite putting them out there to be trodden on.

Psychological studies show us that direct rejection is painful: the brain activity is very similar to physical pain. It hurts. It doesn’t build relationships; it’s something to be avoided. Ambiguity in language does avoid this pain, if we can only learn to deal with it.

The flip side of hating ambiguity is that we don’t necessarily end up with conflict and rejection even if we are definite and demanding. Agreeable, good, well-meaning people will still try to avoid that conflict. That’s why tact is so important: if your friends are agreeable, good people then they will sacrifice their desires in the face of tactless statements of wants and needs. Yet if they’re agreeable, good people they deserve better. Tact is how we avoid taking advantage of good people. And if they’re not good people, we probably don’t want to be friends with them.

As an aside, this is what has happened in national politics. Agreeable, well-meaning people have caved in to regressive demands from right-wing populists and agitators not because they are sensible things to want, but because they are demands. Wishy-washy do-gooders tell each other that they must give some ground to these demands, based on their deep dislike of hurting and rejecting others. But politics isn’t dealing with friends: it’s about right and wrong. A lot of life, in fact, has right and wrong in it, and being agreeable (in the psychologists’ sense of avoiding conflict), although superficially good, can be hugely problematic. The hackneyed saying ‘for evil to flourish it is enough for good men to do nothing’ is popular for a reason. Sometimes conflict is necessary, and although I’m a naturally very agreeable person, I have spent years spotting areas of right and wrong where I resent the fact that others are taking advantage of agreeableness. So I often speak my mind instead, about ideas and politics: not because I have no idea of the pain it might cause others, but because I’m tired of the pain it causes me and the world if I don’t. Bad ideas must be stopped, no matter the [emotional] cost. In that respect, ideas are distinct from social interaction.

And it is this conflict-avoidance that leads us to sexism. Women are gradually realising that assault shouldn’t be a part of life, and men too, albeit more slowly. They are impatient with the old pretences that everything is alright; they want the disturbing, looming threats in their lives resolved and removed.

But women are trained to be passive and helpful; to be conflict resolvers far more than men. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t do-gooding men who hate conflict. I count myself as such a person; I abhor emotional conflict, to the extent I cannot stand soap operas because of the painful tactlessness on display. I loathe farce, because I can’t find any humour in another’s suffering. Many women, in contrast, love the emotional ups and downs of such entertainment. Agreeableness and conflict-avoidance are not just a sexist issue.

In relationships demands and tactlessness very easily become abuse. This is why it’s a noted and often-considered fact that agreeable, nice people are disproportionately represented amongst abuse victims. These are people who end up confused by their situation, not understanding how doing the emotionally nice thing all the time can cause them such misery, and hating themselves for causing their abuser pain when they finally do end the relationship.

Sexual relationships are not built through plain demands. It’s not romantic or exciting when a man requests sex; it’s not romantic or exciting if he makes his intention clear by asking a stranger to a dinner date, either. Those actions force women to be rejectors, and a culture which requires men to make formal moves forces them to open themselves up to rejection. This might not seem like a big deal to people on the other side: how hard can it be to reject someone, or to be rejected? Surely it’s a tiny awkwardness in a life filled with pain, disease and suffering? But we all know this to be specious. Whichever side we are on, we hate the situation, and it crops up rarely in other circumstances. We mostly naturally employ tact and delicacy to avoid flat-out rejection.

It's only in the world of relationships, which are half-scripted for us based on notions of a man formally asking another man for his female property, that we insist on such a strange social set up. We have dropped the ‘another man’ part of the script, but not the ‘formally asking for female property’ part. Women are still objects to be requested, not people to be interacted with. Some women like this: it frees them from the difficult and complex task of engaging, interacting, encouraging and getting anxious about whether interest is reciprocated. In the man’s world, men ask or do not ask, and that is that.

But in most other human interactions interest, liking, decisions… anything, really… are all reached through a joyful dance of ambiguous meanings, subtle implications, gentle climb-downs, suggestions, hints and careful changes of subject. Only children and people with mental abnormalities state their demands up front; and only Brexiters expect them always to be met and blame their pain of rejection on other people.

We use language to convey meaning probabilistically. When I was very young, I learned about something mostly pointless called a box plot. There is a mean, a box representing the confidence interval, and lines at either end representing the full range. A box plot of potential meanings is what we gradually build up through conversation: we shift the mean slightly, extend the range, see that someone pushes the other way and abandon that; or join in and follow up by moving the confidence interval further towards that end of the range with further careful statements. And as we know someone better, we become more comfortable with larger and larger shifts in meaning all at once.

We want to exchange ideas but not be judged negatively for thoughts the other person does not respect. So we probe for signs that the other person wants something too, and only when we have enough confidence do we act. The level of confidence needed varies from person to person: some are thoughtless/forthright and trust in their own likeability; others sensitive and cautious. But confidence can never be 100%. A definite yes can always be revoked: other people don’t always know their own minds, or can’t always speak for themselves in the future.

That is why ambiguity is so wonderful: it allows us to gently probe ideas and attitudes without forthrightly stamping on others’ sensibilities. When we stamp, it can be criminal. Relationships are built on gradual discovery or creation of great green fields of overlapping desires and ideas. Someone wary of conflict will approach things cautiously; extend a verbal feeler or two, and then a few more, and then a few more. Others jump right in, and as a tolerant person, I’m happy with that… but someone who struggles to say ‘no’ could also end up in unhappy situations. That has happened to people I know. On the other end impatient people with low confidence thresholds assume that caution is rejection, and move on; if the other person isn’t instantly positive, then he is being rude. This is the echo of modern society that irks me. It’s just not how I am; I regret fitting in even less than I did, but I draw the line at being called rude or thoughtless because of it. I have always been a cautious person, but that caution has become so atypical that it is now considered offensive.

The fear of rejection, of saying something unwelcome, or of imposing when unwanted, are debilitating: it’s easy to get into vicious cycles of delaying replies because it’s hard to word things carefully, and then delaying them further to avoid dealing with the awkwardness of replying so late. This is an unproductive and extreme version of being socially cautious: it’s being so cautious as to be awkward. No-one should aspire to such a life. But a bit more caution - a few more attempts to judge which way the wind is blowing before choosing a direction – is something that society could benefit from.

You might dismiss me as a crank, but the opposite of me, the character-type that society is building instead, is not a nice person. Anxious, oblivious, too impatient to engage in verbal foreplay, we are growing into a people who, despite being so connected, don’t properly connect with each other. We send pictures of genitalia in place of conversation; we shout and declaim on supposedly conversational panel shows; we offer scripted gestures and pictures in response to standard messages such as ‘feeling a bit down’ or ‘something odd happened today’. It is presence that matters, not content.

And the culmination of all this is rape. Most rape is not a stranger attacking someone in a dark alley. It is two people who have already interacted, with one of them steamrolling over the other’s social cues. It is one very nice, agreeable person being ignored by an oblivious person who is too intent on their own reading of the situation. It is a person with a very low threshold to act, or who doesn’t conceive of resistance at all: for them everything is either forbidden or allowed, and so many people use slightly rejecting phrases as invitations to make more effort that the rapist can twist everything to fit their desires. For him there always remains the possibility that the woman is being hard to get, and people who don’t practice real communication find it impossible to judge what that probability is, or how big it should be before one acts. 

I can’t imagine being so insensitive to another’s communication, but then I enjoy ambiguity and the gentle drift of conversation forward or backward in concert with another person. I want to be near-certain that both of us want to go in that direction; it takes two to drive the direction of interaction. This is not masterful, it’s not romantic in the sweep-off-her-feet way, and it’s often regarded as antisocial, and recently it was even called psychopathic. But if being oblivious to the possibility of rejection is romantic, I’m not sure it’s a good thing. 

I prefer being thoughtful about others, and all around me I see society being unthoughtful and becoming less so. We are all different, and to interact socially we need to smooth over those differences with the buffers of tact and ambiguity; with gentle probabilistic push-and-shove towards different ideas and choices, working out where and how we can fit together. This needs real language and conversation, not the instant gratification of text messages, messages with no meaning and emoticons.

Fungible opportunity

Opportunity is not fungible; you cannot convert some types of opportunity into others. This matters when discussing privilege and inequality in modern society.

We have successfully provided most people with the opportunity to meet their physiological, safety and even love/belonging needs. There is a growing number of homeless men on our streets, but still a small fraction of the population. When economists or social campaigners discuss inequality, it’s often with these levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in mind. How precarious is someone’s access to these things? How good is people’s accommodation? How much food, and how healthy? How expensive?

(picture from Wikipedia creative commons: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs)

              Precarity is a defining feature of modern life that is hard to measure. We try to get an idea by shifting people up the value scale for these basic needs: someone with food that scores 90% on an arbitrary quality rating must be more fulfilled than someone with food that scores only 50%. And that first person must have more opportunity to buy good food. Maybe those figures represent a high earner, earning 50% above the median wage (about £42k a year) and someone on benefits. The relationship might not be linear; perhaps it’s very easy to drop from 90 to 40%, but hard to drop from 40 to 10%. We assume it is. And we assume that the ability to satisfy one’s food needs translates to other needs.

              If you can buy good food, presumably you can buy shelter… that’s what the baby boomers say, admonishing the millennials for buying tasty coffee (oxymoron, I know) instead of saving for a house. But good homes are so expensive it’d take a thousand years of saved coffees to buy one. Millenials can satisfy their need for food with ease but still can’t get good homes: they’re stuck renting places that hit about 30% on the quality scale, whereas baby boomers could buy places at 60% as soon as they started work. Millenials aren’t not necessarily poor; someone can have a decent income and still not afford a good home. The ability to push oneself further up the satisfaction scale does not change linearly with income. Some things money can’t buy.

              When people discuss inequality and economic opportunity, they often mean the ability to reach that sudden steep part of the satisfaction curve; to reach a basic level of life. Some people are prevented from hitting 50% on these basic physiological and safety needs; others start far above those levels. Mostly this relates to poverty. A couple of years ago a sociological study I heard about divided the population into five classes based on income, and concluded that there was social mobility because many children of poor parents moved up from the bottom group.

              I don’t want to deny that escaping the bottom group of truly impoverished people is important (it’s worth reminding ourselves that wealth inequality is even greater than income inequality, and income differences are not the entirety of poverty or inequality).  But that study’s data showed that most children who escaped the bottom group moved only one level up. They weren’t evenly spread across all incomes, as they should have been if we had a fully socially mobile society.

              We do have social mobility in this country, but it seems mostly to allow people to move a bit away from their parents’ level of wealth. Rich parents tend to prevent their children dropping too far into abject poverty, even if those children choose poorly-paid or risky careers. Poor parents can only lift their children so far, and the state is satisfied if they get some sort of job and home, not a great job and home.

              Those people might still feel poor if they have a job that’s just above minimum wage with no prospects and little security; if they have a house that has mould in the walls and noisy neighbours; and if they still buy cheap fast food as a treat rather than going to a better-regarded restaurant. That’s because human needs are not satisfied in a binary fashion, but by degrees.

              And beyond that problem, people will begin to focus on other needs. As people’s desire for food and shelter is satisfied, they begin to consider love, community, respect and self-actualization. Just as having enough wealth to buy great food doesn’t translate into having enough wealth to buy a good home, so too do income and opportunities that help people with the basic needs not necessarily help people with the higher needs.

              Even if a child born to a single homeless parent stood as good a chance of eating well as an adult as anyone else, that equal opportunity for basic needs might not correspond to an equal opportunity for other needs. We can fund food banks through the nose until there’s a soup kitchen on every corner serving Michelin-starred food, but that won’t help people earn respect for themselves (both self-respect and respect from others) or develop great friendships.

              You can’t even sacrifice one form of opportunity for another; not as an individual, anyway. Societies can. You can’t tell everyone that you’re happy with battery-farmed chicken rather than organic, free-range chicken and expect them to give you a spacious flat near work in return; you’ve sacrificed food, but you don’t get shelter. And if you’re a white woman, you might feel deprived of opportunities to become a company director even though you earn enough to satisfy your basic needs.

              It strikes me that even though education and society has focussed more and more on telling children to chase their dreams – to self-actualize – that it has become harder and harder for most people to do so. And this is overwhelmingly related to wealth. There are many mechanisms at work: education, support, a financial buffer that allows one to take risks in careers that require it, and, of course, just fitting in with the language, mannerisms, interests and other shared behaviours of the recruiters.

              If you are rich, you can be an artist and work at it until you are good enough to make some sort of living. If you are poor you can’t afford a few years of no income while you get better at painting and go to galleries or events to display your work and get better-known. I am sure that some artists grew up poor, but the evidence is that most actors and musicians (and presumably artists) come from wealthier backgrounds. It is much easier for them.

              If you come from a solidly middle-middle class background, you might satisfy economists and politicians that you had the opportunities you needed to get some sort of job. But if you wanted to be a journalist, for example, tough luck. Most journalists come from well-off backgrounds and had a journalist in the family, and they’re not the worst profession for this. Society might have full employment, but if a carpenter wants to be a journalist, a journalist wants to be a banker and a banker fancies giving it all up and being a carpenter, then there are still unhappy people out there who aren’t achieving their life goals.

              Sadly, of course, there aren’t nice easy cycles like that. Everyone wants to be a top footballer and no-one wants to be an office cleaner. And it seems to me that not only are the ‘top’ professions less accessible, as demonstrated by sociological evidence, but that the top of the pyramid has narrowed. There is less of it. Music is a perfect example. Before streaming and burning of CDs there was plenty of room for decently successful live performers who might be known in their town or region, and room for a large variety of nationally-known performers. But the system has become ‘winner-take-even-more’. Big bands are massive, advertised and supported by labels who see them as a sure thing. Other bands make do with less, and a hollowed-out industry. The increasing connectedness of the world has meant that winners have even more influence: everyone forms a connection with them in the relationship map of the world, and those connections are lost to people who might have managed to be ‘winners’ in the past.

              In short, the opportunity to self-actualize is very limited in today’s world, including for supposedly privileged groups. If you want to work a reasonable job, have a comfortable life, and grow a family, the modern world has you covered, although even family life has become more demanding in many ways, from working hours, through commuting and two-earner families and on to tuition fees and chasing the best for the children. But if you ever dreamed of something a bit more (than this provincial life, Beauty and the Beast style), then you had better be born very rich.

              I think it’s important to realise that privilege in some respects doesn’t translate into privilege in every respect, because this is at the heart of what makes people angry and upset in many conversations on the subject. People who have all that they need to survive still don’t have equal access to all that they need for a fulfilling life. This is because people broadly focus on the next level up on the hierarchy of needs. The people who have only level one might think it’s unfair that others have level two; those struggling to reach even level one might regard them as ungrateful, without a thought for level two.

              Elderly people who had a better chance to own a home and self-actualize might resent young people’s health while they resent old people’s security of income. And young white men might not feel like they have everything in life even while young black women moan about their privilege. Someone who can afford a better home, or even to buy a home, might still be nowhere near achieving other needs in life. It even seems that people can’t ‘have it all’, in the sense that modern society requires people to work all-out just to achieve one goal in life. So someone who worked 12-hour days for a decade might have a good enough job to afford a nice house, but could easily feel in need of a social life, rest and self-actualization. Someone who pursued the dream of being a journalist, artist or research scientist will have a bit more of that self-actualization but will be jealous of the house and food that the other person can afford.

              That change in our society that requires people to devote even more of themselves to just one option in order to achieve it makes life different for young people compared to those of one or two generations ago. It means that the rich, whose wealth and social networks can get them into good jobs and take care of the chores in life that they don’t have time for, have a huge advantage.

              This privilege of wealth and networks isn’t something that we can change by treating specific categories of people better. Feminists are realising that women still can’t have it all, and eventually people will realise that no amount of gay rights or all-lives-matter will help people reach the pinnacle of their potential. These things are vital in fighting prejudice, but it’s very easy to see all factors holding you back as part of a conspiracy against you specifically, or your group. Even if we treat homosexuals, women, racial and religious minorities, old and young, the disabled, autistic, shy or introverted all the same as we treat everyone else, and even if we then expand that simply to not rejecting people who are different from our ‘normal’, we will still not have equal opportunities.

              Because those top levels of the pyramid are overwhelmingly occupied by the rich, held up by systemic forces that privilege risk-takers, even though the poor can’t afford risk; by people’s limited knowledge of jobs, the job market and recruiters that means that knowing powerful people is a huge advantage; and by a society which demands absolute commitment to every aspiration and allows no room for rounded lives, leisure time or alternative aspirations (making pursuit of dreams even more risky, because you can only have one).

              In short, we don’t have equal opportunity in society. And protected characteristics are just one part of that, not the entirety of it. Wealth inequality, and our wider culture, are beasts that affect 99.9% of us, if not more. We should try to understand each other’s needs in life, whether higher or lower on Maslow’s scale, and work together to improve everyone’s lives. Almost all of us suffer; we just suffer in different ways.