Chat and gossip

Post Reply New Topic

Was there chatting in hunter-gatherers societies? Chatting is motivated by various needs. To fill the void in a party as small as the one that grows in an elevator, as large as a the one you find in waiting rooms. Here you have generally only two urges: to fill the void (people who don’t talk to each other when they are face-to face tend to perceive hostility. Talking is here saying “I am not your enemy, so let’s talk about the weather”). To explore other people in oblique ways, this in social parties, expressly organized to make people meet to reinforce existing bonds and create new ones. Then there is gossip, which is motivated by envy.
All these things probably did not exist in primitive societies of hunters-gatherers. They are the product of the “lonely crowd” of industrialized society, or of stable villages (now disappearing) in agricultural societies.
So, much of what we say when we talk is futile or obliquely offensive. We might live without language competence. So why all this anguish at autistics talking too little?

Paulo, just this once, I think you missed the bus.

So what you think, people in hunter-gatherer societies sat around the campfire every night in silence unless there was something important they needed to say? And you think envy was invented right before the steam engine. I think envy is a pretty ancient emotion.

Territorial animals compete for the choicest territories. Group living animals compete for dominance. Humans do both. It has to do with breeding success, which is why it's around. I'm not sure those behaviors would be carried out without motivating influences that correspond with emotions like envy and greed, which everybody calls vices but everybody admires.

I haven't lived with a hunter-gatherer society, but I've lived with the modern Blackfoot Indians, and they're yapping all the time. A lot of it is humor, which is really fun, but they're as much into malicious gossip as anybody.

For people devoid of envy, hunter gatherer societies did a lot of fighting.

It might have to do with a sort of zen idea where one topic can be just as profound as another, like the tea ceremony, where you make a pot of tea, drink the tea, and wash the dishes, and it's considered the apex of their culture, although it might superficially seem routine and trivial.

On another level, you must have noticed that people only see a need to provide explanations for other people's inclinations and behavior, never their own.

Like if somebody thought old movies were obsolete and boring, so they tried to analyze why you watched them, like it was filling some emptiness resulting from some deficiency in your life, and if it wasn't for that, you wouldn't want to watch them.

Your response would probably be that you enjoy them because they're good movies.

Gossip is not fight for territory, which is omnipresent in animal world. Is brooding about the position reached by others.
Animals below alphas, look for opportunities to unseat alphas through alliances with below-alphas. This happens in chimps and probably in other species. We shouldn't have a mythical representation of primitive men. But the history of the human species is millions of years long and, while we don't know much of humans one million of years ago, we know that language is a tool, like the wheel. Tools are used to amplify drives, deep seated needs. But it's easier to amplify destructive needs, than solidarity needs. There may be a proof of this in the fact that drums and flutes have not changed with the same speed as weaponry.

Funny you should ask. Here is a quote from William Golding's short story "Clonk Clonk", which takes place among primitive hunters:

"When the chimps had gone the Leopard Men relaxed, singing and laughing. The Elder of Elders examined the sun-shadow he stood on which was not much longer than his foot. He stretched and yawned a huge yawn. The other men began to yawn too and move towards the bole of the big tree. They talked all at once but paid little heed to what anyone else said.
It was not speech that Palm or Minnow would have bothered to understand. They would have recognized, being women, that it was not useful speech. It was no more than an expression of an emotional state, so that in that sense, each Leopard Man was talking or singing to himself. Mime of the body, song of the throat, it was a communication at once total and imprecise as the minds that lay behind it."

Chat and gossip exist everywhere, and always have, I believe, what's different is how a healthy person/society does it and how a sick person/society does it. If people aren't insecure, fearful, competitive etc they are simply reassuring, challenging and informing each other. That's what they do endlessly whether on a hunt or in an office. If it's healthy, it's helpful. Otherwise it can become malicious and harmful.

Even if you're in the same city your whole life you still see different people adopting different strategies in their relationships with others. Some people today live in healthy personal situations but nobody lives in a healthy society so everyone to some extent has a part of their brain that is corrupted by having to negate that sickness daily. But not all of them are malicious, it depends on other factors as well. And many of them come up with very great responses to very diffficult circumstances.

But if there was no sickness there would be no corruption hence no malice at all.

But that's hard to imagine these days.

(Also, even without malice there would still be cruelty - animals eat each other, or people whom other people need become sick and die. But the suffering is worse when it's the result of malice rather than just part of the life process.)

I've been a veritable chatterbox on WP for a few days, I have to take a break now. It's very hard work for me to come up with words to show people. It's been interesting though.

I have in mind spans of time in the order of millions of years. When humans took a road distinct from bonomos or chimps, a whatever they were, did they chat and produced gossip? Perhaps. They certainly had not the Sun of London to read while commuting. And do animals chat? Maybe there is some piece of their behavior which is a kernel of what in humans is gossip. But it's also a problem of the quantitative place that chatting and gossip have in our life. Or so I believe.

But I meant "always" as in "since human societies have existed".

And the Sun is about as sick, corrupt and malicious as chat and gossip get, I should think.