In my last post, I asked the question "why conquer". I ultimately concluded that there's some inherent value in the human psyche, some element of being a Homo sapiens, that gave motivational force to this kind of behavior. A great deal of last class was spent attempting to delimit communication and understanding, and attempting to classify what we understand as situations which are inherently communicative. These two aspects of interaction, communication and physical action, are ultimately intimately tied together as an action-reaction sequence. The question remains what aspects of communication prompt certain reactions. What about Cortes's communication with Montezuma and the Aztecs eventually leads to genocide?
The answer to this question lies in the motivation of communication. The greatest drive in humanity is self preservation, second only to the drive to reproduce. This should be taken deeply into account when considering communication. Note: this is a prioritization, not an attempt to characterize these drives. I am not attempting to say these are brought out in any obvious manner. However, these kinds of behavior ultimately drive down to how the genes in our body function. They have been tailored by evolution to encourage self preservation behavior and reproductive behavior, or else they wouldn't exist within us. I brought this point up in class, and I think the "cynical" example of breaking down classroom communication drives this point home.
Consider a general example of a student speaking in class (instead of harping on Tim's GameFAQs example again!). What is his motivation in doing so? For ease of thought, we'll characterize him as being very concerned with academics. Therefore, a student may speak up in class for a couple of reasons. For example, he may have his teacher notice him, or he may be better able to grasp the material. Both of which directly relate to his grade. If our student gets a good grade, it'll reflect better on him. He gains social capital. If he uses to good grades to go on to get a good job, that job will pay him a higher amount. The cash he receives is also social capital, representing some of his worth as an individual. If our student makes the wrong communication, he looses his social capital (like cursing at the teacher).
Gaining social capital allows the fulfillment of our two primary motivators: self preservation, and reproduction. Our student, through his immediate means of communication, is able to project for his needs in the long term: staying alive and finding a mate. Social capital works in a human system to accomplish these ends because of our societal structure.
Then what of altruistic behavior? We'll call altruistic behavior any behavior which, superficially, appear to undermine our two primary drivers. We might consider it to be "artifacts" of the system, accidental end results of individuals attempting to accomplish the two primary drives. As I said in class, the history professor might just be publishing an amazing manuscript to gain tenure, or to gain respect among his peers, which in the end are simply forms of social capital. Individuals need not even recognize that their actions lead to the acquisition of social capital, and need not recognize their expenditure of this capital on self preservation and reproduction.
Coming full circle, what motivated Cortes? As Todorov makes mention of, Cortes's slaughter of the Aztecs certainly wasn't an immediate financial boon to him - preservation of the population could of led to profits from a slave trade. Of the 95% of the population destroyed, at least a portion of that was due to disease, not part of any kind of "motivation". On the personal level, each soldier had a very limited understanding of the Aztecs. While Todorov focuses on Cortes's understanding of the Other, it's really the individuals understanding of the Aztecs that come to bear. To the soldiers, there was no loss of social capital when they slaughtered the natives, raped their wives, and worked them to death. In many cases, there was a gain of social capital among their peers.
This gives us a good chance to delimit understanding and communication. Communication, in this context, is nothing more than a means to a personal end. Its action-reaction sequence is used to get what you want, survival and sex, albeit subtle and sometimes hidden. Understanding, conversely, may be a kind of social limiter. For a Spanish soldier, what's the difference between killing one of his Conquistador peers and killing a native? The former loses social capital, while the later either does not affect his social capital, or is a boon to his social capital. Understanding is the recognition of the worth of another through their preservation.
I understand this model of understanding is very much like an earlier European model, in that understanding somehow precludes violence. There's pretty obvious examples in our literature of understanding leading to violence. Ender uses his understanding to kill the buggers, and even Cortes uses his understanding to slaughter the Indians.
ReplyDeleteThis is not to say that my proposed model doesn't account for this. First, Todorov puts forth 3 different definitions of understanding, based on worth to the individual (a reflection back upon my model). Ender and Cortes utilize the "fact-form" of understanding to accomplish their goal - this form of understanding isn't the social delimiter. Instead, I would say the social delimiter is the value-form of understanding. If Cortes and Ender found social capital value within the Other, then they would have had the effort to preserve them.