how to save the world

What is this strange process we use to get to know strangers? For many of us, I think, it is a little like the process of peeling an onion, slowly stripping away the layers of the other person’s surface identity, and allowing the other person to do the same, sometimes at different speeds and with different styles and techniques.

In fact, it may be that in our complex, anxious, imprisoning and often hurtful modern society, it’s more like peeling off layers of bandages and exposing the wounded skin beneath. Not something we do easily for strangers, and involving a ritual that takes patience, trust, practice, and tact (or ruthlessness) to accomplish successfully.

It entails to a certain extent a standing down from personal power, a willingness to open oneself and be vulnerable to another person, and hope that person will not exploit that vulnerability. This is less difficult, I think, with children, and with people of certain cultures (notably indigenous ones) where there is less pretense and less psychological baggage to overcome.

The process can involve revealing part of someone’s true nature beneath the surface, only to discover another layer of opaqueness beneath that. And one never knows if or when on has reached the final layer, or indeed if there even is one.

It is unclear to me whether chemistry (e.g. pheromones) helps in that unpeeling, or rather bypasses the need for that mental strip-tease entirely, by tapping into a physical-emotional feedback loop instead of the more difficult intellectual-emotional one. When you have both, the mix is potentially explosive: the two of you, physically drawn to each other, and possibly (but not necessarily mutually) intellectually and emotionally drawn to each other as well.

Even in business relationships, the chemistry, while not necessarily sexual, can be substantial: We ‘blink’ to conclusions about people on the basis of first impressions that are often arbitrary or even unfair, but once established, rarely change. Of the 16Mb of information processed by our bodies each second, only 18 bits are ‘conscious’ processing.

Weblogs, if they are candid, provide a means to allow people to be sussed out and, at least in one direction, short circuit the unpeeling process. Still, the circling around each other and sniffing each other out still must usually occur before the relationship can make that uneasy jump from ‘virtual’ to ‘real’.

What might we do to make the process simpler and less fraught with anxiety? After all, it’s hard enough to filter out the people with the most potential from all those casual online acquaintances in the first place, without having to face the additional hazard of blowing what could be a critical relationship by an unnecessarily cumbersome first physical encounter?

I think we need a new ‘getting to know you in person’ ritual. It should draw on the successful rituals practiced by creatures without language, and by indigenous cultures who seem to be much better at it than our culture. It must allow either party to exit the relationship gracefully, yet still allow both parties to save face. And it must be genuine, free of the terrible risk that one party will deliberately or unintentionally defraud the other into believing the relationship has legs when they really know it doesn’t for any number of reasons (ulterior motives, overcompensation for lack of self-esteem, desperation, loneliness, or even psychopathy).

How would such a ritual work? Anyone studied anthropology or animal behaviour or complexity theory enough to suggest the ‘rules’ for such first physical encounters? The cost of lost opportunity is too great for us to be so abysmal at this critical, often terrifying step in the social networking process. Do we need some agreed-upon non-verbal signals, or scripts, at the outset? Could we usepheromone detectors or other technologies to facilitate it?

My two days here in London so far have given me the chance to do this, with some remarkable results:

• I had never noticed before the number of narrowboats moored along the city’s canals. I’d never thought of the UK as a country of canals.
• The new express train from Heathrow to the city is extremely modern, fast, and eerily silent. This is clearly the future of transportation. By contrast, London’s famous and extensive Underground is bordering on dysfunctional, with frequent security alerts and problems with switches and other crumbling infrastructure delaying and disabling large parts of the system for protracted periods. It is not uncommon for message to say, essentially, “find some other way to get where you’re going”. Given the extraordinary quality of its online site, this is a tragedy.
• Public transport is a much more social activity than it is in North America. The Underground is buzzing with conversations. In Toronto by contrast the subway is mostly silent, with solitary people lost in their books and newspapers.
• Much less visible than in past are the once-ubiquitous large communal garden plots (“allotments”) dotting the countryside. Perhaps London is just running out of space. Or maybe in this age of fast food, people have no time for it anymore.
• The city has a lot more dogs than I remember, all of them on leash. Like the British people, British dogs seem exceedingly well-mannered. They also seem to be very happy as city dogs go.
• London is becoming more like European cities in the fashion consciousness of youth, and in the tendency of the fashion-conscious to be constantly checking out others in public places. But among older males the notorious ‘bankers’ nondescript dark grey suit, white or blue shirt and tie still prevails. And while in Toronto the latest fashion craze visible on public transport is shawls, in London it is scarves wrapped around the neck, for both sexes. Or maybe it has always been so in the cooler months here and I’ve just never noticed it.
• As much as I’m trying to avoid it, it’s becoming harder for me not to see the recent large number of astonishing wild animal encounters I’m having as some kind of omen. In Toronto, in addition to the now-famous PucPuc, who still accompanies me on my regular 5k runs in the back yard, it’s recently become a regular occurrence for me to have to stop my car for deer crossing the road. The dogs of friends who used to be indifferent to me (the dogs, not the friends) are now staring at me oddly and following me around. And here in London, at the Knowledge Cafe I spoke at yesterday, a mouse scurried across the room, to the amazement of the local guests who said seeing mice in commercial buildings in London is almost unheard of. And then as I walked from the Underground to the hotel, a fox dashed across the very busy Kensington High Street and leaped up onto a stone wall right in front of me and hence into the consulate grounds I was passing. What’s going on here?

By the way, I want to thank the conference organizers, my blog readers who have dropped by or who I will be seeing later in my trip, andespecially David Gurteen, for their wonderful hospitality.

Watercolour by Julie Zickefoose

Patricia McConnell’s book For the Love of a Dog is one part training manual and one part love story. It is a study of the behaviour of our companion animals and of ourselves, but mostly of our relationships with each other. 

Much of the early part of the book is about dogs’ body language and what it tells us about their emotional state. McConnell concentrates on four primal emotions: fear/anxiety, anger, joy and love. Here is a summary of the signs (the book has photos that illustrate them):

• a closed mouth, ‘frozen’ (stiff) body or wide open ‘whale’ eyes (with the whites visible on the side) – anger or anxiety
• open mouth, loose body, or squinty eyes with crows’ feet – friendly, relaxed
• a turning-to-face you with closed jaw – distress, warning
• looking away from you – submission, deference, desire to defuse tension
• a cocked head – curiosity
• a low growl or deep bark – anger or aggressiveness
• a shifted forward stance – alertness, confidence
• a shifted backward stance – defensive, fearful
• a frown or yawn – anxiety or fatigue
• a wrinkled nose or scowl – disgust
• corners of the mouth pushed forward – confident, aggressive
• corners of the mouth pulled back – fearful, defensive or submissive
• tongue flicks – anxious, seeking appeasement

Just as we need to be observant of dogs’ body language, and careful to note the signs rather than projecting how we would feel (or think we would feel) in their circumstances, we also need to be aware of our own body language and how it is being interpreted by, and influencing the emotions of, our dogs. That means we should avoid wearing sunglasses or large hats that can conceal or misrepresent our feelings, approach dogs we don’t know as they do (from the side without making direct eye contact, walking loosely with mouth open and relaxed, breathing deeply and evenly, and cocking our head). We can be sure that, though we may be unobservant and inattentive of dogs’ body language, they are very attentive to ours.

We also need to avoid gestures and words that mean nothing, or different things, to animals. Hugs, for example, are generally distressing to dogs, since they block view and constrain movement and hence are ambiguous in meaning to dogs. When our words say one thing but our tone of voice or body language conveys something else, the dog will respond to the latter, even when the words are those s/he has been trained to recognize. McConnell has no use for the show-’em-who’s-boss school of training that has recently come back into vogue. There is no substitute, she says, for positive reinforcement and gradual, patient repetition of lessons, not to the point of intellectually exhausting your dog.

As I read this book, it occurred to me that everything McConnell says about how we signal to and relate wordlessly to our animal companions applies very much to how we relate to other humans as well. “Accurate, objective observation is a skill that requires practice, but it starts with asking your mind to focus on what you see, not on what you think it means”, she writes. This is precisely the instruction we are given in cultural (and customer) anthropology training, to learn to better appreciate and understand our fellow human beings. And she goes on to explain in Lakoffian terms how we can misinterpret our dogs by failing to get outside our own ‘frames of reference’, describing a woman who was convinced her dog’s misbehaviour was an attempt to ‘test’ her, when it was merely a reflection of the dog’s ignorance that that behaviour was not acceptable.

The latter part of the book explores the four primal emotions. The chapters on fear explain the Darwinian advantage of shyness/fearfulness (shades of my last post) but note that shyness combined with other traits can lead to aggressiveness. Fear can be genetic, nurtured (deliberately or accidentally), or the result of trauma. Genetic shyness can be overcome with gentle, gradual, patient conditioning. McConnell explains how to do this in the context of dealing with separation anxiety and excessive barking when someone comes to the door.

The chapter on anger/hatred presents an interesting hypothesis that fortunately doesn’t extend to humans: Competition as puppies for mother’s milk and attention teaches a tolerance for frustration, and puppies from a ‘litter of one’ tend to be intolerant of frustration and prone to outbursts of anger/hatred as they grow older unless they are carefully trained. A good test is to gently roll a relaxed puppy after play over on his/her back and hold him/her in that position for a short while — puppies that become very aggressive in this situation will likely be difficult to handle as they become full grown. Just like some people, some dogs need to learn anger management, and this requires considerable expertise (a series of progressive, positively-reinforced ‘stay’ exercises for impulse control is explained in an appendix to the book to help with this). The danger here is that dogs will learn from the model we show them — if we show anger in our training and response to them, it will reinforce the acceptability of such behaviour, no matter what we do to discourage it.

The chapter on joy/happiness lays out the conditions that make our dogs happy: fresh water and good food, of course, but also companionship, physical and mental exercise, consistency and clarity in our behaviour toward them, respect for their individuality, physical contact (at the right times, the right way in the right places), and a sense of security. Our happiness and theirs is mutually contagious and self-reinforcing, and, as with humans, sometimes the anticipation of happy events is as joyful as the event itself (which is why the ‘clicker’ employed just before a reward is given, works so well as a training tool).

The final chapters deal with dogs’ capacity for love, jealousy, grief, self-awareness and problem-solving. Of all the personal stories in the book about McConnell’s beloved dogs, the one I found most moving (perhaps because it reminded me so much of my story and feelings about Chelsea) is one of the last. Here’s an extract:

McConnell goes on to relate evidence of the immense grief experienced by Lassie, another of her dogs and Luke’s best friend, in the months after Luke’s passing, laying to rest any doubt that animals feel the same emotions, and in their own way at least as deeply, as humans.

This is a book for anyone who wants to understand our animal companions better, either to solve behaviour ‘problems’ or just to begin to fathom our own species and its relationship with the natural world. In his books, Jeff Vail talks about how the world is better represented by connections than by the things connected, and McConnell’s book is mostly about our connections with dogs, and through them with nature, and our true selves. Read it and discover how much we can learn from, and feel mutually about, creatures who have no need for our strange and imprecise tool of language.