Informal and Indifferent

In an op-ed in a leading national daily, the columnist opined that today, often, “Language does not reflect reality. It edits it”. The author went on to quote the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure stating that the relationship between words and meaning is arbitrary and concluded that this insight has been turned by some into a “lifestyle choice”. We “invent words not because reality has changed but because our tolerance for naming it plainly has thinned”.

To many of us, these assertions ring true, even perhaps understated. Senior readers may recall a time when our teachers addressed us formally by our surnames and we responded using honorifics like “Sir”, “Miss” or “Ma’am” or even with titles like “Professor”. Many of us will also vouch for the fact that despite such formal and distant forms of address, the underlying relationship was unmistakably one of unspoken kinship. Even when extended into the work sphere, formal interpersonal relationships remained underpinned by a sense of mutual belonging. It was a time when not only civil servants expected working lifetime employment. Many of our major and minor corporations and indeed many an employing institution was infused with the selfsame spirit.

All that has changed dramatically. We have ushered in an era of informal and even familiar address. College teachers and students call each other by their first names and the practice has begun to percolate down to some of the so called ‘forward thinking’ schools. In the workplace too, the hierarchical gap at which the old honorifics of “Mister” and “Sir” are used is growing wider and wider. The paradox is that these developments seem to have gone hand in hand with a growing indifference in the personal and social relations between individual functionaries in the organisational hierarchy. Thus you may well address the Chairman of the company you work in by his first name, “Rajat”, but, far from this ‘familiarity’ signaling bonding or kinship, “Rajat” is unlikely to be constrained by any ‘noblesse-oblige’ in ‘letting you go’, (not firing you, please note). Be assured you do not suffer any adverse consequences from this, you are only ‘impacted’! Console yourself that your failure to keep the job becomes a ‘learning experience’. After the ‘impact’ of the company’s ‘rightsizing’, (changed from the earlier inappropriate ‘downsizing’), you may even find yourself back with your erstwhile employers, not as a temporary or contractual ‘gig worker’ mind you, but as a ‘partner’, no less, earlier a term hallowed in its association with the seniormost executive and ownership levels of business firms and established legal, accounting and consultancy practices. All the while, you will of course continue to be on first name terms with the true ‘partners’, should your paths cross at all.

This ‘transactional’ turn of events has invaded our political space too. Nations do not play any more within a strictly rule or even consensus bound system. Long term treaties and conventions are giving way, more and more, to shorter term ‘agreements’ or even ‘deals’, the changing description reflecting the temporary or one-off nature of the transaction. Think about it; a ‘deal’ can generally be more easily called off when it is not perceived to be in your present best interest, any other longstanding relationship with the other parties involved notwithstanding. Modern day ‘agreements’ and ‘deals’, essentially being contracts, usually come with many voidability clauses which typically allow more flexibility of interpretation than is the case with the more traditional treaties and conventions. Lord Palmerston, later to be the Prime Minister, famously remarked in a speech to the British Parliament in 1848, “We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual and those interests it is our duty to follow”. However, even this fountainhead of contemporary transactional principle has undergone a significant change over the years, for now, in the whole gamut stretching across individual and right through to international relations, interests no longer remain “eternal and perpetual”. Again, all this has been happening even while the language of political and diplomatic discourse has become decidedly more informal.

In the light of all this, can we even say any more that the language we adopt stops at editing the reality of our meaning? Perhaps we have entered a phase where what we say almost never has the meaning traditionally associated with the words used and may deviate from this so much as to come to mean the opposite. Thus we almost never say what we truly mean and never truly mean what we say. We refer to our adversary as ‘my friend’ and show our distaste towards someone by the use of an honorific like ‘sir’. We can be likened to skilled swordsmen dancing around each other with oral feints, thrusts and parries replacing heartfelt or even plain utterances. Our entire communication becomes a stylised version of the kind of strategic misdirection made famous by Sun Tzu in the ancient treatise “The Art of War” where he tellingly said, “All warfare is based on deception” and went on to add “Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night and when you move fall like a thunderbolt”.

We dwell therefore in an increasingly transactional environment with our language steering further towards the informal even as our feelings towards our ‘fellow man’ become indifferent at best if not downright inimical. Whether this spiral descending into ever harsher human behavior is reversible or not is difficult to predict. There are those who would view human nature optimistically and point out that this kind of trend appears to be cyclical; when the spiral hits a rock bottom where complete lack of constancy and conformity become the norm, then there is no element of surprise or advantage left in such behavior as all parties become wary of each other. Then perhaps the upward spiral towards restoring a rule based consensual order begins again – or does it? Only Time will tell.

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY THE AUTHOR ARE PERSONAL

Anirban Mukhopadhaya, Retd. IAS officer