The politics of dancing: Mothertongue and the art of negotiation.

I could argue that much of what goes on in the social sciences consists of pseudo-scientific “proofs” that the human mind is nothing special. Sure, volitional-conceptuality — the ability to engage in mental self-reference by means of abstraction and the ability to act upon those abstractions as a free moral agent — is unprecedented in the animal kingdom, but this dolphin has learned four of the first five letters of the Roman alphabet, and that chimp can stack three boxes on top of one another to steal a cookie. If that ain’t human, they don’t know what is!

Here’s what’s funny: They don’t know what animals are, either!

Monkeys don’t need to do a charmingly poor job at deploying human tools to survive, and cetaceans are perfectly adept at communicating with each other without a notation system — without what I would call fathertongue.

When I’m showing real estate, I’m careful to teach people, especially children, what a dog is doing with his tail. Up and wagging? Take it slow, but the dog is friendly. Straight down? Proceed with caution. Between the legs? Back off. The tail is a dog’s primary signaling device. That’s why people who want dogs to fight bob their tails.

But that wagging tail tells such a tale: “Hi, there!” the dog seems to say. “I am thrilled to make your acquaintance. As you can see by my wagging tail, I’m eager to make new friends. Might I have permission to sniff your anus? Full reciprocity, of course. Really, I’d be put out if you didn’t give mine at least a little sniff, too.”

That’s mothertongue, a complex initiation of negotiations expressed entirely in bodily signaling, with zero conceptual content — with no fathertongue. Animals are perfect the way they are. They are not somehow “better” if they master what are, to them, ontologically-useless parlor tricks. Moreover, human beings are exalted, not diminished, by dancing bears: The vast chasm between emulating human behavior and actually living it is only made more obvious when we see how pitiable that emulation actually is.

The higher animals communicate by mothertongue, and all but one species is excellent at living according to its actual ontological nature. The exception is humanity, of course. We alone possess the ability to communicate in fathertongue, as well as mothertongue, but while fathertongue can help us retain steadily more perfect truths, it is also eminently well-suited for crafting — and enshrining — lies.

But even this — our worst vice! — is an amazing testament to how different we are from mere animals. We are alike unto them in every way that does not matter, but in the one way that does, we acquire the power — the conceptual leverage — to be everything they can never be. Do you choose to be a hero or a villain? An achiever or a schlub? A leader? A follower? A rebel? Whatever choice you can name, you have it because you have mastered fathertongue, not because you are an organism.

Every aspect of organic life applies to you as well, of course, every biological process. But what makes you human is not your biology, not your genes, not your ingestion, respiration or reproduction.

What makes you human is fathertongue, and there is nothing to compare to this in any other species of organic life.

Everything I can do in discursive prose is fathertongue, of course, nothing but notation, no bodily signaling at all. And then think of all the rigorous work done by thousands and millions of brilliant minds in order to make it easy and cheap for you to read these words on glowing phosphors from thousands of miles away — years from now, for all I know. When you think of everything fathertongue does in your life, you can’t stop thinking of it.

And yet, in real-life, much of our communication consists of mothertongue. We sigh and we grumble, we grimace and scowl, we smile — sometimes in delight, sometimes out of fear — we lean, we slouch, we grovel in a sweaty silence or we glower demandingly into a silence no one dares to break. We are rational animals, so we can, if we like, communicate abstract ideas in fathertongue. But whatever else we might be doing or trying to do, we are always communicating — signaling — with our bodies. Always. Even when we’re all alone! Mothertongue is the body’s observable physical expressions of the mind’s interior state, and, in consequence, it is the perfect means of communicating irrationality — no matter how absurd the actual message might be.

But mothertongue is also how we communicate love, affection, trust, admiration, reverence, pride, satisfaction, adulation, adoration and full-blown worship. The self is an abstraction, but everything of the self that I would celebrate as a virtue is felt, also, in a physical delight, the same kind of delight my dog Shyly exhibits in her best moments. I get to experience her type of animal pleasure in my own mothertongue expressions — even though, unlike the joy Shyly feels, these are in fact the secondary consequences of fully-human, fully-abstract fathertongue accomplishments.

And just that much is so much fun to me: I think it’s wonderful to be a human being, and that outrageous integrity is the crowning glory of humanity: You need not act upon your own self as it actually is, but if you do, the reward for your conceptual integrity will be an equally enthralling bodily reward: Doing the right thing feels good. This is not the joyous mothertongue compliance of dogs — or it should not be. Rather, it is the consequence of understanding, choice and follow-through.

Doing better makes you feel good because you can forevermore remember that particular experience of having done better. You see yourself as a better person, in a better light. That one instance is a tiny increment, but your opportunities to do better abound. You do better for the right reasons, but the physical delight you feel when you recall your past successes is a nice sweetener to continue on the path to self-improvement. Not the the primary objective, but a nice reward, and a potent bit of redundant evidence that you’re on the right course.

There’s a downside, of course. If being true to your actual nature leads to bodily pleasure as a side-effect, self-deceit leads always to mental anguish, and, ultimately, to actual physical pain. The cause is fathertongue in both instances, but when fathertongue is used to pursue irrational goals — guess what? — it works. Irrational results abound, but no one wants to admit that they got what they had coming to them.

But isn’t mothertongue the language of irrationality? Mothertongue isn’t language at all. If you want to communicate abstract ideas — even bad ideas, even lies — to other people, you must do this in fathertongue. If they are remote from you in space or time, obviously, but even across the room, you can only communicate conceptual matter in concepts — in words or images or sounds. And yet, your objective is to convey mothertongue expressions: Envy, hurt, resentment, greed, spite, anger, malice. Thus, by means of the power of fathertongue, do we turn individual vice into a broadcast viciousness.

The essence of demagoguery is to induce mothertongue expressions with fathertongue. Looked at that way, the individual irrationalizer is his own demagogue first and always: He self-induces unhappy mental states in order to endure the uncomfortable or even painful corollary physical side-effects. “You make me sick!” takes on a whole new meaning!

There’s more — alas. Demagoguery is the poison of fools, but it is the food of con-men of all flavors: Actual confidence men, carneys, charlatans, politicians and many, many varieties of salespeople. If you’re selling crap that no one needs — or if you know you’re selling people a product they will never actually use to any benefit — you have to hustle them with mothertongue expressions packaged in fathertongue. Whether the scam is a true McGuffin or hair plugs or a fake real estate column to be run as advertising in the PennySaver, you’re looking to tickle the greed bone or the envy bone or the schmaltz bone. If you get anywhere near the cranium, you’re sunk, but — what the hell? — the people you think of as suckers are everywhere, aren’t they?

And now I’m making myself sick, so I’ll stop. The point is this: Every relationship among higher animals is a relationship precisely because it is a continuous negotiation. The dog wags his tail at the beginning of the relationship, but, from that point on, the dog will always express amiability and affection — unless your behavior changes radically. When you meet a new person, you “feel” each other out, and this is a process that will continue, abating slowly but never ending entirely, as you get to know each other. To know another person is to understand how that person chooses to act. Not how he or she acts — and you may not always be able to predict another person’s behavior, no matter how well you know each other — but how that person chooses to act: What thinking process precedes action?

But all of this is happening in mothertongue and fathertongue at the same time — all the time. Teasing is a good example, one that can only work among people who already know and trust each other: You say something in fathertongue that you know the other person will regard as being outrageous and wrong at the same time that you are putting the lie to that statement in mothertongue with a wink or a wry grin. The aftermath of the assertion of physical, mental or emotional coercion is also instructive: Whether you’re watching a teenager in a snit or video of a hostage, the fathertongue communicates a begrudging compliance, but the mothertongue conveys a belligerent defiance.

And let’s think about dancing again, just to illustrate how pitiable is that dancing bear. When you dance with someone you love — or hope to love — the mothertongue and fathertongue expressions are perfectly aligned: The words you are murmuring, mouth to ear, are expressed bodily in the ways you and your dance partner are touching each other. There is so much more going on here than merely moving your body in rhythm to the music: Ardor, the thrill of sexual contact, anticipation, a kind of focused attention that would do you a world of good at work, etc. The mothertongue can extend beyond the two dancers, as well. He might be engaged in display behavior, to show the other guys that he got the hot chick. She might be showing off her clothes to the other girls. There is no limit to how much communication can be going on, and yet all a bear can do is affect to dance — badly — in the hope of earning a treat.

All of these negotiations are going on constantly with everyone with whom we come into contact. We don’t think about this process of negotiation normally, because we have long since habituated the behavior that makes it all work out, in most contexts. But human beings are always negotiating their concourse in mothertongue and fathertongue. When the two forms of expression are in alignment, on both sides of the negotiation, matters can proceed quickly and to much mutual benefit. When the words say one thing but the bodies say another, on one side of the table or both, negotiations bog down.

I dealt with the manifestations of the kind of failed negotiation that we might see in a real estate transaction, without using the terms mothertongue or fathertongue, in my essay on the implied accusation:

Here’s another one, and it is everywhere: The Implied Accusation. It is communicated — if at all — by glares and sighs and harrumphs and scowls. Everyone knows what is going unsaid and nobody says anything. The Implied Accusation works beautifully, because, if you want the accusation made explicitly, you’ll have to explicate it yourself. Except you don’t explicate it yourself because you know that, even though you are without guilt here, you have too much to answer for elsewhere.

The Implied Accusation is the underground river flowing through every unhappy relationship. To address good and evil, all you have to do is bring things out into the open. But after a while, there is simply too much to go through, too much that is too shameful to be cheerfully borne and revisited. Nothing lives underground, but nothing ever really dies, either, its just rots, becoming its own graveyard. In the end, it becomes easier to destroy the relationship than to go to all the work necessary to repair it.

Here is The Implied Accusation in real estate: “Realtors are stupid.” “Realtors are corrupt.” “Realtors are lazy.” “Realtors are self-serving.” “Realtors will say anything to make a deal.” These ideas are epidemic, a cultural undercurrent.

You know these charges are untrue, but what do you do about them? To leave The Implied Accusation unnamed, unaddressed is to seem to confess to it, or at least to plead no contest. Your clients begin their relationship with you with unstated doubts about your integrity, and you hope to counter those attitudes by your behavior.

This is not enough. You have to make the issue explicit. You have to make every bit of it explicit, and not just once. At any point in your relationship with a client — possibly years after a transaction has closed — you may have to address The Implied Accusation. When, specifically? When there arises the possibility of a colorable doubt about your motives. The trouble is not that your client might complain, but, rather, that he might not complain and yet walk away from your relationship feeling aggrieved.

That’s just one example, but it’s a potent one. The fact is that there is a raucous conversation being carried out in the silence of mothertongue in every negotiation you are involved in.

Here’s what matters to salespeople: Mothertongue is everywhere, all the time, in every contact you make with every person you do business with. So: What are you doing about it?

I am not advocating using mothertongue in the service of deceptive or underhanded objectives. This is easy to do, actually, but, as above, it is a path not to Splendor but to misery and physical pain.

But if you take account of the mothertongue expressions your clients are sharing with you — continuously, by habit, and normally without guile — you can get that much closer to what they really want that much more quickly. Your clients can’t be precise in mothertongue, and they can’t express themselves rationally in the interior mental states they communicate by bodily expressions. But they know what they want, and, if you are paying attention, in short order you will know what they want, too.

As an aside, the terms mothertongue and fathertongue are not sex-role related. Henry David Thoreau used these coinages, originally, in a very different way. To him mothertongue was the kind of language Robert A. Heinlein would have called a “milk tongue” — the locally-prevalent language of casual discourse — like English or Spanish — that you learn first at your mother’s teats. Thoreau contrasted this with the fathertongue languages — Latin and Greek — you would later learn as a part of your formal education.

My own usage of these terms is different. Every notation-based system of recording, preserving and communicating human cognition — speech, poetry, prose, math, music, the visual arts, choreography, software — is fathertongue in my formulation. Fathertongue can be communicated at a distance, across time, without any direct contact between the communicants, to anyone already versed in the notation system. Every sort of communication that can be carried out without formal notation — even if a notation system is used for convenience — is mothertongue. When you sing lullabies to an infant, the words mean nothing, but the embrace and the warmth and the comfort and the caressing and the sounds of your singing mean everything.

But this is the threshold of true sales mastery, I think. You have to learn to align your own mothertongue expressions with the fathertongue ideas you are trying to convey. But you also have to learn to “listen” in mothertongue, to pick up on what your clients, vendors and other business associates are saying with their bodily expressions — even if this is very different from what they might seem to be saying in words. If you can do that, you can cut right to the bone and get down to the meat of the matter right away.

Our job, as salespeople, is not to sell the product but, rather, to deliver a satisfying experience to the client. Your buyers or sellers are not likely to be happy if you don’t deliver the goods, but they will only be fully satisfied if they are confident — in their hearts, in their guts, in their bones — that you have delivered the best attainable value in a way that permits them to feel good about the transaction, about themselves and about you.

The biggest part of your job is fathertongue, always. Just look at those huge piles of paperwork! But the most important work you do will be negotiated in mothertongue, in large measure, and the better you do at delivering the goods in mothertongue, the better you will do in sales.