the roots of communication, and discommunication

the issues at hand that i am attempting to make an exposition of require the following seemingly ancectotal aside:

(yet another recounting of this story) i was once talking to a friend of mine. she is/was a linguist at the school i was attending. i do not recall what we were initially discussing, perhaps the rarity of finding decent conversation in our small town, or maybe she was just telling me about her work in computational linguistics, but she went on to tell me of the following.

there was a linguist (i have no idea who exactly she was talking about, but i now have some guesses). this linguist made a dichotomizing distinction, demarking two different modes of language. [i will quickly point out that this is not some absolute dichotomy, but an observation about sociolinguistic tendencies. there is clearly a continuum between the two.]
the observation is that there are two main tendencies in language use:

- language which carries high information content, and low affective (emotional) content. this kind of language is called "referential" language.

and
- language which carries low information content, and high affective content. this kind of language is called "affective" language.

(i will pause here to note that i am not seeming, nor do i believe i intend to seem, as thought i am distinguishing "language" from the act of using language. there may be some reason or occasion to do this, but for the moment, this does not seem like that occasion. i will just say that i could have easily mentioned "two main tendencies in language use".)

when she told me about this distinction, it rang out in me immediately. i remarked something to the extent of "right! exactly! you mean small talk verses actual conversation!". i had a great appreciation for her handy notation. at the time "small talk" was something which vexed me a great deal. i was often feeling isolated from family and acquaintances because i felt like what they had to communicate lacked substance, and motivation. i wanted "deep" things, and "small talk" seemed useless, and almost insulting at the time. it was something i was constantly aware of. i told her as much, and communicated my dissatisfaction with the emptiness of affective language.

while politely acknowledging my youthfully idealistic sentiments, she went on to describe that, in fact, both referential and affective language have their uses, and are equally crucial. referential language is the language that is used to do science, and solve technical problems, enabling the emergence of technology and, in many senses, civilization. this observation was the limit of my perspective at the time. my friend went on to so graciously point out that affective language, while often may seem idle to some (simply by not being loaded with technical information), was incredibly important. affective language is used to build and strengthen social bonds. it reinforces emotional connections between people, and thus, allows for the emergence of communities, the coherency of families, and the upkeep of friendships when there is no technical information to share. the use of affective language is the expression of solidarity, and an assurance that the connections between people are fundamentally independent of technical information, or theoretical perspectives. it is a more basic assurance between living things, which frames the empathy inherent in coexisting as humans in the same fundamental predicament.
while this might be obvious to some, and is now to me, at the time, my it completely blew my young mind. of course this was the case! how could i not have seen it? these people that i was coming to despise were not rattling off noise for the sake of noise, they were community building, family building, diligently working to keep civilization afloat. i had no idea that everything i so extolled was useless, and impossible, in the absence of that which came first. abstract intellect is a luxury that is necessarily preceded by the existence of a robust social structure. here i was thinking that somehow, the ultimate "good" (much more on this word later) was in pursuing intellectual heights, and that that was somehow superior, and independent of all else. i felt as though, if you were not my comrade in such pursuits, then you were weighing it down with your small talk, and idle pleasantries. UGH! just thinking back on this destructively naive perspective makes me very uncomfortable. before this moment, i thought my acquaintances, friends, family (especially my mother), were essentially blowing bubbles on a battlefield, clueless while the "real world" carried on without them. but it turned out that i was the one lost in the imaginary efforts, while the actual world carried on without my understanding. my mother was not being idle in her efforts to communicate, she was trying to have a relationship, to strengthen our bonds. i was her only child. she was just trying to be family with me, and i was disgusted by this.

[as a note, i will just briefly say that i have vastly corrected this, and now my relationship with my mother is exemplary. i am so happy for this fact.]

So then, instead of continuing to see virtuous paths in this world as courageous linear trudges, "progressing forward" into the space of scientific ideas, i realized that the situation is much more complex. the network upon which all of this world happens is created and upkept by one kind of language/thought, allowing for the emergence of another language/thought, letting us conceive of, and distinguish between, finer scale things. i will not pretend to suggest that such a complex thing could happen as straight forwardly as the previous sentence might suggest. both modes of language have undoubtedly coexisted and intermingled since the early primate mind, and likely further back than that. animals use tools in the wild, exhibiting critical thought, and problem solving. they also groom each other. furthermore, all humans constantly use both. most, if not all, human activities require and utilize both.
what i mean to remark on here is the highly noticeable specialization, wherein some entities may reside largely in one mode or the other, and begin to identify with one mode more than the other.
regardless, there are recognizably distinct uses and manifestations of these modes within human culture which, in order to understand in full, require an explicit appreciation of these two modes.

after hearing of this distinction between referential and affective language, i began to ever so cautiously, and slowly, notice something else about this distinction. as bad as i felt about it, it occurred to me that quite often, women tended to use affective language more often than referential language, and men tended to use referential language more than affective language. LET ME BE CLEAR that i do not mean to make too general a claim. again, all humans use both. some women are very referential, and some men are very affective. this is not an absolute, but as researchers (and generally, countless societies and generations) have found, it is a universal tendency. women are more often emotional communicators, and men are more often factual communicators. i am now pretty sure that the linguist that my friend was talking about a researcher named janet holmes, who does work in a field called sociolinguistics. she and others have looked into what they call "sociolinguistic universals", which are linguistic tendencies that are independent of culture, and thus are more or less ubiquitous across human civilizations. their research has turned up empirically that which verifies our intuitions, that women generally speak affectively, and men referentially. there are also other really interesting examples of such universals (i.e. the use of formal and informal language when speaking across larger social, or class distances, the fact that women tend to have vastly greater linguistic stylistic variety, etc.), but for the moment, we will concern ourselves with this one.
that women tend to be affective, and men referential, we have often experienced first hand. in so many of my miscommunications with my (very) significant other, i have noticed that the problem stemmed from the fact that we were each using our respective gender-typical languages, without the appreciation that the other person was not speaking the same language we were. often, she would make a statement, and i would refute it or take issue, and this would really offend her, and so on, until either she or i realized that, i was interpreting her as making a factual claim, while she was just describing her feeling. if, for instance, she had prefaced her statement with "i feel as though..", then this would have been clear. but in her language, this preface is more or less implicit, whereas in my language, it is implicit that statements are factual claims, open to factual refutation and examination. another example was an instance where my love informed me that she had decided to open her own preschool for the summer. i was very excited and interested, and immediately began to ask questions about the details of how she was going to go about it. later i found out that she was very disappointed in my reaction, and felt as though i was completely unsupportive. i was baffled to find this out, until i realized that my reaction was completely referential, and i had offered her no sentiments of solidarity, or support. i thought my remarks were "supportive", in the sense that i was attempting to anticipate potential problems, and imagine potential solutions. at the time, it seemed like the most reasonable thing to do if i supported the effort. now i realize that there was a need gone unmet by my remarks. for all she was concerned, i could have been a problem solving robot, who could care less about her excitement, and only wanted to mechanically pose and solve technical problems. she did not feel her emotion resonate within me, and so the social experience failed for her. meanwhile, the intellectual experience went forward without issue to me.
this leads me to my next, and potentially final, prerequisite collection of concepts with which i can begin to frame my predicament. it is a matter of value, and scale, and it requires some remarks on the evolutionary nature of the universe. those remarks are forthcoming, and with them, we will finally arrive at our starting place.