©Julia Welstead

First published in the Human Givens Journal

The wind is up and it’s stormy at sea, but we have an appointment with our neighbouring island and there’s no question of letting them down. Our conductor’s campervan, rocking to the beat of the ferry engines, is choc full of string instruments, score sheets, black dresses and suits, while their owners huddle out on deck in wellies and woollies. On arrival we surge along a windswept pier and dive into the village hall for tea – an immense spread of scones, cakes and fancies laid proudly along groaning trestle tables. Woe betide us if we don’t tuck in, for our host islanders will be mightily offended. Fortified and cheered by the sheer force of community spirit, we squeeze scone-bellies into our Sunday best, pick up our fiddles and flock like a murmuration of starlings through leaden skies to the immense stone hulk of a church. But oh dear, we have forgotten our box of music stands! Without hesitation, the assembled audience all flit back to their homes to collect up their own stands (every home in Orkney has one) and bring them back for us.

When a tiny island community decides to put on a production of The Messiah for Christmas, it’s essential to seek out our strengths and pool our resources. Has anyone sung it before? A surprising number of our 500 islanders know it, a few even know it quite well. One notable gentleman (mostly notable for propping up the bar) is word and pitch perfect and can sing the bass solos with the resonance of a Welshman, as long as he has slaked his thirst with two or three pints of best bitter. Less than that and he is too shy to sing, more and the notes and phrases begin to slip-slide off their bar-stool. But this can be remedied by our conductor joining in. So Bob gets his attention needs met, backed up by a caring community who know him well and can appreciate his talents while forgiving him his habit.

Looking back on this, I wonder what would have happened to Bob in a less caring community, or a larger one where he wasn’t known. The chances are that he would not even have had the courage to come forward, and if he had, someone would have noticed the whiff of beer, the genteel unkemptness, the broken boots, and he would probably have been told he wasn’t suitable for the part. His beautiful voice would never have been heard and his needs for attention, inclusion, status and meaning would have gone unmet. In the event, Bob did not make it onto the boat that day, and our conductor sang the bass solos whilst still managing to conduct us. It didn’t matter. The nine months of rehearsal time was much more important to our community cohesion, and to Bob’s wellbeing, than the actual performance.

In his 1976 book Beyond Culture (Anchor Books, USA) the American anthropologist Edward T. Hall coined the terms high context and low context to describe different cultures, and reading it recently got me thinking about the differences between remote living, island living, city living, and life in non-Western cultures, all of which I have done in my time. When I spoke recently with author, storyteller and therapist Pat Williams, who divides her time between a Scottish island and London, we discussed some ideas about how well our emotional needs are met within different kinds of community with which we are familiar. Many communities that seem on first glance to be similar, for instance equally remote or equally urban, seem to be qualitatively different in terms of how well the humans in them are thriving. Can we identify a recipe for a successful community and apply it to different places? Our discussion produced more questions than answers and, as it’s a subject close to my heart and, I think, very pertinent to our collective HG wish to help people to live more fulfilling lives, I thought it worth an airing.

For Hall, one key distinction between high and low context communities lies in how we communicate, and this is affected by context: the framework, the background, the environment, the circumstances. How we interact with each other boils down to the context in which we are living. High context cultures (HCC) tend to be highly relational and collectivist – relationships are important and members of the community swim as one shoal, looking out for each other, helping, sharing, respecting, protecting. For humans, as for any gregarious species, collective harmony and consensus is more important than individual achievement. People within HCC tend to be contemplative, share learned wisdom, and use their intuition when making decisions. Mutual trust is highly valued and verbal agreement and a handshake takes precedence over any written contract, to the extent that HCC business people may even be offended by the implicit lack of trust suggested by the need for a contract. 

Non-verbal cues (body language, expression, tone of voice, gesture, posture, synchrony and rhythm) speak louder than words, and indeed people from HCC tend to speak less, when acknowledging each other and negotiating, than those in low context cultures (LCC). In the various Scottish islands where I have lived, the word ‘aye’ can be said in a hundred different ways, with as many different meanings, and a whole silent language of acknowledgement is based around the lift of a hand, the inflection of an eyebrow or the set of the shoulders when passing by, whether on foot, tractor, horse, bicycle or in car. People know and understand each other, there is no need for elaboration on many of the day-to-day decisions. I suppose it’s a bit like a long-standing marriage: the depth of knowledge is such that not many words are required. It might not always be harmonious, but there is at least tolerance and a falling in to step, a shared pulling of the yoke.

In world terms, HCCs tend to be found in South America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia, but I would argue that you can find pockets of HCC throughout our Western World as well, most notably in our small island communities and in ‘alternative/traditional’ communities such as the Amish and the Hutterites in America. Further to that, one finds seams of richness even within seemingly unremittingly low context cultures: I’m sure we can all think of places where the community really does stick together in a positive way, often through adversity.

Communication within low context cultures (LCC) is much more word-based. Where people don’t know each other and don’t know the context in terms of background, family and trustworthiness, there needs to be a lot more verbal clarity. Negotiations need to be clear, linear, logical, factual, literal and contract based. Agreements are not trust-based and, if something goes wrong or doesn’t happen as agreed, finger-pointing blame is quick to follow. LCC people are individualistic and tend to use their left-brain logic over any emotional or intuitive feelings. As is so starkly represented in Damien Hurst’s artwork “Isolated Elements Swimming in the Same Direction for the Purpose of Understanding: 1992” each fish is suspended in it’s own lonely tank, separate from its fellows, and notably dead in its toxic environment, though still appearing to be collectively shoal-like. If I may make so bold as to suggest an addition to the work, I should like to see a large fish tank containing a shoal of fish alive and swimming in clear water juxtaposed with this installation, just for contrast. Imagine the flashes of silver-blue as they switch back and forth in unison.

If you don’t consider yourself to be living in an LCC, think about the last time you tried to get any changes agreed at work, or bought or rented a new home. Recall the protracted negotiations, the amount of paperwork involved, the contracts required, and the precision timing of swapping those contracts, keys and funds. I have owned homes in both Orkney and Islay, and in both cases nobody could remember where the keys were, and the expectation was that the outgoing folk would move out, and I in, when we had verbally agreed and it suited us in terms of ferry times, weather, the lambing season and so on, rather than waiting for lawyers to dot i’s and cross t’s. There’s a long established sense of common decency: in part because life is very visible (it would be nigh on impossible to do anything dastardly and get away with it) but also because, for the most part, folk are getting their needs met in balance. 

After many years of island life, I currently live in a city and I often find myself looking at a client and asking myself how many of their issues would be solved by being in an island type of community. Recently a woman came to me who feels lost and lonely in the city with no family around her and a corporate job where she describes herself as ‘just a number processing numbers’. She finds life meaningless and is fairly sure no one would even notice if she vanished. What a desolate thought. No amount of pilates classes or joining walking groups (as suggested by previous therapists she had seen)  has made a difference. Would she be better moving back to her native Hebridean island, whose community cohesion she misses enormously? It is well known by TV producers that we yearn for such communities “where everybody knows your name, and they’re always glad you came” (the theme lyrics from ‘Cheers’). This is why community based TV series are so phenomenally successful. They call to a need in all of us for a community in which we are known and valued and have a role to play.

In an environment where context is so low that you don’t know anything at all about those with whom you have to interact, stress levels can rise to the point where cortical thinking becomes hijacked. Pat recalls a London client who was hugely anxious about myriad aspects of his life. In particular, he had had some financial dealings with a young man who had subsequently gone quiet, and Pat’s client became convinced that he had been cheated. Pat urged him to reality test the situation before taking legal action: simply ring or visit the young man and ask him what was happening. Perhaps some adversity had befallen him. The client had been in such an anxious state that he hadn’t thought of doing that. It turned out that the young man was being true to his word, there was no duplicity, and they came to an amicable understanding. Had these two been in an HCC they would have known that they could trust each other, or at least would not have needed a therapist to suggest the obvious – if in doubt, ask!

Another strand of my current work involves seeing trauma victims in Glasgow. Many of these people are living in what I would consider HCC in terms of being close-knit communities where everyone looks out for each other, and yet these are not emotionally healthy places. Harry Burns, retired Chief Medical Officer for Scotland who is currently highlighting the plight of poverty stricken areas of Scotland, refers to these as places where a pall of cortisol hangs in the air, as stress levels run high and both physical and mental illness is rife and the three top causes of death are heart disease, drug/alcohol abuse and violence. The difference between this tight knit community and an island one is that the latter are places of low status, and the people there know it. Unemployment is the norm and no one feels particularly wanted or needed. 

Consequently they lack security, have little sense of competence or achievement, struggle to find meaning, and blame ‘the establishment’ for all their troubles, which impacts on their need for volition. In many cases the emotional needs to be in control, be part of a community and have something to do, is achieved by turning to crime. Whilst I’m in no doubt that it is useful to be there to help individuals, like throwing starfish back into the sea, I am also asking myself the obvious bigger question, ‘what can be done to help this community overall?’ As Harry Burns asks, how do we change the conditions, raise the social temperature and melt the iceberg of social inequality?

Remote doesn’t necessarily equate with being high context. I know plenty of remote areas of Scotland mainland where there is no work and very little to do except visit the pub. As one teenager growing up on the north coast of Scotland explained to me (and I’ll spare you the dialect and expletives), ‘there’s nothing to do but drink and smoke spliffs’. No amount of beautiful scenery can make up for not getting your needs met.

Canadian journalist John Zada gave me a flavour of the situation for the indigenous people living in coastal British Columbia where historically they thrived well in a traditional culture tied to fishing, hunting and plant gathering. Colonization robbed them of this and brought disease, cultural marginalization and racism. Now, in a good summer, fishing, lumber and other jobs might give about one third of locals work. In winter unemployment approaches 90% with consequentially high alcohol/drug abuse and high suicide rates. But there are positive changes afoot, he says, with indigenous tribes running cultural community programmes to teach knowledge about how to sustainably manage their environmental resources.

Malcolm Gladwell uses the example of the Roseto Effect as the prologue to his book ‘Outliers’ (Penguin Books Ltd, London 2009) to illustrate a recipe for success. Roseto is a town in Pennsylvania renowned for the physical health of its occupants (specifically, reduced rates of heart disease), which a study in the 1960’s found to be significantly connected to community unity and wellbeing, rather than diet or exercise. The close knit, cohesive Italian immigrant community were looking after each other’s emotional needs. Everyone lived in similar egalitarian circumstances, no one was trying to outdo others, there was much socialising, laughter and fun, virtually no crime and ‘stress’ was an unknown phenomenon. It was this study that alerted the medical establishment to the idea that psychological factors might affect physical health and that culture and community has a profound effect on individual wellbeing.

What’s the difference, then, between communities in decline or under stress, and healthy communities that work? Why are people in one community thriving and in another not? Is it as simple, for instance, as islands having very easily defined geographical boundaries, which give occupants a clear sense of group identity? Can we use the human givens framework to see what is making some communities sick and others well?

Pat and I came up with a few attributes of small yet thriving island communities that render them good places to get one’s needs met. As depicted in that old classic movie ‘Local Hero’ everyone tends to have more than one job or role, everyone feels useful. Often folk are identified by their main role: Archie-the-pier, John-the-post and so on. I recall Mary Fish being flown off to hospital one day, and, when asked by the para-medics, no one could remember her real surname! The low density of people means that everyone is needed, which stimulates human resources and provides opportunities for people to stretch themselves and gain competence through effort and enjoy a sense of achievement. There are no social barriers and no one gets marginalised: with so few people it is unnecessary to sub-divide. Social events are all inclusive and see three-year olds dancing with octogenarians, and if anyone is missing it will be noted and followed up. There’s almost an obligation to be involved, support the community, volunteer, get stuck in. The day we arrived on our northern Orkney island I was greeted at the pier with the question, ‘can you swim?’ When I replied with an affirmative, ‘aye’ I found myself being enlisted on to the volunteer lifeguard training group without further ado: what a great way to be welcomed into the fold.

There is also a terrific realism and pragmatism on the islands. Any new comer who arrives puffing and blowing about themselves gets pretty short shrift and is left to calm down and learn how to earn the community respect through endeavour. Resourcefulness is highly valued and very necessary in a place where there might be no vet, no car mechanic, no abattoir, no hairdresser. There are many things islanders have to do for themselves rather than relying on some greater expert or authority. The art of barter is alive and well. What’s the price of a kitchen haircut? A couple of lamb’s kidneys, or a dozen eggs or perhaps some fresh mackerel. Or how about a time swap for jobs where two people can work together more effectively than alone: you help me fix my fences and I’ll help you shear your sheep. 

Tolerance is another small community attribute. It is impossible to ‘move on’ for example after a failed love affair, if your former partner is someone who you are likely to encounter fairly frequently, so individuals have to learn how to let go of the associated emotions and continue to tolerate the other’s presence. In cities you just never have to see them again. Another aspect of tolerance is that of people’s habits and failings, as with Bob. My father told a wonderful story of being out drinking with other convivial fishermen in a Stornoway pub one Saturday night. The clock struck midnight and everyone stuck to their bar stools as the pub was ‘closed’ in what is euphemistically called ‘a lock in’. A great night was had by all, but the next day, the Sabbath, when Dad attempted conversation with these same men at the Kirk gates, his banter was met with silence. They were united in their mute denial of any such merrymaking. Tolerance, of course, can be found anywhere. A friend tells me, “When I stayed with my alcoholic aunt in London she drank in an Irish pub each night after work. Some nights she got so drunk she began behaving appallingly, swearing and spitting at people, almost having fights. You would have thought they would have barred her but the next night they would greet her cordially, her behaviour of the previous night seemingly forgotten. I guess the fact that she was a good customer (2 bottles of wine a night minimum) had something to do with this, but there was more to it. She was known to them, had lived there 20 years, and it seemed that she was accepted for what she was – a drunk that was not all bad.”

A small cohesive community has the advantages of what we know as the ‘law of 150’ (see ‘Human Givens’ new edition p137 for a good description of this) whereby we, as a species, have an optimum group size within which we can thrive and flourish. In hunter-gatherer terms it is a group size that can best be managed, fed and protected, where everyone has a role and therefore a sense of competence, status, connection, attention, security and meaning. There is also an optimum number of relationships that a human mind can track properly in terms of knowing, or being able to work out from connections, a person’s background, trustworthiness or contextual significance. On all the islands that Pat and I have experienced, whether tiny and remote or larger and closer to the mainland cities, crime is rare, there is very little policing required and there are few, if any, psychotherapists. An island newspaper with a headline of “Wheelie bin stolen, not sure if full or empty” says it all.

So what of the downsides of small island life? Which needs might not be met? Pat and I have both spotted islanders who are just itching to get away. One can become typecast in a small community, and as time goes on you may find that your ‘character’ no longer fits with who you really feel like, yet it is hard to alter people’s perception of you. For some, the arena is just too small and stifling. Some people (especially young adults) actually need anonymity to try out who they are, find out what they are like outside their family or community context and, creatively speaking, test themselves against the high standards that big cities demand and associate with like-minded others. They also hunger for the richness of culture and opportunity to be found elsewhere. Yet I have also seen a lot of island youngsters head off to the mainland, or further afield, to study, travel, experience the world, only to return a handful of years later, appreciating their community all the more. If nothing else, they are very clear that they want to bring up their children in the island environment and with the island community values. Of course there is the age old necessity to live where there is work. In this instance the digital era is definitely a positive, as one can now live on an idyllic island whilst working via computer (don’t all rush at once).

But could the Scottish Islands be victims of their own success, and in a sense offer a vignette of what is inherently wrong with our whole perception of how to structure our society? They are currently ‘enjoying’ a population boom (according to the 2011 census) and have been labelled the happiest places to live in the UK (‘Population of the Scottish Islands’ by Scott MacNab, The Scotsman 16th August 2013), but closer inspection of the figures show an influx of wealthy retirees, which is driving up the house prices and causing the young locals to leave. Furthermore, many houses are bought as holiday homes, thus becoming unavailable to locals yet lying empty a lot of the time – the absent owners being of no use to the island at all. Islay is suffering a workforce population decline and an ageing population increase: the intricate mosaic of the traditional community has been distorted, and with such small numbers of people, the participation of every member is crucial. A more recent look at Roseto shows an influx of ‘strangers – new Jersey people’ bringing with them the perhaps seemingly small, but actually hugely intrusive changes of ‘fenced in yards, satellite dishes, expensive cars’ (Grossman, Ron; Leroux, Charles (October 11, 1996). “A New ‘Roseto Effect’: ‘People Are Nourished By Other People'”.Chicago Tribune (Roseto, Pa.).

Our perception is that our Western society is getting ever more ‘low context’, which means that it’s harder to meet these human needs. This is because when no one knows or cares who you really are, you begin to feel adrift, alienated, worthless. Correlate this with the dire and life-threatening consequences of being cast out of the traditional group and there’s an unsurprising similarity in the resultant symptoms of stress, leading to physical and mental illness. A subversive society inevitably arises when such alienated people associate with each other, as a way of giving their feelings meaning, and spiral even further down into the world of drugs or crime. Our world is changing into a place, and at an alarming rate, where we can all potentially become outcasts, and we all feel the stress of that. Nobody is immune to this. As Joe Griffin said in his interview with George Hook on Dublin Radio, ‘it’s harder to stay now than it was 50 years ago, a lot harder’ (The Right Hook Interview 31st October 2012)

Another obvious question arises: what’s the impact of the rise of the digital era, as discussed in our 2014 HG conference? Is the internet and social media lowering context, or is it actually reconnecting people, albeit in a different way? I asked a friend from my Islay days, and he told me that, sadly, he felt that life in that 3,200 strong island population is beginning to feel different, less connected, as everyone spends more and more time staring at screens rather than paying attention to each other. Of course television began that process last century, but that was a box sitting in a room at home, whereas now our screens are mobile and can keep us company wherever we are, even in the remotest of places.

In terms of mental health and needs met, small island communities would appear to have a winning formula, and it would seem that remoteness in itself is not the key, but having a clearly defined community might be. Yet humanity flows relentlessly toward urbanity, and cities are currently perceived to be the way of life of the future, despite our knowledge that the current urban structure increases anonymity and lowers context and, as life also becomes more virtual, feelings of alienation are likely to grow, and these are the feelings that generate protest and criminality as well as poor health. How low can context go before a culture disintegrates entirely?

Given that we can’t all live on small islands, and probably can’t, or don’t want to, return to a perceived pre-industrial idyll, how can we promote the small, tight-knit community values within our big society? Can we use the ‘island community’ as a template for what works, a community structure that can be repeated across cities to create mini-contexts in which people can thrive and flourish? Indeed, should we be widening our perspective to look at the idea of incorporating more croft-like systems into our culture, whereby each community gets a little bit more space to call their own, grow some food, see the sky and feel the earth, savour some peace from the madding crowds, and share some community endeavours, even if it’s a city roof garden? 

Looking in more detail at island structure, and the structure within many other cultures across the world, one finds that every village community has a patch of land. However small an acreage, at the very least it’s enough for a veggie patch and some chickens. UK planning has always focussed on keeping new development within, or attached to existing conurbations, which grow larger and larger, producing heartless satellite housing estates that lack their own identity. What is the perceived wisdom of this strategy? Are we doing it to save habitats for wildlife (many of which have been destroyed by intensive farming practices, where crofting methods were maintaining them), or to maintain a rural playground for the lucky few? I will be the first to hold my hand up as someone who loves to get away from humanity and find peace and the long view in an isolated wilderness, but is this an indulgence at the cost of cramming more and more people into soulessly structured urban areas? Perhaps there is a better balance to be found.

How might we plan our communities with the givens of human nature in mind? If we continue to evolve mindlessly, in an uninformed manner driven by greed, fear or habit, then it seems matters will become only worse. What will it take for the knowledge of what we really need as a species to become woven into the way we do things? If we are to successfully respond to the evolutionary pressure of our rapidly changing world and develop a healthier cross-cultural understanding we must, as Edward T Hall says, “embark on the difficult journey beyond culture, because the greatest feat of all is when one manages to gradually free oneself from the grip of unconscious culture.”  Perhaps rather than ‘beyond’ where we must look is ‘beneath’ for underlying all of our cultural differences is a level of humanity common to us all, we all have the same needs, and this is where adoption of the Human Givens approach is so crucial. By looking at any situation with our HG goggles on, we can see what needs are not being met, and work out what to do about it.

As the human brain is designed for just such problem-solving, and we are motivated by survival, we are surely able to rise to this challenge.

With many thanks to Pat Williams, John Zada and Jack Fleming for discussions and input.