Affinity

- noun
1. A natural liking or attraction to a person, thing, idea, etc.
2. a person, thing, idea, etc., for which such an attraction is felt.
3. A relationship by marriage or by ties other than blood.
4. Inherent likeness or agreement; close resemblance or connection.
5. Biology: the phylogenetic relationship between two organisms or groups of organisms resulting in a resemblance in general plan or structure, or in the essential structural parts.
6. Chemistry: the force by which atoms are held together in chemical compounds.

- adjective
7. Of or pertaining to persons who share the same interests.


Last night I attended a party where I knew most of the other guests, but I didn't know any of them well. While we watched the adorable 2-year-old daughter of one couple run around and play and say incredibly cute and adult-like things, we started to talk about childhood and how children imitate and display their family/social group's culture.

One of the guests told a story about his time teaching very young students (7-10 years) in Thailand recently. He said that in Thailand, it is a very important part of the culture for everyone to belong to a specific social group. He said this as though it were not the same in the US. He described the culture as extremely tolerant, but at the same time emphasized that it was extremely important in the area where he taught that each individual identify with some group. He didn't specify in what way that this importance is communicated, but he gave an example of a young boy telling him, "you don't need to call me Mr. so-and-so, I'm a fairy-girl," by which the child which meant that he was claiming identity as a homosexual with an affinity with a well-known and accepted group.

This was probably the most interesting thing said all night. Everyone in the group marveled at the wonderful example of undeniable "tolerance" displayed in the example: a child felt free enough to associate with a group which in the US might be treated with far less tolerance! (gasp!)

It reminded me of the recurring human need for "belonging," and the associated feelings of affinity for shared customs, symbols, traditions, activities. For this child, of course, as with US school children, it's likely that the social group he was claiming with his words and actions was not yet well-defined enough in his mind for him to truly relate; rather, he was testing out the "fit" of a social role he didn't understand yet but which had a symbolic or iconic quality for him, through play. And through play he would come to understand whether or not the social role really fit him (an alternative notion of social roles might say that playing in this social role would shape him. I tend to think it's a little bit of both).

Earlier that day at lunch, my classmates and I had laughed about how much more meaning was conveyed in certain movies we'd seen as kids than we were ever aware of, as kids. We may have loved the movies as kids, but we didn't understand everything. We can remember not understanding it, but we can't always identify the moments when we came to understand. It was by being exposed to those unintelligible meanings and then having subsequent life experiences that we came to our own fuller personal understanding of meaning.

It's amusing (and maybe a little bit lonely) to know that even as we marvel over what we think are shared experiences, even as we feel understood by others and laugh about our personal journey to gain understanding, the meanings in our heads are always completely our own. Yet so often we try to impose them on others, selfishly. And sometimes we impose these meanings that we come to understand on ourselves, but we think that they're being imposed by others because of our own need to "belong" to a group.

As I listened to the party guest's story about the Thai boy's play at social games which were foreign and yet not foreign to the same behavior in our region, I reminded myself that adults are really no different from children. A favorite mentor of mine once said, "adults are just kids with responsibilities and big-people clothes on." Like children, adults are also free to "play" with our lives and social roles, unless we have "locked" ourselves out of freedom through our need to belong by choosing a social role that forbids straying outside its defining traditions, lest we become ostracized and lose our social ties. Commitments to family, job, and other responsibilities are still choices, even they might not feel that way from the "inside."

If our lifestyle is part of a small-scale local "counter-culture" or "indie movement" rejecting some larger-scale social norms, if our choices use the choices of others as models for our own then we're still choosing a social group. The very personal context in which we make the choice to align with some social group can hide the fact that we're aligning with that group from our consciousness. By trying to be edgy and original, we are of course just like everyone else who's trying to be edgy and original.

The real edge is not a sharp edge, it's a frayed and ragged edge because pieces of it reach further from the "middle" than others. It's lonely at the edge, but when there's nowhere else to belong, it's one place to go. And as some approach the edge, others are drawn by them and follow, and eventually the edge becomes the middle.

It's more work not to be part of any group than it is to try to be part of some group in particular.

Nothing particularly original here. Just teasing out my own sense of meaning.