Steve WhitlaSomething extraordinary happens towards the end of Milkman, Anna Burns’ Booker Prize winning novel. It’s a very unusual book, set in 1970s Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles and filled with shootings, stabbings, poisonings and beatings, but the thing that’s most unsettling as a reader is that it’s written entirely without proper nouns: the narrator has a relationship with “maybe-boyfriend”, goes running with “third brother-in-law”, is harassed by “renouncers of the state” and so on. Nothing, nowhere and nobody is ever named. The sense of paranoia this generates is palpable: say anything too clearly and you might live to regret it.
So the extraordinary thing, the thing that takes the reader by surprise at the end of the book, is not yet another violent episode, but the appearance of a proper noun. I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel before that turns so decisively on a grammatical function!
I’ll share the actual proper noun in a second, but this feeling of paranoia that the book generates really got me thinking about the whole phenomenon of naming in general. I also grew up in Northern Ireland during the troubles, but you don’t need to have lived through extreme experiences like that to make the more general connection between our willingness to name things and our sense of psychological safety. As I was reflecting, I recalled how many presentations I’ve sat through for work which were also almost completely devoid of proper nouns, where I couldn’t really pin down the meaning of any of the words in any of the boxes on any of the slides, but where it felt unsafe to ask, because of the social dynamics in the room. What’s going on here?
Back to Milkman. The thing that happens at the end (spoiler alert) is that the central character, a senior IRA commander known as “milkman” (no one is quite sure why) is shot, and it’s revealed that the reason he was called milkman was because it was actually his name: Mr Milkman. A proper noun. It may sound silly, but it’s hard to convey the emotional impact of this scene without also reading the preceding 300 pages in which nothing, nobody and nowhere is ever named.
I’ve spent much of my life noticing moments like this, analysing them and reflecting on them. They are moments of meaning, and you can sense them because of the distinctive feeling they give you, the feeling of becoming more connected to the world and the people around you, the feeling that something that didn’t make sense now does makes sense. The world may become friendlier or scarier as a result, but at least it’s now friendly or scary in a more predictable way.
Proper nouns turbocharge meaning, because they connect what people are talking about to actual things that exist in the world. But this also makes them more dangerous, because if people know what you’re talking about, you lay yourself open to accidentally saying something wrong, or taboo, or dangerous. The presence or absence of proper nouns is therefore a measure of the level of psychological safety in a group.
If you’re not sure what I mean, listen to how people in authority – managers, politicians, diplomats – answer questions in public. If they are trying to appeal to a wide audience, they will tend to veil everything behind abstract nouns – “the international community”, “democratic values”, “economic resilience”, “bipartisan consensus” – because these words don’t carry any risk. But they also don’t carry much meaning. One of the reasons populist politicians are popular is that they don’t do this. They know their audience, so by happily calling things out by name they attract a following, not because what they are saying is necessarily true, but because it’s so much more meaningful by comparison (“CNN is fake news!” “We send the EU £350 million a week. Let’s fund our NHS instead!”).
Here’s a subtler example that’s closer to home. I remember noticing ages ago that customer service representatives, particularly in call centres, would occasionally start addressing me as “yourself” or “yourselves” rather than “you”. Some will do this from the start, but some noticeably transition into “yourself” language when the conversation feels like it might go sour: “I’m sorry Mr Whitla, we sent the letter to yourself on X.Y.Z and we didn’t receive a reply, so we …” It’s a subtle thing, but “you” is the equivalent of a proper noun – the actual participant in the conversation, whereas “yourself” is the subject of the conversation. By abstracting out the participant, “yourself” feel safer to the rep who has bad news to share. If you don’t think this is a thing, try using the word “yourself” in everyday conversation and see how it feels.
I could multiply examples, but what they all point to is a really subtle but pernicious paradox that seems to me to be at the heart of all sorts of social and organisational problems, and it’s this: we all want meaning, because it makes the world feel safer, but to name things often doesn’t feel safe. How do we resolve this?
The first thing is to observe that we make meaning in two distinct ways. Proper nouns point us to the meaning we feel when we become more connected to the world. We are bodies in the world, and meaning feels good because it makes us feel safer, in that the world is less likely to surprise us in unpleasant ways. But we are also social creatures, so we find safety in the shared meaning that we create with one another. The problem arises when the meaning we create at a group level starts to become disconnected from the meaning that connects us with the world. And when push comes to shove, most of us would rather know that we’re safe in a group that’s disconnected from reality than safe in a reality that’s disconnected from the group.
And that takes me back to the troubles in Northern Ireland. Over the last several years, whenever I’ve gone home to where my family lives, I’ve driven past this wall, and when I read the words I always think the same thing: why Latin? How many people on that housing estate understand Latin and could translate the bottom line? Well, Feriens tego is actually the motto of a Unionist paramilitary group, so in this context it doesn’t actually matter what the words “mean” in English let alone Latin, because its real meaning is to do with group identity. When I was growing up the paving stones on this road were all painted red/white/blue, the colours of the United Kingdom, while in other towns they were painted green/white/orange, the colours of the Republic of Ireland. What did that “mean”? Nothing as far as the physical world is concerned, but everything for the identities of the people who lived there. There’s nothing about the physical characteristics of the island of Ireland that make it inherently “united” or “divided”, but that’s the question on which thousands of people have suffered violent deaths. Feeling part of a community is a wonderful thing, but when your world is defined by the boundaries of that community, bad things happen. If you’re not sure know what kind of bad things, read Milkman. In trying to make ourselves feel safer, we make our shared world more dangerous.
Various people have said in various ways that the size of your moral universe is defined by how many people you include in your concept of ‘us.’ We are biologically set to find meaning in the norms that are unquestioned by those closest to us. If we want to create a world that is more meaningful though, then we need to be comfortable challenging those norms.
In another clever twist, the closest thing that Milkman has to a hero is the un-named character who is, in fact, a real-life milkman. He’s an incredibly stubborn man, resolutely living in reality, calling things what they are, helping people out when they’re in need and incurring the wrath of the “renouncers of the state” as a result. We discover towards the end of the book that his first love was a girl called Eve, who forsook their relationship to go and live in a convent. She’s the only other significant character in the book who’s named, and the choice of name felt to me like a glimpse of an alternative way that the world could have been but wasn’t, a world in which we find ways to harmonise our commitment to those we love and work with and live alongside with a commitment to reality, even when it hurts.
But it’s a world that we can, in small, seemingly insignificant ways, still help to create. We create it when we choose to re-instate proper names that are notable by their absence. When we choose to call things what they are rather than what our particular group calls them. When we gently ask people what they mean when they use obfuscatory language. When we have the courage to be meaningfully wrong instead of just vague, because it gives other people the chance to correct us. To be curious about other people’s perspectives. To choose to find meaning in the way things are, and not just the way we would like them to be.
