How Do Humans Create and Sustain Viable Communities? A Review Essay

Abstract

In a very lucid account, Efrén Pérez and Margit Tavits’s Voicing Politics: How Language Shapes Public Opinion reports empirical studies demonstrating that language is an important foundation in nation-building. Their research makes excellent use the considerable percentage of Estonians who are proficient in Estonian and Russian, prominent languages spoken in Estonia; the two languages differ in how they characterize gender, how they characterize the future, and how they characterize ethnicity. Pérez and Tavits make use of experiments and survey modes of investigation. And across both modes and across many opinions, they find repeated, hence reliable, and modest “nudges” due to the language bilingual speakers are randomly assigned to use. I expand the focus to consider how language is but one of the important means by which the human species is able to generate very different social forms. Some societies—or better, polities—are more rigid, reliant on past practices to survive; some are more fluid and open to new possibilities. Each has proven vulnerable. I argue that the diversity of sociability enhances the likelihood of the survival of the species by having some better able to address the challenges of the moment—a better strategy than a fixed single solution.