We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibres connect us with our fellow men; and among these fibres, as sympathetic threads, our actions act as causes and they come back to us as effects.

Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick

The reason that communication is essentially dialogue and not mono­logue lies very deep within human nature.

In fact, we become persons only in relation to one another – and that entails mutual giving, receiving and sharing. The Bantu-speaking tribes of southern Africa have a word for it: ubuntu. The concept this indicates means literally ‘I am a person because of other persons’. Hence the African proverb: ‘It takes the whole village to raise a child.’

Reciprocity is at the heart of being human. Reciprocity means the return in due measure by each of two sides of whatever is offered, given or manifested by the other. Usually, therefore, it implies not only a quid pro quo – a ‘this for that’ – but an equivalence in value, though not necessarily in kind, on each side (as of love, hate, understanding, courtesies, concessions or duties).

You might think, for example, that the communication between a human mother and her baby is entirely one way: all giving on one side and all receiving on the other. But that is not actually the case.

Research shows that human mothers instinctively teach their babies in the first year of their lives to be reciprocal. From about six months onwards, mothers naturally start giving their babies objects and encourage them to give them back. By twelve months there is an equivalence of giving and receiving such objects between mother and child, accompanied of course by smiles and warm sounds.

In other words, what mothers do quite unconsciously is to establish the foundation of reciprocity, the basic building blocks that we need to become human beings and individuals. Gorilla and chimpanzee mothers, by contrast, don’t do this. They don’t need to, because gorillas and chimpanzees are not destined to be persons.