After getting into an argument last week with someone who believes that ASL-using, culturally Deaf people are “insular,” I took the time to look the word up. I had always assumed it just meant “insulated” or “closed.” But when you know you’ll probably be having the same argument again in the near future, it’s a good idea to prepare for it with precise definitions. So here are a few that I found for “insular” using a Google search:

• relating to or characteristic of or situated on an island; “insular territories”; “Hawaii’s insular culture”

• suggestive of the isolated life of an island; “an exceedingly insular man; so deeply private as to seem inaccessible to the scrutiny of a novelist”- Leonard Michaels

• narrowly restricted in outlook or scope; “little sympathy with parochial mentality”; “insular attitudes toward foreigners”

• either of an island, or suggestive of the isolated condition of an island

Strange, isn’t it, how the word “island” is mentioned again and again. So for the hell of it I looked this up as well, since it seems so central to the concept of “insular.” This is one of the definitions I found:

• a body of land surrounded by water on all sides

Now taken together these meanings strike me as somewhat incompatible. Do you notice how none of the definitions for “insular” seem to mention what people who live on islands are isolated from? Or what those islanders have narrowly restricted their collective outlook or scope to exclude? Certainly the definition of “island” alone doesn’t tell us these things. It seems foolish to assume that islanders have isolated themselves from the knowledge that they’re surrounded on all sides by water. If I’m wrong on this, the following experiment should resolve the situation: We’ll simply ask a dozen fishermen randomly selected from a dozen islands if they indeed strive to exclude the existence of water from their outlook on life. Their answers should tell us what we need to know.

I also have a somewhat hard time figuring out why life on an island—solely by virtue of the fact that it exists on an island—is “isolated.” Especially when you consider that human life doesn’t really reproduce itself very well when a human being is alone. Thus if there’s a human society on an island at all, isn’t its very existence direct evidence of the fact that at least some of these islanders got together long enough to dispel their isolation?

Not that any of these things matter, of course. It’s a good bet that the term “insular” has less to do with people who live on islands and more to do with people who came to these islands long ago in huge ships armed with cannon and guns. In fact, before they showed up, based on the definitions above there probably wasn’t an islander in the ocean who believed that he had an insularity problem. It’s also a good bet that he only became convinced he had one after the captain of one of these ships pointed a cannon at him and told him that he had one.

But I’m not arguing here that “insularity” is actually a term that denotes the practice of using islanders for target practice. Mainlanders have been blowing each other apart for as long as anybody can remember, as well. Thus “insular” also probably has less to do with who lives on the mainland than it does with which mainlanders have more cannon and guns at a given time. In fact, simply being a mainlander has nothing whatsoever to do with anything. History is replete with situations in which so-called “islanders” happened to develop more cannon and guns (or some equivalent) faster than the mainland. Guess who was then attacked?

If you want a better definition for “insular,” this is what I think it should be:

• relating to or characteristic of any person or group with less power that strives to protect himself/itself from a person or group with more power

This definition simplifies things a bit. When we focus on what is characteristic of power and protection instead of upon what is characteristic of an island (and by extension isolation), we get at the heart of why insularity arises. We may also realize that at any given moment, anyone can have more power than we do. Thus all of us to an extent are insular. We have no choice but to be so.

You certainly exercise power in your own home, for example. You can invite into and expel from it anyone you wish (barring your own legal dependents, though at times you may wish you could expel them, too). You also expect protection from it. The fact that we can lock our front door is the sole reason many of us can sleep at night.

Now suppose you come home to find an uninvited stranger sitting in your favorite chair drinking your beer and watching a baseball game on your television set. You ask him to leave but he refuses, so you start to dial 911.

Imagine how absurd it would sound if he then accused you of being “insular.”

What’s confusing is that in a sense he’d be right. After all, you are closed to the idea of uninvited strangers being in your home, right? That whole concept is completely outside the scope of your outlook. And not only that; the more this particular stranger argues that he has a right to be in your home, the more likely it will become that you’ll make its interior inaccessible to his scrutiny. In fact the tiny group of people (think: island) permitted to enter your home without a formal invitation is probably limited to your immediate family and closest circle of friends, right?

Deaf people are insular because everyone on this planet is insular. When we’re guarding ourselves, our loved ones, our houses, or our culture, insularity is a necessity. Nothing in this world can survive without it, because whatever the outside world isn’t kept at bay from, it usually assimilates. That’s why we guard against it—or at least certain portions of it—in the first place. It’s why we don’t let our children stay overnight in the homes of people we don’t know. It’s why we have locks on our front doors, our car doors, our desks, and our safety deposit boxes. It’s why we have borders lined with chain link fences and armies to defend them.

So the next time Deaf people are accused of being insular, maybe we should take a moment to question just how much of the so-called “real world” we voluntarily isolate ourselves from. And if we’re arrogant enough to believe that we don’t, that we’re truly open to everything and everyone, maybe we should test this belief by propping open our front door and leaving it that way for six weeks straight. We are, after all, surrounded on all sides by people who are only too willing to take from us everything that we own. Give it enough time, and sooner or later one of them will show up.

Once that happens, a little bit of insularity will probably start looking pretty good.

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