|
WHY BOTHER? GETTING A LIFE IN A LOCKED-DOWN LAND |
|
Chapter Eight: OTHERS The problem has always been other people. Wrote James Baldwin, "The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass, and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you ..." Which may be why Americans, freer than most, have stayed on the run. The native American was forced westward by the young escaping the limits of East Coast American villages established only a generation or two earlier by parents escaping the limits of European villages. From the start, whether invading Indian lands, seeking a whale, rafting with Huck Finn, easy riding with Peter Fonda, or next week in Cancun, there has been a strong American belief that happiness lies somewhere else. And yet as we find freedom we also rediscover loneliness. As geographer Yi-Fu Tuan says, we require both shelter and venture. We need freedom and support, silence and cacophony, the vast and distant, but also the warm and near, a voyage and the harbor, the great adventure and the hobbit hole. The iconography of our times gives little sense of this. Instead, the individual is treated as a self-sufficient, self-propelled vehicle moving across a background of other things, other places, and other people. When this is not the case, as in a heart-warming newspaper profile of a community engaged in some noble task, the story is often crafted with such syrupy, fable-like simplicity that it simply seems irrelevant to what we know. Besides, our own experiences with community may evoke something from which we have fled -- a fouled-up family, a stifling neighborhood, little economic opportunity, an oppressive religion -- rather than that which we seek. We may have declared, either consciously or unconsciously, never to go through that again. And so we look for maximum freedom and decline to make the trade-offs -- except, of course, when we are working, commuting, or buying those things that are supposed to make us free. In the end, ironically, we may find ourselves having mostly freed ourselves from voluntary associations. Those relationships, appointments, and activities required by our status, employment, or to pay for our totems of liberation, are not impeded at all by our declaration of independence; rather they sit there happily munching away at what we, with an increasing sense of nostalgia, call our "free" time. And so, perhaps surreptitiously, perhaps with clumsy premeditation, we may find ourselves seeking community again. Sometimes it's as easy as a pick-up basketball game, sometimes it's as tenuous as sitting in the back row of a church for the first time since adolescence, sometimes it's as quirkily satisfying as a book club going camping and kayaking together. David Grenier in the 'zine Retrogression described well the awkwardness of getting it started:
It was a lot easier when you didn't have to invent your community. The problem, of course, was that you didn't get to choose your own community either. It was defined for you. For example, David Hackett Fischer in Albion's Seed describes four distinct types of communities created by the early British settlers in America. For each trait or value -- such as freedom -- he found distinct variations even within this narrow cultural band. For example, in Puritan New England, freedom was strictly ordered; the community set its limits and described its character. If you didn't like it, you had to take your freedom somewhere else. In Virginia, freedom was hegemonic, which is to say the more power you had the more liberty you had. If you were a cavalier, you had a lot, if you were a servant you had little, if you were a slave you had none. "How is it," wondered Samuel Johnson back in England, "that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" And John Randolph, as though in answer, said, "I love liberty; I hate equality." In the back country there was a live-and-let-live gestalt, libertarian we would come to call it, while in the middle Atlantic colonies there developed a form of reciprocal freedom in which it was assumed that one couldn't be free unless others were as well. Four distinct styles for something that certainly existed but still didn't have a name; it would not be until the early 19th century that Tocqueville coined the phrase individualism. Bur you didn't get to chose between them; your style of freedom came with the territory. One of the virtues of our present situation is that while community may be harder to find, it is also far easier to create. You don't have to found a new colony or risk your life in the unmapped west. Today, for example, there is hardly a human characteristic, from sex to philosophy to illness, that has not established its own "community." Even the CIA claims to be part of an "intelligence community." Anyone who has belonged to such a group knows the support it can provide. From lover to mass movement, we just don't want to be free all by ourselves. What we really want, I suspect, is the right to take it or leave it, to draw at will from the well of others -- their presence, their traditions, their ideas, their love -- and then to blend it with everything that it is already in us in a way that is peculiarly our own. This, after all, is how art is formed -- by communities of ideas. Not by a big bang, but by mixing the borrowed with bursts of virgin imagination. It has been suggested, for example, that the blue note in jazz stems from the mating of the European scale with the tonalities of Africa; certainly much of what we think as unique in jazz draws from various cultures and the music would be far poorer if it didn't. Even rejection of artistic tradition requires knowledge of the rejected, for one cannot leave a room one hasn't visited. *** No one has ever accused me of excessive conformity, yet like so many my individualism was formed not in isolation but within powerful communities. These included caring communities such as a high school that saw something in me beyond the scared, wise-acre kid I saw in myself. My college radio station was a creative community that served as a refuge and a garden for a motley collection of dissidents, odd-balls, minorities, and free-thinkers. This unlikely assemblage managed to create fine programming while still honing the distinctive personalities of those involved. In the Coast Guard, I found a community of common purpose. Ships and the ocean have their own rules about such things. "Of all the living creatures upon land and sea," wrote Joseph Conrad, "it is ships alone that cannot be taken in by barren pretenses, that will not put up with bad art from their masters." From such an imperative comes a community of the competent. Discipline in the Coast Guard was lax in most respects save one: results. We were, for example, handed down a motto from the old Life Saving Service that clearly defined the limits of our individualism: "You have to go out; you don't have to come back." Later, in a Washington neighborhood, I found a geographic community that, among other things, accepted communal responsibility for its young. This had a subtle effect on our children for they had more than two adult models nearby. And the "mayor" of our street for more than a quarter of a century was an artist -- from the most individualistic of trades, yet the creator of community as well as pictures. Perhaps in my case it went back, earlier than all that, as I was reminded while being interviewed about my writing on the Clinton scandals by another presidential critic, liberal journalist Philip Weiss. Weiss asked whether it didn't bother me to be mixed up with all the right-wingers who were also on Clinton's case. Without hesitation, I replied no, that I had come from a large family and was used to being around people who disagreed with me. As it turned out, both Weiss and I were third children of six-sibling families. We had learned early the essence of politics: who gets the window seat, whenm and for how long. And we had also learned about the failings of those bigger and more powerful than ourselves, such as older siblings or presidents. This coincidence caused me to wonder about some other journalistic critics of the president. I contacted Roger Morris (author of Partners in Power), Sally Denton (investigative journalist and wife of Morris), reporter Christopher Ruddy, and independent investigator Hugh Sprunt. With the exception of Morris, all came from families ranging from four (Sprunt and Denton) to 14 (Ruddy). Only Morris and Sprunt led their sibling pack. Ruddy was 12th born. Not only did large families predominate, but we each had strong moral influences in our childhood. Ruddy, the son of an Irish police lieutenant, told me, "My parents were patriotic. They believed in the country, in values. Of course we [didn't] have much money and it was sort of stressed that money was not as important as doing the right thing." One of Sally Denton's grandmothers was an early 20th century feminist and another of her free-thinking ancestors fled mid-19th century Utah just ahead of Mormon enforcers. Weiss's parents were anti-Vietnam War. Mine were New Dealers who had started an organic beef farm even before Silent Spring. Roger Morris was strongly influenced by his grandmother in the Kansas City of the Pendergast machine: "Her view of the inner darkness of real American politics left me an indelible sense of the shallowness and disgrace of most or our public discourse, the fundamental immorality of both old parties, and an abiding sense of reformist outrage." Hugh Sprunt, describing himself as "noy a complete Randite," had gone to church regularly through high school. It counted as a class. All through high school, I went to Quaker meeting each week and it, too, counted as a class. While he was reading Atlas Shrugged, I was reading Stride Towards Freedom by Martin Luther King. In short, rather than being a sinister ideological conspiracy, we formed a confederacy of the hopelessly independent -- this despite having been raised in large families suffused with moral messages. Rather than emerging suppressed and defeated, these early communities had actually helped make us rebellious and independent enough to challenge the most powerful man in America. Communities do things like that -- things that individuals can't and things that institutions won't. From the friend who drives you home when you've had too much to drink, to farmers rebuilding a neighbor's barn after a tornado, people draw strength from others that is unavailable in isolation. And in the process, they become themselves. Communities can also create men and women unafraid of life's natural variety, who do not hide behind the doors of homogenous happenings -- like the Brazilian Archbishop Helder Pessoa Camata who once declared:
In the end, it is as much a matter of our perspective towards communities as the communities themselves. Emerson put it this way:
*** The contemporary free market mythology has obscured a basic point about humans: while we may be isolated competitors at times, this is no wise the central nature of our character. Some sociobiologists argue that we are biologically coded to try to get along with other human beings in order to protect ourselves. Or at least our genes. As one scholar put it, an organism is just a gene's way of making another gene. In Cheating Monkeys and Citizen Bees, Lee Dugatkin says that one thing scientists do not disagree about is whether humans are social creatures. "We are, period. We know of no cases throughout history where large numbers of humans have intentionally lived outside the fabric of some kind of society.... We are simply not designed, either physically or psychologically, to live as solitary creatures." Economists tell us otherwise as they keep trying to convince us that God's ways are better revealed by the dollar bill rather than by other values. To test the point, however, simply ask an economist how big a factor voluntary activity and unpaid work are in the gross domestic product. The answer is not all. The cost of murder, oil spills, cancer, and divorce are all factored positively into the equation, but housework, driving kids to school, or caring for an aged parent are not. Progress, it is implicitly argued, consists only of that which can be measured by money. Jonathan Rowe, who has written about the misapplication of economics, calls such accounting "a grueling cycle of indulgence and repentance, binge and purge. Yet each stage of this miserable experience, viewed through the pollyanic lens of economics, becomes growth and therefore good." Rowe also notes that if it takes a $200 billion advertising industry to maintain what economists quaintly call "demand," then "perhaps that demand isn't as urgent as conventional theory posits. Perhaps it's not even demand in any sane meaning of the word." An increasing number of scholars are getting around to examining some of the less mercenary and macho aspects of life, such as why we help each other out so much. For example, Dr. James A. Shapiro of the University of Chicago, who has studied the behavior of single-cell bacteria, says
At beginning of the Reagan Administration, Robert Axelrod began computer studies of the classic game problem known as the "Prisoner's Dilemma." In its traditional form, this game sets up four possibilities for a pair of captured prisoners:
What makes this complicated is that A and B do not know what the other is going to do. In Axelrod's experiment, the choices given were whether to cooperate or defect based on a logical reward system. Further, Axelrod proposed numerous repetitions of the game to make it more like a real situation. Axelrod ran a tournament, inviting game theorists around the world to participate in a computer exercise of 200 moves. As it turned out, the winning entry was also the simplest program, dubbed tit-for-tat. In it, the player cooperates on the first move and after that simply imitates the other player's move: cooperation for cooperation and defection for defection. In fact, reciprocity and cooperation worked so well they resisted the pressure of more aggressive concepts. Said Axelrod in The Evolution of Cooperation, ''A population of nice rules is the hardest type to invade because nice rules do so well with each other." He proposed several principles for successful cooperation even in an unfriendly environment:
Since then, sociobiologists and others have challenged some of Axelrod's ideas and transformed others into more complex concepts. Matt Ridley in The Origins of Virtue warns that there is a dark side to tit-for-tat. What happens, for example, if one party accidentally defects; then the other side defects in response; which brings yet another defection, and so on. This, notes Ridley, is what happens in a "tit-for-tat" killing spree brought on by a factional feud. Further, tit-for-tat assumes that those involved continue to play the game. Says Ridley, "If people can recognize defectors, they can simply refuse to play games with them." This technique, dubbed "discriminating altruism," insures that everyone "is playing by the same rules." In some cases, this involves social ostracism of the defector; in others the cooperators remove themselves from the field of battle. Dugatkin, for his part, suggests that a number of paths to cooperation used by animals are more complicated than simple tit-for-tat. There is the alarm cry that a single squirrel -- at considerable risk -- sends its colleagues so they can scurry safely away from an arriving hawk. If squirrels were as selfish, and happiness a much of the product of that selfishness, as some would have us believe, the squirrel would simply run to safety and let the rest fend for themselves. But what if it isn't the squirrel that is selfish, but its genes? Dugatkin notes that sisters share about 50% of their genes. If you were to die on behalf of two of your sisters, genetically speaking that would be an even trade. If you saved three sisters, your gene pool would come out ahead. Your family would consider you a hero; neo-Darwinists would view you as having been doomed by your genes. Then there is the reciprocal altruism of guppies. Approached by a predator, a pair of guppies may move out to examine the enemy, then return and seemingly warn others of the danger. The easiest thing to do, if you are a guppy, would be to hang back and let another guppy take the risk. But then the greater guppy community would face increased danger. Despite their tiny brains, guppies seem to have grasped the notion of tit-for-tat. Dugatkin writes: Each fish keeps track of what the other is doing when both go out to examine the predator. Should one fish lag a little behind, the other fish slows down and makes sure that the distance does not become too great. To top it off, guppies genuinely prefer to spend their time hanging around other guppies who cooperated with them during their danger-filled sorties, presumably to be in their vicinity again, should the situation arise once more! Still another approach is the teamwork used by wild lions. Instead of chasing a gazelle by herself, a lioness will work with one or more others to trap and chase it. Finally, Dugatkin describes group altruism, exemplified by the ants of the Sonoran Desert whose egalitarian consumption of food is preceded by just one queen going out -- at considerable risk to herself -- to collect it. Why? Dugatkin explains:
Ridley has his own menagerie of cooperation. For example, there is the naked mole rat of East Africa who shares underground shelter with 70 to 80 other celibate worker rats and one giant queen. "Like termites or bees, mole-rat workers even risk their lives on behalf of their colonies, by, for instance, running to block a tunnel when a snake invades it." Perhaps most amazing are the more than 45 species of small reef fish and shrimp that clean parasites attached to larger predators:
Another appealing example of cooperation comes from Merl W. Boos. editor of Agricultural Notes, who explains why geese fly in formation and what happens when they don't:
We, no less than the geese, are driven by cooperative imperatives we may not even credit. Such as writing a will that leaves our assets to our children -- in some ways a gene-preserving scheme in the guise of selflessness. Writes Ridley:
Out of the new interest in the genetic provenance of behavior has come considerable controversy. Some see in it the ghost of past infatuations with eugenics. Others, like Ridley, see the evidence supporting a happy middle ground between Hobbes' view of humans engaged in a pitiless struggle and Rousseau's romantic natural person, the noble savage. Melvin Konner takes a far dimmer view of the selfish genes. Writing in The American Prospect, he argued that "in art and poetry the lion may lie down the lamb, but in evolution the lamb gets eaten." Since he realizes this may not sit well with his liberal readers, he attempts to draw a distinction between what is and what ought to be. He argues that nothing in the neo-Darwinist arguments had changed the way he voted because "I want to live in a decent society." And he cites the Constitution as the sort of document humans need to hold their genes in line, "an intricate, elegant device, a sociological invention for keeping human nature in check, while allowing the conflict that seethes in the human breast to leak out through various safety valves." Thomas Paine, he says, felt the same way. The Constitution, Paine said, was produced to "restrain and regulate the wild impulse of power." And in Federalist 51 it says. "If men were angels, no government would be needed." Of course, it's easy to believe in neo-Darwinism if you've done well enough in life to get paid to teach, research, and write about it. After all, humans are the only species to have created complex systems for mimicking or countermanding whatever it is that evolution and our genes are up to. One of these systems is called "higher" education which, among other things, decides who becomes a sociobiologist. Anthropologist Robin Fox suggests that genes and culture actually function like a feedback loop. In order to survive the changing circumstances around them, humans took the cultural route; they simply had to move faster than evolution. But as cultural pressures grew, so did the natural selection pressures for better brains and "as better brains emerged, culture could take new leaps forward, thus in turn exerting more pressures." In other words, a lot happens after we climb out of the gene pool and dry ourselves off. We are not like guppies or naked mole rats if for no other reason than that we can sit around arguing whether we are or not. Guppies and naked mole rats don't do that. What we think of as culture and history is really a form of artificial evolution. While both cooperation and selfishness have deep roots in our genetic core, nothing in this core made inevitable the Civil War or the end of small pox, Martin Luther King or Margaret Thatcher. Human choices did that, choices that included deciding what tools, virtues, bludgeons or trickery to pull out of the overstuffed closet of our humanness.
|