Month: May 2019

Empedocles partitioned the universe into four elements, earth, water, air, and fire, a commonsense taxonomy that mirrors the four physical states of matter, solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. Science long ago disabused us of this backward perspective, and the ancient Greek view is now seen for the simplistic and unenlightened—primitive—view that it is. Atomic theory tells us that there are 118 elements, each capable of assuming multiple physical states according to their energy level at the time their physical state is being assessed. The universe is a far more complex place than Empedocles could have possibly imagined.

But this doesn’t seem quite right. Atomic theory tells me that the air entering my lungs is composed of a multiplicity of elements, mostly nitrogen, an inert gas that is somehow also responsible for the sky’s particular shade of blue. Atomic theory has to tell me this, because it is not at all obvious. In fact, the composition of the air entering my lungs is entirely beyond my direct experience. The air of a crowded room breathes differently than the air of a forest trail, but the difference I experience is a difference of the air taken as a whole, as a unitary presence, as a coherent and indivisible entity, a difference in its density, its viscosity, the way that it folds itself around my exposed skin. And, likewise, with the many solid and liquid substances I come in contact with. Wine flows differently than water, but the molecular components responsible for this difference are quite beyond any experiential grasp.

A perspective informed by science, while useful for scientific purposes, imposes a conceptual barrier to the world of direct and immediate experience, a world that flows and breathes and binds us inextricably to each other and to all other beings.

Pascal’s wager is ridiculous, of course, the idea that we should believe on the outside chance god turns out to be true. First off, belief is not the kind of thing that one can bring into existence simply by an act of will, least of all the kind of conviction required to accept an undetectable and incomprehensible Bronze Age deity. And although it is clearly possible to fake it, surely any god worth half a pillar of salt would see right through the ruse. In addition, Pascal’s argument can be turned around on itself with equal rhetorical force: if you choose the life of a believer, and death brings nothing but the void, then you have squandered your one chance to live life to the fullest.

My own response to Pascal—and to the salvation pushers who occasionally show up at my door—is that if there is a god, he made me knowing full well that I would use his gift of reason to reject his existence and then be consigned to an eternity of suffering. Such a god is a monster not a worthy of anyone’s praise and worship.   

But there is something even more insidious about Pascal’s illogic, something hidden, a tacit assumption about the need to choose a path, and the role that chosen path plays in structuring our lives. The decision to believe in the Christian god—or any god, or any comprehensive life-directing principle—ushers in the foreclosure of potential. A chaste and pious path is an exceedingly narrow one. But so is any other path that imposes directions and boundaries and limits our ability to respond to the richness, nuance, and impenetrable unpredictability of the emerging moment. To walk a predetermined path is to close yourself off to the world.

Instinct, intuition, holistic right-brain impressions, or just a gut feeling, we have a way of communicating with ourselves, a back channel that is far more direct and potent than what we get through our conscious language-based self-talk. Language is unable to engage the world as it is, raw, unfiltered, in the moment. Emotion is the communicative medium in this back channel. It would have to be. And, given the primacy of emotion, it is probably a mistake to call it a “back channel.” To think in this way is to submit to a civilized thought-form that inverts reality, one that elevates the deterministic, analytic, systematic, mechanical—the technological—above the organic, holistic, contextually-grounded.

I attended a powwow today, and it happened to me again. It happens every time. As the drums start and the dancers make their way into the arena for the Grand Entrance, the tears well up uncontrollably, and I am forced to hide behind my sunglasses so as not to make a public fool of myself.

Wolves affect me in this way too. Each time I visited Wolf Park, in Indiana, the tears came uninvited. And again, when I wrote about my Wolf Park experience. And again, when I edited what I wrote. And again, when I wrote and edited another piece about wolves. And even later, when I reread these pieces after they were published.

Indigenous Americans and wolves. There is an important message in this. What is it that my tears are telling me? I feel a kind of pressure here, as if I am supposed to do something, as if I have forgotten something vital, something that I need to remember before it’s too late. Too late for what? I listen intently, but my civilization-deafened ears are not equal to the task.

Some time ago I was listening to an interview with Alice Walker, the famous poet, on NPR. She was lamenting the loss of civility and the disintegration of empathy. She said—and I’m paraphrasing—that humanity needs to relearn how to be empathetic. We have become too self-centered and selfish. The word humanity was not a paraphrase. She used that specific word several times.

Humanity.

What is that, exactly? Humanity is one of a considerable number of deceptive abstract terms that, while they are ultimately meaningless, nonetheless suggest something of paramount significance. Humanity is a fuzzy category that has no actual physical, concrete referent. Humanity doesn’t exist. Anywhere. It never has and never can. Humanity is a rhetorical device. It is frequently used as a placeholder for the entirety of our species. But even as shorthand for “the human species,” or simply “humans,” it is invariably used in ways that are illusory and misleading. For example, it has been said that humanity has been to the moon, when actually only a handful of individual humans have done so. And if by humanity, Walker meant to say “the human species,” then she was speaking gibberish—unpoetic gibberish. The human species is incapable of empathy. The human species is an artificial creation, a taxonomic category, not an actual thing in the world.

Humans, individual human beings, individual people, are actual things in the world. And, while it is true that there are several individual humans who could probably use a little more empathy in their approach to other individual people, there are several folks out there who ooze empathy from their pores. When Walker says that humanity has lost, or is in need of learning, empathy, what is she saying? That there are more and more people who are less and less empathetic? And, further, perhaps, that the world would be a better place if these people could add a bit more empathy into their daily thoughts and interactions? If that was what she meant, then I’m hard-pressed not to agree. Given the context of the conversation, however, it appeared that she intended to mean something more than just this.

Her main point was that “humanity needs to become more empathetic.” And I do remember her saying that humanity needs to “learn” empathy. What does that mean? How can an abstraction learn? Where is this newly acquired knowledge to be housed? And if she meant “all people,” need to learn this, such a blanket statement is entirely unwarranted. Again, there are plenty of people who are at this very moment operating at the very top end of the human niceness spectrum.

Perhaps some additional context might help to sort this out. Walker’s NPR interview was given in the midst of congressional hearings relating to a belligerent and misogynistic supreme court justice nominee who had been accused of sexual assault, and on the heels of the President openly and publicly mocking his psychologically wounded accuser in extremely demeaning ways. The man is clearly an oaf who does not deserve to be in any leadership position, no matter how trivial. And by “the man,” I mean both the supreme court nominee and the President. The media is saturated to the very brim with similar stories, alongside stories of mass shootings paired with open disdain for any suggestions that something substantive should be done to prevent them, and a number of other clear indicators that empathy—in even the most rudimentary sense of that term—appears to be a rarified element of society.

But Walker is wrong. Even if we allow the slippery non-thing of humanity to mean something concrete, she is wrong. Humanity has nothing to do with anything because the situation she is referencing has nothing to do with actual humans. It has to do with the operative design of the complex collection of bureaucratically organized systems of power that are being forcefully imposed on people. She is talking about global corporate consumer society itself. She is talking about civilization.

Individual people are acting “unempathetic” toward other individual people because civilization reduces—and in many cases completely eliminates—the possibility for us to act toward each other as actual human persons. The major part of our behavior toward each other has nothing to do with anything human. We are not living together as authentic and spontaneously interacting humans, we are living scripted roles, as functionaries, as servomechanisms in the machine. We are made to grind against each other because that is the nature of the machine itself, because the resulting friction is necessary for the machine to operate. The scarcity of empathy is a direct result of our forced participation in a system based on a grossly unequal distribution of power, on manipulation, on competition, a system that overtly punishes empathetic behavior.

The human empathetic response is an evolved capacity, an adaptive capacity that came about because of its potent utility as a tool for maintaining group cohesion in small-scale hunter-gatherer society (and, likely, in the social systems of our proto-human primate ancestors as well). In terms of survival value, it is second only to our inborn sense of fairness and the resulting social norms of reciprocity that are defining features of the anarchistic and largely egalitarian human social circumstances that were universal up until just the last few thousand years. The second you add a power differential to society, the second that people no longer have equal and unrestricted access to essential resources, is the second that empathy starts to lose its survival utility.

Neither egalitarianism nor anarchism exist in the modern world. They disappeared among the civilized the moment that the civilized came into being. The elimination of these features of the social landscape is part and parcel of the civilizing process. An egalitarian civilization would not be a civilization. Anarchistic civilization is an oxymoron. Sharp inequalities of power and access are not just necessary conditions for civilization, they are what civilization ultimately is: a complex collection of mechanisms for amplifying and maintaining power, and for disseminating inequality.

The question “Who is we?” is a game changer. All of the handwringing about how we need to change society is misplaced because no one is asking this basic question, the question of “we.” The problem isn’t what some nebulous “we” (or humanity or—insert your favorite reified abstraction here) is or is not doing. The real problem is the fact that this “we” has absolutely no power to do anything. We is simply not that kind of thing.

You and I, however, there is where the real power lies.