Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being
can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know,
you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself -- in a world which is doing its best, night and day,
to make you everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight;
and never stop fighting.
- ee cummings
My
article on Monday, Nobody But Yourself, was one of the worst articles
I've ever written, not only because, in cluttering it with tangential
arguments, I failed to articulate the point I was trying to make, but
because, in the process, I made two outrageously dumb statements* that
totally undermined my credibility. So rather than trying to clean up
that mess, I'm going to start again from scratch, because this is important.
. . . . .
Humans are, and always have been, inherently social creatures. This is evolutionary, but it isn't all about survival. It's about surviving being worth it. Social behaviour is about joy, about learning, about the value of shared experience. Those things make you want to survive. And if you want to, you will. So Darwin has a hand in this, but mostly indirectly.
Because we are social, we enter into tacit social contracts
with others. These contracts entail giving something and getting
something, mostly in a win-win proposition (or one party wouldn't agree
to the contract). What we get are some pretty important things:
- appreciation/love (for who we are and what we do)
- attention
- understanding (a mutual reward)
- desired actions from others
- the '1+1=3' benefits of collaborative action (accomplishing things no one can do alone)
In
evolutionary terms these advantages have evolved into needs: We can no
longer live without them, because they are now part of what defines us
as a species, so that those who lack them tend to select themselves out
of the gene pool. We have developed an insatiable appetite for these
things, and we have invented tools that allow us to get more of them.
The
most notable of these is language, which we evolved to allow us to be
more precise in giving instruction and in communicating what we mean
(and perhaps what we feel, though that's debatable). As a consequence
of these inventions, and practice at using them, what has emerged is
shared patterns of behaviour and activities, what we call culture. And because culture is social 'software', it can evolve much more quickly than the hard-wired 'hardware' parts of what makes us us – our bodies, our emotions and our instincts. And because they can evolve much more quickly, when it suits their purpose, they do.
So
we now live in a world where we are trying to employ 21st century
social software while we remain trapped in bodies that are largely
prehistoric – they evolve very slowly, and haven't changed much in tens
of thousands of years. One obvious consequence of this is the physical
and emotional illness that comes from our visceral reaction to stress:
What used to be an evolutionary advantage (the ability to move very
fast and strike very hard when you're about to be eaten by something
bigger than you) has become an evolutionary handicap, a
worse-than-useless vestige of our prehistoric past.
I mentioned above what we get from the social contract. Other than the risk of losing our physical and emotional health due to stress, what do we risk or give up in this bargain? Cummings would argue, I think, that unless we are extraordinarily diligent and extremely self-aware and self-competent, we give up everything that make us us – we give up being nobody-but-ourselves and we become everybody else.
Think about the nature of the social interactions you enter into every day:
- At
work, you tie yourself in knots to be appreciated and understood, from
dressing like everybody else to very gradually shifting your whole
worldview to one that is more compatible with, and easier to
communicate with, the worldview of everybody else.
- In your
political thinking, you align yourself with the group that comes
closer/closest to your own worldview, and you end up defending that
party's worldview, often fiercely, despite not agreeing with or not
understanding much of it, because the alternative of the other party's worldview is even worse: "you're either with us or you're with the terrorists".
- In
your family life, you may contort yourself to earn and be considered
worthy of the love of the one person you are allowed to love (alas, in
our modern culture, polyamory is not tolerated); you may do anything, including trying to make yourself what you are not, to get or keep that love.
- In
some subcultures, you are expected to sacrifice yourself for some
collective ideal, norm or ritual: To marry someone you despise, to
self-immolate if your spouse dies, to mutilate yourself to show you
'belong'.
- In all your social circles, you're under enormous
pressure to conform to the 'norms' of many different peer groups: if
you don't, you risk being bullied in the schoolyard, excommunicated,
shunned by your neighbours, and gossiped about behind your back: Just
try and get attention and appreciation then.
Dave
Snowden quotes Terry Eagleton as saying "you can only defeat an
antagonist whose ways of seeing things you can make sense of". I think
the corollary is equally true: there is no point trying to persuade
others unless they understand your frame or worldview. The need to make this constant, convulsive accommodation to achieve any kind of mutual understanding places enormous pressure on us to think more and more like everybody else. And the more we think and act like everybody else, the more we become
everybody else. Suppress or deny your feelings, conform, do what you're
told, choose Brand A or Brand B (no other brand, and no opting out), look like everyone else, dress like everyone else, talk like everyone else, read and watch and talk about what everyone else reads and watches and talks about.
There
have been some remarkable studies of 'wild' children, those who have
grown up without human social contact. They are generally considered to
be mentally and socially 'retarded', but they appear to have amazing
perceptual and intuitive abilities, and their brains' neural patterns,
not forged by constant exposure to monolithic language, are
astonishingly different from 'civilized' people's. They are nobody but themselves.
Perhaps
for the first few hours of our lives, we are all nobody but ourselves.
After that, I'm not sure our species has ever been anything except
everybody else. My anthropological studies would suggest that, at an
astonishing pace over the past 30,000 years of civilization culture, we
have become less diverse and more homogeneous, in both our thinking and
behaviour, and that at an accelerating rate we are becoming more and
more everybody else. Indigenous peoples are modestly less monolithic
and more tolerant of personal differences of thought and action than
civilized people, but they are more like us and everybody else than
they are nobody but themselves.
Cummings' point, and mine, is that it is extremely difficult to be nobody but yourself, but that it is worth
it, that we have paid far too high a price for the social contract we
have struck, that our poor bodies and emotions and instincts are
suffering for it, and that it's getting worse.
My novel-in-progress The Only Life We Know
is about this, and it portrays a world after civilization's collapse in
which every child born is again free to be nobody but themselves, for
their lifetime. Perhaps fiction will convey this idea, and its
importance, in a more compelling and articulate way than I can in an
essay. I just know there is something missing, something lost,
something we have given up in civilization's social bargain, something
that we instinctively long for, something worth fighting the hardest
battle that any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.
That's what I was trying to say on Monday.
*
My first ridiculously dumb statement in Monday's post was that I don't
really care what readers think of my writing or ideas. The second was
that, given the choice between a dialogue on something I've written and
writing something new, there is no contest. A dialogue in
a medium that allows for effective communication between articulate
people who have substantial shared context and understanding of each
other's worldview is about as close to intellectual and
emotional nirvana as it gets. You'd have to be seriously antisocial to
prefer solitary writing to that.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
