Roots

I'm sitting here with a rather obvious reminder of how rash it can be to forget that things that appear on the surface to be totally disconnected - for example, a nondescript, seemingly dead piece of vine on one side of the yard and a sprig of poison ivy on the other - often turn out to share a single root.

This image is a fairly obvious metaphor for the kind of connectedness I wrote about a few posts back in terms of family trees and "one life," but it's also a way to start attempting to reconcile what might appear to be a glaring inconsistency in my recent rambling divigations.

On the one hand, I spewed quite a bit of verbiage scorning contemporary atomistic-individualistic models of the person as "illusory" and "a betrayal of our true nature as humans." But in my last two posts, I endorsed the idea that the only real foundation for ethics "is each person knowing right from wrong and persistently trying to live in accordance with this knowledge." In other words, a truly ethical society exists only when each individual in that society lives ethically.

So it certainly could appear as if I'm condemning social atomism with one breath and promoting it with the next. Obviously, that's not my intention. By way of explanation, I want to reiterate the distinction I made previously between "individualism" and "individuality."

I defined individualism as "the assembling of a personal identity through selective self-identification with a collection of intellectual components such as beliefs, ideas, attitudes, interests or affinities, and physical activities, possessions and displays." I've ranted more than once, in fact, about our seeming acceptance of this externalized model of identity formation.

But I haven't offered a definition yet of what I would allow as "real" individuality or how it's cultivated, mostly because it's harder to define. In fact, I believe the ultimate basis of individuality or "personhood" is a kind of inner core that is the part of us that connects us with the whole stream of life. Ultimately, it's a mysterium, irreducible to a verbal formulation: It's to be lived, not discussed.

So it's easier to talk about the "how" than the "what." And the "how" is of course quite well known, and has been known for millennia. I'll let Plato explain one way of looking at it, and leave it at that for now:

“Now we have also been saying for a long time, have we not, that, when the soul makes use of the body for any inquiry, either through seeing or hearing or any of the other senses — for inquiry through the body means inquiry through the senses — then it is dragged by the body to things which never remain the same, and it wanders about and is confused and dizzy like a drunken man because it lays hold upon such things?”
“Certainly.”
“But when the soul inquires alone by itself, it departs into the realm of the pure, the everlasting, the immortal and the changeless, and being akin to these it dwells always with them whenever it is by itself and is not hindered, and it has rest from its wanderings and remains always the same and unchanging with the changeless, since it is in communion therewith. And this state of the soul is called wisdom.”

Phaedo, 79c-d; trans. by Harold North Fowler. Online at the Perseus Digital Library.

Howdy, Cousin

Our culture is so conditioned to the idea that a society is formed by the voluntary association of individuals that it may come as an actual shock to some people to learn that there are alternative models of social formation. In fact, as I think everyone realizes deep down, the original mode of social organization was kinship. And this remained the dominant mode until very recent times, by way of a series of extensions or expansions: from family to clan to tribe to nation, with accompanying formalizations of relationship and status, reaching a peak of elaboration in the kind of hierarchical society exemplified by, say, the court of Louis XVI.

Now, I'm not going to argue that humanity's needs would best be met by a return to monarchy and hierarchy. But I am going to suggest that something of real value is lost in the current atomistic-individualistic view of things. In the understandable rejection of tyrannical absolutism, we’ve gone a bit too far in the opposite direction. One way of looking at it: In the famous revolutionary triad of "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité," the present-day view seems to regard them as listed in descending order of value; indeed, "fraternité" seems largely to have gone off the radar in our hyper-competitive, social-Darwinist era.

The fact that we humans really are all members of one big family can be illustrated by something I’ve been mulling over recently:

Every human being has two parents. You have two parents, your parents had two parents each, giving you four grandparents, each of whom had two parents, giving you eight great-grandparents, and so on. So in looking back at your ancestry, the number of your ancestors doubles with each generation further back you look.

There's a conundrum here. At this geometric rate of expansion, by the time you get back to your 28-times-great grandparents, you've got a billion ancestors in that one generation. Allowing 20-30 years per generation, that would have been the situation somewhere between 600 and 900 years ago, i.e., sometime between the years 1100 and 1400. But according to experts' best estimates, the total human population didn't reach 1 billion until the early 1800s. And the disparity just gets bigger as you keep counting backwards: If you go back a further 30 generations, the number of your ancestors in that one generation rises to a staggering 1.2 quintillion; meanwhile, the actual population on Earth has shrunk to an estimated 200 million.

So how can we reconcile the obvious truth that everyone has two parents with the equally obvious truth that the human population gets smaller the further back in time we look? I think there's only one explanation: Among those theoretical 1 billion or 1.2 quintillion people, there's a lot of duplication. In other words, the same couples appear multiple times in a given generation, making them your ancestors along multiple lines of descent.

Suppose, for instance, you lived in the 15th-century and your father hiked 20 miles to a (to him) distant village to find his bride. Well, there's a fair chance that his great-great-great grandfather did the same thing in the opposite direction. So your father might have ended up marrying his fourth cousin, and you would have the same 4-times-great grandparents on both your mother's and your father's side – which, incidentally, would make you your own fifth cousin.

What this boils down to is that when you're standing in line at the grocery store, there's a pretty good chance that the cashier or some of the other people in line are your not-terribly-distant cousins. And if you don't believe a more or less random selection of people can turn up these kinds of family connections, recall that during the 2008 presidential campaign, the genealogical experts at Burke's Peerage informed the world that Barack Obama is an 11th cousin of George W. Bush and a ninth cousin of Dick Cheney.

Everyone is aware that all humans are related on the basis of the so-called "mitochondrial Eve" or whatever, but that kind of connection goes back tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, so it may seem pretty remote and not very relevant to our lives today. But it turns out not to be necessary to look back anywhere near that far to see how connected we are, how closely related we all are.

Regrettably, in an age when social atomism has reached such an extreme that even the nuclear family seems increasingly fissile, it may not matter much to a lot of people to be reminded of their kinship with strangers; they’re already used to treating members of their immediate family like strangers. One way of looking at this spreading alienation is as an increasing narrowing of our horizon of interest or concern: from all humankind to our close kin to, finally, our singular personal selves.

It's an even more drastic narrowing of horizons if one looks at it from an even wider perspective than the merely human, as I want to do next time.