2B1

I’ve written a lot in this blog about my belief in the fundamental connectedness of people, of living beings in general, of things in general. And I suspect it has been a waste of time. There are only two likely reactions anyone might have to this notion at this point in history: “Duh, who didn’t know that?” or “Are you insane?”

If you look at the world around us right now, it certainly doesn’t look like what one might call “an organic whole.” The level of social fragmentation and conflict appears to be historically high and increasing, as does the level of conflict between human beings and Nature. No one seems to be able to agree about anything, especially in reference to how we might solve any of these problems –we can’t even agree what the problems are – but everyone seems to be ready to fight to the death to push the solution they like. It’s a situation I’ve taken to summing up like this: Where there’s a will, there’s a won’t.

Philosophically, theologically, ecologically, there’s widespread acknowledgment that everyone and everything is interconnected; that, indeed, all is one. But there’s also widespread antipathy toward that idea, widespread efforts to divide and conquer, to impose some form of absolutism or exclusivism, which means the conversion or eradication of everyone who believes in anything else: My way or the highway.

Even among people who say they believe in the kinship of all humans, the unity of existence, you don’t find many who behave accordingly. On the contrary, mostly they’re just promoting another absolutist/exclusivist ideology and contributing to the general fragmentation.

Now, if I suggest that the real solution to this problem involves each person looking inward and disengaging from mass culture and mass thinking, it might seem as if I’m promoting an even more intense degree of disintegration. After all, everyone else seems to think the answer is for everyone to unite, to join up, to enlist in some movement or other. But that’s just an invitation to choose sides in the war of exclusivisms.

Real unity begins at home, so to speak. People who are fragmented inwardly cannot bring about any kind of world except one that is likewise fragmented. Conversely (contrapositively, actually), a unified world can be brought about only by people who are personally unified.

This is, of course, the overall message of Plato’s Republic (see esp. 443d-444a), and it is a theme that has remained constant in the Western tradition from that time to the present. Plotinus, for example, reiterates:

“Know Thyself” is said to those who, because of their selves’ multiplicity, have the business of counting themselves up and learning that they do not know all of the number and kind of things they are, or do not know any one of them, not what their ruling principle is or by what they are themselves. (Enneads VI.7.41. Trans. A.H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library/ Harvard University Press.)

The message remains fundamental right through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, as evidenced by a statement of the alchemist Gerhard Dorn (quoted several times by Jung): “Thou wilt never make from others the One that thou seekest, except there first be made one thing of thyself.”

And of course it’s a basic principle in the synthesis offered in the 20th century by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky: “First of all, what man must know is that he is not one; he is many. He has not one permanent and unchangeable ‘I’ or Ego. He is always different.” (P.D. Ouspensky, The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution, First Lecture.)

The tradition is, of course, full of advice and techniques for the individual to attain self-unification, but the overall idea is presented beautifully in my favorite passage from Plato’s Phaedo:

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. (Plato, Phaedo, 79c-d; trans. by Harold North Fowler. Available online at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/.)

In today’s world, in which we are barraged 24 hours a day by stimuli from our immediate environment and even more from our expansive electronic environment; in which we imagine ourselves constantly “connected” with our friends, family and business associates by our wireless devices and other kinds of electrical umbilical cords; in which we turn our attention incessantly from one outrage to another, from the latest missing child report to the latest natural disaster to the latest celebrity scandal to the latest political uproar to the latest phony “reality” show development to the most recent “friend” update on our favorite social networking site – each one of our “interests” is just one more fragment of our soul torn off and sucked into the diffuse cloud that constitutes what we imagine to be our identity.

Strange as it may sound, the cure for this condition – and it is truly a sickness, of the soul – is to care less, to care about fewer things, to stop wasting our attention and our life-energy on things that don’t matter and which we can do nothing to change, and to focus on the one thing that is truly within our power to alter for the good: our own minds.

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.