It’s the holidays in 2020, and I’m sure many of us are plotting how, exactly, we’re going to connect with our friends and relatives in a time where we’re either encouraged or directed to stay away from other human beings. Gone are the office holiday parties of yore, at least for now, and also forgotten are the grand family gatherings, with extended relatives coming in via plane train and automobile to share gifts, bad habits, annoying tics, and poor holiday fashion choices. In their stead is a lot of online communication: my son, for example, will be sharing the seventh night of Hanukkah via Zoom this evening with his Jewish friends in Seattle. My tradition is Catholic; my son’s tradition is whatever transformation of Christian charity and mid-nineteenth century American pragmatic that I’ve been cobbling together, but he’ll get to incant
Ba-ruch A-tah Ado-nai
E-lo-he-nu Me-lech ha-olam
with his friends tonight as the candles are lit, as the seventh candle is lit, as we all collectively remember the miracle of the eight nights of light.
Veronique asked the Essence of Water confab to read a book called Homo Interpretans, by Johann Michel, this week. It’s a very good book – for those of you who have the patience to read this blog, I highly recommend it – and in it, Michel relates the notion that our interpretations are shaped fundamentally by the “great orders of recognition” to which we belong, as much as by what he terms our biographical particulars. That is to say, we interpret on the basis of our individual experience, but that individuality is intertwined with the social structures that we participate or are embedded in – such as family, state, tribe, village; as an academic he even includes “educational institution” although I sense that most of us feel only a passing relevance to where we got our diploma or certificate. First off, full credit to Vero for recommending yet another extraordinary book; prior examples included Mikhail Bahktin and Michel Foucault, and this latest work is probably the best of the bunch. But more importantly, her choice for this work has forced me to think about the social structure into which I am embedded, by choice or by habit or by initiation, and I think that’s a powerful bit of self-examination.
We all are part of a family, whether we like it or not; even the orphans among us were raised by someone, and I think that may be a better definition of “family” than one’s genetic origins: who imparted to us the basic foundations of knowledge? I mean really basic: how to speak, how to interpret discipline and affection, whether love is bounded and conditional or whether it is unbounded and unconditional. Family is something all of us have as part of our makeup. For me, I have a family which loves unconditionally but for whom the notion of shame is foundational; somewhat paradoxical, but there you go. Other people I know come from traditions of deeply conditional love; or from families which live in fear of not being able to know, where knowledge is terrifyingly necessary but impossible ever to achieve to satisfaction. Some families are biological; others are cobbled together through adoption and quest. But each of us, I think, for good or for ill, identifies with some original bonded force.
Michel pointedly mentions “state” as another, but before we get there, I think there is a notion of “tribe” which retains some validity for us. Tribe, to our postmodern ear, has a vestigal sense of the hunter-gatherer, but I think this is incorrect – for settled peoples, “village” or “neighbourhood” is just as valid. It’s not the same as region – again, we’ll get to the larger agglomerations in a moment – but it is real. I see it even in my son. He’s living in a semi-rural town in Maine now, but he stridently identifies with Greenlake in Seattle. His parents are not from there, and I don’t think either his mother or me feels any particular loyalty to the “neighbourhood” – but my son does, oh my yes he does. His friends in Maine get angry whenever he brings up the fact that the pizza or sushi or weather or school or first grade teacher or summer camp in the park was best in the whole world in Greenlake in Seattle – but for all that, my son will keep bringing it up. I hadn’t really understood the pull of the village until I saw it manifest in my son; for me, I always felt separate from the town I grew up in, a poncy sort of upper middle class suburb of Portland. I felt connected to the land, but not the villlage. Not so my son. And as I see it in him, I now understand it more among the kids I grew up with.
So layers: family, then village. We don’t skip either one, so if I missed the village of Cape Elizabeth, what village did I attach to? Well easy: it’s the village that would read the essays we post here at The Essence of Water. It is defined by people who share a common set of values and mores, not a common set of neighbourhood places. I was introduced to this village by a teacher, who pulled me out of second grade math hell and let me learn and read and explore as fast as I cared, so long as I did it well and did it with intention. My village was virtual before anyone had defined the term – I was introduced to it, after all, in 1983, and over time I’ve come to realise my parents belonged to that village as well, each of them introduced to it in the 1950s.
Villages, in this sense, are real because the citizenry of the village self-identify; they follow one another via post, or email, or website link. I think back to one of my heroes, Erasmus, who lived variously in Paris, Basel, Cambridge, and Leuven; he could never be said to be a local anywhere (he found complaint everywhere, instead of celebrating the good of each and every place on earth), but he constructed and maintained a community of scholars and practitioners who, despite their distrust and dislike of one another, shared a love of Erasmus, and thus formed a village that endured in creating the last great spark of pre-Reformation ecumenical learning and disputation. We are all a part of a village, one home “place” where we feel emotionally, spiritually at peace, and often physically so if the surroundings can be as pleasant as those of Queens’ College, or of the recently erected study space off of Matt’s driveway in Boerne, Texas. We either settle into the comforts of the village into which we are born, or we painstakingly construct the village of our dreams – and if we fail at each, we remain hermits in the world, but we are defined by village nevertheless.
And then we come to the grander constructs: the states, nations, educational institutions, or social superstructures of the human world. These have no grounding in either biology or gestation, such as is family, or in choice and proximity, as is the village. These are constructs: they are built by humans, for humans, with no real reference to anything other than ourselves. The “village” of Erasmus (and my village) are probably the primordial clay of these institutions: they are initiated in some sort of communality, but they are ossified into rigid foundations by the application of rule and control. Here, I think, we start with tribe as I mentioned earlier: tribes, as I can understand them, are fully human constructions. Someone – literally, some one person – had to impose his or her idea of what “had to be” in terms of an organizational construct. This wasn’t about birth – which is a biological fact; we have a mother who is identifiable, and in most cases the father is also identifiable without a huge amount of doubt – or about place, which is a physical fact. It’s also not about the kind of intellectual or spiritual choice involved in creating the kinds of villages I feel a part of; no, tribe is about the imposition of rule, of control, over individual choices.
Tribes therefore feel the natural basepoint for the evolution of states, or corporations, or other artifices of organisation which we use to frame the world in a human image. Tribes are the first point of, if you will, anthropology; the forms before that are more in the realm of biology. Bears, after all, have children and families, and they are centred in place: they have a territory and that defines their realm. So do squirrels, and chimpanzees; although with primates, we start to see a broader context for tribalism. Families interconnect and expand their territory and have social rules, in a way that bears don’t seem to have (although other mammals do – say elephants, or dolphins). So I say tribalism is a the basepoint of artificial constructs of social norms, but it may not be totally human – it may just be that humans first took the baton and ran with it. But it is different – it is based in self-reference, not in reference to the non-human physical world, or in the human world which is no different from that experienced by other creatures.
What I find extraordinary is that we can feel that the connections of family, and of village, are actually less relevant than those of tribe, of state, of institution. That’s an amazing statement about the power of the mind, of its ability to create associative bonds that are entirely based on its own creative capacity. What happened to our minds in the last few hundred thousand years that made self-reference more powerful than reference to the real, to the tangible reality that we face in our daily game to survive, thrive, and experience pleasure? We now seem to favour our relations to one another – in the form of exchange value in money, in the form of social value in prestige and shame, in the form of aesthetic value in fashion and music, in the form of power in all of that evil’s manifest forms – over any relation to the world in general. We even classify the “world in general” in terms of whether we have classified and corralled it versus whether we think we still have some danger of not being in control, in the form of the wilderness versus what is not.
There’s a storm coming tonight in Maine, and we’re expecting a foot or more of snow through tomorrow night. It’s quite cold, though, so it’ll be good snow: the kind you can dive into and slide down hills on a piece of plastic, the kind the dog can jump and frolic in like she’s in a new world. It’s the kind of storm which reminds you that you’re attached to the world in the form of ice, and snow, and cold air, and burning wood, and hot soup. It’s not wild or not not wild: it’s the weather. My son and I and the dog will have a great day together. We will be a family. And his friend is going to come over – his friend’s dad is an electrician and has a bunch of emergency calls so even with the snow he has to go to work – and thus our village will have a snow day. I don’t want anything else to drop meaning on top of that. I don’t want a tribe to emerge, and I don’t want to impose on the world a separation between ourselves and the snow, the trees, the land, the cold, crisp air.
It won’t work, though. We’re human, and we will construct our relations despite ourselves. All we can do is reflect on it and wonder what, if anything, is really necessary.