The Individual

Fred Allebach 4/24/01

Epistle of an Individual

One tack in deciphering the complexities of human behavior, is looking at a biological/ evolutionary context and comparing ours to animal behavior. That things would change and take new forms was and is inevitable, why, because that is a basic attribute of life. Then the question becomes, why did particular forms of behavior arise? Presumably because there was some advantage. There have always been individuals, more or less enmeshed in their social/ ecological context. Some animals are more solitary, some more social, more specialized, more generalized but the fact remains that there are different ones, individuals. The new ecology says an animal is it’s ecosystem, an “ecotype”, like a Dire wolf, a bone cracker, tuned into the resource base and the resource base tuned back.

For example, modern social chase predators did not evolve until world-wide climatic conditions created a drying out, which led to savannahs, which led to an advantage for grazers in herd behavior, which led to social organization and pack hunting in some predators. (This is the same context in which those bipedal apes started turning into people.) With modern wolves, highly social animals, transcending their size with culture, to be able to take larger prey and handle herd behavior, and which have a hierarchical society similar to people, there is always a variety of temperaments in a litter of pups. Not all pups can be the alpha animal as an adult, some must defer, and this gets played out and established through their youth, who will be where in the hierarchy. These animals are individuals and also, say, different color threads that make up the tapestry of a pack of wolves. That there are individual differences is clear, yet those differences are always within the limiting context of wolf behavior in general, which is in the context of climate, primary production of plants, prey availability etc. This is the old “you can’t separate this from that” academic disclaimer, before everybody goes and does just that. Whether the differences we see are basic attributes of nature or are just abstractions we cook up, to bring phenomena into line with our baseline argument/ primary assumptions, is a constant question, easier to point out in others than ourselves. All sorts of biological explanations exist for explaining human behavior, like birth order, etc and the risk here is adopting an exclusively biological argument, being chunked into that despicable socio-biology camp, as a reductionist, of which all arguments seem to fall prey anyway, to reductionism. On the other hand, we are flesh and blood, animals, with the same history as all other animals, unified on the continuum of nature, evolution and biology, and it seems to me that this history plays a role in who we are now, just what, I can’t say, but it seems to me foolish to deny that we have any animal nature. I throw this in as part of a wide net strategy, it’s messier, but ultimately maybe more accurate.

In the history of the human race, there is this romantic notion that in the old days, all was honky dory, in harmony with nature, turned in on itself with a kind of all enveloping magic perspective that integrated all into the group and it’s cosmology. People couldn’t see outside of that because that would have meant challenging the order, accusing the spirts and gods of being false, because there were no individuals back then, like we understand it today, no ability to tease out abstractions and see a new way. I submit that the cultural, social, religious evolution of humanity, was always challenged by new twists put on the old and that this came from individuals, who may have been ostracized, but whose ideas ultimately prevailed. You can’t have this tremendous brain, capable of cooking up any variety of novel perspectives, and not have it exercised every now and then through history and pre-history.

I suppose one could also see any changes in the status of individuals relative to the group as directly tied to the metaphorical ecosystem, as it were, for if an animal is it’s ecosystem, then changing resource procurement strategies are going to result in new explanations of why things are the way they are. For example, in a bare bones way, we changed from hunter-gatherers/ animists to agriculturalists/ fertility goddesses to city livers/ astrological determinism to industrial production/ the modern milieu. This would be a structural type explanation, as the metaphorical ecosystem changes, you get a new being every time, not necessarily in some inevitable march of evolution or dialectical materialism, but just as the way it is, it just happened that way. Change is a basic attribute of life, whatever names get hung on it.

Some guys are going to want to say that the myths come first, they are a priori, others say it is the economy (ecosystem), others meld culture and religion as primary, but a reasoned description is going to take all this into account, that it can’t be all one thing and none of the others, that just doesn’t make any sense. How then to say anything that makes any sense when trying to describe every thread in the tapestry while maintaining a sense of the tapestry as a whole?

I have given some thought to the roles of science, religion and psychology/ psychiatry, as well as structural stuff like the inter state highway system in the USA, as to how individuals have become more isolated and alienated from the previous, perhaps more genuine milieus. This is part of my own romanticism of the past, that pre-industrial guys couldn’t have been alienated. But I think the romanticism is bull shit, as I can see medieval peasants being seriously alienated by the capricious corruption of the Catholic church, Native American slaves must have been a little alienated as well, and as the ice age ended 10,000 years ago, people must have felt that the whole world was shaken to it’s foundation by the mass extinctions and climatic changes.

Another interesting thought is the role of the Protestant Reformation and what differences lie therein which shaped the history of the New World as we see it today. Could it be that our sense of the individual in the USA today, grew out of a more liberal view of the relation of people to the creator, as compared to a stricter, more authoritarian, shepherd/ sheep Catholic scene to the south?

Anyway, there does seem in the USA, that there has been a movement away from a more pastoral context, to more and more centralization in cities. My parent’s generation grew up in small towns, face to face communities. They were unified by the Depression. My grandparents on both sides, had their first language as Norwegian and Pennsylvania Dutch. Their ancestors were immigrant farmers, peasants, Mennonites, Quakers, working class. (I can situate myself as being a direct product of the Reformation, unfolded out centuries later.) The industrial and transportation advances that happened around WW2 busted open the bubble and all of a sudden, people could think of moving away, to take advantage of better jobs in cities far away. I grew up, another step removed, away from all relatives as my parents had taken jobs out of the small towns and when I busted out of suburbia and middle class, 50's stasis, I couldn’t wait to get as far away from that shit as possible. I had the roots of genuine meaning in my ancestry, but I had to find it on my own.

As I reflect back on the process that has shaped my context, I see the above, as contributing to my being isolated from village and extended family. That leaves a sense of loss, a lack of being enmeshed, yet I have a tremendous freedom to, as Emerson said, to create the whole world out of myself, to question everything. In fact, how things have unfolded, I would not want to be in a limited social context and be blanketed by real social security.  Pandora’s box has been opened and now cannot be shut without forever knowing what I saw inside. I can take advantage of world wide trajectories in philosophy, see the commonalities of ancient Greek notions of the tri-partite soul/ appetites, Kundalini/ chakras, Christianity/ personal relation with the creation and place myself firmly as a human being, essentially with the same challenges as any other human being. (Thou art that.) I can point to how the ascendancy of the scientific world view shattered the facile notion of some hidden determinism of my soul and at the same time, be well aware that whatever layers of meaning I place on my life or life in general, it still gets down to me doing the work to align my actions with universal highest principles. And like a good human being, I don’t always succeed. Those things are 1000's of years in coming, and they didn’t come out of nowhere,  there must be context from pre-history that led up to the ancients being able to think of this stuff. The threads go way back.