(Prague, Czech Republic—April 7, 2002)

I grew up learning to whore. First it was for religion, then later for my country, and then, for a while, both at once. I was most ragged during that latter time and must have seemed older than my adolescent age.

In church, I testified to the mighty strength of God and the fear He instills in his children, a fear as pure and as justified as the love we seek from Him in return; elsewhere—in school, on the street, in the civic temples celebrating commerce—I proclaimed the mighty strength of the American nation and the fear it instilled in godless communists, thus the necessity of girding our loins with military strength so as to defend democratic civic virtues and free enterprise against the totalitarian State. Heady stuff for a fourteen-year-old boy, but I was full of it.

My performance was supported from both behind and below by the usual quid pro quo arrangement between a young person and his elders: affirmation of the collective myth reaps a generous reward in the form of yet another affirmation, that of the young person’s individual worth. That an individual would discover his true worth in the reflected and collective glory of God and Nation proved too emotionally lucrative for me to question. I desperately needed that love, even on such compromising terms, and it sustained me, at least for a while. And so I learned to rationalize such apparent contradictions by ignoring them. But that, too, lasted only for a while.

Mathematics put the fly in the ointment. Or perhaps the fly was already there, was in fact the contradictory condition itself, and mathematics merely revealed it to me. In any case, a deep understanding of logical processes, of which mathematics is one form—the first such logical form we are taught to consciously manipulate, and sometimes the last—seemed to come to me naturally. I was very good at mathematics, and for some reason did not have to try very hard to understand mathematical operations; it was as if I was learning something I already knew, a kind of sustained revelation—not really learning at all, but a prolonged, orgasmic epiphany. Not only the adding and subtracting, the multiplying and dividing, but the presumptions underlying the very existence of numbers, the substructure of these processes which seemed alchemical in their mysterious tendency to prove predictable in a world that seemed most unpredictable, even dangerously so—these deeper aspects of mathematics drew me ineluctably toward the whole, and they brought me exquisite pleasure. They also taught me to think clearly.

Of course, that was the beginning of the end to my devotion toward the collective myths concerning God and Nation, which were based not on reason but on blind unquestioning faith, and the blinder the better. The contradictions were manifold; they often seemed obvious to anyone giving a matter some thought, and many were staggering in their magnitude and scope. How could anyone not see them? The U.S. Declaration of Independence said we all were created equal, a premise backed by the Judeo-Christian commandment to love thy neighbor as thyself, yet all around me religious and patriotic citizens routinely qualified the principle in accordance to ethnicity, religious affiliation and income level. Some qualifications seemed especially pernicious because they were so clearly disconnected from choice; no one chooses the color of his skin, so why would he be punished or rewarded for it? This sort of obvious contradiction bewildered me, and because of the inexperience of youth, I at first assumed it need only be pointed out and my elders would move quickly to rectify the error.

Naturally, I began publicly expressing these observations, and they produced the effect I expected—embarrassment, surprise, even alarm—but not the results. Confounded by the lack of initiative among my elders, I began asking questions. Bereft of answers, they told me to stop asking the questions. But I could not stop. In this way, my dwindling devotion to the collective myth, to God and Nation, was noticed. Indeed, it was closely monitored. Measures were soon taken. The reaction was swift and terrible. I was punished for every step beyond the carefully circumscribed territory of the collective belief, for trespass is a serious offense: it endangers the public sense of security, which is a kind of collective property. This state of affairs is an inversion of the normal meanings of property and trespass, for I was not attempting to invade another’s territory, but was instead only trying to exit secured territory and enter unmapped lands, to explore property which the collective culture had rejected and did not want. The anxiety this incited in my elders, and the fervor with which they punished my minor trespasses (after all, at this time I was still only asking questions), served to lend that unknown territory a mysterious and seductive character which made me all the more curious. What was it the others did not wish me to see? What did they want, even need, me not to know?

As must be obvious, but is only known by the wise because of its simplicity, action breeds reaction in human affairs as surely as it does in the affairs of physics, though what can be calibrated by science within the calculated constraints of a laboratory becomes not only difficult to measure and predict but potentially explosive within the crucible of the human heart, especially one overheated by youthful exuberance and not yet tempered by experience. And so it transpired that the fierce opposition of those around me to my youthful curiosity merely enlarged and strengthened my need to explore. The more censorious and autocratic my elders behaved—and in their fear, they became the totalitarians they had so often warned me against—the more determined I became to strike out on my own.

At that point, I was forever lost to them.

A prostitute worships the security of belonging to her pimp and finds affirmation in her self-estimation as valued property, the lowest denominator of belonging. This inversion of values—a person choosing to forego individual will, subverting one’s own humanity to become the property of something perceivably more powerful, whether that thing be a person or an institution or a society—is a perversion of the values we collectively embrace. Our collective myth endorses individual freedom. This is why we place a prostitute so low in our esteem, provide her so little dignity; she has sacrificed the very thing we say we most value: individual freedom. We advise her to take the one step that will lead to a recovery of that freedom: leave her pimp. It won’t be easy. If she tries, he will beat her; if she runs, he will chase her down. But if she doesn’t give up, she will succeed. Either that, or he will kill her. Her survival depends on both persistence and skill in evasion. Of course, what she sees—and what we fail to see—is that in order to escape she must become an outlaw to the very values she previously endorsed, to the collective myth she is rejecting.

And so it happened for me. I stopped whoring and became an outlaw. It was one or the other, but by making a choice the transition was inevitable. It was the choice that did it. Making a choice, an exercise of will, is not merely a catalyst; it is the action which creates its own existence. That this transformation began so long ago, when I first observed the fly in the ointment and began to understand the nature of contradiction and the nature of humans in relation to contradiction—that we do not like it and so ignore and even deny it if possible… well, remembering that time is akin to remembering a dream. In the dream, the recognition of contradiction is the first step toward freedom. For freedom itself is a contradiction; it stands in relation to something else, either embraced or rejected, and the most we can hope from it is the courage to recognize what is false and what is true and the will to move toward the true, which forever recedes from us. This movement, this action, is the very affirmation that an individual will not receive from the collective body, but can only provide to himself. It makes him an outlaw. But that is better than being a whore.

The comprehension of this existential understanding, so long in the forming, is the measure of a long journey. It began so long ago, in my youth. And it began with thinking, nothing less that clear thinking, the simple requirement that if A is true and A leads to B, then B, too, must be true and cannot be false. It is not complicated. But it is revelatory.

As all mathematics are.

[Note from Christopher: For most of 1995, during a time when I lived in Paris, I worked for an international trade union organization. But my boss didn’t give me much to do. I sat in an office with lots of thinking time on my hands. So I thought, and I wrote about what I was thinking. At the time, I was thinking a lot about the biological basis of human behavior, about civilization, about the possibility of free will and choice, and about art. Somehow they all connected. But how? I wrote the following essay trying to discover the connection. I’ve done a lot of thinking and writing about the subject since, and much of it is clearer now than it was in 1995. Quite honestly, the essay could use a good editing. Still, it lays out some important groundwork and reflects where I was in the discovery process at that time.]

(Paris, France—1995)

A biologist friend who lives in a cabin on the beach north of Galveston writes me continually. He sends observations on the biological basis of human behavior, that being his main interest and main pursuit, too, when he isn’t hauling dirty laundry. That is his job: Residents along the beach pay him to collect their dirty laundry, ferry it from Bolivar Peninsula to a Galveston laundromat, then return it clean. It is, he notes, a job which implies ultimate trust.

In his frequent writings he also sends pithy quotes—the last from Mediocretes: “Anyone who believes in an imaginary being is an imaginary being.”—but mostly he conveys his latest observation on human behavior and a plausible biological explanation for it.

His continuing investigation of the biological basis of human behavior has always intrigued me. Like him, I believe it to be true. That is, I look for first cause in biology. Only he traces its trail like a bloodhound, following the mildest scent through hill and dale and desert and creek, losing it for a bit, finding it, inevitably losing it again, bellowing with surprise and relief and enthusiasm when he finds it once more—persistent always, tenacious—until he finally locates the perpetrator, laid up in some barn or house disguised in some contemporary social or cultural or political finery, posing in the garb of free will or choice. I like that about him—that and the pithy quotes from Mediocretes and others—and always have. The best scientist is a poet, too, as we know: consider dreams of snakes in a circle eating one another’s tails, or noticing volume’s relation to displacement while taking a bath, and so on.

Though I believe the fundamental basis of human behavior is biological, I tend to begin my thinking with “the choice.” (Perhaps, in terms of intellectual integrity, this is a mistake, though in pragmatic terms I’m not sure it makes a difference.) Anyway, “the choice.” That is, I believe we do make choices and have the freedom to do so. Admittedly, those choices are limited by circumstances: biological (gender, size), psychological (personal, familial) and social (cultural, political, economic). For example: You choose a pet cat instead of a pet dog because your wife hates dogs and besides that a dog once bit you and moreover you hate stepping into random deposits in the yard. So choices do get made, and they are regarded as “free” despite limiting circumstances; after all, you could tell your wife to get lost and overcome fear of dogbite and hire the kid next door to police your yard.

In any case, the basis of the idea of justice—which along with compassion and freedom constructs my Trinitarian Credo, of which more later—is that each of us must be responsible for our behavior as if there is free choice. I’ll go farther: Even if there is no free choice, we still must be held responsible for our choices—a tough position, but necessary if we are to live in community. Any leniency from that stance (i.e., compassion, forgiveness) should be based not on responsibility but in consequences. To wit: the man who finds his wife in bed with another man has a choice: he can join in, walk away, shoot the intruder, shoot the wife, or shoot both of them. He is and must be responsible for what he chooses.

But the consequences vary. Joining in with them poses consequences too complex to explore here; walking away is simplest if he can manage it. But suppose he chooses the gun. In that consequence may be found leniency (legally, anyway) if he chooses to shoot one or both of the parties, though more leniency (under the guise of temporary insanity) is given for shooting the intruder than for shooting the wife or both (a bizarre arrangement for which explanation may require a retreat to biology: That is, you can shoot one lousy expendable sperm but you don’t shoot the egg… although a contemporary educated American would probably explain it in more recent post-evolutionary social terms, that being sexism, with the man treating the woman as property and shooting the trespasser while retaining the property).

What, you ask, does all this have to do with dirty laundry, Mediocretes, biology, free will, and art? Be patient and read on. Because life is not simple, explanations are not short.

My Trinitarian Credo—justice, compassion, freedom—is a personal credo but it also is the one I think necessary for a well functioning community, be it as small as a family or as large as the planet. It is largely “post-biological” in evolutionary terms for reasons I will explain. Admittedly, it is a closed system (most credos are), meaning the entire system collapses when part of it does, or when it must adapt so radically that it only vaguely resembles the original system (which, for a credo, means all is lost since the credo is by definition the original whole, harmonious and integral). In my credo, justice is based on the interplay of freedom and compassion (freedom entails choice and responsibility but consequence may be modified by compassion); compassion is based on the interplay of justice and freedom (to modify consequence one needs a just standard to modify and the free choice to carry out the modification); and freedom is based on the interplay of justice and compassion (just standards ensure optimal choices from which to choose and compassion ensures acknowledgment that those standards must be abided if choices are to be had).

That is the credo, justice being the impulse for equity, compassion being the impulse for love, freedom being the impulse for choice. Thus I recommend this credo for anyone attempting to live in community with others, and for civilization itself.

So while I understand my friend’s infatuation with the primordial biological first cause, the process of becoming human beings requires creating civilization—which means justice and compassion and freedom rather than unreflective, biological, self-centered brute force and unrestrained power over others—and in turn requires opposing and rechanneling some biological impulses and tendencies. Note that I write “opposing and rechanneling ‘some’ biological impulses and tendencies.” Why? Because some are helpful: the impulses to touch, to show affection, to protect the young, and so on. Note also that I say “the process of becoming human beings.” I refuse to call our entire species human beings; we are just homo sapiens. But some of us do become human beings, some doing it so well that we glorify or deify them (Buddha, Jesus, Gandhi, and so on).

Certainly, becoming a human being is tough uphill work; maybe we can’t as a species do it; the fact that so many of our species seemingly can’t do it makes it harder for those who can and even harder for those who actually try. Nietzsche, I think, would agree with the idea of homo sapiens versus human beings. That’s what he seemed to be onto, though of course a certain savage group of homo sapiens (Nazis) latched onto his ideas with their primitive incomprehension and used them to justify their own unreflective, primordial, biologically driven and culturally justified self-centered brute force and (for a while) unrestrained power. Unfortunately, they weren’t the first and aren’t the last; vide, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Croatia-Serbia, Rwanda, and other places; vide, though often less overtly brute and violent, racism almost everywhere on the planet; vide, though even more muted, the treatment of the “masses” of people by the wealthy and powerful class (we called them the “Establishment” in the sixties) in America and throughout the world.

In short, civilization has not progressed far and even the very presumption of it is laughed at by cynics and grieved over by the disappointed. In technological terms homo sapiens has progressed a great deal, but that is not what I’m referring to as civilization. Nor have the Golden Civilizations (Greece, Egypt, etc.) in our past done more than claim human being-ness for a few. No, it is the idea of a truly democratic civilization universally and successfully applying human the values like justice, compassion, and freedom to which I refer. And though I personally work every day as a trade unionist for improving the conditions in which such a civilization might emerge, I do so simply because it is an expression of what I call my civic duty; it is an acknowledgment of myself as a social being.

Of course, it also is the way I exchange my labor for my needs. But there are other ways to labor, other jobs for earning my keep. I simply have tried to create a circumstance in which the labor I exchange also is an expression of my civic duty, and that that duty is expressed not through mere contributory maintenance of things as they are but an attempt to create what they might become. Still, I do not labor under a false presumption; the prospects are not good; indeed, they are practically nil.

So, really, why do I bother? My first response is to say that my labor is yet one more thing: it is part of my attempt to become a human being. Even though the civilization I imagine may not come to pass and my efforts are for naught, for me to raise myself from homo sapiens and become a human being, I must make the effort on behalf of myself, my fellow human beings, my fellow homo sapiens who would be human beings, and for all those in the future.

Yet there is one more reason, a reason I only recently began to dimly comprehend and which is growing, gestating, awaiting birth, and will (hopefully) eventually manifest itself in my life. And this pertains not to this specific labor, this job I have in the trade union movement, nor to less substantial though broader labors that might best be called “labors in spirit” on behalf of global democracy, human rights, environmental justice, and the like. No, this labor to which I refer pertains to the labor of trying to become a human being at all. It is a great effort, demanding all of me, and it never lets up. Some would call it an obsession, but it is not. It is more than an obsession, which is, after all, merely a peculiar and individual psychological phenomenon. No, it is not personally unique, for others are engaged in the travail, as well. It goes deeper than that. And what is deeper? Biology?

Ah, yes. Perhaps. I can see my friend at the beach north of Galveston smiling triumphantly even as I write. Still, like him, perhaps I have sniffed out that ephemeral and indistinct scent and followed it back to its primordial origins. But that is following the trail backward. Let’s go forward. Where does it go? Where does this drive to become a human being take me? In what barn or house is it hiding from its pursuer and in what disguise? And why follow the scent at all?

But then, why does a cactus rose bloom in the desert when it requires untold effort and enormous resources to do it, when it cannot live long, when no one will see it? Because it can. Because it must. That is its raison d’existence (though actually the French say raison de vivre), its purpose, its mission, hence its project, and thus its biology. Therefore, that explanation is a dead-end philosophically, a feeble tautology: it does because it must and must because it does. It is mere biology and, for homo sapiens, an insufficient explanation, a tautology provoking the psychic predicament which leads to religion for most of the species, anxiety for many, the spark of creative freedom for a few.

Still, why? Why does it bloom? And what would the answer mean to us? The cactus huddles unmoving in the desert, its body collecting every spare molecule of moisture from sand and air, hoarding it within its thick flesh, growing and saving it, building it patiently and persistently toward that point in which the plant finally releases the energy into that one radiant and glorious bloom. All that for a flower! And so, the comparison: The seething masses of homo sapiens eat, shit, fuck, birth, buy, sell, trade, and die: and for what collective purpose? What rose might bloom, might emerge from all the seething noise, motion, transacting, eating, shitting, fucking, birthing, killing, dying? I give this straightforward answer: for one human being.

One human being who has transmogrified not all flesh, not all biology, but that flesh and biological impulse which holds him downward in the dark mire, in the brute unreflective past; yet who retains that irrational and fecund Dionysian impulse which roots him to the earth, the biological fundament; and who retains that flesh and biological impulse which raises him up toward the light, the reflective and reflecting illumination of the sun and his own consciousness and his own becoming human being-ness. The Apollonian sun, Christ consciousness, one human being a radiant blooming rose.

And that rose is Art.

(Prague—October 28, 2005)

Hierarchy in human relations (social, cultural, political, economic) appears to be biologically hard-wired. That is, a powerful leader (or leaders) with many followers is the human norm. This hard-wiring, while biologically adaptive to the species in the past, now reinforces some of the more self-destructive tendencies in human behavior: tribalism, patriotism, blind loyalty, failure to assume both individual and collective responsibility.

But we humans refuse to acknowledge that we are animals with hard-wired behavior; instead, we claim to be beings with immortal souls and free will, therefore superior to the animal realm, and an exception to it.

The biologist Edward O. Wilson suggests that in the history of our species, human groups who were religious were more adaptive; religious beliefs held in common forged purposeful, collective behavior. These humans better survived difficult natural world conditions; given human predatory behavior, they also successfully extinguished any human groups who lacked such collective belief and purpose. Therefore, through selection over time, religious behavior itself has become hard-wired. That is to say, the belief that we humans aren’t hard-wired is hard-wired into us.

Given the powerful tool of science and its recent technological consequences, this contradiction—hard-wired animal behavior versus hard-wired religious faith—now poses a species survival problem. Religious belief, even though it asserts individual free will to choose between right and wrong, with consequences for the individual immortal soul, permits us to deny our collective will and our collective responsibility for collective behavior. Collective human behavior falls into the realm of God’s will, God’s plan, or the “invisible hand” of God; therefore, we humans are not responsible for our collective behavior, or its consequences.

One result of this belief is that damage we collectively cause to the planet’s ecological balance is not our responsibility. Even though the ecological damage threatens our own long-term species survival, we are not responsible for it; the consequences are part of God’s larger plan.

Given current trends, unless we intervene in this collective belief pattern we will almost certainly extinguish our own species. Our extinction will result from our own success: technological success for which we are unwilling to take responsibility.

The ideal solution is for us to accept that (1) we are hard-wired animals, (2) who possess limited will rather than free will, (3) who cannot be shown to either possess or not possess immortal souls. Regarding each of these three assertions:

(1)  While biological hard-wiring is a powerful force, cultural and intellectual values are an attempt to influence and even overcome such wiring. Moral codes and moral spiritual principles that are born of religion, and legal codes and principles of justice born of political systems, all are attempts to overcome biological hard-wiring. Success in this endeavor has been partial. The Ten Commandments, the legal code of Confucius, the appeals of Christ to love and forgive, Buddha’s embrace of non-attachment, the Golden Rule, the Magna Carta, the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights… such human constructs attempt to limit and overcome the biological hard-wiring of aggression and predation, both individual and collective. Their partial success—that is, the degree to which they fail—is evidence of how strong the hard-wiring is, how resistant it is to change, but it also indicates that such change is possible.

The above description of the interplay between biology and culture is more easily embraced by the non-religious than religious person. But it is possible for the religious believer to accept the hard-wiring of humans as part of God’s plan, and even view the human attempt to transform and overcome hard-wiring through law, ethics and spiritual values as part of that plan.

(2)  The notion that free will exists as a pre-given human attribute, an attribute as clear-cut as speech or hearing, is erroneous. Will is an ability than can be learned and developed, just as we can learn mathematics, just as we can develop increased muscle mass. Therefore, “free will” is a misnomer; there is only “will,” with relative degrees of freedom.
 
Humans do choose; we make choices between alternatives, but any choice is limited to those alternatives. If none of those alternatives are desirable, then we choose the least undesirable or (less often) create a new, more desirable alternative. The more alternatives one has, the more free one feels, and the more will one seems to possess. It is in our interest, then, to increase the number of alternatives from which we choose.

The ability to create new alternatives is a function of creative intelligence and education. The stupid, the ignorant, they possess and create fewer alternatives, and so feel less free, seem to possess less will. Creative intelligence cannot be taught (it is hard-wired), but intellectual skills (education) can be taught and learned. The equation is straightforward: more education leads to increased alternatives, increased freedom, increased will.

In the end, will is a human ability that exists in varying degrees along a continuum between “zero will” and “free will.” A person can learn to move along that continuum in either direction.

(3)  The existence of an immortal soul possessed by a human being can be neither proved nor disproved; one either believes in its existence, or does not. The belief is a function of religious faith, not empirical proof. Arguments for and against the immortal soul’s existence are rhetorical exercises more likely to create interpersonal and collective conflicts than to illuminate the actual case. The wise person chooses to avoid such discussions.

There is, in fact, an alternative to the dictum that one either believes or does not believe in the immortal human soul. I can choose to say that because belief holds no sway over the fact (it either exists or does not), I neither believe nor disbelieve; I simply do not know.

A further possibility: To treat the human soul as a poetic construction, a poetic metaphor for human aspirations. As such, the soul’s immortality is a poetic construction, as well. Still, one may decide that given what we know about ourselves, this is bad poetry.

In any case, the tendency of arguments over the existence and nature of an immortal human soul—and what we are obliged to do with it—to lead to human conflict, aggression, and even war, persuades one to affirm religious tolerance as a solution. This will not occur if religious authorities control political affairs. Religious belief must fall under the protection of a political authority, the civil power must require religious tolerance by statute, and such tolerance must be enforced if necessary by force.