Does that depend on understanding?

 I’ve heard thoughtful people say that this country is more divided now than it’s been since the Civil War.

I can’t quite believe that. I grew up during the social upheavals of the 1960s and listened to the debates at family gatherings and public meetings. Eric Hoffer, writing during that era, said:

 

How many and deep are the divisions between human beings! Not only are there divisions between races, nations, classes, and religions but also an almost incomprehension between the sexes, the old and the young, the sick and the healthy. There would be no society if living together depended on understanding each other.

 

Hoffer always makes me think, but I’m not sure I believe that — that we can have a society without understanding each other. I don’t think a society would last if it couldn’t find some common ground. To my mind, deciding that we can go on without trying to reach an understanding is a bit like deciding that the termites in the foundation aren’t that big a problem.

I have the same doubt about our relationship with the natural world. I think this might be the biggest lesson we humans have learned during my lifetime: We’d better get better at understanding the natural world and our place in it. If we don’t, our societies, our cultures and our civilizations are not going to last.

• Source: Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition; New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1974, p. 85.

The writer’s responsibility

 James Baldwin said, “The responsibility of the writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.”

So much of the American experience seems unhinged to me. Maybe this is a bad example because it’s obvious and easy, but it’s election season in Georgia, and people are saying things that make no sense. Soon, people will do something important — they will vote — based on thinking that makes no sense.

It’s not just our politics. Our beliefs and attitudes about race, religion, the natural world … it’s a long list, these things that don’t make sense but nevertheless influence us.

There’s nothing glorious about these excavations that writers are called to do. Archeologists excavate latrines to see what ancient peoples were fed. It’s an ugly metaphor, but it’s apt. We Americans, especially, are fed so much stuff that isn’t good for us, isn’t good for anyone.

Each generation needs people who will look at and question what it’s being fed.

Today’s Baldwin’s birthday. He was born in 1924 in Harlem. I think his essays are best.

The quoted remark came from a conversation with Nikki Giovanni. Several were recorded for broadcast and were published as A Dialogue: James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni in 1973.

What would Hoffer say?

 Eric Hoffer probably ought to come with health warnings, like those for cigarettes and alcohol. But I read him anyway.

People who read Hoffer usually talk about The True Believer. But I like his collections of items — not knowing what else to call his jottings. I was once told that Reflections on the Human Condition is a collection of aphorisms. But some of the items are several paragraphs long. No. 18 is more than 600 words.

Reflections is a strange book. I read it because of things like this:

 

It almost seems that nobody can hate America as much as native Americans. America needs new immigrants to love and cherish it.

 

I wonder what he would think of the hysteria against immigrants today.

• Source: Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition; New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1974, p. 34.

Writing advice from Hoffer

 If I could pass on only one bit of advice to young people who want to write, it would be this: 

That which is unique and worthwhile in us makes itself felt only in flashes. If we do not know how to catch and savor the flashes we are without growth and without exhilaration.

 

That’s No. 80 in Eric Hoffer’s Reflections on the Human Condition. Hoffer was talking about all creative work, but I thought about writing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once took the time to convince a young Henry David Thoreau to keep a journal. It wasn’t apparent to anyone but Emerson, but Henry had a talent for catching those flashes.

• Source: Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition; New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1974, p. 51.

How the country is changing

 An old neighbor went to a sandwich shop for lunch. The fellow ahead of him ordered a foot-long. The counter guy cut a roll in two and put four slices of cheese on the sandwich, two for each half of the roll.

When my friend ordered, the counter guy got one slice of cheese, tore it in two, and spread it across the pieces of the roll.

The first guy in line was white. My friend is not.

My friend protested to another employee at the register. He was told nothing could be done, so he left the food on the counter and looked for another place to eat.

Great social forces are at work in this country. The evidence at the neighborhood café says they’re poisonous.

The instinctually challenged species

 Looking at the literature on the genetic basis of instinct has convinced me that I don’t understand what instinct is.

Eric Hoffer called humankind “nature’s mistake.” Here’s part of the explanation:

 

The source of man’s creativeness is in his deficiencies; he creates to compensate himself for what he lacks. … He became a thinker to compensate for the ineffectualness of his instincts.

 

Yesterday’s note on bird nests made me think about the survival skills we learn, as opposed to those we have by instinct. Few of us live in a shelter we devised by instinct. That’s obvious — but I’d never thought of it, as Hoffer did, as evidence of the ineffectualness of instincts.

• Source: Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition; New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1974, p. 4.

The bird-nest problem

 I can see how a gene can express itself in a physical trait. But I have trouble understanding instinct — how patterns of behavior can be transmitted genetically.

I did some reading on “fixed-action patterns.” The cloud of unknowing did not lift for me.

Identity isn’t just a matter of physical expressions of genes. The identity of being a bird involves having feathers, but it also involves building nests.

Within the identity of nest-building creatures there are architects (hummingbirds and orioles) and those that barely bother (yellow-billed cuckoos and mourning doves).

The way birds behave in building nests is consistent by species. This is not learned behavior. Birds raised in captivity by humans build nests that are true to species.

I have no problem imagining that a mad biologist with access to a gene-editing lab could change the color of an oriole’s feathers. That’s just a change in the physical expression of a gene. But I can’t imagine the mad scientist changing its nest-building behavior with some genetic editing. That seems to me to be more of a change of the bird’s history, its evolution.

It seems like a claim that we have a technology that could change the past.