Author: Mark Seely

Empedocles partitioned the universe into four elements, earth, water, air, and fire, a commonsense taxonomy that mirrors the four physical states of matter, solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. Science long ago disabused us of this backward perspective, and the ancient Greek view is now seen for the simplistic and unenlightened—primitive—view that it is. Atomic theory tells us that there are 118 elements, each capable of assuming multiple physical states according to their energy level at the time their physical state is being assessed. The universe is a far more complex place than Empedocles could have possibly imagined.

But this doesn’t seem quite right. Atomic theory tells me that the air entering my lungs is composed of a multiplicity of elements, mostly nitrogen, an inert gas that is somehow also responsible for the sky’s particular shade of blue. Atomic theory has to tell me this, because it is not at all obvious. In fact, the composition of the air entering my lungs is entirely beyond my direct experience. The air of a crowded room breathes differently than the air of a forest trail, but the difference I experience is a difference of the air taken as a whole, as a unitary presence, as a coherent and indivisible entity, a difference in its density, its viscosity, the way that it folds itself around my exposed skin. And, likewise, with the many solid and liquid substances I come in contact with. Wine flows differently than water, but the molecular components responsible for this difference are quite beyond any experiential grasp.

A perspective informed by science, while useful for scientific purposes, imposes a conceptual barrier to the world of direct and immediate experience, a world that flows and breathes and binds us inextricably to each other and to all other beings.

Pascal’s wager is ridiculous, of course, the idea that we should believe on the outside chance god turns out to be true. First off, belief is not the kind of thing that one can bring into existence simply by an act of will, least of all the kind of conviction required to accept an undetectable and incomprehensible Bronze Age deity. And although it is clearly possible to fake it, surely any god worth half a pillar of salt would see right through the ruse. In addition, Pascal’s argument can be turned around on itself with equal rhetorical force: if you choose the life of a believer, and death brings nothing but the void, then you have squandered your one chance to live life to the fullest.

My own response to Pascal—and to the salvation pushers who occasionally show up at my door—is that if there is a god, he made me knowing full well that I would use his gift of reason to reject his existence and then be consigned to an eternity of suffering. Such a god is a monster not a worthy of anyone’s praise and worship.   

But there is something even more insidious about Pascal’s illogic, something hidden, a tacit assumption about the need to choose a path, and the role that chosen path plays in structuring our lives. The decision to believe in the Christian god—or any god, or any comprehensive life-directing principle—ushers in the foreclosure of potential. A chaste and pious path is an exceedingly narrow one. But so is any other path that imposes directions and boundaries and limits our ability to respond to the richness, nuance, and impenetrable unpredictability of the emerging moment. To walk a predetermined path is to close yourself off to the world.

Instinct, intuition, holistic right-brain impressions, or just a gut feeling, we have a way of communicating with ourselves, a back channel that is far more direct and potent than what we get through our conscious language-based self-talk. Language is unable to engage the world as it is, raw, unfiltered, in the moment. Emotion is the communicative medium in this back channel. It would have to be. And, given the primacy of emotion, it is probably a mistake to call it a “back channel.” To think in this way is to submit to a civilized thought-form that inverts reality, one that elevates the deterministic, analytic, systematic, mechanical—the technological—above the organic, holistic, contextually-grounded.

I attended a powwow today, and it happened to me again. It happens every time. As the drums start and the dancers make their way into the arena for the Grand Entrance, the tears well up uncontrollably, and I am forced to hide behind my sunglasses so as not to make a public fool of myself.

Wolves affect me in this way too. Each time I visited Wolf Park, in Indiana, the tears came uninvited. And again, when I wrote about my Wolf Park experience. And again, when I edited what I wrote. And again, when I wrote and edited another piece about wolves. And even later, when I reread these pieces after they were published.

Indigenous Americans and wolves. There is an important message in this. What is it that my tears are telling me? I feel a kind of pressure here, as if I am supposed to do something, as if I have forgotten something vital, something that I need to remember before it’s too late. Too late for what? I listen intently, but my civilization-deafened ears are not equal to the task.

Some time ago I was listening to an interview with Alice Walker, the famous poet, on NPR. She was lamenting the loss of civility and the disintegration of empathy. She said—and I’m paraphrasing—that humanity needs to relearn how to be empathetic. We have become too self-centered and selfish. The word humanity was not a paraphrase. She used that specific word several times.

Humanity.

What is that, exactly? Humanity is one of a considerable number of deceptive abstract terms that, while they are ultimately meaningless, nonetheless suggest something of paramount significance. Humanity is a fuzzy category that has no actual physical, concrete referent. Humanity doesn’t exist. Anywhere. It never has and never can. Humanity is a rhetorical device. It is frequently used as a placeholder for the entirety of our species. But even as shorthand for “the human species,” or simply “humans,” it is invariably used in ways that are illusory and misleading. For example, it has been said that humanity has been to the moon, when actually only a handful of individual humans have done so. And if by humanity, Walker meant to say “the human species,” then she was speaking gibberish—unpoetic gibberish. The human species is incapable of empathy. The human species is an artificial creation, a taxonomic category, not an actual thing in the world.

Humans, individual human beings, individual people, are actual things in the world. And, while it is true that there are several individual humans who could probably use a little more empathy in their approach to other individual people, there are several folks out there who ooze empathy from their pores. When Walker says that humanity has lost, or is in need of learning, empathy, what is she saying? That there are more and more people who are less and less empathetic? And, further, perhaps, that the world would be a better place if these people could add a bit more empathy into their daily thoughts and interactions? If that was what she meant, then I’m hard-pressed not to agree. Given the context of the conversation, however, it appeared that she intended to mean something more than just this.

Her main point was that “humanity needs to become more empathetic.” And I do remember her saying that humanity needs to “learn” empathy. What does that mean? How can an abstraction learn? Where is this newly acquired knowledge to be housed? And if she meant “all people,” need to learn this, such a blanket statement is entirely unwarranted. Again, there are plenty of people who are at this very moment operating at the very top end of the human niceness spectrum.

Perhaps some additional context might help to sort this out. Walker’s NPR interview was given in the midst of congressional hearings relating to a belligerent and misogynistic supreme court justice nominee who had been accused of sexual assault, and on the heels of the President openly and publicly mocking his psychologically wounded accuser in extremely demeaning ways. The man is clearly an oaf who does not deserve to be in any leadership position, no matter how trivial. And by “the man,” I mean both the supreme court nominee and the President. The media is saturated to the very brim with similar stories, alongside stories of mass shootings paired with open disdain for any suggestions that something substantive should be done to prevent them, and a number of other clear indicators that empathy—in even the most rudimentary sense of that term—appears to be a rarified element of society.

But Walker is wrong. Even if we allow the slippery non-thing of humanity to mean something concrete, she is wrong. Humanity has nothing to do with anything because the situation she is referencing has nothing to do with actual humans. It has to do with the operative design of the complex collection of bureaucratically organized systems of power that are being forcefully imposed on people. She is talking about global corporate consumer society itself. She is talking about civilization.

Individual people are acting “unempathetic” toward other individual people because civilization reduces—and in many cases completely eliminates—the possibility for us to act toward each other as actual human persons. The major part of our behavior toward each other has nothing to do with anything human. We are not living together as authentic and spontaneously interacting humans, we are living scripted roles, as functionaries, as servomechanisms in the machine. We are made to grind against each other because that is the nature of the machine itself, because the resulting friction is necessary for the machine to operate. The scarcity of empathy is a direct result of our forced participation in a system based on a grossly unequal distribution of power, on manipulation, on competition, a system that overtly punishes empathetic behavior.

The human empathetic response is an evolved capacity, an adaptive capacity that came about because of its potent utility as a tool for maintaining group cohesion in small-scale hunter-gatherer society (and, likely, in the social systems of our proto-human primate ancestors as well). In terms of survival value, it is second only to our inborn sense of fairness and the resulting social norms of reciprocity that are defining features of the anarchistic and largely egalitarian human social circumstances that were universal up until just the last few thousand years. The second you add a power differential to society, the second that people no longer have equal and unrestricted access to essential resources, is the second that empathy starts to lose its survival utility.

Neither egalitarianism nor anarchism exist in the modern world. They disappeared among the civilized the moment that the civilized came into being. The elimination of these features of the social landscape is part and parcel of the civilizing process. An egalitarian civilization would not be a civilization. Anarchistic civilization is an oxymoron. Sharp inequalities of power and access are not just necessary conditions for civilization, they are what civilization ultimately is: a complex collection of mechanisms for amplifying and maintaining power, and for disseminating inequality.

The question “Who is we?” is a game changer. All of the handwringing about how we need to change society is misplaced because no one is asking this basic question, the question of “we.” The problem isn’t what some nebulous “we” (or humanity or—insert your favorite reified abstraction here) is or is not doing. The real problem is the fact that this “we” has absolutely no power to do anything. We is simply not that kind of thing.

You and I, however, there is where the real power lies.

A close parallel to the distinction between flotsam and jetsam: those relationships lost in the chaos and confusion of a major life transition, and those intentionally discarded to lighten the load. There is a third category as well. Or perhaps it is only flotsam’s prodromal phase: those relationships holding fast through the swells, resolute, clinging to the rails even as the ship is thrown violently against the rocks.

And I’m not talking about people here. Or, not exclusively so. Our relationships with people are not different in their essence from our relationships to the other items on the ship’s manifest, not different in their form from our connections to other valued objects inhabiting our emotional cargo hold. I mourn friends I have lost, those who were swept overboard during storms of crisis, transition, and transformation. But I also mourn those parts of myself that were torn from me, cherished hopes that got caught up in the rigging and were pulled silently overboard into the waves, involuntary amputations of dreams made weak through idleness, partially ruptured plans pushed aside and rendered gangrenous by inattention. 

In the calm of the early evening, as the effects of the wine first settle in, there is a moment or two of nostalgic recollection, almost as if I am standing two decades in the past, almost as if the last twenty-two years were only yesterday, almost as if when I open my eyes I will see the house that harbored so much potential, each corner of each room replete with shadows of a future treasure, a kitchen filled with laughter, a feeling of family, an incipient awareness of true purpose.

And the echoes of laughter become the mournful cry of a lone seagull outside my futureless apartment.

Start from a dark place, the darkest place. Scour the ground of existence down to base granite. Borrow Descartes’ example. Whittle the rational mind down past its inner xylem, into the pith, to the central core. Doubt even the solidity of this. Borrow Descartes example, but not his purpose. The purpose of this mental knife-play is not to establish a foundation for belief; the purpose is to lay bare your intimate fellowship with the void. Prior to birth was nothing. No nouns. No verbs. No past or future tense. No beginnings or endings to serve as a frame. Nothingness itself was nonexistent. No opposing principle by which to form nothingness into an object of contemplation. No contemplative being capable of granting such principles.

There is little about this state of prior nonbeing that seems personally threatening to me now. Why is that? Why am I able to calmly imagine an infinite expanse of time when I wasn’t? There is something about the present moment that renders my prior nonexistence irrelevant. I find myself in the present moment occupying a richly furnished living state of being in a universe populated with nouns and verbs and tenses—most of which I have yet to discover and many of which I will never know. Contemplating the infinity prior to birth is little more than an intellectual exercise, nothing ominous or menacing.

But despite its intimate familiarity—its intimate but ultimately unknowable familiarity—things appear quite different to me when I turn my gaze the other direction. When the universe ends for me, the same eternal absence-of-even-oblivion from which I emerged waits only to wrap me in its disintegrating, obliterating embrace. I die, but I can never be dead. Death is a feature of the living present moment. Death is a verb. There is no after-death in the first-person. In my mind I can project the universe beyond myself, but this is an illusion of objectivity. After this, there is nothing. Death leads us not just to an end of life, but to a complete annihilation of all that ever was, the universe itself, with its unfathomably infinite furnishings, never existed. Life doesn’t come to an end with death. With death, life never happened to begin with. 

Yet here, now, in the present moment, it seems as if there is something worthy of my attention.

This moment now the evening sky is dim and the reflection of my face has become visible in the window, a grizzled gray beard beneath shadow-darkened eye sockets, the dog is using my outstretched foot as a chinrest, and thoughts of Spanish wine are inserting themselves between the words my fingers are slapping out on the keyboard.

It is quiet this afternoon. Or maybe it’s the relative stillness. There are sounds here. Pervasive and intrusive. A basketball slaps the concrete in irregular but predictable pulses, punctuated by the occasional glancing metallic reverberation of a rusted hoop. Here, inside, the refrigerator floats the persistent low-level mechanical drone of its compressor, punctuated by the liquid pop and crack of its auto-defrost mechanism, an acoustic mirror image of the basketball.

I frequently confuse the two, motion and sound. This probably has to do with the fact that they frequently cooccur, and even when they don’t, I add the missing counterpart. I clearly see the ball recoil off the rim despite the fact that there is a wall preventing any direct visual contact. And sound and motion are not separate territories of experience, after all. They are two poles on a continuum of movement, one inhabiting the micro level, the level of molecular oscillation, and the other at the macro level, a level that bleeds into the visual, into the realm of light.

This afternoon, the light of the room is a substance in motion, fluid and transient, as brilliant angular stripes of shadow and sunlight are cast by the narrow-gage window blinds onto the large wooden toolbox. The white-gold stripes vanish, then gradually reemerge, somehow brighter, in response to an itinerant cloud.

The dog sleeps on the couch, from my perspective she is directly behind the wooden toolbox. She is angled into the sunlight, with the entire front portion of her head suspended in the open air beyond the edge of the cushions. Her forehead also carries the shadow-casted sun-stripes. She is having an intense dream, and her body shudders and writhes in aborted movement. She whines in spasms that, from inside her REM-sleep world, voice full-throated declarations.    

The present moment becomes past as soon as I step into it. The best I can do is breathe my way through it, experience it as it occurs in fleeting points of lucidity that fragment and dissipate almost instantly, blown aside by loud, vaporous exhalations of the restless rutting beasts that inhabit my mental menagerie: associative half-recollections and tacit anticipation, fairytales of the past and mythical prophesies of the future.

Each instant is a non sequitur, an entirely novel emergence, and yet each is irredeemably saturated with the past. Heraclitus tells me I cannot step into the same river twice; the water of my first step has long since flowed downstream by the time I take a second. And, by extension, the me that steps into the water is not the same me that stepped before, only a moment ago. The river at my feet carries with it its entire prior course, sediment and debris from upstream, water that has passed all points along its path. In this way too, when I step into the present moment, I carry with me not merely my entire life’s experience up to that point, but the entire history of the universe.

And there is something else. Something impossible. This moment right now, as it opens itself up to me, here, as my fingers slap against the keyboard in front of me, is not the same moment that is opening itself to the dog curled up on the floor beside me, or the tree outside my window. These are not just different observational perspectives, different facets of the same temporal movement, different features of the same perpetual incipience; they are entirely incommensurate, each belonging to entirely unique experiential epochs.

And yet they coexist, cohabitate—miraculously interdigitate.

Kafka understood, but was only able to express it obliquely. We are no longer human, those of us who inhabit civilized spaces and breathe the toxic effluence of the machine. We are couriers of power, bureaucratic functionaries, servomechanisms. And it’s not simply that our daily activity is steeped in meaninglessness until our flesh is rendered of its animal vitality, but the ultimate futility of it all has penetrated the very bones of our thought, into the marrow. We are hollow vessels, cyphers.

To wake up as a gigantic insect would be a welcome change.

Emptiness is necessary, essential. It is not incidental. Our emptiness is not a design flaw. It is in fact the very source of the machine’s power. The modern world is built upon nature’s abhorrence of vacuums. Deprivation. Need. Want. Desire. Emptiness to be filled. Emptiness that begs for the smallest crumb of meaning. Emptiness that pleads for the faintest illusion of purpose. It is emptiness—our emptiness—that draws civilization along its ever-expanding planet-eating trajectory.

On some level, we know this. On some level, like Kafka, we understand too. Although we long ago learned to hide this knowledge, conceal it behind each new consumable distraction, confusing the palliative of diversion for actual remedy. On some level we know this, and we long for someone or something to save us. We wait desperately for a Sherpa to guide us back to ourselves.    

But where would such a Sherpa take us? Where would we go? Where is there other than here? There is no sturdy mountain peak in the distance, no beckoning snow-covered summit to serve as a point of reference, no visible target, no map coordinates to establish direction of travel.

Any route you choose to take through the void will lead you to the same nowhere.

It’s easy to see the survival advantage. It is important to distinguish the appetitive from the aversive. One berry is sweet and energizing; the other kills you. But the conceptual tools that attend human language turn categorical discernment into compulsion. Nouns require criteria of inclusion and exclusion, and in those many places where Nature fails to offer clear boundaries, we quickly add our own. The world is an exceedingly complex web of dynamically interacting and ever-changing multidimensionality, yet we prefer easy dichotomies. Even the idea of human (and species, more generally) is a tool of simplification, a mere linguistic designation that has no solid referent in the natural world.

Yesterday I took an online personality test based on the enneagram model, a typology consisting of nine personality types. I took the test because it wasn’t immediately clear from the type descriptions which of two adjacent types I fit into, “the investigator” or “the individualist.” According to my test results, I am more “investigator” than “individualist,” but not much more. My results came with a list of Barnum statements telling me things about myself that I already know, things that apply in larger or smaller portions to everyone else, regardless of personality type, things like “Although you enjoy the company of others, you also need alone time.”  

Nature, of course, doesn’t recognize types. Nature is a-categorical. Nature acts with unbridled intimacy. Nature deals only with individuals. But this is a terrifying prospect. It is terrifying for the civilized to imagine a world of individuals, uncountable billions of individuals (uncountable trillions if we include the microscopic): each one irreducibly unique, each one impossible to dismiss as irrelevant. In a world of individuals, there can be no actionable classification, no categorical imperatives, no hierarchies of worth to serve as a guide.