Author: Mark Seely

My first bicycle flat tire was a painful lesson in game theory. My friend, Vaughn, and I were riding our late 1960’s stingrays in looping figure eights interrupted with spontaneous wheelies in the street in front of my house, when one of us got the idea that we should play a game of chicken, James Dean style. So, we squared off on opposite ends of the block and rode our bikes directly at each other at full speed, each of us wearing hell-bent looks of determination (bicycle helmets weren’t a thing back in 1969). Neither of us was going to give an inch. And neither of us did. Our front tires hit dead-on at a combined speed of impact that was probably well over 20 miles per hour. Both of us ended up in the street several feet from ground zero, with our bikes lying in a tangled pile, wheels still spinning. In my time-yellowed, frame-jumping, Kodak Instamatic Super 8-quality memory replay of the crash, I can still clearly see my tire rip itself open across the axle bolt extending beyond Vaughn’s front fork. Neither of us was hurt beyond the expected asphalt burns and minor bruises, but I was angry. My bike was out of commission until dad got home and could fix it. And, in my eight-year-old mind, it was obviously Vaughn’s fault. He should have yielded.

Thirty-five years later I was at a Catholic college, team teaching a junior level interdisciplinary college class pretentiously titled “The Human Condition.” We had a guest lecturer, an economics professor, speaking to the class about game theory. He had the class play a game he called the “hand or fist game.” The rules were simple; he would ask students to raise their hand in one of two postures: open hand or closed fist. On the screen was a payoff matrix showing the contingent payoffs for raising an open hand if the majority of the students also raised an open hand and if the majority raised a fist, etc. The matrix was set up so that if the majority raised an open hand, everyone raising an open hand would get $5 and those who raised a fist would get $8. But if the majority raised a fist, then those who raised an open hand got nothing and those who raised a fist got $2. Students were told that the game would repeat through multiple rounds, and that the goal was, obviously, to amass as much money as possible. Clearly, the best long-term strategy for everyone is to cooperate and raise an open hand, where everyone would get $5 each time. But, as long as the majority keeps following the open hand strategy, those who raise a fist will clean up. After only a few rounds the vast majority of students were raising fists, and it was clear that open hand was a sucker’s bet; from that point on, raising a closed fist was the rational choice.

I had participated in this demonstration on a couple occasions in the past, and each time I noticed that, even after several rounds, long after it was clear that open hand was a sucker’s bet, a small number of students continued to raise an open hand. And they did so knowing full well that their payoff would be zero. Why is that? Why would a handful of students continue to choose an option that was guaranteed to lose?

First, it is clear that—economic theories aside—humans are not rational decision makers or optimizers, or anything of the sort. We are primates with sophisticated evolved social propensities. And I know that psychologists—myself included—would want to point out that there are social payoffs for continuing with the open hand that are unique to the situation, and that for some of the students these social payoffs, in the context of a lecture hall filled with their peers, likely outweigh the imaginary monetary payoffs of the game. But perhaps there is something more going on here as well. Perhaps humans, at their core, are noncompetitive, and more specifically, perhaps competition of this sort is something that only emerges in artificial situations where some kind of restriction of resources or limitation of access has been imposed.

Nineteenth and twentieth century ethnographies of traditional hunter-gatherers strongly suggest that cooperation, not competition, is the default assumption. Tell a hunter-gatherer that you want to play a game, and they will expect that the two of you will be working together, on the same team, as it were, rather than working against each other. It may well be that cooperation is an evolved expectation for our species, and that competition, at least the type of competition found among the civilized, has to be taught, socially reinforced, and enforced through systemic power differentials in order to countermand or overwrite the cooperative default.

Competitive games in previous iterations of civilization often had life and death consequences. The Romans had their circuses; the Aztecs had their ball games. Competition seems to be built into agricultural societies, societies with a long history of domestication, societies with a long history of hierarchical power relations and socially-mediated and unequally distributed access to resources. But if you look at band society, at foraging hunter-gatherers, you find that competition—where it exists at all—is usually a far more lighthearted affair. Modern-day hunter-gatherers (with a few rule-proving exceptions such as the Yanomamo) appear to enjoy games of chance far more so than games involving direct competition. In fact, overt competition can be extremely corrosive for egalitarian foragers, and hunter-gatherers have complex social leveling mechanisms to guard against competitive interpretations of hunting success, for example.

Authentic human lifestyles are based on an economy of abundance. Each member of society has open and easy access to all the knowledge and resources necessary to satisfy their own needs. Civilization is based on an economy of restriction in which each individual member is entirely dependent on others—and on the system itself—for access to knowledge and resources. Access in civilization has been turned into a zero-sum game in which each person is vying for their piece of a purposely limited pie, and the more pie I get, the less is available for you. In authentic human culture, it is a game of mutual enrichment. Cooperation is entirely optional (by definition, I suppose), but when we cooperate, together we get more than the sum of what we each walk away with when we are forced to compete.

In a densely forested area it is often still possible to see the sky from ground-level because trees leave a space between themselves and their immediate neighbors, a phenomenon called crown avoidance. Every child learns that leaves (and needles) are able to orient themselves based on the direction of sunlight, and a common elementary school class demonstration of this involves placing a newly spouted bean or squash plant near the window in the morning and watching as the whole plant bends itself toward the light through the course of the day. Crown avoidance, however, involves something more than this simple photophilic response; it emerges, instead, from a sophisticated kind of plant intelligence. Leaves can detect light reflecting off the leaves of a neighboring tree and can differentiate between leaf-reflected sunlight and raw (and even tree-filtered) sunshine. Once a neighbor’s leaf-shine is detected, the tree stops growing in that direction. The neighboring tree is, of course, doing the exact same thing, and the result is a thin, puzzle-piece demilitarized zone that snakes its way through the treetops.

What is interesting here is that crown avoidance is not an example of tree altruism. The trees are not bound by an egalitarian social contract, nor are they observing an arboreal reciprocity norm or engaged in some kind of evolutionary quid pro quo. The trees are simply responding to the contingencies of their local environment, and they don’t want to invest energy growing in an unproductive direction; the strategy of doing your own thing while simultaneously not getting in each other’s way allows an entire forest to flourish. Trees, it turns out, are libertarians.

No, that’s not quite right. Libertarianism assumes some form of top-down control and a society structured by power relations. The freedom that a libertarian worships is the freedom to act on self-interest within the system. A system of structured power relationships is necessary in order for the idea of self-interest to have any real meaning. To speak of the subtle interrelationships in a forest as if they comprise a system is metaphor bordering on simple anthropomorphism. Without top-down control, without a system of authority and restriction, self-interest has no target beyond the satisfaction of momentary needs. And, in the absence of a system of control and restriction, there remains nothing to prevent or limit the pursuit of authentic needs. In a traditional foraging society, for example, where access to essential resources is direct and unmediated, the idea of self-interest carries very little weight. What does it mean to say that I have a self-interest in hunting antelope when the only thing that prevents me from doing so is the antelope themselves? I mean, I could say that, but why would I? Why would I need to include the “self” part if my interests and your interests are not in competition with each other. I want to hunt antelope today and you want to fish, and there is no reason for me to distinguish my interest from yours—at least no reason to assert that I have a right to pursue my interest. Civilization, however, involves a complex hierarchical structuring of disparity. All civilizations run on restriction of, and violently enforced differential access to, resources. Self-interest emerges only when it is in competition with the interests of others, and competition emerges only when limited resources are coupled with a system of unequal access and distribution.

Trees are not negotiating with an externally-imposed system of power and restriction. Trees, in pursuing access to sunlight while avoiding their neighbors who are doing the same, are not libertarians. If anything, trees are anarchists.

Not long ago I had a dream in which I was preparing a lecture about fundamental defects in the scientific worldview. Maybe it wasn’t a lecture. Maybe I was giving a talk to a group of my colleagues at a dinner meeting. People were eating and drinking and seated around rectangular portable tables in a room bathed in yellow-orange light reflected off of varnished wood walls and a well-worn linoleum floor.

I was going to begin the talk with a prop, a section of human vein loaned to me by a female acquaintance who had recently undergone chemotherapy for terminal leukemia. The vein was hollow and empty like a thin wet straw made of surgical tubing or a limp, elongated macaroni noodle, and that was going to be my main talking point: that the sterile piece of vein in my hand was not an actual thing, that once you had extracted it from the complex of physiological systems in which it was embedded, it was no longer anything at all, and to call it a vein was to confer upon it an unwarranted entity status, even to call it “tissue” was to grant it more significance than it deserved. Analytical science, I was to continue, arbitrarily partitions the world into separate and distinct entities—isolated objects and mechanical processes—that have absolutely nothing to do with experienced reality, and yet these artificially individuated objects and processes become the default. In authentic reality—reality as it is actually experienced, not the collection of Frankenstein beasts that emerge from the cold materialism of science—there are no veins in the human body. Even stronger, there are no human bodies! At least not as isolatable entities somehow independent of all relational context.

Science inverts reality. Science chops the world into pieces, and then takes the pieces it has created and christens them the fundamental features out of which the universe is constructed. Science collects individual drops of water from a raging river and then claims that in reality—a “true” reality that exists somehow beyond, behind, or beneath our experience of the surging molten pulse—the river is merely a collection of water droplets in motion. But the true defect in this worldview is seen in its consequences: if you start with the indissoluble wholeness of authentic reality as the default, you could never turn pristine mountain habitat into barren strip mines or foul rivers with the chemically extracted dross from tar sands dredged from beneath what was once verdant forest. To do so would be to gouge deep fissures into your own flesh and to inject poison into your own bloodstream.

As I woke, in the twilight of half sleep, I mulled my dream-speech over and I realized that there was a potent truth here that I would never be able to put into words. And anyway, I would be wasting my time with these folks.

Suppose there was a group of Jews in a concentration camp during the Holocaust—or choose a similar situation, Number Four Prison at Constitution Hill in Johannesburg under Apartheid, for example, or Guantanamo Bay under Bush and Obama, or pretty much the entire Gaza Strip. I keep returning to the Nazi abomination only because the special status it has been granted by Euro-Americans (Oh my God! It can happen to light-skinned people too!) makes it such an easy rhetorical tool. Anyhow, suppose that this group of Jews became angry and upset because there was another group of Jews in the same camp who were given slightly better access to bread and water. How would you go about convincing them that their anger was misplaced?

Further suppose that some of the Jews who were experiencing the (very relative) bread-water deprivation, perhaps along with some justice-minded members of the group with better access, pooled what little energy and political resources they had to petition the guards for more equitable bread and water distribution. If you were a guard, what would you do?

If you were a guard who had to deal directly with the prisoners on a day-to-day basis, you might acquiesce to the prisoners’ demands, and take the steps necessary to ensure more equitable circumstances in order to keep the death machine running smoothly.

On the other hand, if you were a particularly savvy guard, if you were concerned with keeping the prisoners from confronting the actual reality of their situation, if you wanted to keep them from actively revolting against their loss of freedom and dignity, if you wanted to keep them from directing their energy and intelligence toward the true source of their troubles, you might go out of your way to encourage the presence of privilege and enhance their perceptions of inequality as a potent form of distraction.

Modern civilization is corporate death camp. Civil rights issues are red herrings. While we continue to struggle for LBGT rights, women’s equality, minority access, etc., the gas chambers are becoming increasingly efficient.

The generational amnesia that has eroded our conscious connection with the lifestyles of our indigenous relatives and those of our ancestors in the distant past is, perhaps, not a permanent form of memory loss. In many cases of trauma-induced amnesia the memories return with time, and much of what doesn’t return can be relearned. We lost touch with our wild nature slowly, generation by generation, immersed in civilization’s corrosive epigenetic bath, but a core wildness still remains active and ready to respond, deeply embedded in the genetic tissues of every newborn child.  Although it took 10,000 years to get this far away from where we belong, it can take just one generation to bring us to the beckoning threshold of home.

In this there is hope.

However, rewilding is not a matter of simply dropping our cell phones and fashioning atlatls and spears. It’s not a matter of simply adopting the material trappings of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. An authentic human life is not a role to be enacted, something to be read off a script and supported by the appropriate props. The world is not the same place it was prior to the Neolithic. The world is not the same place it was even as little as 200 years ago—or yesterday, for that matter. Many of the life-ways appropriate to the artists of Lascaux or to the Cheyenne of ten generations past are no longer relevant or even possible given recent changes in the physical environment. Adopting a “primitive” lifestyle, living in the forest, rediscovering the skills of the ancients, learning to craft Stone Age technology and master Paleolithic hunting methods, and surrounding yourself with wild nature is a better option than taking a job at a fast food franchise, perhaps. But it is important not to get stuck on the surface. The tendency to get stuck on the surface is a characteristic feature of a mind that has been thoroughly alienated from itself, a mind that is cued by distraction, a mind that no longer knows how to get beyond its own reflection, the shallow narcissistic mind of a consumer.

Continue reading “Hope”

One of the most nefarious consequences of the delusion of progress is that it leads to a moral disengagement from the past. Progress erases the evils of previous iterations of Western civilization through a “present-ends-justify-the-prior-evil-means” logic where the present and active foundation of the status quo is entirely ignored. Simple case in point: the genocide of Native Americans was not merely something unfortunate that happened in the past, it was necessary in order for the US to exist in its present form. Perhaps a simpler case in point: black slavery was not just a regrettable period in US history, it was absolutely essential to produce the present circumstances.

And this is not just a theoretical exercise—it’s intimately personal. Rewind history to the year 1610, remove the slave trade, and then let history play forward again, and not only would the United States not emerge in anything comparable to its present form, but neither you nor I would exist. Our personal presence on the planet (regardless of our respective skin tones) is not independent of the entire history of events prior to our birth.

A common refrain of white privilege: “But that was then and this is now, and we shouldn’t dwell on things that we cannot change in the past.”

The logical problem with this refrain is that the past has not gone anywhere. It is still with us this very instant, in all of its brutal ugliness, right now, whether or not we have the stomach to acknowledge it. We are all reaping the concrete benefits of eight millennia of genocide and war and slavery and torture and chronic immiseration of countless millions of humans and beyond countless billions of other beings. We are all standing on a pile of corpses stretching back to the agricultural revolution.

We all were born in sin. But with devout and unwavering faith in progress all of our sins are resolved.

A Buddhist master—was it Dogen?—said that listening is the gateway to enlightenment; our acoustic sense provides the true path.

Breath can be calmed, and the other senses can be stilled, yet sound still retains its capacity for intrusion.

It does not ask permission.

You can close your eyes, or gaze forward at no place in particular until your vision dissolves. You can sit in zazen posture until the skin of your entire body merges into a single pressure point in the universe. You can overwhelm your nose with incense such that no other scent can penetrate, and your tongue pressed into the roof of your mouth is quick to forget. But the presence-then-not-presence of sound remains unmoved.

Birdsong like a flurry of sparks across your ears; rain against the window like drunken soldiers upon your skull.

And the shimmering void between the notes, and the emptiness that separates each raindrop collision, in that piercing moment of absence—just now, and just now again—a single fleeting instant that traces the echo back to the origin of mind.

In the summer the cicada wasps take over the sidewalk outside of one of the buildings on a campus where I used to teach. They weave and bob just above the white concrete, in a solitary dance only they understand. As wasps go, they are gigantic, fearful looking beasts. But they are harmless to humans, or as close to harmless as a stinging insect can be. They are unlikely to attack even when provoked. Despite this, one of my colleagues wanted them poisoned. He is allergic to honeybee venom, he told me, better safe than sorry. I tried to tell him that his fear was unfounded, but his determination to have the insects killed was unaltered, and I watched as one of the campus grounds keepers soaked the grass around the sidewalk in pesticide.

Fear.

Not long ago, the dog and I were returning from a trip to the local quarry. An acquaintance, the elderly wife of another colleague from campus, was trimming the rectangular hedge in front of her house. I stopped to talk for a minute, and told her that the dog and I had just seen a family of foxes, an adult with several pups. Her face immediately contorted in a look of horror. The idea that such wild animals were living barely a city block from her house terrified her. They’re just harmless foxes, I tried to tell her. But she would have none of it. Foxes are wild animals, and, in her mind, the dangerous beasts of folklore and fairytale.

Fear.

Misplaced fear. The farm field behind her house was recently sprayed with atrazine, a potent endocrine disruptor known to cause cancer. On her porch was a bottle of Roundup herbicide, also a potent endocrine disruptor linked to a variety of diseases, declared carcinogenic by the state of California, and, in conjunction with the GMO crops it is designed to be used on, tied to the disappearance of honeybees. The electricity running her electric hedge trimmer originates in a coal power plant, a major source of greenhouse gasses that are likely rendering large portions of the planet uninhabitable for large numbers of organisms—including humans.

But she is afraid of foxes.

The passenger train creeps into the heart of North Dakota. Rickety rail and a constant procession of freight trains carrying oil and coal make for frequent stops and slow speeds.

Outside the observation car window stretches an endless sea of virgin prairie grass and herds of buffalo so thick that they seem to form one giant amoebic mass that threatens to engulf the horizon as if to digest the few small clouds that linger there. The feeling is one of breath and life and endless space.

And then my eyes blink through into the modern era, the mechanical now, and the prairie becomes coal and oil in the form of GMO corn and soybeans arrayed in GPS guided rows upon the sterile ground, and the black amoebic masses of buffalo are foreshortened into an endless passing parade of tanker cars, their sides dripping with the dark toxic lifeblood of civilization.

The word sabotage comes close, but misses the mark. It evokes a dark gallantry, careful backroom plans, cunning craft. We are not saboteurs. We are neither cunning nor crafty. We fight for no higher cause. We know of no higher cause than our own greedy oblivion. Self-immolation comes closer—a symbolic sacrificial suicide—but it too falls short, with hints of faith and virtue.

Imagine killing a lover because you were overwhelmed by your own feelings of love and compassion. Imagine your lover’s dying breath forgiving you.

Imagine a sea of dead coral or a forest of driftwood.

From Born Expecting the Pleistocene:

Suppose there was an elephant who somehow managed to get a butterfly net stuck across the front part of the top of his head. Suppose further that the elephant knew that the purpose of a butterfly net was for capturing butterflies. Suspend your disbelief a bit further and suppose that the elephant thought that because it was caught in the net, it was, like a butterfly, trapped, and had no recourse but to submit to the demands of the person holding the other end of the net. And suppose that, tragically, there was in fact no one on the other end of the net.

You are walking through the jungle and happen upon this elephant, which is by this time well on the way to starvation because, being trapped in the net, it has not been able to move from the spot for several days. What would you do to try to save the elephant? Feed the elephant by hand so that it doesn’t die? Inform the elephant that there is no one holding the other end of the net? Attempt to convince the elephant that it is not a butterfly, and thus not subject to the rules of butterfly nets, that a butterfly net is powerless against its massive bulk? It seems the simplest solution might be just to remove the net.

There is one other possibility, however. Since the elephant is already convinced it is helpless and at the mercy of its captor, you might simply grab hold of the other end of the net yourself and start issuing commands.