Category: Words and Life

In his book, Leviathan, published in 1651, Thomas Hobbes argued for a powerful central government, and claimed that without civilization’s top-down systems of order and control, every man would be an enemy of every other man, and life would be: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Hobbes’ disparaging view of life outside—and by extension, before—civilization has become deeply entrenched orthodoxy. The problem with this orthodoxy is that it is, and always has been, demonstrably false.

Consider each of Hobbes’ five descriptors, starting with solitary. On the surface, a civilized life appears the antithesis of solitary. High population density is a defining feature of civilization. At present, the global human population is on the order of seven and a quarter billion people, and the majority of those people live in densely packed cities. Add social media to the mix, and the word solitary seems not to describe anything at all about modern life.

But solitary doesn’t refer to just the lack of physical exposure to other people. It refers to isolation and the potential for loneliness that attend a psychological separation from other people. As the cliché goes, you’re never more alone than when you are in a crowd of strangers. Detachment, isolation, and alienation are side effects of civilization. And as counterintuitive as it may seem, the potential for isolation actually increases with population density. Empirical psychology is informative here. The rural-urban distinction is a favorite variable for social psychologists, and several interesting differences have been found between city dwellers and their rural counterparts. Most notably, people who live in smaller towns are more willing to offer assistance to strangers in need than are those who live in crowded cities. Animal studies clearly show the health and behavioral costs of living in close proximity with too many conspecifics. Research suggests that we suffer in similar ways as do lab rats when forced to live in crowded environments. Along with a wide range of physical health risks, living in cities increases the risk of psychiatric disorders.

Contrast the stranger-populated environments of civilization with the kind of social circumstances that correspond to uncivilized lifestyles. Hunter-gatherers live in small and extremely tight-knit bands; traditional indigenous societies tend toward extended community sizes of perhaps a few dozen. And there are biological reasons for this. The size and structural complexity of the human neocortex places the upper limit on the size of the personal social network that an individual can functionally negotiate at slightly less than 150 people, a fact known as Dunbar’s number or the rule of 150.

A paradox that has been noted by Western anthropologists is the extent to which individuals in traditional human societies prefer to be in close physical proximity to each other. Huts are sited right next to each other even when there is a surfeit of space available to spread out; and when sitting beside each other, neighbors are frequently found with their bodies pressed against each other and their arms interlocked. Civilized humans have long ago abandoned this perpetual physical closeness. Civilization creates separation, and Western civilization, especially, emphasizes the individual. Consumer marketing drives this tendency to the extreme: everyone needs to have their own (house, car, television, latest sparkly gadget). We are repulsed by the thought of sharing our intimate spaces with others, and then assume that solitude is part of primordial human nature rather than a defining feature of civilization.

We haven’t been strictly limited by the size and complexity of our cortex since the advent of written language. And now, with our internet-based personal networking gadgets, we can manage the names, faces, and continuously updated trivial life details of hundreds, even thousands, of “friends.” It’s an obvious quantity-for-quality trade-off reflective of our mass-consumption approach. We once lived in close contact with people who directly supported our physical existence and provided the raw material out of which we constructed life’s meanings. We now live in giant tribes of two-dimensional beings, engaged in a shared superficial monologue, searching for constant distraction, desperately trying to convince ourselves—through sheer quantity of experience—that our isolated consumption-driven lives are meaningful.      

What about poor? As with solitude, poverty is a side effect of civilization. Even stronger: poverty is an explicit and purposeful creation of civilization. Consumer society is a way of generating endless personal deprivation, and guarantees a sense of poverty even among the very rich and powerful. There is a subjective, contextual component to poverty. Impoverishment is relative to your comparison group within society, and incoherent once you step outside of the unnatural power hierarchies of civilization. Poverty cannot exist when people have direct access to essential resources. Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins referred to hunter-gatherers as “the original affluent society.” Just in terms of available free time, a typical member of a hunter-gather band is living better than the super-rich of Western society. All indications are that most “primitive” societies were overwhelmingly egalitarian situations where access to resources was open to all and few if any restrictions or mediators existed. It is true that individuals had few material possessions. But a nomadic foraging society has no role for material possessions. Material property beyond what can be carried on one’s person for long distances poses a serious practical disadvantage. In contrast, a minimum store of material possessions is necessary in civilization, as an entry condition for participation. “Poor” applies only to the civilized. 

It is interesting to note that when people quote Hobbes’ list of qualities of uncivilized life, the first two are often omitted. Life would be “nasty, brutish, and short.” The “solitary” and “poor” descriptors are the ones that are most easily forgotten. I suspect this is because there are too many examples of people within civilization who are living undeniably solitary and poor lives—the poor are especially salient among the throngs of homeless in the inner cities. Perhaps it is just too obvious that civilized life is no prophylactic against isolation or poverty.   

Nasty? I’m not really sure what Hobbes means by this term. Maybe it’s just a general reference to the lack of civilized refinements. Since hot showers and flush toilets didn’t exist in Hobbes’ time, I am inclined to think he is perhaps referring to life in close proximity to the natural world, with all of its beasties, bugs, and filth. Or maybe he is referring to the “war of all against all” social circumstances he imagined. War is a very nasty business, with its blood, dismemberment, and painful gangrenous death. In either case, the term cannot be made to apply to life in a traditional human society. For hundreds of thousands of years, human society was in most respects the antithesis of a war of all against all. War itself is largely a civilized invention. And it wasn’t until the advent of domestication just a few thousand years ago that true filth was introduced into human society. Nomadic people typically don’t stick around in any one place long enough for the diseases associated with human waste to become an issue. Cholera was likely rare to the point of nonexistent. Parasites are a chronic problem for all animals in the wild, but the vast majority of parasitic problems historically affecting humans (from viruses and deadly bacteria to cockroaches and rats) are direct effects of sedentary life-ways that include long-term storage of food and life in close proximity to domestic animals.

Brutish? Brute is from the Latin for dull or stupid. It is a derogatory term applied to uncivilized creatures, human or otherwise. For Hobbes to call life outside of civilization brutish is pure arrogance, based on his question-begging assumption that the uncivilized are inferior. This sentiment reflects the “great chain of being” view that humans are superior to the other beasts, and that civilization is the better part of what makes us so. Humans are above the brutes and beasts in the natural order of things. What is the evidence of human superiority? Civilization itself is the proof. What is the evidence that the uncivilized are inferior? They are uncivilized, it’s right there in the definition. No evidence needed.

Short? Although it is true, perhaps, that a person raised to depend on the physical and bureaucratic structures of civilization to provide life’s necessities would not last long if access to these structures were suddenly removed, this one was demonstrably false even in Hobbes’ time. Life expectancy in 17^th century England was around 35 years. And it is not entirely true today, even for the privileged minority among us who have access to the wonders of modern medicine. It is likely that human longevity has only very recently returned to what it was prior to the agricultural revolution. The number one cause of death—in Hobbes’ time and during the Paleolithic—involved childbirth. Infant mortality among humans was probably around 30%, which is actually lower than the 50% found in most other primates. Take infant mortality out of the equation, and there is probably not all that much difference between the life expectancy of a typical 40-year-old in the Pleistocene and a typical 40-year-old in the US in the 21^st century. Longevity measured as life expectancy is a statistical abstraction, and there is a difference between average life expectancy and life span. There is no convincing evidence that the biological life span of a normal healthy human has changed at all in the last 250,000 years.

Hobbes’ chauvinistic assertions have become orthodoxy. Why? Why does belief in these five defining characteristics of uncivilized life persist despite the ease with which each one can be shown to be false? As with any other false orthodoxy, the facts are secondary to the role the orthodoxy plays in justifying and supporting the belief system as a whole.  

Late morning, sitting on the hardpack at the edge of the ravine.

A perfect confluence of city and forest in the soundscape: the stream below, a steady liquid presence, shrill birdcall, slight crackle of leaf-fall, no wind, only a very slight breeze. And traffic from the road, a steady pulse of tires in perpetual doppler ascension and descension, an earth mover, its metal blade grinding heavy against asphalt somewhere over the far rise, and small aircraft flying low toward the Sound.

A bright yellow leaf falling in the band of sunshine now directly over the stream. Its course is unusual, slow, at a sight angle from vertical, it falls twenty feet, pauses strangely, then twenty feet more—and then reverses course in a way that shocks me until I realize it isn’t a leaf after all.

A butterfly.

Sitting in a waiting room. A cube-shaped aquarium in the corner with five fish, tropical, saltwater, of various species, swimming in staccato circular pulses that remind me of hoverflies riding miniature convection currents in the thick air of an August afternoon.

Mesmerizing.

Around me, a handful of people, most staring into their palms.

The aquarium: a mirror, a fractal echo of the larger room, itself a microcosm of the world outside—all of us in forced confinement, wild beings stuck in a box, surrounded by strangers, cheap furniture, and plastic plants, with nowhere to go.

And still we wait.

Viruses can’t think. Hell, they aren’t actually alive, at least not in the way that we normally envision life. They exist only through a kind of asymmetrical symbiosis. Outside of a host’s cell they are just tiny particles of organized matter armed with a couple enzymes and some otherwise innocuous fragments of genetic material. A virus doesn’t have a strategy or plan of attack. It doesn’t plot an expanding vector through a population of potential victims. It merely exploits the hosts’ gregariousness, piggybacks off of their social proclivities, their patterns of connection and incidental contact. And all without forethought or malice.

A virus is critically dependent on their host in a way that, if it could think, would give it pause. A virus becomes extinct—if that word really means anything when talking about a virus—when vulnerable host populations cease to exist. If a virus could think, it would realize its own precarious position, its degree of dependency. It would understand that its own future survival is critically dependent on the continued availability of a host. If a virus could think, it would form congressional subcommittees to craft legislation to ensure a sustainable supply of future hosts—and maybe call it “The Host New Deal.” If a virus could think, it would have vocal activists and political action committees and celebrity endorsements and a substantial social media presence.  

Civilization is occasionally likened to a planetary virus. And although this is usually meant as simile or metaphor, it is a very thin metaphor, only barely metaphor, metaphor in which the target and vehicle are too close to be mere analogy: civilization in a very real sense is viral. The planet is being consumed, its biological and geophysical health is being degraded at breakneck speed by civilized forms and structures that replicate and proliferate in ways that closely resemble the lytic cycle of a virus, forms and structures that exploit vulnerable systems of the host to make deadly copies of themselves, quickly mutating around unprepared defensive systems, penetrating ever-deeper layers of tissue until, eventually, there will be nothing left to consume.

Civilization is un-strategically parasitic. Civilization exists only through a kind of asymmetrical symbiosis. Outside of a physically diverse, materially-rich biome populated with humans, civilization is just a collection of hierarchically organized patterns of power distribution armed with lethal technology and some otherwise innocuous delusional belief systems. Civilization doesn’t have a strategy or plan of attack. It doesn’t plot a vector of expansion and progress. It merely exploits natural vulnerabilities, piggybacks off human social and psychological proclivities and their easily manipulated fears and anxieties.

And all without forethought or malice.

Several myths frame my dissatisfaction, my disaffection with myself. They are myths of Western culture, and perhaps something more than mere myth, so primal and deeply entrenched that their formative principle operates at the perceptual level, the molecular level of thought, too immediate and transient for the slow, slippery grip of consciousness, grasped only obliquely, only through the dissection of metaphor, a cold postmortem that reveals the cause of death but not the murder weapon.

At face value, these myth-reflecting metaphors are incommensurable. Consider the most pervasive, perhaps: “life is a journey,” life is a road to be navigated through rites of passage, in route to some hazy final destination—in our mechanical modern world, a path to be plotted and mapped and strategized, with lines of travel and turning points, with benchmarks and interim targets and waystations. Yet, at the same time we are also told that happiness is a kind of quarry, illusive prey to be flushed out and chased, followed wherever it leads us. Surely, such extemporaneous deviation in the pursuit of happiness would take us irretrievably off course. But then there are those who would argue that the two are not mutually exclusive after all, that as long as we stay on the right path pain and struggle and persistence will eventually lead us to happiness’ hidden lair. Platitudes abound. “No pain, no gain.” “Anything worthwhile takes time.” “Slow and steady wins the race.”   

To abandon myth and metaphor, to see myself in the moment, taking only what holds me within the moment itself as primary, ignoring the story I tell myself about how I got here, the traveler’s tale of missteps and wrong turns, obstacles and barriers, stormy seas and uncharted waters, to take myself for what I am now, as I am now, leaves me disoriented and confused, and yet, somehow, wholly free and unburdened, no longer tethered to illusion. And, for a brief moment, right now, right next to me on the floor in a sleepy assortment of legs and ears and tail and fur: happiness.

Full disclosure right up front: I’m a “libtard.” Actually, that’s not entirely true. “Libtard” is too weak of a term. My political leanings lie far to the left of libtarded, well into libimbecile range—even the libtards think I’m soft-headed. But, like the libtards, I am perpetually shocked, angered, and amazed by the barely coherent thoughtforms Donald Trump excretes daily, and dumbfounded by the way that his racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, hate-filled followers slurp them up as if each of his grammarless tweets was a honey-flavored drop of colostrum oozing from their mother’s teat. 

A fundamental psychological reality is that each of us interprets the world in terms of our personal knowledge and experience. It is impossible for us to do otherwise. And yet we fail to see the broad limits this sets on our ability to understand. Most of what falls outside of our current scope of understanding—which, in our unimaginably complex universe, turns out to be the vast majority of things—might as well not exist. The rest is distorted and forcefully altered in order to make it consistent with our previous knowledge and experience. We never see things as they truly are, but only in terms of what we think we already know. But not all things are equal in this regard. The broader your education and experience, the more extensive your knowledge base and the easier it is to interpret and integrate something new. It’s a rich-gets-richer situation, where the more you know, the more you can know, the more accurate and useful your knowledge becomes, and the easier it is to learn new things.

As a group, liberals, because they tend to be more highly educated, probably have the advantage in this regard. In addition, the liberal/conservative divide to some extent also parallels the urban/rural divide. Living in cities provides greater exposure to people from different racial, ethnic, religious, and national backgrounds. Rural areas tend to be socially homogeneous places, where an individual’s knowledge of people from different racial, ethnic, religious, and national backgrounds is more heavily influenced by myth and media stereotypes, and less likely to involve personal experience.

No doubt some of the tension and animosity between progressive-leaning liberals and the conservative MAGA folks has its source in underlying differences in knowledge and experience, with each side distorting the facts to make them comport with what they already believe is true. But there may be something else going on as well. Distorted facts alone cannot explain the dramatic polarity between the two sides on issues such as gun control, abortion rights, immigration policy, health care, climate change, and a growing number of other points of contention. The opposing standpoints on these issues seem too extreme to be explained by differences in education and experience alone. The issues are being framed in radically different ways by the two camps. It appears that the two sides are reading from an entirely different rulebook when it comes to what makes something good or bad, right or wrong. It appears as if they are living in two completely different moral universes.

In the 1970s, Lawrence Kohlberg came up with a theory about the development of moral reasoning. Kohlberg’s theory includes six stages spread across three levels that involve progressively sophisticated modes of reasoning about right and wrong. The first level to emerge in childhood is the preconventional level, and includes two stages in which decisions about whether an act is right or wrong are based on its potential consequences. Guiding ethical principles at this lowest level include “do whatever you want as long as you can get away with it” and “the ends justify the means.” The golden rule, treat others as you would like to be treated, is an appeal to the self-focused, punishment-and-reward sensibilities of people operating at this level. The two stages of the second level, the conventional level, probably apply to the majority of adults. At the conventional level, rules, laws, and social conventions determine what is right and wrong. Any act that breaks the law or violates the rules is wrong regardless of the larger context in which the act occurred, and regardless of whether the act led to a good or bad outcome. Behavior that falls outside the norm is bad because it falls outside the norm. The highest level of moral reasoning in Kohlberg’s scheme is the postconventional level. Right and wrong at this level are based on self-chosen higher-order ethical principles, and are relative to the specific situation in question. The first stage of this level deals with social contract notions of what is good and bad for civil society as a whole—Kant’s categorical imperative that we should act in ways that we would wish were universal law probably fits here—and the sixth and final stage deals with notions of universal human rights and human dignity. It is important to note that, despite the fact that this is a developmental theory, not everybody makes it to the postconventional level, and that quite a few people never make it beyond the preconventional level.

Kohlberg’s theory has received a lot of criticism over the years. For one thing, his postconventional level seems to reflect Western ideals that might not apply in other cultures. In addition, his theory’s focus on an ethics of justice has a decidedly masculine bias to it. Females tend toward a more socially-embedded ethics of caring and compassion. Because of this, women are more likely to top out at the conventional level. Nevertheless, his theory provides a useful rubric for distinguishing differences in the ways that individuals think about right and wrong, as well as providing insight into a potential source of disagreements among political factions.

Consider what might happen when a person operating at the conventional level, the level at which right and wrong are a matter of established rules and social norms, confronts the principle-based situational ethics of a postconventional argument. The conventional thinker is not able to consider the argument on the level that it was formulated, but that doesn’t prevent them from interpreting the argument in terms of their own prior moral reasoning experience. Conventional thinkers were once preconventional thinkers, and it is easy for them to translate the argument in ways that fit with a lower level of moral reasoning. The conventional thinker is likely to miss the whole point, and interpret the postconventional argument in preconventional terms in which principle-driven situational ethics becomes “ignore the rules and do whatever you want.”

Donald Trump is quite clearly operating at the preconventional level of moral reasoning (although I balk at ascribing any actual reasoning to his reasoning—let alone attaching moral status to it). His morality, like his third-grade emotionality and social proclivities, is entirely absent even rudimentary sophistication. To the extent that his followers share his ideals and approve of his methods, it is likely that they are operating at a similarly primitive level of reasoning as well. It is not too much of a stretch to assume that the majority of the MAGA folks are not postconventional thinkers. And, judging by the content of their posters and their hate-filled chants of “lock her up” and “send her back,” few of the attendees at Trump rallies are likely candidates for even the conventional range. Perhaps a major difference between progressive-leaning liberals—libtards—and MAGA-hat-wearing Trump supporters has to do with differences in the sophistication of their moral thought.

Although I am not aware of any hard data that would back this up, there is overwhelming anecdotal evidence to suggest that part of the reason the left and the right are talking past each other is because they are arguing from incompatible levels of moral reasoning. The border security issue makes a good example case. The liberal mantra “A border wall is a stupid waste of money and won’t solve the problem” gets translated as “liberals want open borders.” Liberals and progressives are up in arms about the way that flesh and blood human beings crossing the southern border are being treated: children separated from their parents; people held in holding pens for weeks under conditions that would be illegal to treat livestock. The right-wing crowd seems to think that there is nothing wrong here. Conservatives operating from the conventional level of moral reasoning focus on the illegal part of illegal immigration, and lump desperate asylum seekers in with common criminals. Since many of these people entered the country illegally, they deserve what they get. Those conservatives operating from a preconventional level see them as greedy people wanting to take advantage of the system, either looking for a free handout or wanting to steal our jobs. Although there are probably postconventional arguments for refusing these people entrance into the country, it gets progressively harder to justify ill treatment of asylum seekers and others crossing the southern border as you get into the postconventional range of reasoning. Basic principles of fairness and due process, as well as notions of civility and respect for human dignity, demand that we treat people humanely and with compassion.

A similar story can be told about left/right differences in environmental policies, and entitlement programs, and whether Trump is guilty of obstructing justice, where the extremes of the debate pit punishment-and-reward preconventional perspectives and black-and-white conventional logic against more nuanced postconventional views. The sharp disparity between republican and democrat talking points might signal more than just different beliefs about the role of government, or different views on the best economic, social, and environmental policies. Beneath the stark differences between left and right political agendas might lie fundamentally different modes of reasoning about right and wrong.

What you see is all there is; we can only work with what is available to us to work with. How we work with what is available to us is important too. How we determine right and wrong in a complex universe is determined by the ways that we frame the questions, what principles, if any, we apply to the situation, and what we already believe is important. As a highly educated city-dweller occupying the left-most reaches of the libtard spectrum, and as a fan of nuance and higher-order principles, I cringe at the simplistic and childish babble spewing up from lower Trumpistan. As a cognitive psychologist, I am painfully aware that my perspective is not without bias, but I am nonetheless convinced that, when it comes to the competing views offered by left/right factions of the political debate, one of them is clearly less wrong.

Here’s a sentence that I have used in my psychology classes over the years as a way of demonstrating the difference between knowledge and understanding:

 The haystack was important because the cloth ripped.

Linguists and cognitive psychologists point out that there are hierarchically organized layers to human language, and the sentence above can be read on at least three “levels.” At the surface level, you have the physical sentence itself, the specific words and the order in which they appear. Although the surface level is necessary for any sort of communication at all, the meaning of a sentence cannot be derived from its surface expression alone. The same meanings can be expressed using different words and word orders: the meaning of “My knee hurts because I tripped over the dog” is essentially the same as “Tripping over the dog is the reason my knee hurts” despite the fact that they are distinctly different sentences. In addition, the exact same words in the exact same order can mean completely different things: “They are fighting dogs” can refer to someone sparring with dogs; or it might be referring to a type of dog, specifically the kind of dog that fights. The meaning of a sentence is not to be found on the surface. Meaning has to do with the way the surface features are being organized mentally. Meaning isn’t out there in the world. Meaning is something that has to be built internally—or so the story goes.

But there are levels involved in this as well, levels to the internal meaning construction process. Closest to the surface, you have the propositional level of the sentence, what is sometimes referred to as the “textbase.” This is the level at which syntax and decisions about the meanings of potentially ambiguous words come into play. Is “fighting” a verb or an adjective? This level can provide us with quite a lot of information. Looking at the sentence above in terms of this level of meaning, we have two objects, a haystack and a cloth, and an event, the ripping of the cloth. But we also have information that the haystack is not just any old haystack, it is one that is, or at least was for a period of time, important. And further, we know that there is a causal relationship between the ripping of the cloth and the haystack’s importance, that it was the very fact that the cloth ripped that made the haystack important.

However, despite the fact that we know what all of the entities in the sentence are and how they relate to each other, the sentence is impossible to understand. We are missing something critical that has to do with a deeper level of meaning, the level at which the propositional content of the sentence can be connected to things not included in the sentence, and integrated with our personal experiences and our general knowledge about the world. This deeper level of meaning has been called the situation model level of representation, or sometimes simply the mental model level. What makes this sentence such a good classroom example is that providing a single word is sufficient for this deeper level of meaning to become available in a sudden flash of insight: parachute.

The haystack was important because the cloth ripped. Parachute. Suddenly, not only do you know the relationships among the entities and events in the sentence, but you understand the sentence, you can see it in a larger context that incorporates information that is not part of the word meanings and propositional structure of the sentence itself. You can go beyond the sentence and construct a mental model using your broader experience with the world. You can see the parachute ripping and the skydiver averting sure death by landing on a haystack (the first time I came across this example, I pictured a scene from a Looney Tunes cartoon).

Information, knowledge, and understanding, these terms are frequently used as synonyms. But information is not necessarily knowledge, and, as we have seen, knowledge does not necessarily imply understanding. Information is really just data—potential content for knowledge. Information corresponds to the surface level. Knowing something means, at the very least, that you can do something that you could not do if you didn’t know that thing. Even something as prosaic as knowing that pandas eat bamboo allows you to provide an answer to the question “What do pandas eat?” Knowledge in this minimal sense corresponds to the propositional or textbase level: knowing there is a causal relationship between the ripping of the cloth and the importance of the haystack, for example. Understanding involves the embedding of information and knowledge within a broader context that includes additional information and knowledge—and additional understandings. To gain understanding means to alter, in some perhaps only small and subtle way, your current worldview.

In the last couple decades, our exposure to information has increased by orders of magnitude. But this has occurred in the absence of a concomitant increase in the ability to develop a deeper understanding. Along with the internet’s burgeoning cornucopia of information has come technology for dramatically increasing the efficiency with which we can organize and apply this information. This combination, virtually unlimited access to information coupled with potent algorithm-driven tools for searching, sorting, organizing, and applying this information, creates the illusion that we understand something when really all we have done is acquire surface knowledge about tiny interrelated portions of the stream of information itself. The sheer volume and relentless accumulation of this information is making it more and more difficult to formulate deeper meanings. And what’s worse is that we are left with a false sense that the superficial knowledge that we are able to glean counts as real knowledge—that knowing about how various things and events available in the information stream relate to each other is real understanding.   

It may even be that a truly broad situation-model level understanding of current events is impossible to attain. There are simply too many things happening, and the relations among them are too complex for us to be able to integrate them into anything that resembles a stable and coherent worldview. Instead of a comprehensive and nuanced worldview consisting of meaningfully integrated knowledge and understanding, we carry multiple compartmentalized worldviews, many of which are logically incoherent and incompatible with each other, worldviews that are shifting and shallow and over-simplistic, the kind of worldviews that can be encapsulated in sound bites and trite memes.

Access to information is not the same as knowledge, just like eating at five-star restaurants doesn’t make you a chef. And, again, knowledge is not the same as understanding, in the same way that you can know that it was the ripping of the cloth that made the haystack important without any understanding whatsoever about why that was so. The result of all of this is that, where prior generations once strived for an active and penetrating understanding of the world around them, we are now merely passive consumers of information—and we mistake the efficiency with which we can navigate and organize information with meaningful understanding. We know all about haystacks, and about the many ways that different kinds of cloth can rip. And we entirely fail to notice that we are missing the parachute.

The world isn’t really like that. In fact, to call it the world is already a mistake. Maybe reality would be a better word to use. Yet even this ushers deception. To speak of reality is to suggest there is something else, something that can’t possibly be. To provide a label is to separate the inseparable, to extract and to abstract. To claim reality as a noun is to claim there can be modes of being that fall outside of being itself.

But language isn’t the real problem here. Language is merely a porous membrane of attachment, a membrane meant to bind us to each other, a membrane designed to provide a deeply-penetrating social texture to experience. The real problem is the way that language has been subverted, turned around, and plied against us. The membrane has become infused and infested with parasitic tendrils of civilization.

We are social primates, each of us meant for a community-embedded life. But modern social spaces no longer provide access to community. There are people, for sure, but community is more than people, and even our closest relationships are woven of superficial threads, absent those qualities of attachment and union that define a true community of equal beings. Civilization has no use for equal beings. Civilization is powered by inequality, by absence and lack and emptiness, whether real or imagined. Equal beings engaged in authentically human intercourse cannot know the absence, lack, and emptiness that are endemic to civilization. What could I lack that is not readily provided? Who would not spare some of theirs if I were in momentary need? And to whom would I not freely offer a portion of my own? And how could I possibly fall into need when abundance and plenty define my every breathing moment?          

Understanding something involves seeing it on its own terms, seeing it as it is, within a richly furnished context. Explaining something involves talking about it in terms of something else, something outside of, or behind, or beneath the thing itself.

Understanding the apple hanging red and heavy from the branch is to see it in terms of its trajectory from blossom to swollen fruit to rotting heap on the ground to worm excrement nourishing the roots and to the seed traveling with the bird to bring the tree to another valley. The redness of the apple is a beacon, an invitation. To explain the apple is to present a description of genetic plans and protein synthesis and sugar manufacture and transport, where its redness is the result of the human visual system’s reaction to light of specific frequencies—with understanding, the apple’s redness is a meaningful thing in itself, with explanation it becomes light wavelengths and neural signals.   

Understanding is a form of communion. Explanation reduces the world to abstraction, so that we might gain power by pulling it apart.

Civilized spaces are places with borders, places defined in terms of limits and zones of restricted access. We occupy rooms in houses and buildings with exterior walls sited relative to neighborhoods and city limits and county lines and state, provincial, and national borders; we commute in climate-encased vehicles to jobs where we assemble on shop floors, or sort ourselves into offices or cubicles, or step into our stations behind counters or service windows, or climb into other vehicles. All of these bounded spaces are designed as regions of containment, aggregation, and, above all, segregation and separation. That which falls on the other side of the border is external, outside, other.

This is a wholly unnatural thing. Externally-defined boundaries are artificial contrivances, inventions of civilization, technologies of control with no true counterpart in the natural world. Animals, we are told, inhabit territories. And some creatures will fight to the death defending a patch of terrain. From within the civilized mind-scape, such fights can only be seen as a kind of border dispute. We are quick to apply a civilized template, quick to see parallels to civilized notions of property.

Property, however, does not exist in wild nature. Neither do regions or zones or territories. And especially not states and provinces and nations. These are all tools of power and control, technologies of restriction and constraint. And the borders themselves, the boundaries associated with these things are defined primarily in terms of the limits of control, and only secondarily by what is contained within or without.

For animals—and noncivilized humans—boundaries are defined by the center, by the spatial and temporal contours of their capacity to act in the moment, a region that travels with them, expanding and contracting according to transient changes of purpose and circumstance.