"We are not here in this world to find elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative, or to serve the ways and modes of profitable progress. No, we are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. That is our only certain good and great purpose on earth, and if you ask me about those insoluble economic problems that may arise if the top is deprived of their initiative, I would answer 'To hell with them.' The top is greedy and mean and will always find a way to take care of themselves. They always do."
I think Foot himself lived up to this, and it is no coincidence that the affection towards him and appreciation of his oratory and vision has risen since his death. This is what happens to people who are loved. They live on in peoples' hearts - even in the hearts of people who were born long after them.
At the same time, I think some further reflection on the sentiment expressed here is needed. The problem is that there are so many people who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. No individual can provide for them all. So we would imagine that we need social policy to try to provide for them. But as soon as we try to enter into the realm of policy, so the temptation is to find "elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative" - however well-meaning.
Ivan Illich addressed this problem when he spoke against charity as a variety of colonialism. He framed the challenge as one between autonomy of the individual, and heteronomy of the state or corporations: basically, it's the difference between what we can do as individuals, and what is done for us, or to us. Society goes wrong when the balance of autonomy and heteronomy is lost and heteronomy takes over. There is a huge difference between the hungry person on the street in front of you, and the hungry or dispossessed in a far away place whose tragic faces appear in the media appealing for money.
I think Illich intuitively highlighted the difference between local biological interaction, and non-local consciousness. Both dimensions have epigenetic effects, but those effects are more directly felt in the local context. The love and care for someone close has an immediate effect on their physiology, which can potentially produce physiological change that is carried forwards in the gametes (particularly if they are young). Even for the old, acts of kindness and love are often directed towards the young for this very reason: there is an epigenetic dynamic that binds endocrine mechanisms to acts of kindness and endocrine responses in the physiology of the young. It's not uncommon for men (for example) to become kindly and doting grandfathers, when in youth they were complete bastards! What's the biology of this? Well, here's a theory: The Phenomenon of “Subjective Age” as an Epigenetic Cellular-Molecular Mechanism (researchgate.net)
So Foot might not be entirely right to restrict the purpose of life in caring for those worse off. Caring for those worse off is part of a process geared towards preparing a better world for tomorrow, mediated by the zygote of the next generation. Kindness and love really matter - certainly far more than ambition and success. To show love or experience love is to testify to a truth about the universe. To be ambitious or cruel is to testify to the conflicted nature of ourselves as individuals.
But why do we see so much cruelty, selfishness and violence in the world? These things too are epigenetic in origin. The logic of violence is a logic of individual survival and response to threat. The logic of love is a logic of collective survival. Biological evolution occurs as a result of the absorption of environmental threats through symbiogenesis: cells endogenise that which threatens them so as to acquire greater variety in their potential to organise into ever-more adaptable and viable entities. The uncomfortable fact may be that without the cruelty and selfishness, there can be no progress, any more than without love there would be self-destruction.
Human relationships are such a good example of this principle. All deep and long-lasting partnerships are contested spaces where the forces of love, ambition and individual survival play out and people either grow together or grow apart. Interestingly, people grow apart when their individual growth is stymied by the partnership - and that is usually to do with an absence of love and care. Whichever way it goes, we learn new things about the world, and those experiences have epigenetic effects which are passed down to the gametes. We build a map for the generation to come of what the world looks like, and how to survive in it - maybe survive better than we did. And of course, the really important scientific insight from epigenetics is that my "I" is not an "I" trying to survive until inevitably "I" die, but my "I" is a "we" that never dies. Mortality is a peculiar illusion.
Foot's message is not so much in his oratory, but in how we now feel about him. It is the warmth of affection for someone now long dead that lives on in a message of love and hope in a world which which will always challenge us to grow. We need love to grow, and we need struggle too. So the question is how do you grow, and how will we help those around us to grow?
And here's a beautiful but sad song about growing...
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