The beauty and the tragedy of the modern world is that it eliminates many situations that require people to demonstrate a commitment to the collective good.
In modern democracies, however, an ethos of public sacrifice is rarely needed because freedom and survival are more or less guaranteed. That is a great blessing but allows people to believe that any sacrifice at all – rationing water during a drought, for example – are forms of government tyranny. They are no more forms of tyranny than rationing water on a lifeboat. The idea that we can enjoy the benefits of society while owing nothing in return is literally infantile. Only children owe nothing.
Poverty is its own cruel trap but still raises questions about whether we own our possessions or are owned by them. Somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania we saw a man who had tied the handle of a snow shovel to his belt and then piled all his belongings onto the blade, which sledded along behind him. Depending on your perspective he was either the freest man in the country or just the poorest.
At the heart of most stable governments is a willingness to share power with people you disagree with – and may even hate.
Two of the behaviors that set early humans apart were the systematic sharing of food and altruistic group defense. Other primates did very little of either but, increasingly, hominids did, and those behaviors helped set them on an evolutionary path that produced the modern world. The earliest and most basic definition of community – of tribe – would be the group of people that you would both help feed and help defend.
Construction workers are more important to everyday life than stockbrokers and yet are far lower down the social and financial ladder.
Humans evolved in a world where nothing moved two thousand miles an hour, so there was no reason for the body to be able to counter that threat, but the brain still had to stay ahead of the game. Neurological processes in one of the most primitive parts of the brain, the amygdala, happen so fast that one could say they compete with bullets.
Whatever the technological advances of modern society – and they’re nearly miraculous – the individualized lifestyles that those technologies spawn seem to be deeply brutalizing to the human spirit.
Unfortunately, for the past decade American soldiers have returned to a country that displays many indicators of low social resilience. Resources are not shared equally, a quarter of children live in poverty, jobs are hard to get, and minimum wage is almost impossible to live on. Instead of being able to work and contribute to society – a highly therapeutic thing to do – a large percentage of veterans are just offered lifelong disability payments.
I once asked Cortez whether he would risk his life for other men in the platoon. “I’d actually throw myself on the hand grenade for them,” he said. I asked him why. “Because I actually love my brothers,” he said. “I mean, it’s a brotherhood. Being able to save their life so they can live, I think is rewarding. Any of them would do it for me.
Combat jammed so much adrenaline through your system that fear was rarely an issue; far more indicative of real courage was how you felt before the big operations, when the implications of losing your life really had a chance to sink in. My personal weakness wasn’t fear so much as the anticipation of it.
What catastrophes seem to do – sometimes in the span of a few minutes – is turn back the clock on ten thousand years of social evolution. Self-interest gets subsumed into group interest because there is no survival outside group survival, and that creates a social bond that many people sorely miss.
Studies from around the world show that recovery from war – from any trauma – is heavily influenced by the society one belongs to, and there are societies that make that process relatively easy. Modern society does not seem to be one of them.
The word freedom comes from vridom, which means “beloved” in medieval German, and is thought to reflect the idea that only people in one’s immediate group were considered worthy of having rights or protection. Outsiders, on the other hand, could be tortured, enslaved, or killed at will. This was true throughout the world and for most of human history, and neither law nor religion nor common decency held otherwise.
The choreography always requires that each man make decisions based not on what’s best for him, but on what’s best for the group. If everyone does that, most of the group survives. If no one does, most of the group dies. That, in essence, is combat.
Everyone – including people who vehemently oppose any form of federal government – depend on a sprawling supply chain that can only function with federal oversight, and most of them pay roughly one-third of their income in taxes for the right to participate in this system.
Wealth is supposed to liberate us from the dangers of dependency, but quickly becomes a dependency in its own right. The wealthier we are, the higher our standard of living and the more – not less – we depend on society for our safety and comfort.
The central problem for human freedom is that groups that are well organized enough to defend themselves against others are well organized enough to oppress their own. Power is so readily abused that one could almost say that its concentration is antithetical to freedom.
Poor people are forced to share their time and resources more than wealthy people are. And as a result, they live in closer communities. Inter-reliant poverty comes with its own stresses, and certainly isn’t the American ideal, but its much closer to our evolutionary heritage than affluence. A wealthy person who has never had to rely on help and resources from his community is leading a privileged life that falls way outside more than a million years of human experience.
If there’s an image of the Apocalypse, I thought, it might be a man in a business suit building a fire in the courtyard of an abandoned high-rise. In different circumstances it could be any of us, anywhere, but it had happened to him here, and there wasn’t much I could do about it. I nodded to him and he nodded back and then I left him in peace.
Christianity is a high moral system based on the preaching of a destitute ascetic.