What a terrible time for our democracy. We’re walking on ice and slipping every minute.
MEANWHILE, I ordered a shirt from a company with a “storefront” that claimed to be a mother daughter company in “Newport.” I accidentally hit the key twice (two shirts) and tried to correct it instantly, sent messages, but no, it was apparently now chiseled in stone. Three minutes after I ordered, it was now “in production” and too late to change. So I now have two identical shirts. Capital One can’t do anything to help me unless I can show that I sent the shirt back and was not reimbursed. But I can’t send the shirt back because the company won’t give me an address to send it to. This supposed company in “Newport” is somewhere in China, and if I sent it back, they say the postage would be huge, more than the cost of the shirt. That’s what they say.
In Southern parlance, I got snookered. We are all slipping on ice. Things are out of control. Or, barely in control, I should say.
This situation has a lot to do with a book I’m reading, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes, the Yanomamö and the Anthropologists, by Napoleon A. Chagnon, a famous professor of sociocultural anthropology at the University of Missouri and the deceased husband of a women who now lives in our retirement community.
The Venezuelan Yanomamö were pristine, untouched by civilization when he began visiting and studying them. He made this study his life’s work, both praised and condemned. The title of the book is deeply ironic because savages are not noble. Basic human nature is violent. And this is the controversial part: he saw that it’s not the need for resources that spurs warfare, it is the women. It’s the instinct to spread one’s genes, one’s influence, as widely as possible, unsullied by mixture with others’ genes. Steal the women from neighboring tribes and kill anyone who tries to mate with them.
As the tribes got larger and larger, Chagnon says, rules and organization became more and more necessary. Back to walking on ICE, you can see what’s happening. It’s become impossible to “purify” our gigantic tribe. What is our “tribe?” Our current government is trying to both define that and do the “purifying.”
I think it will require an evolutionary step to get us out of this fix. It will take the skill of the poets, the novelists, the artists, the musicians. We’ll have to evolve to understand the world as wider, deeper, more complex than we thought, and to be okay with that. We once had to loosen our grip on the idea of a Earth-centered universe. Now we’ll have to expand the boundaries of our thinking again. And again.
Only music and poetry and their offspring can see farther than we can see. Farther, even, than religion. We will have to pack all our (maybe) well-meaning divisions into suitcases and roll them past the borders. Past the demarcations of husband/wife, past native/ immigrant. It is going to feel like slipping on ice with every step, but we’ll have Heisenberg and his uncertainty principle to guide us.