Prerequisites, Propinquity, & Poetry

I’m always trying to figure out what’s at the heart of the matter. What does it all mean? (Gestures vaguely.) What’s in the middle of every venn diagram?  What’s the thread that weaves it all together?  The place where all the tributaries and rivers merge into one? 

What is the foundational weakness

undergirding our societal problems? 

Over time I’ve become accustomed to the changing nature of my answer. For a while I thought it was the industrial revolution. Then the agricultural revolution – (have you read Sapiens?!) These days I’m thinking about the tension between the individual and the community. 

The problem is that even when you think you’ve identified the heart of the matter, there’s always some sort of prerequisite. Something or idea you need to understand in order to comprehend the other thing. Start from the beginning. But where is the beginning, you know!???  The water moves in circles. 

Transvalutaion of All Values: The Individual and the Community

How many times have I journaled about this podcast? I suppose just about annually since 2019, when I first stumbled upon it around the same time I went to Hong Kong and was learning about Taoism, which led me to a philosophy podcast that led me to another, and then there it was, a seven-part series called Transvaluation of All Values by a philosophy professor named Wesley Cecil. 

What meaning would I have you make of it? 

We must orient ourselves toward community. 

And this is time sensitive. 

We’ve taken individualism as far as it can go. As Cecil puts it, we’ve maxed out the potential benefits of individualism. I’m being sincere when I say I’ve journaled about this a lot; I think about it a lot. Talk about paying attention and starting from the beginning... it seems to me that this is exactly what it all comes down to. How many of our political chasms are rooted in divergent ideas about how to navigate the inherent tension between the individual and the community? 

I enjoy consuming disparate movies/books/podcasts/whatever simultaneously, and seeing what comes of the porousness of ideas. What do these things have to do with each other? What does Transvaluation of All Values have to do with the book I’m reading now?  Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make – and Keep – Friends was written by psychologist Marisa G. Franco. (Tuesday Group attendees will recall that last week I spent some time ruminating on the word propinquity, and the positive impact of consistent proximity on friend-making.) 

Anyway, according to Franco, friendships are of colossal importance. Friendship networks (or lack thereof) powerfully influence mental and physical health. Humans are social creatures. Here's an excerpt from the book:

Friends don’t just support us personally; they benefit us collectively. When we zoom out to evaluate the merits of friendship on a macro level, we see how these relationships better society. As societies aim to increase justice and decrease prejudice, friendship provides a means. Research finds that having one friend in an outgroup (i.e., a group you’re not a part of) alters people’s support of policies benefitting the outgroup, suggesting that friendship may be necessary (but likely not sufficient) to trigger systemic change. Another study finds our hostility toward outgroups decreases when our friend is friends with someone in that group, signaling that friendship across groups can have ripple effects throughout entire networks. Prejudice thrives in the abstract, but once we become friends, others become complex beings who hurt and love just like we do, and no matter how different we think they are, we see ourselves in them.

A 2013 meta-analysis found friendship networks had been shrinking for the preceding thirty-five years, and the impact of this trend on society is grave. Friends, research finds, increase our trust in others, and trust is necessary for society to operate. A study with participants from Germany, Czech Republic, and Cameroon found that across all three cultures, people who felt disconnected experienced something called social cynicism, “a negative view of human nature, a biased view against some groups of people, a mistrust of social institutions, and a disregard of ethical means for achieving an end.” Robert D. Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, emphasized how when we share a social network with someone, we develop “thin trust” – we trust people we don’t know well – but, he argues, “as the social fabric of a community becomes more threadbare, its power to undergird norms of honesty, generalized reciprocity, and thin trust is enfeebled.” 

This is why Boundary Waters Connect invests in efforts that are designed to strengthen our social fabric. 

One of the most striking moments, for me, in the podcast, is when Cecil proclaims that the necessary answer/response to the tension between the individual and the community is love. We have to voluntarily say that “for the love of the community – and for the love of myself that can only thrive in the context of some community – I am willing to give over some of my personal liberties and capacities for the greater thriving of those with whom I share and form the love I have myself. (Because, again, you cannot thrive as a human being on your own.)” 

Abby Dare recently gifted me a lovely book called Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words by David Whyte. Let’s add this to the mix. Here is an excerpt from Whyte’s prose poem for the word help: 

This overwhelming need for help never really changes in human life from the first day we are brought from the womb calling lustily for that commodity. We need extraordinary physical help to get through our first years, continued help through our childhood, and extraordinary emotional help and good luck to get through our adolescence. After that, the need for continual help becomes more subtle, hidden as it is by the illusion that we are suddenly free agents able to survive on our own, the one corner of the universe able to supply its own answers. 

It may be that the ability to know the necessity for help, to know how to look for that help, and then, most importantly, how to ask for it, is one of the primary transformative dynamics that allows us to emancipate ourselves into each new epoch of our lives. Without the understanding that we need a particular form of aid at every crucial threshold in our lives, and without the robust vulnerability in asking for that help, we cannot pass through the door that bars us from the next dispensation of our lives: we cannot birth ourselves. 

I can’t disassociate the word help and the idea of community. Aren’t our communities precisely the people we turn to for help? Whyte’s interpretation of the world compels much contemplation of vulnerability. But I didn’t previously associate the word community with vulnerability — I associated it with strength. Yet, come to think of it… it’s there; the vulnerability is there.

And, it turns out, there is strength in vulnerability – it’s a circle. There is an entire chapter in Platonic about vulnerability. To truly become strong we must be deeply supported by others. Franco writes, 

For some, it’s tough to disavow individualism, because in the US, it seems like the natural order, but anthropologists Nick P. Winder and Isabelle C. Winder argue that so is vulnerability. They view vulnerability as an heirloom passed down from our primate ancestors. According to their “vulnerable ape hypothesis,” as our ancestors siphoned into small groups to travel to isolated areas with less competition and more resources, their population was too small for only the most physically fit to survive. They didn’t have enough genetic diversity for the physically “fittest” to surface, and the entire population could be wiped out in the meantime. Who survived, then, was not the strongest. 

It was those most comfortable with vulnerability.

Those who would form relationships and call upon those relationships in times of need survived. They revealed when they were starving and needed food or got others to help them build shelter. They didn’t deny their needs. They communicated them. The survivors harvested the resources of a collective, and thus no individual had to be particularly fit or strong, but in doing so, each individual was stronger than any “fittest.” If we are to be as successful as our ancestors, the vulnerable apes, we must do as Kathleen Dwyer, a social science analyst who studied relationships, instructed me: “The goal of independence is not to be completely autonomous, but to recognize when you need somebody, and know how to reach out to them to get what you need.” 

I often wonder if our community is fostering a culture of expressing our needs. Do we know where to look for help? Do we know how to ask for it? Are our friendship networks increasing or decreasing? Is our social fabric threadbare? Does it need mending? What is the difference between a friend and a family member and a neighbor and a community member? For whom are we willing to sacrifice what, and in exchange for what? 

What do you think? 

With that I give you leave to listen to the podcast (and I’ve gone ahead and linked the first episode in the series as well – The Individual and the Community is the second). I encourage you to forward this email to a friend, inviting them to join you in listening and contemplating. Perhaps you might ask them to help you make meaning of this little farrago, through the beautiful process of dialogue. 

Thank you for listening. 

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