The Human Condition

"....[I]t should be intuitively obvious to the casual observer..."

Twenty some odd years ago I worked in Burlington, Vermont for a megalomaniacal corporation with an ego big enough to match its bottom line and market share. While I was there I took advantage of their educational opportunities to further my skills, and signed up to complete the regular Calculus I through IV sequence. Since my company was rolling in so much cash, they hired a professor from the University of Vermont ("Groovy UV") to come on site to teach, we got regular college credit at no personal expense, and everyone was happy. Well, that was until we started taking Calculus.

I had a very strange professor for Calc II & III. He had a quirky sense of humor. While he may have floored his colleagues at conventions of professors of higher mathematics, it was pretty much lost on us as our brains oozed out our ears trying to understand, what I have come to believe, is impossible to understand. He had one phrase that he used when he had just explained something none of us got: "[I]t should be intuitively obvious to the casual observer....". I understood the humor of the phrase, though I believe it was lost on most every one else.

I'll get back to that phrase is a little bit.

The most terrifying and gratifying day of my life was May 24, 1993. The day my child was born and I became a father. Having suffered health problems since the day I was born, I was scared shitless that I might pass on the same issues that plagued me my entire life to my child. We consulted doctors and they assured us there was almost no chance, but until the moment I saw for myself, there's no describing the agony I felt at what might befall my child for the sin of having me for a Dad. After the delivery, I went with the nurse to the clean up room where the baby is cleaned up, measured, weighed, and the like. At that moment I knew what my parents must have felt like when the doctors told them there were problems with their child. But everything came out fine, there were no health issues, and I was the proud father of a bouncing baby girl!

I bring this up because I've heard a phrase more than a few times over the last 13 years and I've come to believe it. When you become an adult, you are only half grown up. Its not until you raise a child that you fully grow up. Ain't that the truth! You have no idea the fun it can be raising a child. Christmas comes alive like you haven't experienced since you were a kid. To see their eyes light up at all the "stuff!" Easter egg hunts, Halloween, first day of school, first time swimming, words can't describe it, you need to experience it. A few years ago we bought her her first two wheel bike. I was in the kitchen and noticed her sitting on it for the first time in the back yard. She had the big, goofy, over-sized helmet we bought, and she was hunched over the handle bars. I watched wondering what she was doing when she suddenly lifted her head, made the sign of the cross and then tried riding it for the first time. It was then I realized she was praying to God to not let her die on this monstrosity. She was scared as heck, asking for God's help, but nothing was going to stop her from trying!

I would be remiss if I didn't mention all the pitfalls that come with being a new parent. Another heart stopping moment is when your brand new family checks out of the hospital. Did you know the only requirement to taking a new born baby home from the hospital is that you have an appropriate child seat? The orderly looks in the car, and if you have a place to put the baby, off you go. I don't know what happens if you don't, because we did. Then you drive home at about three miles an hour, go inside, and guess what? You have a baby! There are no tests to pass, no certifications to qualify, no nothing. It's your kid, go home. And if you have to go back to the hospital, and they see something questionable, the state steps in. Talk about a sobering moment!

Don't get me wrong, we did our homework as best we could. We took the Lamaze courses, we took the baby care classes, we read the books, I highly recommend "The First Twelve Months" to any expecting parents who may be reading this. And here is where I'm going with the baby stuff.

Babies don't know anything when they're born. It's almost safe to say they know absolutely nothing, but not completely true. Babies are born with several instincts, other than that, they are a compete blank slate. Doctors check for, if I remember correctly, seven different ones. Among them is the gag instinct, the falling backwards instinct (when you feel like your going to fall and your eyes bug out and you flop around like a moron). Another one is walking. If a new born is held up over a surface, their legs will mimic walking (though they can't actually do it, their bones are like wet noodles at this stage) but they will make the movement. They loose this instinct after a few weeks, but it comes back in a few years when they do start walking.

We were fortunate while in the new baby section of the hospital to have a day nurse who was my cousin's wife. Family! She was so kind, and so caring, and so helpful words can't explain how much she helped us. Did you know newborns don't even know how to eat? Their mouth will suck, but they haven't the slightest clue as to what to do. The baby and the mother both need to learn how to breast feed.

I'm getting closer to my point!

Humans are blessed with having the largest, most functional, most developed brains on the entire planet. I'm sure some greenie out there would scoff at me and point to dolphins or porpoises, to which I reply: Apollo moon landing baby! There is one major drawback though - birth. How does one get a brain that large through the birth canal of a female human? It doesn't fit. So what evolution has come up with is the brain is mush, the skull is elastic, and the baby's head changes shape during birth. Only up until the last hundred years or so, giving birth was a major cause of death among women and children worldwide. It still is in most of the world. Having a brain that's not much more than oatmeal solves evolution's problem of getting a big brain from the womb to the world, but it presents many other problems. Such as, you have a baby with a brain like oatmeal and a head shaped like a cone. They know absolutely nothing. Zero. Zip. NOTA. (I remember at about four months, looking at my daughter with her cone head and thinking "damn, with that head, you are ugly! Oh well, you're mine and I love you anyway." Thanks goodness it does eventually round out.)

When a human is born, they know how to sleep, they know they are hungry (though not what to do about it), they know how to crap, and they know how to cry. And that's all folks. A puppy or a kitten can be weaned from their mother between six to twelve weeks, then off they go. At twelve weeks, humans can't even see. Some animals do spend a few years teaching their young how to hunt and survive before sending them out into the world, at a few years most humans can't even speak or walk. Everything a human knows, everything a human believes, everything they are absolutely, completely, 100% sure of is taught to them. Practically nothing is instinctual. Nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing is "...intuitively obvious to the casual observer." Nothing. I told you I got the Calc professor's joke!

While I proudly stand on the nurture side of the 'nature vs. nurture' debate, allow me a caveat: I fully understand how genes play out in this debate. I have no doubt Michael Jordan's kids are tall, fast, and most likely excellent athletes. I also don't doubt that parents with super-sized IQ's probably have kids with high intelligence also. But in my opinion, by and large, how, when and where a human grows up has a lot more impact on their lives than who their parents are. If the smartest person in the world grows up on an remote, isolated farm, chances are all they'll probably know is the smartest way to run a farm. And as for intuition, to me, it's nothing more than having a brain that can make certain associations so quickly, even the person themselves don't realize it.

Now another twist.

For some time, I've been personally studying the origins of Christianity, the Bible - New Testament in particular. Every week during Sunday Mass, several times I repeat the words "The Word of the Lord." Being naturally curious (maybe there are some instincts we inherit?) I've been interested in learning just who decided what is the Word of the Lord and who decided what wasn't the Word of the Lord. Along the way, I've learned about a vast cast of characters. One in particular stands out, St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. At first glance he comes off as a whacko. He's the guy who decided that Original Sin (Adam, Eve, the serpent, that stuff) was passed on from generation to generation via sperm, and all we need do is look back of 1,600 hundred years of Church sponsored sexual repression to see how that worked out. I believe it was also the basis for the theology backing the virgin birth and Immaculate Conception, where as since Jesus wasn't conceived by human sperm he was therefore born without original sin. Digging deeper, he did have some (emphasis on some) reasonable logic to make his claim. If a child is born free of sin, then why were so many children born with such horrible defects? Remember this was the early 400's so there was much suffering. Missing limbs, blind, scared, already infected with diseases. How could something so innocent be plagued by such misery? His rationale was that humans must be born with the punishment of Original Sin. He has a point. A very shaky one, easily dismissed with the help of today's science, but at the time? Think about it.

In a nutshell, St. Augustine believed that the world we live in was the punishment for Original Sin, we are doomed as humans to live in this misery, in pain, with the death we all know is coming, ruled over by an imperfect government and society, and our best hope is to pray the Church leads society as best as possible to deal with our collective punishment. Not a very inspiring vision, and from that I can see how Christianity had such a gloomy image for so many thousands of years. It is a startling thought to realize that we must live every day of our lives, surrounded by death, knowing, with out a doubt, that is our fate. Crucifix any one?

Personally I believe we should take this one more step. It's not just that we must live in this imperfect world, surrounded by pain, misery, starvation, agony, death and impending death, but also with the fact that we have no inborn instincts on how to survive other than violence. That's about all humans come packaged with. If something scares you, won't feed you, won't help you, you feel this over reaching urge to choke the living shit out of it. By the way, that's one definition I've heard for stress. Other than that, we are pretty much at society's mercy. It exists, we don't understand it, but we'd better pick it up pretty damn quick or else society will deal with us as it pleases.

So how does all this add up? Is there a point to all my rambling text? Of course there is. And you though I was just trying to sell you Amway!

There are many blessings to being a human. I can't tell you the joy when my young daughter told me I was a gift from God to her. Excuse me while I get misty here. There is also great draw backs to it. For one thing, we know nothing about anything. Everything we know, everything we believe in, everything we base our entire lives on, the morals we profess, the way we treat our neighbors, our family, ourselves, is learned. Bigotry? Learned. Hatred? Learned. Thievery? Learned. Murder? Learned. Love? Learned. Compassion? Learned. Love of learning? Learned.

Now here's where it gets tricky.

The Church my family attends (yes I drag them with me pretty much every Sunday) is a beautiful old building. It was built in 1900. Last year during Christmas Mass, the lector pointed out this was the 105th Christmas Mass celebrated in this very building. For 105 years, people have been coming to this very building to worship, to pray, to hope, to Baptize their children, to bury their dead. There's a hall underneath the Church where countless new couples held their wedding receptions. One hundred and five years worth of Lenten Soup Supers. Countless children's parties. Up in the main Worship area (that's where the alter and the pews are) are three massive stained glass windows. The one on the east side is the Resurrection and it catches the morning light perfectly. The bottom reads something like "Donated by the veterans of St. James Parish in memory of their comrades in the 'Great War' who made the ultimate sacrifice for liberty."

The Great War.

For those who aren't history fanatics like me, that's the older name for what modern society now calls World War I. At the time, 1918, it was the worst man-made catastrophe ever experienced by civilization. Five million dead in four years. At that time people thought it was such a horror that humanity would never attempt such an atrocity again, and so it's also called "The War To End All Wars". Boy did they ever get that wrong. How this ties into my theme is this: the generation that fought World War I, the lost generation, those who inhabited this society we have inherited today, thought they had reached a pinnacle, a peak, a summit in human history, never again would things be the way they were, because of their trials and tribulations, society, civilization, humanity itself would be irrevocably changed. Guess again.

But then again, doesn't every generation believe the same? They are the masters of their environment, their society, living at the peak of history. We live in today's world, standing on the shoulders of every generation that came before us. We have the cumulative knowledge, wisdom and experience of all those before us. Or do we? If one generation of humans can realize the futility of fighting the 'War to End All Wars' then how come the next generation went on to fight World War II? And then Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War, and now repeated forays into the Middle East? I thought the lost generation solved that problem? What happened? I'll tell you what happened. Life happened.

Louis S. B. Leakey is credited with the phrase those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it. Catchy, but I don't see it selling a lot of t-shirts. What is this history that we need to learn so we don't make the same mistakes? Its the documented achievements and failures of all those other generations before us, who, like us, thought they were the peak, the pinnacle, the summit of humanity and civilization. And as they were wrong in their assumption, we will be wrong in our assumption. We are not the pinnacle of humanity. We are hairless monkeys who came into this world not even knowing how to eat. And just as surely we will pass, leaving nothing more than a brief watermark in history that future generations will pretend to read about in history class, while in reality waiting for the bell to ring so they can sneak out of school, act real cool, stay out all night.

Society is a concept unto itself. We are born knowing nothing, we are raised by society in general, hopefully by our parents in particular, and we must absorb the lessons of life as we grow into adults. My generation didn't build the Church I attend, others did, we just inherited it. It's up to us to make sure it's safe, sound and secure when we pass it on to the next generation that will rise up to take our place, and in turn, they will do so for the next generation. The same happens with all institutions: schools, universities, governments, charities, what have you. And the key to this long missive is, we do not shape the institutions around us - regardless of how sure we are that we do - so much as they shape us. My daughter will grow up as a Catholic. There are good aspects about religion as well as bad. I hope she picks up the good ones, and ignores the bad. She will know little or next to nothing about Islam or Judaism, other than what she picks from society in general. She won't learn racism or bigotry from me, because I am not a racist or bigot, so I don't have those traits to pass on to her. My father grew up in a different generation when there was no talk of sparing the rod. He was regularly whooped to stay in line. Yet he made the conscience choice to not pass those traits on to me and my siblings. Therefore they will not be handed down to my daughter, so she won't hand it down to her children. Proof the chain can be broken.

One last curve ball.

I'm a big Beatles fan. I grew up in the 1970's and it was so not cool to like the old hippie groups like the Beatles from the 1960's. I didn't care, I liked the music. I bought a couple of books on them and came across an interview with John Lennon, given after the band broke up. He answered a question about all the anger the fans showered on Yoko for destroying the best group in the world. His response was very insightful. He said the fans have all the old records if they want to listen to them, and then pointed out how a generation that claimed it was in favor of such radical change, howled like babies when something changed, namely the Beatles broke up. He hit that one right on the nail. Humans always claim to love change, new adventures, see new places, meet new people, but in reality, over all, most humans really don't like change much. When things change, we can't be sure how they'll turn out. Sure people want to see new fads, new foods, new shows, new games. But change one ingredient in Coke and all hell breaks loose. Could be good, could be better, but could also be much, much worse. Not all humans are like that, but experience has taught me most are. Those that don't usually end up out of the gene pool if they don't come to their senses before it's too late.

Why don't we like change? Because we like stability. We like the usual, same old, day to day things. We might bitch and gripe about it, but we like our lives to be predictable. We know how to deal with the predictable, it's the unpredictable that scares us. What happens if we don't know how to react? If we don't know what to do? What if something bad happens? What will we do? You may not be in love with your job, but it sure beats the hell out of not having a regular pay check to keep a roof over your head, and food in your fridge. But the real dichotomy is, everything changes. Nothing stays the same for long. The lost generation from World War I is almost gone. The generation that fought World War II is steadily slipping away. And some day our generation will be lost to history too.

I believe it's this strange dichotomy which accounts for much of the stress and problems in our world. Regardless of what we say, what we think, what we believe, deep down, at some level we all know there is no stability in the world. Anything could happen at any time. Floods, hurricanes, fires, storms, asteroids, heart attacks, the heart break of cirrhosis, anything at any time. Kind of unsettling isn't it? At this very moment you could have a single cell in your body go bad and cancer breaks out. A single clot in an artery breaks free and wham, a stroke. We live our lives pretending to ourselves and others that there is some type of stability in world that in reality is governed by chaos.

And it's that veneer of stability that some of us hold so dear, that we refuse to part with it for any reason at all. How can some one you know, who appears to be sane in every other aspect, appear to be completely insane in others? My theory is that person came into this world as a blank slate, grew up under particular circumstances, shaped by various institutions, and the lessons learned from those experiences shaped and molded the thin veil they use to shield themselves from the impending chaos we all know exists, but prefers to ignore. Any attempts to penetrate that personal shield causes them to question the very stability they use to protect themselves from the inevitable instability of life. And that's asking an awful lot of a person.

How can a regular sane person also be a racist? Because they grew up that way, and for them, that's the way life works, and they would rather argue and fight than come to the realization that their view of the world might be wrong. Or even that there might be a different way to view the world. Way too big a chance they might have to face the reality that they have no real control of the world around them, and that in the end, they will just be dust. Maybe if they're real lucky, they might be worthy of a few lines in a dusty old history book. Or maybe a vague, general reference on a beautiful stained glass window, showering colored sunlight down on a group of youngsters making their first Holy Communion on a Sunday morning, taking their first steps at learning how to exist within the society and the institutions they will all too soon inherit.