I may have been at my happiest in 6th grade. So far as I could perceive, I was untroubled; this is not because my life was an idyll, but because I couldn’t perceive my life or myself very well at all; I wasn’t paying attention to “my life” or “myself”; I didn’t know that anything was wrong, and now, after decades of time spent reflecting on all the things that were terribly wrong, I’m once again not sure anything was wrong. It was what it was. It’s hard at 42 to recover even the form of one’s internal monologue from that age, but whatever it made of the darker dynamics of my childhood, it seems to have been airy and sparse in a way that, to a frenzied, dense, and soggy adult consciousness, feels confidently free and beautiful.
At school that year, I was given a book called “Values,” but it was not a handbook or prescriptive in the least; it was a collection of essays, reflections, and even some plays relating in some interrogatory or exploratory way to moral questions. It was full of dilemmas or recontextualizations that challenged and amused and pleased at that age. What if plants felt pain? Would aliens looking at earth from space think cars were the planet’s dominant organism, and we just their organs? (It was the 1980s).
One essay stayed with me, although I cannot find the author or recall the name. But it asserted that the history of humanity entails, or at least features, the expansion of “circles of empathy.” In this telling, humans of the distant past cared only for themselves or their family; then came villages, in which we cared about far more people and cooperated more too; then tribes, then cities, then states and faiths and so on, all the rather larger circles of empathy we know today. The author said that for progress to continue, we each had to expand our circle of empathy to include everyone, the whole world.
This sounded right to a 6th grader, or at least, to me. Here was an observed, narratively (if in no way quantitatively) linear trend in history, so far as I could tell (not very); since history was well-known to be roughly improving, no matter how much we all complained, this phenomenon of expanding circles of empathy seemed correlated with historical progress and with much of what I think of as good (for example: large enough circles of empathy to make wars less likely; the deprioritizing of differences; etc.).
This little theory no longer really sounds like anything to me now. I barely accept the validity of the involved concepts. But if I try to take it seriously, I see it very differently today than I did then. Larger circles of empathy suggest to me larger circles of antipathy, and more tension and difficulty within each circle too. There’s a larger border to patrol and more fractious individuals and constituencies to police to ensure community integrity. As scale increases, the scope of potential action does too, but at the same time the challenges of coordination explode, creating immense pressure for something dramatic to happen just as it becomes impossible for people to agree what needs to happen or how. Inaction is intolerable, though: the vast circle of empathy abuts so many enemies, touches so many threats; it becomes a landlocked nation surrounded by foes, on the verge of both civil war and invasion.
On its face this seems like a darker view of humanity. But I am much more positive about humanity now than I was then, when adolescence had already begun to infect my thinking and an idiotic contempt for “how stupid and mean everyone is” arose in me. Today, I’m very sunny on people as a whole. I’m just less sunny on linear teleologies. I used to regard the many cyclical histories in religions as very odd, but no longer. History seems structurally paradoxical to me: a fusion of undeniable linear progress, something constant, and mysterious cyclical repetitions, possibly yielding some kind of overall balance that results in nothing changing while everything changes.
I was in a conversation today in which the subject was how we as individuals change, and the varying rates at which we change, over the course of a lifetime. We discussed how in adulthood, one’s perceptions will change dramatically without much impact on how one behaves, such that one seems not to be changing at all while one’s own experiences have never been more constantly revolutionized. I believe it’s often asserted that history is like this: while something —material conditions, technology, political structures— changes, something else —human nature— remains the same. For the persistence of human nature to matter, I think we need to have an expansive sense of what human nature means. For if it’s only, say, “our drives and instincts,” it seems hardly sufficient to disrupt the linearity of progress, too mild a force to successfully counteract e.g. the highly-consequential march of technology.
But human nature isn’t only our drives and instincts. It’s also a nearly-fixed framework that structures, again, our perceptions. A primitive human surveys her environment and, to some extent, affixes “good” to what is best in it, “bad” to what is worst in it; “happy” to the feeling she has when engaged by the good, “miserable” to the feeling associated with the bad, and so on. A modern human does the same. That the environment surveyed has improved so much perhaps does not change the relative weighting of the good and the bad as much as we’d hope. We find much intolerable about this world, however we improve it. An aging person experiences great change without seeming to adopt new behaviors because perception is evolving in great bursts; a progressing world seems never to change because perception is not evolving as quickly as what we create. Is this another paradox?
(Or is human nature “evolving” after all, due to medical miracles or micro-plastics or a wiser culture or superior children’s board books?).
One: what of our shared world is realer, the perceptions and experiences of peoples, or their infant morality rate and GDP per capita and UN Human Rights Index score? (They must be correlated, right?) Two: which part of you is realer, more “who you are,” your perceptions and experiences of the world, or your behavior and outward appearance and social reputation? (They must be correlated, right?) The two questions should have the “same” answer, but I can’t tell. If they do not, is that part of why scale is always a problem: because large groups of individuals are fundamentally different than groups of individuals, even though they are made of individuals? There is something that breaks the symmetry or congruity of these things, individuals and crowds, but it remains unclear to me what it is, or why this should be so. Whatever it is, I suspect it also breaks the model of expanding circles of empathy, a theory which I think has other flaws besides (chief among them: a naive view of what empathy is and how enduring it is). Humanity will divide as it scales; humanity will degrade as it transcends; humanity will be shit and champagne, rising and falling in a way that when I’m happy seems like beautiful dynamical grace and when I’m unhappy feels like an inescapable diabolical contraption.
The key thing is probably to be like a 6th grader and simply not pay that much attention to any of this.
Not a comment really but three associations as I was reading this:
1. Religion, originally from "relegere": "to go through again/to repeat."
2. Fitzgerald: "I like large parties. They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy."
3. Thucydides, circa 400 BCE, in his introduction to The Peloponnesian War (which remains as relevant as ever in its predictions and lessons): "It will be enough for me, however, if these words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future. My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last forever."
Hey, Mills, remember how I asked you to tell me if you started posting your writings and you said "Yes, of course"