Belonging And The Need For Collective Identity–How Community Has Become A Higher Good Rather Than A Means To An End

Man is a social animal, and communities are as important now as they were in the Paleolithic to ensure survival.  Cooperation among like members of a tribe, village, or region has always been essential to survival and longevity.  Different communities have valued the place and value of the individual differently giving more or less importance to individual enterprise and expression, but in all cases a culture is known more for its collectivity – its culture – than specific members of it.

At the same time this sense of collective identity and culture have contributed to war.  Communities endowed with a sense of identity and loyalty will do anything to protect themselves.  Such protection has always included expansion of the perimeter, acquisition of more land and territory to provide a buffer between one community and the next.  Survival has always been based on natural resources – arable land, favorable climate, and water – and when these resources become scarce or when their carrying capacity diminishes with increased population, communities become aggressors.

In short, there is little more to community than survival.  An aggregation of individuals into groups gives strength in numbers, and this calculus has never changed over time.  America, perhaps the most individualistic nation on earth relies as much on social groupings for strength and survival as the most primitive Amazonian tribe.  While in many quarters groups are given a higher, intrinsic value, they still remain only operational units in service to the welfare and interests of their members.

In what has been called the most fractious political era in American history, allegiance to political philosophy and the parties that promote it has never been more passionate and determined.  There seems to be no way to close the cultural divide between liberals and conservatives for the differences are not only profound but more tenaciously held.  How to reconcile these differences when they are based on world view, convictions and beliefs about perfectibility, human nature, and the role of the individual within society?

These political passions have been extended to ancillary but related causes.  Environmentalism is part of a more general philosophy of human progress.  There is no such thing as a hardwired, ineluctable human nature; and that the violence, aggression, territorialism, and acquisitiveness experience throughout history need not necessarily continue if we organize for positive, productive change.  The movement for civil rights is as much a statement of higher purpose (social harmony, universal justice, morality) than a political and economic one.  Those with passionate, personal allegiance to this cause believe they are doing right and aspiring to a higher good rather than just facilitating a necessary social adjustment.  Protecting the planet has less to do with mitigating man-made influences which affect climate than it does with aspiration to a higher good.  Society, like the individuals which comprise it, has become greedy, insatiable, and immoral in its pursuit of wealth; and stopping the assault on the world’s natural life.

Those who adhere to more conservative values group together for the same type of philosophical reasons. A society which devalues the worth of the individual and places collective action over individual enterprise will necessarily fail in its objectives.  It is the individual who has been endowed with God-given rights, a spiritual endowment, and the intelligence and energy to succeed.  Communities, necessary for order, law, and a degree of social organization, are the beneficiaries of individual enterprise, never the other way around. Conservatives are no less passionate about their beliefs than any other political grouping, and join together just as militantly.

This may all be straightforward and understandable – politics and political philosophy have a bearing on taxes, land disposition, opportunity, and prosperity – why do we insist to such a degree on belonging to groups which have little to do with the promotion of our interests? Labels and denominations are common everywhere from religious faith to football.  Belonging to men’s groups, PTAs, neighborhood associations, and a thousand other groups organized to promote or protect, serve, accommodate, or defend seems to have far more benefit for the member than their beneficiaries.

While community organization and action have been acclaimed for their commitment and interest, change is more function of macro-economic and –political investment than any small-scale collective enterprise.  If one were truly interested in the ends rather than the means, then focus would be exclusively on effecting policy change or even changing the nature of governance.   The current political debate in the United States over tax law will have dramatic outcomes; and will affect every American citizen for good or bad.  Similarly, if one were truly serious about the dangers of corporate America, then individuals would stop buying products, change their patterns of investment, resist and thwart corporate intrusion into medicine, insurance, and commercial services.  Belonging to groups which have a singular and objective purpose – to change public policy and corporate investment – would make sense.  Passion and identity are diversions and belonging to groups which espouse ‘higher values’ makes little sense.

Some observers have suggested that as society becomes more complex - more socially, politically, and economically diverse in a bewildering information age – the more anxious people become, and not only need the support of groups which tend to their interests but groups of likeminded, sharing, and supportive people. Membership in a church where social commitment is as important as spiritual evolution provides a special level of comfort that does not exist outside the congregation.  Where else can one hear that faith and social justice are one? Where else do moral right and spiritual right coincide?  Residents of old, wealthy communities may join together to stop Wall Street investment and the intrusion of corporate interests into what has always been a unique, traditional, cultural enclave.  They do so to protect their patrimony and the integrity of land and community and in so doing strengthen their sense of place and belonging. Not only will a simple way of life be disrupted by ‘New York’ interests, but the likely end of an old and storied history of tradition, money, and class.

So what about football, and why are fans so passionate in their support of local teams? The biggest college stadiums accommodate more than one hundred thousand people, are always full every week of the season.  Fans support the Mets, the Giants, the Phils, or the Nats even though the team itself – players, managers, top management, and ownership – may have changed completely.  The team a fan in New York  or Chicago started to support twenty years ago is unrecognizable today.  All that is left is the name. Why is that enough to generate such enthusiasm, passion, and undying support?

The late-night listeners to WFAN, a sports radio station in New York not only call in to comment on trades, ownership, or management; but to share their feelings.  A loss by the Yankees or the Mets is not simply a loss but a letdown.  A victory is not only a move upward in the standings but a vindication of team and individual worth.  Fans always speak personally. We should trade for so-and-so…We need to get more bats in the lineup.  These are the fans with season’s tickets, paraphernalia, and membership in the community of supporters.  What does such fandom provide?  Diversion from 9-5, divorce, settlements, wives, and politics? Or a label when none other is available?

The true, unencumbered, unaffiliated individual is a rare bird, an outlier, and a threat.  A lack of affiliation is taken for a lack of commitment; and a lack of commitment can only mean a lack of moral values, faith, and sincerity.  Anyone who does not belong to something is suspect.  Belonging is a higher value which shows the better side of humanity.  A person who belongs cannot, ipso facto, be niggardly or selfish.  Belonging bestows value as well as provide it.

What’s more remarkable about the need for belonging is the fact that we all die alone.  Ivan Ilyich in Tolstoy’s story of the same name, has constructed his life to limit any meaningful personal engagement with his family, colleagues, or associates; and he was surprised at the unexpected early end to his life that he was totally alone.  He was afraid of dying, not because of what he was leaving behind, but that he was facing an uncertain eternity alone.  We all die alone, Tolstoy said.  Nothing else matters, and nothing that has come before matters.  Such an epiphany should not come so late, he implied, but better late than never.

A Fox In The Hen House–The Animal Sexual Metaphors Of Lawrence And London

She lowered her eyes, and suddenly saw the fox. He was looking up at her. Her chin was pressed down, and his eyes were looking up. They met her eyes. And he knew her. She was spellbound--she knew he knew her. So he looked into her eyes, and her soul failed her. He knew her, he was not daunted.

She struggled, confusedly she came to herself, and saw him making off, with slow leaps over some fallen boughs, slow, impudent jumps. Then he glanced over his shoulder, and ran smoothly away. She saw his brush held smooth like a feather, she saw his white buttocks twinkle. And he was gone, softly, soft as the wind.

She put her gun to her shoulder, but even then pursed her mouth, knowing it was nonsense to pretend to fire. So she began to walk slowly after him, in the direction he had gone, slowly, pertinaciously. She expected to find him. In her heart she was determined to find him. What she would do when she saw him again she did not consider. But she was determined to find him. So she walked abstractedly about on the edge of the wood, with wide, vivid dark eyes, and a faint flush in her cheeks. She did not think. In strange mindlessness she walked hither and thither…

She took her gun again and went to look for the fox. For he had lifted his eyes upon her, and his knowing look seemed to have entered her brain. She did not so much think of him: she was possessed by him. She saw his dark, shrewd, unabashed eye looking into her, knowing her. She felt him invisibly master her spirit. She knew the way he lowered his chin as he looked up, she knew his muzzle, the golden brown, and the greyish white. And again she saw him glance over his shoulder at her, half inviting, half contemptuous and cunning (The Fox).

The sexual metaphor of a fox in the hen house is not new –  cunning male predator, a society of women, sexual flurry, rape, and satisfaction – but for Lawrence there is much more than simple sexual intrusion.  It is a matter of will, dominance, and submission.  March can not only forget the fox, she looks for him. 

March also was not conscious that she thought of the fox. But whenever she fell into her half-musing, when she was half rapt and half intelligently aware of what passed under her vision, then it was the fox which somehow dominated her unconsciousness, possessed the blank half of her musing. And so it was for weeks, and months. No matter whether she had been climbing the trees for the apples, or beating down the last of the damsons, or whether she had been digging out the ditch from the duck-pond, or clearing out the barn, when she had finished, or when she straightened herself, and pushed the wisps of her hair away again from her forehead, and pursed up her mouth again in an odd, screwed fashion, much too old for her years, there was sure to come over her mind the old spell of the fox, as it came when he was looking at her.

It was as if she could smell him at these times. And it always recurred, at unexpected moments, just as she was going to sleep at night, or just as she was pouring the water into the tea-pot to make tea--it was the fox, it came over her like a spell.

So the months passed. She still looked for him unconsciously when she went towards the wood. He had become a settled effect in her spirit, a state permanently established, not continuous, but always recurring. She did not know what she felt or thought: only the state came over her, as when he looked at her.

He is the predatory male, frightening, and completely sexual – an animal with no sense of propriety, no moral code, no social justice, no complex motives or considerations.  Henry wants March only sexually; and she responds.  No man has wanted her with such sexual desire and with such determined, unalloyed will.  Henry is the fox, a male of uncomplicated and simple instincts, without human reserves. 

When you really go out to get a deer, you gather yourself together, you coil yourself inside yourself, and you advance secretly, before dawn, into the mountains. It is not so much what you do, when you go out hunting, as how you feel. You have to be subtle and cunning and absolutely fatally ready. It becomes like a fate. Your own fate overtakes and determines the fate of the deer you are hunting. First of all, even before you come in sight of your quarry, there is a strange battle, like mesmerism.

Your own soul, as a hunter, has gone out to fasten on the soul of the deer, even before you see any deer. And the soul of the deer fights to escape. Even before the deer has any wind of you, it is so. It is a subtle, profound battle of wills which takes place in the invisible. And it is a battle never finished till your bullet goes home.

When you are really worked up to the true pitch, and you come at last into range, you don't then aim as you do when you are firing at a bottle. It is your own will which carries the bullet into the heart of your quarry. The bullet's flight home is a sheer projection of your own fate into the fate of the deer. It happens like a supreme wish, a supreme act of volition, not as a dodge of cleverness.

The sexual metaphor of the bullet going home after the hunt is not new, but Lawrence again adds the dimension of will.  Male and female will always struggle to assert their will and to dominate.  Gender itself has nothing to due with sexual victory; and Lawrence is neither feminist nor chauvinist.  He, like Albee in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, takes no sides; but only comments on the inescapable willful, sexual combat which will always occur between men and women.

True intimacy can only result with its settling.  There is no winning or losing – no victory for patriarchy, misogyny, or male supremacy or for the castrating female; only a sexual equilibrium. The  male must be a fox, a hunter, an unstoppable animal force; and the female must be receptive to his advances. Yet a willing submission has nothing to do with capitulation or subservience.   It is the end game of sexual combat when male pursuit is balanced by female receptiveness – when the particular sexual configuration between male and female is agreed upon.



Doris Lessing wrote:

This animal obsesses March, the stronger of the two women. From the first, this beast is more than itself. "For he had lifted his eyes upon her and his knowing look entered her brain. She did not so much think of him: she was possessed by him." The biblical echoes here are part of the spell: the fox again and again "came over her like a spell".

Strongly set as this tale is in its social place, we have left realism behind. So it always is with Lawrence's animals. His feeling for them, or with them, is much more than anthropomorphism or the sentimentality these islands are sometimes accused of. The fox is representative of some force or power, alien, inhuman, other, part of all old world, inaccessible to humans. Except of course through intermediaries, like Lawrence, whom it is easy to see in a line of descent from the old shamans, whose knowledge of animals was a reaching out to other dimensions. This fox is demonic. "She felt him invisibly master her spirit."

March sees Henry, the soldier returning from the war as the fox, the intruder.

March sees him as the fox. She dreams of singing outside the house, which she cannot understand and made her want to weep. She knew it was the fox singing, but when she went to touch he bit her wrist, and whisked his brush across her face, and it seemed this fiery brush was on fire because it burnt her mouth. Any old magical man or woman would have recognized this dream's fear, and power, and warnings, and its deep attraction for the forbidden.

What is forbidden is man, is men, the masculine.

Henry, like the fox, upsets the brood.  He sees the prey he wants and cares nothing for the rest of the flock.

So, one thieving fox is dead, but the human fox is alive and determined to have March. He began by coveting the little farm, but now it is the woman he wants. He is in a contest with Banford, and for a while this battle dominates the tale, and March, the contested one, is almost an onlooker. The young man detests Banford. This is a power struggle, naked and cold, like the one between the human world and the fox, ending in its death. There has to be a victim. Banford is a frail thing, dependent on March, and it is clear she will do badly without her.

Lessing concludes:

But what do we care about his pronouncements on the sex war? What stays in my mind is the entranced woman, wandering about her little farm in the darkness watching for her enemy the fox, for the white tip on his fiery brush, the ruddy shadow of him in the deep grass, then the struggle to the death between the two women and the young soldier, the long cold evenings of that winter after the war where they watch each other in the firelight. "A subtle and profound battle of wills taking place in the invisible," he says.

Jack London’s The Call of the Wild is another parable of male will and authority.  Buck is the uber-male - wild, untamed, ferocious, indomitable and dominant – while men have been corralled, harnessed, stabled, and shod. While London said that he did not set out to write a parable and comment on the human condition, he admitted that the parallels were clear.  The story of Buck is nothing if not the embodiment of the American dream, escaping from the entangling complexity of modern life to an unencumbered natural state; and the male sexual dream of uninhibited sexual victory.



More important are the influences of Darwin and Nietzsche.  Buck is an animal Superman whose indomitable will, rejection of good and evil and the morality of the Southland enable him to rule the North.  His slaughter of the Yeehats is not just retribution and revenge, but a brutal, willful savagery and the final portal to the wild.  Buck is also a perfect example of Darwinian evolution and the survival of the fittest.  Buck combines both evolutionary superiority and the unique character of animal will.

There is something even more compelling about the story of Buck – his aggressiveness, and male dominance.  There is a completeness and perfection in the male character of Buck – he has no feminine side – and his will is male, one unmistakably virile, potent, and forceful.  While many men may publicly disavow any such characteristics as primitive evolutionary throwbacks, privately they feel that they have capitulated their maleness, accommodated women far too much, and become neutered.  It is one thing to support women’s equality of opportunity and enterprise, another thing to feel emasculated by their insistent claims of emotional and intellectual superiority.



Both Lawrence and London have their feminist critics who see in both a rude chauvinism couched in Tantric and Nietzschean ethos.  Their characters are little more than cutout figures, acting out Victorian male fantasies; and their use of animal metaphors reeks of social Darwinism at its worst.

More careful readers, however, realize that Lawrence was anything but a misogynist, and that his claims to distinct, biological, incontrovertible male and female sexual natures are consistent with social and biological history.  His focus on will has nothing to do with male aggression and abuse, but the natural, common, and inevitable struggle between two different sexual species.  His conclusion that the most complete union of male and female results from an equilibrium of wills, and acceptance of male and female imperatives makes ultimate sense.  His metaphors are recognizable.

Jack London was conclusive about human will and the fundamentally animal nature in all of us.  There was no doubt that Buck was a male, that his will derived from his maleness, and that his actions were consistent with his nature; and there was no doubt in London’s mind that human males have the same predatory, defensive, and aggressive instinct.

Yet London was not the patriarchal misogynist, Victorian throwback, and primitive male of which he has been accused.  He like Lawrence understood the principle of sexual complementarity, a state which never just happens but is the result of a concerted battle of wills.

London and Lawrence were sexual realists who could not ignore gender determinism.  Their earlier counterparts Ibsen and Strindberg were no different.  Hedda Gabler, Rebekka West, and Hilde Wangel are willful women for whom sex is an after thought and female dominance uppermost.  Laura, the Captain’s wife and Miss Julie, both understand how to bring men to heel and have the will do do so; and there is far less sexual subtlety in these writers than in Lawrence.

In an age of gender spectrum, it is important to read these authors who refused to ignore sexual determinism and understood how accommodation can only result from battle.

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Paradigm Shifts–The Nature Of Cultural Change And The Inevitable Evolution Towards A Post-Human World

Ever since Thomas Kuhn popularized it with his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the notion of a “paradigm shift” has led to fascinating arguments about whether this or that break with previous scientific understanding counted as one. But that a “paradigm shift”—like the “shift” from Sir Isaac Newton’s cosmology to Albert Einstein’s, or the shift from the miasma theory of disease to the germ theory of disease—is a rupture in continuity is not in much dispute. A “paradigm shift” signals a dramatic, sudden, and unexpected break in human understanding—and thus something of a new beginning (George Weigel, First Things)

The question is whether American society has undergone a paradigm shift, whether or not the fundamental characteristics which have defined America since its inception - freedom, liberty, equality, enterprise, faith, optimism, and opportunity -   are still the most telling; and no matter how it may change, such change can only be superficial   If the principles of 1776 still apply,  then the temporal shifts in political attitudes, morality, the distribution of labor and capital, and the way society is organized and individuals perceived are only small adjustments – rearrangements of the furniture but leaving infrastructure and superstructure untouched.  If these principles are simply moorings in rising waters, then a move away from sexual polarity towards a gender spectrum is indeed fundamental and structural.  More than likely it is combination of the two and that the dramatic paradigm shift towards a post-human society is a result of both tradition and modern dynamism.

Importantly, all these socio-technological phenomena are happening at the same time.  Never before in history have such fundamentally altering changes happened individually let alone all at once.  What makes American culture so radically different from any before it is that while fundamental principles may still underlie cultural change, these principles have become so pronounced if not exaggerated, that they permit and assure an elemental and irrevocable reordering of life.

Technology has no life of its own but is enabled.  While there is room for scientific genius and inspired insight, none of the major discoveries of the past 500 years could have happened without some cultural shift.  Something was happening in Europe to have encouraged the revolutionary ideas of Copernicus and the equally radical political ideas of Machiavelli – at the same time. Both in their own way reconfigured the way one looked at the world.  Machiavelli’s amorality challenged the existing social order of kings, religion, and enterprise.  There was no such thing as chivalry, family honor, divine right, or social justice.  Human nature – aggressive, territorial, self-serving, self-protective, and ultimately ambitious – was behind all political and social events.  Idealism was folly.

Copernicus was not the first to postulate that the earth revolved around the sun and others, operating in the same early Renaissance cultural environment which enabled creative thought, had the temerity to think outside the Church, but never developed or publicized their ideas. 

While Einstein’s genius is universally respected, to say that the concept of relativity itself was new is false. Emrys Westacott has written about the history of social and moral relativism from its early origins in Ancient Greece:

Many scholars see the first reappearance of a relativistic outlook in the writings of Montaigne, which, not coincidentally, came on the heels of the publication of Sextus’ writings in the 1560s.  In “On Custom,” Montaigne compiles his own list of radically diverse mores to be found in different societies, and asserts that “the laws of conscience which we say are born of Nature are born of custom.” (Montaigne)…

In the centuries following, further trends in modern philosophy helped prepare the way for moral relativism by chipping away at people’s faith in the objectivity of ethics.  In the 17th century, Hobbes argued for a social contract view of morality that sees moral rules, like laws, as something human beings agree upon in order to make social living possible. An implication of this view is that moral tenets are not right or wrong according to whether they correspond to some transcendent blueprint; rather, they should be appraised pragmatically according to how well they serve their purpose.

Hume, like Montaigne, was heavily influenced by ancient skepticism, and this colors his view of morality.  His argument, that prescriptions saying how we should act cannot be logically derived from factual claims about the way things are, raised doubts about the possibility of proving the correctness of any particular moral point of view.  So, too, did his insistence that morality is based ultimately on feelings rather than on reason…

Perhaps most importantly Westacott writes of the influence of relativism on scientific inquiry.

With the remarkable progress of science in the 19th and 20th centuries, the fact-value distinction became entrenched in mainstream philosophy and social science.  Science came to be seen as offering value-neutral descriptions of an independently existing reality; moral claims, by contrast, came to be viewed by many as mere expressions of emotional attitudes.  This view of morality suggests that all moral outlooks are on the same logical plane, with none capable of being proved correct or superior to all the rest…These philosophical ideas prepared the ground for moral relativism mainly by raising doubts about the possibility of demonstrating that any particular moral code is objectively correct.  But anthropological research in the 19th and 20th centuries also encouraged relativism.  Indeed, many of its leading contemporary champions from Franz Boas to Clifford Gertz have been anthropologists…

In a culture where not only have traditional values eroded but also the universal respect for anything traditional, it is not surprising that without the moral underpinnings of the past, anything goes.  If prospective parents could choose from a catalogue of registered DNA – Michael Jordan’s athletic ability, Elizabeth Taylor’s beauty, the genius of Watson and Crick, or the talent of Shostakovich – then why wouldn’t they? Why wouldn’t they opt for a designer baby to exactly suit their fantasies? 

Why should anyone be content with the hand life has dealt them and not opt for the personalized, ideal world of virtual reality.  When mind and computer are finally linked, reality will have no more meaning.  if there is no distinction between virtual and ‘real’ worlds, why would anyone choose the latter? Why not dine with Louis XIV in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles or make love to an Indian princess?

The two technological advances – virtual reality (artificial intelligence) and the manipulation of the human genome – will permanently alter human character, personality, and society.  We will be unrecognizably different from all who have lived before us.

The point is that this radical paradigm shift could never have happened without the conditioning, enabling factors of culture; and in the case of America, these factors have always been there but are now expressed in more significant ways.  Our individualism, enterprise, dismissal of history in favor of opportunity, and our willingness to always grant corporate, commercial interests their sailing lanes, we are the enabling factors for eventual revolutionary technological change and ultimate paradigm shifts. We willingly give up our cookies to marketers and corporate interests because we like the personalization that they guarantee.  We barely stop to question this exaggerated mediation of normal enterprise.  We have no moral qualms about genetic modification because it can eliminate disease and psychological pathologies so why should we have any compunctions about an improvement in ability, disposition, and temperament?  Why not tinker a bit with our DNA to produce a child to our specifications?

Given both the gender revolution and genetic engineering, sexual assignment will be a matter of choice; and with it will go the suspicion of and hostility towards sexual difference.  Rogers Brubaker author of Trans, a book about rethinking racial and gender categories said the following:

The sex vs. gender distinction allows us to distinguish the inner-gender identity from the outward sexed bodied. There’s no analogous way of separating out the inner from the outer in the domain of race. The inner-gender identity can be understood as an essence that only the person concerned can know, and can be independent of the sexed body. We just can’t think about race in that way. It is incomprehensible if I tell you that I simply feel black (Interview with Emma Green, The Atlantic 10.2.16)

Forget for a moment the academic-speak of the text.   The author is on to something, although he is unaware of it.   Genetic engineering  will change forever the way we think of race, gender, beauty, or intelligence.  No longer will we be subjected to the luck of the draw, dealt genes from long-dead ancestors, look like Gainsborough portraits in the library - the Stanton chin, the Smythe nose, or the Fairfax ‘infirmity’- and wondered where exactly we came from.

Once choice becomes the rule, obsession with difference – differently-abled, alternatively-gendered, or racially distinct – will disappear.  In any case such concerns are only a temporal phenomenon borne out of need for individuality and identity in era of intense competition and unequal distribution of resources.  No one really cares what race a person is, with whom he sleeps, or what is his national origin.  Race, gender, and ethnicity have no inherent value but are only temporary markers – insignificant in and of themselves, but important signifiers in an increasingly confusing world.

In a world of genetic choice, if you want to be black, you can be black.  If you want to be gay, be gay.

America’s paradigm shift is no different than any other, but no doubt more revolutionary.  It is the perfect complex of social, cultural, historical, and technological factors, all complementing and facilitating every other.  It is perfect.