Confessions of a Bipartite Being

(part 1 on n)

I am somewhat reluctant to publish this piece and the thoughts that it suggests, because it trespasses over current mores and wanders across taboos. I’m trying to unravel the tangle of relations between our biological natures and our self- and social images. As such, when pulling on some strings the reflections may seem anarchic, and when tugging on others it may seem dismissive of cherished ideals.

I don’t intend either. These thoughts are analytic, not prescriptive. I don’t expect anyone to act on them. There’s no advice. Just mystification.

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It isn't easy being human.

Cats don't seem to have a whole lot of trouble being cats, and saplings grow into trees with enviable grace. But we humans have a unique situation: we live halfway in the world of sensation and phenomena, and the other half in our heads; half of our life is made of instinct and experience; the other half is made of stories. And these halves don't always get along.

The number of conflicts, dramas, misunderstandings, self-torture, depressions and comedies that derive from our bipartite natures are too numerous to count. So many self-imposed strictures are toxic to our biological selves; and so many biological urges rise up through our minds to become social travesties. Very few philosophies that I'm aware of come up with even an unquiet detente. One hears "advice" like "suppress your animal desires" and contrariwise, "live life to the fullest, follow your desires". (The contrast between those two is the driving theme of The Rocky Horror Picture Show which makes it a much more profound comedy than it appears to be at first glance.) And both extremes have their reflections in monitory tales: the amoral, "logical" computer which would without hesitation destroy humanity to achieve some sort of solution to some sort of perceived/pre-programmed problem, versus the swarms of vampires giving in to vicious hungers and glorying in violence. There are gods in different mythologies embodying these extremes, too: Dionysus versus Apollo, Jehovah versus Satan, etc. Where can a confused mortal go to find a happy medium?

Actually, I'm not sure a medium is even possible. Certainly not a happy one. Freud seemed not to think so in his Civilization and Its Discontents. And someone wrote (I can't find the quote at the moment) "Maturity is the acceptance of conflict." 

To give a few concrete examples of the problem: I am 72 years old and I'm attracted to the bodies of women who are 30 to 50 years younger than I am. My body wants to touch them, and have them pay attention to me. Of course, I'm perfectly aware that each of those bodies contains a human personality with whom I have little or nothing in common, whose goals and desires and tastes have nothing to do with mine, and who would be appalled if I were to approach them with anything more intimate than a smile. On the other, I have a lot in common with my female friends who are approximately my own age, even though I am not physically drawn to them. So, of course, being a civilized (and hopefully not creepy) person, I don't flirt with younger women. But that doesn't quell the inner desires.

Here's another confession. I am a biologist, and I like to think that I hold a deep interest and abiding warmth for most living organisms. I have a bird feeder in my backyard that's a buffet for a pair of Steller's jays (Percy and Annabeth) and the occasional visiting crow and invading squirrel. When I find flies in my house I try to lure them outside, and I find myself apologizing to spiders when I have to break their webs to get out my basement door. But yesterday at sunset, I saw two large rats eating peanuts from the bird feeder, and I was filled with a surprising anger. I wanted to kill them. And I never want to kill anything! (Well, maybe mosquitoes.) And I wondered where the feeling came from. Rats aren't all that different from squirrels. And I like squirrels. The rats do gnaw their way into my house, but the big flicker that pecked its way into my attic did a lot more damage, and I don't feel murderous about him. So where did this visceral hatred come from? I can imagine it's a biological urge related to millenia of conflict. I feel similarly about maggots. Perhaps a primitive part of me knows that they're stealing my food, sullying my den, and making me and my cubs ill. Another possibility is, of course, that I have been conditioned by the stories about these evil, plague-ridden, destructive, un-cute rodents. It's very hard for me to discern the difference. [BTW, this latter observation is an important jumping off point to think about racial and religious prejudices.] We humans have a hard time distinguishing personal experience from stories garnered from childhood or from people we consider to be leaders.

I think in order to become complete (or at least, graceful) human beings we have to accept the needs of our bodies as well as the needs of our minds. Stories: the accretion of pseudo-experience via speech and reading, are as essential to our whole being as food, water, shelter, sex and excretion. There's no such thing as a naive, wild-type human. Stories, culture, are part of our makeup. I think in order to come to any kind of peace with our dual existence we have to come to a deeper understanding and acceptance of our own natures. As Alexander Pope wrote in An Essay on Man, "The proper study of mankind is man."

Anyway, I would like to consider the sources of some of these conflicts. To my mind, the ability to abstract has a lot to do with it. When I look at the parts of the living world absent the human kind of consciousness, the human way of abstracting, it seems to me that it is self-limiting and graceful. There are conflicts but not wars. There are deaths, but not genocides. There is territoriality, but not colonialism. There is competition over mates, but not murder. The tendency to abstract a value or a desire – land, mates, status, power, food – and pursue it far beyond the bounds of biological need and environmental carrying capacity – is uniquely human. The social constructs that would work for angels or robots would never work for bickering, dominance-seeking, greedy, lustful, big beautiful primates like us.

I want to try to examine some of these confusions in more detail. I absolutely don't expect to come up with any solutions. I'm not even certain that solution is the right concept. You kind of have to understand and abstract a problem in order to have a solution. I'm just looking for a deeper understanding. Mostly for myself.

So, with enough time and gumption I'll try to untangle some of these knots that I find confusing and dismaying. I like to think that once untangled I'll discover it's all one piece of yarn – but that's probably one of those simplistic abstractions I'm trying to avoid.