We Need Others

Fifteen months into the Covid-19 Pandemic, I asked myself what I missed most about the pre-covid days. Because of social distancing, I missed having friends for dinner. What surprised me most was that I missed the one- or two-minute conversations with the baristas and patrons of my favorite coffee shop. I always thought of myself as a lone wolf; when I was much younger, I spend hours in solitude in the high mountains surrounding Santa Fe, my hometown.

To check if my response to the experiment of social distancing was unusual, I read the Pew Report “How the Covid-19 Pandemic Has Changed American Lives.”[1] Forty-one percent of those surveyed said they missed mainly family and friends and worried about losing touch with people they used to see in person. A third of the respondents said the forced social isolation gave them more time to spend with spouses, children, or other family members. Both the negative and positive responses to the Pandemic lockdown show that we are social by nature.

Students who hated school missed their friends; neighbors who disliked each other shared beers and hot dogs at the opposite sides of the driveway; senior citizens who were critical of their children and grandchildren connected with them via Zoom every week.

Why We Need Others

The Pandemic lockdown readied most of us to see a great truth about who we are by nature. You and me and every person in every culture in every time were born radically incomplete and were completed by others, not by nature, as all the other animals are.[2]

Without others, we could not acquire language, and without language, our mental life would not be much higher than that of a chimpanzee or a bonobo. Helen Keller gives us a glimpse of how the world is experienced in the absence of language. When she was 19 months old, an acute disease, possibly scarlet fever or meningitis, left her blind and deaf. She soon “felt the need of some communication with others and began to make crude signs. A shake of the head meant ‘No’ and a nod, ‘Yes,’ a pull meant ‘Come’ and a push ‘Go.’ Was it bread [she] wanted? Then [she] would imitate the acts of cutting the slices and buttering them.”[3]

Without language, Helen’s interior life was limited to sense perception, motor skills, tactile memory, and associations. She exercised neither will nor intellect and was “carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus.” She felt anger, desire, and satisfaction; however, she never “loved or cared for anything.” She describes her inner life then as “a blank without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation, without wonder or joy.”[4]

Ms. Keller recounted that the sign language she learned from Anne Sullivan “made me conscious of love, joy, and all the emotions. I was eager to know, then to understand, afterward to reflect on what I knew and understood, and the blind impetus, which had before driven me hither and thither at the dictates of my sensations, vanished forever.”[5] She no longer lived an animal life; language freed her to be human.

Without language, without others to learn language from, the mental capacities that Ms. Keller, you, and I were born with would have not developed, and our lives would not have been much higher than that of an animal. Through language, humans bring out the full potentiality hidden in matter, advance the building of bird nests and beaver dams to architecture and engineering, the gathering of nuts to farming, squawks and barks to music, sexual reproduction to love and compassion, and limited animal perception to the intellectual jewels of modern Western culture, Newtonian physics, Maxwell’s electrodynamics, special and general relativity, quantum physics, and the biology of the physical basis of life, including the deciphering of the genetic code. 

Even a recluse who retires to a remote region of Alaska to live alone brings with him knowledge and skills acquired from prior group living. In our highly technological society, no person knows how to produce everything that he or she consumes or uses in a single day. What person knows how to grow broccoli, make eyeglasses, weave cloth, generate electricity, and fabricate a microchip? The community of humans supplies all our needs. The farmer is given the fruits of ten thousand years of experimentation with the growing of crops; the poet, a language and the poetry of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare; the physicist, the understanding of Newton, Einstein, and Bohr. No farmer, no poet, or no physicist could ever pay for all the gifts he or she receives gratuitously.

Living Contrary to Nature

Tocqueville captured in one word the essence of Modernity, our era. He was the first person to use the word “individualism” and reported “that word ‘individualism,’ which we coined for our own requirements, was unknown to our ancestors, for the good reason that in their days every individual necessarily belonged to a group and no one could regard himself as an isolated unit.”^[6] The Latin word “indīviduum,” the root of the English word “individual,” means an indivisible whole existing as a separate entity.

Individualism is contrary to nature, for there is not one single indivisible whole existing as a separate entity in the universe. Yet, we humans can believe and act as if we are separate entities. You and I can regard ourselves as separate entities, although we are always connected to others in many ways. Homo sapiens is the only species that can act contrary to its nature. All modern cultures, including American, are founded on individualism, an idea contrary to nature. To live opposed to nature always ends in disaster.  

Tocqueville warned that under the sway of individualism, “each man is forever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.”[7] Today in America, loneliness is epidemic. The 2000 U.S. census uncovered that one out of every four households consists of only one person. Roughly twenty percent of Americans feel so isolated from others that loneliness is a major source of unhappiness in their lives.^[8]  

Loneliness, the desolate, empty feeling of being deprived of human companionship, is an inescapable consequence of individualism. We Americans move away from our families, do not know our neighbors, and get accustomed to walking down the same crowded streets every day without looking anyone in the eye.

Isolation from others affects our physical health. Vice Admiral Vivek H. Murthy, the Surgeon General of the United States from 2014 to 2017, observed that “loneliness and weak social connections are associated with a reduction in lifespan similar to that caused by smoking 15 cigarettes a day and even greater than that associated with obesity, [as well as with] a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, depression, and anxiety.”^[9]

Capitalism Separates Us

Tocqueville observed that under industrialism — what we call capitalism — the capitalist and the worker “are not linked in any permanent fashion either by custom or duty. . . . between the workman and master there are frequent relations but no true association.”[10] Our economic system separates people, and thus is contrary to our social nature.

We are schooled for capitalism. Public, private, and parochial schools are founded on grading, a system of competition that instills the ethos of capitalism. The most lasting lessons in competition are given in the classroom, not in the workplace or on the playing field.

Anthropologist Jules Henry describes how competition entered into a fifth-grade arithmetic lesson he observed: “Boris had trouble reducing 12/16 to the lowest terms, and could only get as far as 6/8. The teacher asked him quietly if that was as far as he could reduce it. She suggested he ‘think.’” Undoubtedly, Boris remembered hearing the teacher tell him to reduce the fraction to the lowest terms, but then he could not speak. When the teacher told him to think, his mind was probably paralyzed, and his ears buzzed. Other children, frantic to correct Boris, waved their hands to get the teacher’s attention. The teacher, quiet and patient, ignored the waving hands and asked Boris, “Is there a bigger number than two you can divide into the two parts of the fraction?” After a long silence from Boris, she asked the same question again, this time more urgently, and still there was not a word from Boris. She then turned to the class and said, “Who can tell Boris what the number is?” A forest of hands appeared, and the teacher called on Peggy, thrilled to give the correct answer, four. Both Peggy and Boris see the classroom as a place where they are told to do certain things and praised if they do them right, disapproved if they do not.^[11]

Henry points out that the grade-school lesson in competition he witnessed is the “standard condition of the American elementary school.”[12]From the smile on her face, Henry knew Peggy felt great about herself; Boris’ failure was his problem, not hers. In the schoolhouse, winners are taught to look to the good they have gained and ignore the unavoidable emotional damage caused to the losers. The goal in a competitive society is to win without violating the rules. That is how the game works in America, and that is how the natural empathy young children feel for the pain of others is squashed by the ethos of capitalism.

I once conducted an informal survey of various age groups about their grade-school experiences. Every person volunteered a traumatic experience similar to Boris’. If it wasn’t a math knock-down, it was the spelling bee or a show ‘n tell, where kids competed with each other to bring to school the best toy or possession. No adult now, of course, cares how he or she did in show ‘n tell. But the lasting lessons were not about math, spelling, or toys. One lesson was that I succeed only if someone else fails, and the converse — if someone else succeeds, I must have failed. No wonder, so many of us feel our heart sink at the success of another, even if it is only a stranger successfully photographing an albino zebra on the Serengeti Plain. That stranger has bested us. Another lesson was that my success is entirely due to me, and no other person has a legitimate claim on its benefits — a fundamental ethic of capitalism, where each person is responsible for his or her own success or failure.

Let us return to Peggy and Boris, this time as infants. Both were born seeking their mothers. Ethologist Robert Fantz and many subsequent exper­imenters found clear evidence that babies, even those less than twenty-four hours old, prefer to gaze at a human face more than any other object, whatever its color, shape, or pattern.^[13] Investigators have also found that “the human voice, especially the higher-pitched female voice, is the most preferred auditory stimulus in young infants.”^[14] These preferences are clearly not learned: In one study, the youngest babies were ten minutes old. The social nature of Peggy and Boris was apparent from birth.

Both Peggy and Boris were lovable babies, completely ignorant with an intense desire to know, each a cute bundle of erōs, the natural desire for full existence. Born radically incomplete; without others, they would have remained so.

Every school recognizes the incompleteness of its students, for the goal of all education is to move students from ignorance to knowledge. Competitive schooling divides students into winners and losers. Students in the lower grades and in high school, work for gold stars, A’s on report cards, and the honor roll, and, in college, for the Dean’s List and a Phi Beta Kappa Key.

Through daily grading of classwork in grade school and the issuance of report cards every marking period, students conclude that if they fail, something is wrong with them; they do not work hard enough, refuse to carry out instructions properly, cannot focus, or lack intelligence. The bearer of a report card of Ds and Fs is a D or F person, not worthy of respect, not loveable, and often invisible to the teacher.

Most Americans do not give their lives over to unbridled ambition and competition. And the reason is simple: All but the brightest fail. If a student constantly fails, she accepts an imposed second best as a way of living with the situation in which she finds herself trapped. And if you don’t believe this, go visit any sixth-grade class, and you’ll see that most students have already assigned to themselves the role of second or third best.

A student who does not excel resents a student who does because the successful child robs the unsuccessful child of dignity and worth. Grade-school children learn to hate the success of others, and along with their hatred goes the hope that others will fail. Children, of course, are also taught that it is bad to openly express their hatred and envy in public, but in private, the “losers” make fun of the “winners” with their geeky ways.

In his field trip to Peggy and Boris’ school, Henry confirmed our observations: “Since all but the brightest children have the constant experience that others succeed at their expense, they cannot but develop an inherent tendency to hate — to hate the success of others, to hate others who are successful, and to be determined to prevent it. Along with this, naturally, goes the hope that others will fail. This hatred masquerades under the euphemistic name of ‘envy.’”^[15]

Later in life, Peggy and her fellow winners out of “ignorant and coarse”^[16] self-interest learned in grade school would be indifferent to the fate of the three million children in America who live in abject poverty, the kind found in Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world.^[17] Education induces blindness to the 53 million low-wage workers earning median hourly wages of $10.22^[18] and to the workers riding the down escalator to the underclass.

Competitive education destroys the social nature of both the winners and the losers

If you do not consider this a problem, consider Jeff Bezos, supposedly worth $124 billion; in one single day in 2020, his wealth jumped $13 billion, or what the total Amazon workforce of 1.3 million employees worldwide makes in 3 ⅓ years. What does he do with all that wealth? Now and then, he buys a luxury item that he fancies. His current fancy is a super-yacht, when completed will be 417 feet long, span several decks, flaunt three enormous masts, and will likely cost more than $500 million. That price tag does not include a smaller motorized “support yacht” that Bezos also plans to buy. The smaller yacht features a helicopter landing pad — Bezos’ girlfriend, TV host Lauren Sanchez, is a trained helicopter pilot. The main yacht cannot support its own helipad due to the three sailing masts on its deck. The smaller yacht will be loaded with cars, luxury speedboats, and probably even a submarine.[19]

If we were not blinded by individualism, if we were schooled to embrace our social nature, not the ethos of capitalism, we would think Jeff Bezos was not a real person but a character in a romantic comedy. We would laugh ourselves silly, for who would be so stupid to spend $500 million to build a super-yacht and more dollars on a smaller companion helipad to impress a girlfriend. Surely, the director of this imaginative comedy is telling us that Jeff Bezos is squandering the wealth produced by Amazon employees.

We Still Can Choose

Nature, or God if you like, made us radically incomplete, and like Helen Keller, we need others to love, to wonder about ourselves and the world, and to take joy in the simple pleasures of life; otherwise, we will remain ignorant and be “carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus,”[20] like animals are.  Many of us discovered during the Covid-19 lockdown that we actually like being with other people, maybe playing Hearts, or marching in a band, or conversing about cosmology, or exploring Italian cooking together, or just hanging out and doing nothing, or . . . the list goes on forever since humans are so varied.

The other element of living together is that nature, or God, does not distribute intelligence, bodily strength, and physical beauty equally. As we saw, the competitive system of education destroys the social nature of students; the losers hate the winners, and the losers are ignored by the winners. If pushed to its logical conclusion, competition in schooling and in society at large would result in a war of all against all.

The abandonment of individualism is not that difficult on the personal level, although maybe impossible for society as a whole because of cultural inertia. If we truly believe the first line of Aristotle’s Metaphysics — “All men by nature desire to know” — then students do not need rewards to learn. Education should not only fulfill students’ innate desire to know but also their social nature.[21]

We saw that competitive education crushes the desire to know for many students and extinguishes for all their social nature. The simplest way to remedy modern education is to abandon the model of competition and institute programs where the more talented and advanced students help the weaker and beginning students, the system of the one-room schoolhouses of early America. Young Americans, then, discovered that helping others to succeed can be a joy. Through the experience of helping others and being helped, students learned that natural gifts are not disturbed equally and are to be used for the good of all: The wise can guide others; the intelligent can uncover the secrets hidden in nature; the well-organized can administer businesses that provide employment; the strong can protect the weak.

Such an understanding of natural gifts does not mean that financial rewards are disturbed equally, only that today’s compensation where a typical CEO makes 260 times that of an average worker is absurd, especially in contrast to 1965 when that ratio was 20-to-1.

If we continue to drift along opposed to nature, then we move closer to a war of all against all, to political violence, to irrational mass shootings, to a country forever split between Left and Right, to an ungovernable Nation-State, to an economic system with a ruling one percent, an administering fifteen percent, and the rest low-wage workers and welfare recipients. Such a society is doomed to collapse in the ugliest manner.

Endnotes

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[1] Pew Research Center, How the Covid-19 Pandemic Has Changed American Lives (March 5, 2021).

[2] For example, nature furnishes the anteater, the zebra, and the rhino with a fixed occupation, a fitting dress, and an appropriate emotional profile, respectively. See Homo sapiens: The Unfinished Animal. Also, see my forthcoming book The Great Transformation: How Contemporary Science Harmonizes with the Spiritual Life.  

[3] Helen Keller, The Story of My Life (Mineola, New York: Dover, 1996 [1903]).

[4]Helen Keller, The World I Live In (New York: The Century Co., 1904,1908).

[5]Ibid.

^[6] Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolu­tion, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Doubleday, 1955 [1856]), p. 96.

[7] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper & Row, 1966 [1835, 1840]), p. 508.

[8] John Cacioppo and William Patrick, Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection (New York: Norton, 2009), p. 5.

[9] Vivek H. Murthy, “Work and the Loneliness Epidemic,” Harvard Business Review (Sept. 27, 2017).

[10] Tocqueville, pp. 557, 558.

[11] Jules Henry, Culture Against Man (New York: Random House, 1963), pp. 295-296.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Robert Fantz, “The Origin of Form Perception,” Scientific American 204 (May 1961):69.

[14] Daniel G. Freedman, Human Infancy: An Evolutionary Perspec­tive (Hillsdale, New Jersey: Erlbaum, 1974), p. 30.

[15] Henry, p. 296.

[16] Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 557.

[17] National Poverty Center, Extreme Poverty in the United States, 1996 to 2011.

[18] Martha Ross and Nicole Bateman, Meet the Low-Wage Work Force, Brookings Institution (November 7, 2019).

[19] Devon Pendleton and Brad Stone, Jeff Bezos’s New Superyacht Heralds Roaring Market for Big Boats, Bloomberg Wealth (May 7, 2021).

[20]Helen Keller, The World I Live In.

[21] Several friends with young children informed me that Maria Montessori recognized the dual nature of the child and that schools that adhere to her pedagogy recognize that children are naturally eager for knowledge and thus do not encourage competition between students.