As a child on a farm, I enjoyed bringing treats to the chickens, cows, and sheep. On occasion, during a humid summer, caterpillars would bloom freely on feral apple trees in our pasture. I’d climb up and tear down some branches infested with pulsing hordes of caterpillar nests. Then I’d drop the branches amidst our flock of sheep who were clamouring for a snack other than grass. On espying the caterpillar condiments, the sheep often would avert their gaze, like a vegan strolling past a Steakhouse. Occasionally, though, leafy greens tempted them beyond the reproach of squirmy fuzz-worms, and my woolly sheep below would munch down furry caterpillars along with the foliage. In such childhood moments it occurred to me that terms like herbivore were by no means as cut and dried and absolute as one might think. Even sheep-brained creatures functioning on instinct are not fully wedded to their given identity; even herbivores could make an exception.
Such tendency breaks in the raw reality of nature invariably find their cause in environmental conditions; by this token the nature of human nature clearly depends on the conditions of a given cultural climate. However, the basic assumption that we hominids are a social, rather than solitary, species remains. As a matter of emotional repast rather than literal diet, extrovert consensus seems to have fenced us in to assuming that to be well-adjusted one must be well-socialized. One can imagine that the sheep felt a little guilty at breaking their plants-only taboo, comically anyway, but with humans, living up to who one is goes part and parcel with a packaged sense of confident affability. Being not oneself is a common method of explaining unsavory behavior, as though we can temporarily step out of our being rather than deign to include undesirable traits within the canon of our identity. Such denials conveniently sidestep analyzing one’s core beliefs, and the consequences of one’s political predilections and beliefs about human nature.
Social circumstances bring out the worst in participants, but they also say much about how we are made, not born, into our identities and our social relations. In his grim 16th century description of aristocratic enclosure and privatization of common grazing lands, as part of a slow grinding away of the traditional rights and freedoms of the rural peasantry, Thomas Moore of the wool barons wryly noted: “your sheep, that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, now, as I hear say, be become so great devourers, and so wild, that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves!”
To this day our livelihoods, not to mention our emotional well-being, are daily lashed to external exigencies like usurious costs of food and housing such that the essence of who we are, meek or vengeful, often seems to be drawn out of us in a manner not befitting our inner countenance. Yet the belief remains that just as sheep eat grass and chickens eat bugs, and both flock together to dissuade predators, humans do best when they socialize with others. Inflammatory though a gathering can be it feels good to grouse in a group. Yet, consider literal wolves who join into packs to hunt but also as part of perpetual conflict with other wolf packs. Perhaps the social human myth isn’t about demonstrating the possibility for people to join as a vast, universal, human family, but more about our ape-like tendency to be part of a troupe who is vigilant and vengeful against a perceived egregious Other.
Note, for instance, how even the most starry-eyed idealist gains a darker shadow over their visage when they discuss this or that corporate pariah, or bad actor, that has crossed the path of their cause. Indeed, the notion of a broad human family including every biped specimen always seems to contain a caveat whereby a dark figure is seen as the one barrier to the fulfillment of social utopia. For communists this Other is the capitalist ruling class who, by the laws of history, is destined to be replaced by the workers when the latter realize the irrationality of the profit system; for feminists the bad guy is the inveterate misogynistic, whose failure to attain a gendered slave mate leads him to lash out in every aspect of the culture and economy. Meanwhile, for the Woke activist, the Other is the first two and crucially the white colonizer, born into an eternal and unforgivable sin of historical ethnic association with slaveholding, wife-beating, land-stealing, white European ancestry.
Behind each ideology’s purportedly glowing assessment of social humanity’s hope and promise there lies a dark and tribal tendency to reduce us to a binary us and them mentality. One of the darkest days in such enlightenment’s history, as illustration, was the Terror in France where bread-poor revolutionaries, as sure as sailors stranded in the Arctic and out of food, systematically killed and dismembered their brethren until everyone realized that there was no amount of cancelling, blaming, denouncing, or guillotines that could erase the fundamental viciousness unleashed by the human spirit when it feels righteous and justified. “Robespierre and his followers believed firmly that the Revolution’s end goal was to obtain a republic governed virtuously by the general will. But there was a pressing danger that if certain bad actors were left to their devices, the general will would be corrupted, and the Republic would fail. To prevent this, the Robespierrists were intent on weeding out potential counter-revolutionaries and traitors. Therefore, a genuine Republic could not exist without a foundation of Terror, for in Robespierre’s own words, “terror without virtue is fatal, virtue without terror is impotent” (Robespierre, 21).” Crucially, with the incipient printing press providing an early taste of what was to become digital social media, throughout The Terror “inflammatory journalists and politicians kept citizens on their toes, insisting that their poverty and hunger was the fault of counter-revolutionary agents or foreign conspirators.”
So maybe underpinning collective togetherness is not a bond of connection but an outward view of negativity towards an Other. Now consider the bison in days of yore; early Spanish explorers saw them in such multitudes that the bison herds seemed to manifest as an ocean. Coronado in 1542 stated: “There is such a quantity of them that I do not know what to compare them with, except with the fish of the sea…there were so many that many times when we started to pass through the midst of them and wanted to go through to the other side of them, we were not able to, because the country was covered with them.” A massive number of bison naturally gathered like a vast bison brotherhood, the better to ward off predators of another species. Wolves, meanwhile, in their smaller packs, expressed wily lithe prowess at literally picking apart humongous bison hordes. Where do we humans fit on this spectrum? Well, consider what would happen if all humanity, bison-like, was taken as an expansive oceanic herd. Sooner than you can cause a stampede at the banging of a stick on a rock the whole herd would splinter as people came to disagree over this or that policy; indeed, tribal fragmentation seems part of how humans learn to belong, above all to their precious self-image. Every society has the concept of a family unit, for instance, and of ethnic connection over and against the Other of the rest of humanity. Many cultures, the Maori for instance, use a name for their cultural whole that literally translates as “the people” but such a definition ends with the cultural norms and bounds of the given ethnicity. In this sense, over and against modernist ethos, human splintering makes us more wolf-like than bison-like, particularly when pariah individuals break taboos. Like eating the proverbial caterpillars.
So if humans are social more in the manner of a wolf pack, bound largely through family and cultural ties and ever-ready to fight tooth and nail with neighbours and those who differ from themselves, then what gives with the desire to erase this essential tribal tendency? Remember, the sheep generally went to significant pains to eat around the caterpillars – had they opposable thumbs they’d have doubtless separated the leaves from the worms before diving in with those cud-chewing molars of theirs. Our tendency as animals is to stay in our identity lanes; perhaps togetherness also depends on an external threat of an Other. The boy who cried wolf, that beloved Teutonic tale of yore, says much about the wall separating the village from the Other while also reminding us that our basic bonds are external and insular, not expansive and global. The boy breaks the bond of truth with his brethren and such puts everyone at risk; the wall between village and wolf itself is taken as vital and necessary.
What’s certain is that human society implies complexity and contradiction within a tendency to enforce conformity among its adherents. The moral of this story, then, is that to break the bonds of normalcy within a social setting one has to, as it were, have a peek at your neighbour to ensure that she, too, is likewise eating those caterpillars! Critical thinking provided by university studies can only further our progress when we remember that we, too, are susceptible to group think pressures present in each and every place where two or more humans socialize.
Finally, a little hard science is in order. We humans think of ourselves as social animals, and tend to be described that way, yet the raw dental reality of our bodies reveals another truth: We have incisors not for nonchalantly chewing on a salad or mindfully swishing a wheat grass milk shake around our palette. Incisors, be they a baboon’s a bonobo’s or barber in Balzac, Alberta, are for rending and tearing meat off of a bone. Sometimes, if you’re one of the first two on that list, it’s the meat of a species peer. No wonder politics can be so vicious and cut-throat! Maybe next time you face an especially aggrieved political animal you can recall that laughing hyenas express themselves in part to deny their opposition from the pleasure of feeling power. Give a chortle, a guffaw! “Laughter, according to Bakhtin, is a powerful response to official culture and to the truth that officialdom tries to cultivate.” Indeed, when we consider the nature of the social as a whole it does seem a lot more like a cult writ large than a true emboldening process of the individual. If you’ve ever ventured to express a contrary, dubious in terms of political correctness, classroom opinion you’ll see what sort of gentle herd specimens your fellow pupils are.
All that being said, it is quite a testament to humanity’s relative peacefulness that we manage to abide with so very many of us on such a very small planet! So, let’s learn to forgive those who offend our sensibilities and recall that, even as we dish out humble pie to our peers, it never hurts to cut a slice for ourselves. Next time you wonder about not only how you will accomplish your school-work but also who you are as you do the hard toil of learning, remember that you’re engaging in the great “mystery surrounding the notion of essence itself” one noted for the “sheer difficulty of developing a plausible epistemology” by which to accomplish some meaning (Makvotsev, online). As hunters of truth, rather than foragers waiting to be ambushed by life, we truly can channel our most primal impulses towards intellectual betterment.