Gens Part 1 | Sympos

“Gens”: Generation, Generosity, Genocide

by Roman Sympos

Part 1: the Gens

gens (Latin): family, tribe, clan, nation, race

In ancient Rome, the word gens designated any group of people who claimed to have descended from the same individual—often a legendary or mythological ancestor, sometimes a god. The word has begotten a great many descendants of its own among the languages of Europe derived from or influenced by Latin, the language of imperial Rome. They are often dissimilar in meaning or connotation, although all share the same “family” trait: the notion of “us” versus “them.”

Most people, in my experience, don’t realize that gathering things into groups requires us to reject, to push aside, not just physically but mentally, the things that don’t “belong.” We are under the impression that what belongs simply takes a step forward into our field of awareness, like an obedient soldier responding to a drill sergeant’s command, while what doesn’t belong remains standing at attention or at ease, motionless and silent, unseen and unheard. Minding its own business.

But let’s examine what really happens when we gather things into groups. Take sorting the laundry into “white” and “colored.”

If you’re like me, you don’t begin sorting without some idea of which one you want to do first. Let’s say it’s the whites. You look down into the laundry bin with, perhaps, a mental image in mind—call it “whiteness”—and, behold! the garments matching your mental image seem to leap up at you, as if they were levitating, just begging to be chosen!

And you begin to sort. How? By picking up the white laundry you can see and pushing the not-white laundry out of the way to look for more of what “belongs.”

But how can you push the not-white laundry out of the way without, quite actively, rejecting it? And even before you begin the physical act of rejection, you’ve already rejected “what does not belong” perceptually and mentally. Your eyes have seen it: it’s left its image on your retina and its impact, at some level of awareness, on your mind, via the optic nerve. It’s your mind that has rejected it because it’s “not white.” That black T-shirt? It doesn’t match the mental image of “whiteness” that you’ve made the criterion of “belonging.”

But here’s what really interests me: I’m never aware of rejecting anything when I’m busy selecting “what belongs.” If I were a follower of Hegel, the great German Idealist philosopher, I’d say I must be “negating the negation”—mentally denying my own active denial that this T-shirt is one of the things that “belongs” to the group I’m gathering. If I were a follower of Jacques Derrida, the late French deconstructionist who was himself a follower of Hegel and, like him, helped change the course of Western intellectual history, I might say this is an example of differánce at work. But I’ll settle for the word, “ignore.”

I’m ignoring—denying attention to—what does not belong and, more disturbingly, ignoring my repeated and necessary act of ignoring it.

We typically think of ignorance as a hapless condition of not-knowing that we fall into entirely by accident, like a utility hole in the street that someone left uncovered. We were minding our own business, trying to reach the other side, looking both ways for traffic and—whoops!

But the verb, “to ignore,” is active. In the passive voice it refers to what is “being ignored,” what we are denying entry into our field of awareness, what we are, at some level of cognition, tossing out of the group of things that we’ve decided “belong” there. A big hole in the middle of the street? Doesn’t belong there, so we ignore it, and, apparently, we do so without knowing it.

In short, what’s being ignored is anything “other than” what belongs to the group we’re gathering.

And gathering around us. The group with which we identify. The group in which we have decided we belong. This is our in-group, and it cannot exist, as I hope I’ve shown, without an out-group of rejects from which its members can distinguish themselves. Everyone and everything “other than” the things that belong to our in-group is, collectively, “the Other.”

In philosophy and the social sciences generally, “the Other,” despite the definite article that’s attached to it, never refers to another person as a unique individual. It refers to an idea, a category of persons that includes any and all who are not in the in-group, regardless of other characteristics that might define them as individuals. As an individual, any member of the out-group might share a great many characteristics with individuals belonging to the in-group, and in-groups themselves often overlap, like the fields of a Venn diagram. (We’ll return to the Venn diagram in a later installment of “Views from the Precipice.”)

However, despite these individual similarities with non-members, all in-groups have one thing in common: they arise from our desire for validation, affirmation, understanding—what we call, in everyday life, “connection” or “relatability.” They arise from each member’s search for understanding—religious, moral, ethical, linguistic, racial, national, political, emotional, aesthetic, athletic—name your modifier—down to the most trivial: culinary, horticultural, avocational. Stamp collectors share the same enthusiasm for an inverted Jenny, bird-watchers for the same rare warbler.

This desire for connection, for validation of one’s preferences, opinions, tastes, and enthusiasms, of ones likes and dislikes, if you will, suggests that, as individuals, we are fundamentally uncertain of who we are, and need others to assure us of our own identities, which each individual thinks is unique and essential to them, but which is, in fact, something they construct using the symbolic tools and materials—the words, the clothing, the rituals— provided by the various overlapping in-groups to which they belong.

The most important of all in-groups for the purposes of self-definition is the gens, the group defined by blood, beginning, in the modern era, with the nuclear family (Mom, Dad, sibs) and then, in decreasing importance, the extended family (grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins), the clan (more distant relatives), the community (neighborhood, town, perhaps state or province), and, at the outer limits and after taking many forms, tribe or nation.

All of these concentric in-groups, nested like Russian dolls, have one thing in common: a shared language—crucial for any endeavor at self-definition. But only the first three (unless we assume universal human descent from Eve, or a hominid like Lucy) share a common blood ancestor. And among these three, the nuclear family holds the trump card: it alone marks the site—physical (hospital or bedroom or rice paddy), biological (your mother’s womb), temporal (your birthday and time of birth)—where and when you first came into existence.

The first thing the gens does, then, is generate. It generates generations and these generations draw not just their identity, but also the importance and prestige they attach to that identity, from the number of identifiable generations that have preceded them. This line of progenitors provides each generation with a cultural and linguistic heritage of norms and practices whose origins may be named, but never truly known. Herein enters myth, legend, folk-tales, and those innumerable stories handed down from one generation to the next (and often dropped along the way like a fumbled baton in a relay race) that goes by the name of “lore”—Grandma Taylor’s trip to Egypt, the time a hobo came to Uncle Silas’s back door to beg for work, Great Great Grandfather McKenzie’s fighting in the Battle of Antietam, or his daughter’s tragic drowning in the Johnstown Flood.

The second thing the gens does is nurture its members: it is unconditionally generous toward them and expects, in return, their unconditional generosity—of time, effort, money, even risk of life and limb—in maintaining the solidarity and longevity of the gens.

The third thing the gens does is defend itself against genocide. Unfortunately, that defense often leads to its committing genocide in order to achieve this goal. Typically, the gens is a poor judge of what is or isn’t a real existential threat, being unavoidably and helplessly prejudiced toward the negative from the moment it defined itself as an in-group. (See “negating the negative,” above.) Because it has relegated to “the Other” all the bad things it cannot admit it shares with individual others, the gens is naturally suspicions of strangers and their intentions.

In the next three months, I’ll be reflecting on the dynamics and consequences of each unique individual’s attempts at self-definition using the tools the gens has provided them, beginning, in Part 2, with the temporal cohort within each gens that goes by the name of a “generation.”

Part 2: Generation

People try to put us d-down
Just because we g-g-get around
Things they do look awful c-c-cold
I hope I die before I get old

--The Who

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

--Mark Twain

As we saw last month, individuals and the groups with which they identify come to understand who they are by making sure they all understand who they’re not, namely, an “Other” that corresponds to an abstraction or amalgam of undesirable traits and tendencies that cannot exhaust the infinite complexities of any single specimen of a human being. “We’re not like that” is where the journey to “We are like this” begins.

In most cases, as with hobbies, amateur sports, professional organizations, or avocations generally, this process of negation takes the relatively benign form of “not knowing”: the out-group doesn’t “know that” or “know how,” while the in-group does.

The gens ("family" or "tribe") alone anchors “Othering” in a genealogy that traces the origins of the group-that-is-not-Other to a single blood ancestor or family of progenitors. This entails a process of renewal and reconnection because, in order to perpetuate itself, the gens must produce new members to replace those who have “passed on” and at the same time get each of them to identify with their genealogical predecessors, beginning with their parents. The gens has deposited all the tools necessary for this task—all the rituals, codes, signs, and symbols—in a single cultural tool kit: the wisdom of the elders.

We’re talking about enculturation, otherwise known as “brain-washing.”

Of course, with kids, you’re really talking about brain-writing, since they’re pretty much born with the proverbial tabula rasa or “blank slate” firmly lodged between their ears. There's nothing on it to wash off.

Nowadays we know there’s more to that slate than just a flat, thin slab of sedimentary rock. The brain offers a much more sophisticated and receptive surface for cultural inscription than that. What gets inscribed on the blank brain is what we call Mind. The hand that inscribes it belongs to adults and the language in which it is inscribed is the language of their family, clan, tribe, or nation.

But with the adults wielding not only the upper but often the only hand busily at work writing the cultural Ur-text of Mind on every child’s blank brain, how do successive generations ever get to the point of wanting to differentiate themselves, as groups that are chronologically distinct iterations of a common bloodline, from those coming before and after?

Clearly, children, as individuals, know what and who they are not: adults, whether living or dead. But how does that negation lead to the negation necessary to allow children—and now we’re talking about adolescents and teens and young adults—to think of themselves as a distinct cohort, defined by age and date of birth—the Beats, the Boomers, X, Y, Z—from the generations preceding them, including their parents and grandparents? After all, that’s where the power lies: the power of autonomy, of authority, of knowledge handed down from time immemorial, not to mention physical size and strength. Why would any child cling to the notion that they belong to a generation distinct from that of the omnipotent and omniscient adults? Why wouldn't they want to join the club of grown-ups as soon as possible?

In premodern times and societies, they did, and still do. Premodern societies do not distinguish successive generations by giving them group names and identities. There are children and there are adults and there's a process for turning the former into the latter, once they've reached a certain age.

The meaning of “premodern” has been much debated since it was coined by Reinhart Koselleck in 1970. Roughly (very roughly), it’s the opposite of what we used to call “primitive” (no longer PC) or the “Third World” (“undeveloped”) or “Second World” (“developing”) countries. Modern societies and economies call themselves (immodestly) “First World.”

Signs of “modernity” include, among other things, economies based on industrialization, large-scale monetary investment, the division of labor, and the commodification of goods; bureaucratized governments that gather information, distribute tasks based on certified expertise, and enforce explicit rules of law rather than implicit norms of behavior; and a scientific worldview validated by rapid technological advance.

But however we define the term, all modern societies are marked by their tendency to erode the power of the gens at the family and community levels by redistributing it in larger units at the level of town, state, or nation. Power moves from the gens to the government, from the sphere of what German sociologists call Gemeinschaft (groups bound by common interests, practices, and values) into the sphere of Gesellschaft (groups bound by rules devised to balance competing self-interests). The first is intimate—in the words of the theme song to that old TV show “Cheers,” it’s the place where “everybody knows your name” (and a good thing, too!). The second is impersonal—privacy is highly valued (you don’t want strangers to know your name), giving money talks louder than giving your word, and lawsuits take the place of working things out over the back fence or a shared meal.

In short, premodernity puts the interests of the community first, the rights of the individual second. Modernity reverses this distribution of value. As a result, kids in modern societies tend to see grown-ups, including their parents, merely as powerful individuals, not as authorized and legitimated keepers of the gate to adulthood. In premodern societies, as a rule, the keepers of the gate are understood, without question, to be the elders of the family, clan, or tribe, and that gate is clearly demarcated. It’s the rite of initiation.

We have vestiges of initiation ceremonies in modern societies, coexisting happily with rampant depersonalization, proliferating litigation, and the commodification of anything that moves. But these rituals are, by and large, merely ceremonial and non-binding. They may, as in the Bar or Bat Mitzvah, represent something real and meaningful to the inductee’s family, relatives, and local synagogue (their gens), and even impose some serious requirements, like learning Hebrew. But the child who eventually decides Judaism is not for them will not be ostracized or banished by family or faith, unless, perhaps, that family and faith are Orthodox or Ultra-Orthodox. In many households, there is nothing resembling such a ceremony.

The initiation ceremony allows the initiate—literally, the naïve and unknowing “beginner”—to join the ranks of the knowing and powerful. Like baptism, which symbolizes being “born again” from the life-giving waters of the womb, it bestows upon the child a new identity, in this case, one that is gendered and adult, rooted in but different from its pre-sexual and dependent one. The initiation ceremony invests the child with an authority and power ballasted by real-world responsibilities (usually symbolized by a difficult trial, test, or ordeal) for perpetuating and sustaining the gens. In patriarchal versions of premodernity, this means, for women, bearing and caring for children, and for men, hunting for food and defending the gens from enemies.

There are no such obligations, as a rule, imposed on children in a modern society, nor are there any universally recognized rituals of maturation for imposing them. (High school graduation may be the nearest thing.) In a polity that values the individual over the gens—freedoms over obligations, competition over cooperation, unearned autonomy over earned authority—children are left to make their own coming-of-age rituals, so they do so with other children, their peers. After all, they’ve been told by adults, at least since 1972, when the song was first released, that they’re all “free to be you and me.”

There’s much to be said for modernity’s respect for individual freedom. When genuine and not used as ideological cover for special interests (as in, “We’re a Christian nation, so religious freedom applies only to Christians”), it has alleviated a great deal of suffering among those who don’t fit the roles traditionally prescribed for its members by the gens, e.g., for the transgendered, the differently abled, the non-religious or religiously anomalous, the professional woman. But individual freedom, if pursued too relentlessly, brings its own set of anxieties, sometimes bordering on panic. When you are not given, by those with the know-how, the tools to construct your own identity or a set of plans to follow, you have to make your own. It’s the equivalent of trying to build yourself a place to live with a stone ax, a crayon, and some pieces of driftwood just as the leading edge of a thunderstorm starts to peek over the horizon.

The rituals and codes and costumes and ceremonies that children in modern societies use to turn themselves into adults—or try to—differ from one generation to the next, but bear a striking resemblance that spans the last three or four centuries at least (that’s how long modernization has been gaining ground in one part of the world or another): they all affirm the autonomy—the “adulthood,” if you will—of the members of the younger cohort not by adopting or imitating the practices of their autonomous elders, but by shutting out, flouting, defying, mocking, or blatantly transgressing those practices. Which is to say, by negating them.

Rebellion is the most appropriate coming-of-age gateway for children in a society that prizes individual freedom and autonomy over the gens. Perhaps it is the only one possible. In contrast to the initiation trial facing premodern children, which tests their ability to shoulder the responsibilities of adulthood, the modern child must demonstrate that it is, like its elders, a free and autonomous individual, and thus capable of making the only choice that a society with such values will recognize as legitimate: the free choice to become one of them. Anything else would look like capitulation, a loss of autonomy. The child, in short, must refuse to obey to win acknowledgement of its ability to choose to obey. As we’ll see in a moment, modern children usually make the right choice, at long odds far in excess of what true freedom of choice would predict and, moreover, without realizing they’ve done so—that is, while still thinking of themselves as not like their parents.

Marlon Brando, playing Johnny Strabler, leader of the Black Rebels motorcycle gang in The Wild One (1953), spoke for his entire R&R cohort of pot-smoking juvenile delinquents, bongo-bopping Beats, and postwar gang-bangers generally when he answered the question posed by one sweet-sixteener, “What are you rebelling against?” with the reply, “Whadayagot?”

Wars are particularly fertile epochs for spawning generational solidarity through negation, first, among young surviving combatants and secondly, among the combatants’ offspring. World War II’s “Greatest Generation” negated the horrors of combat by burying them under piles of consumer goods, affordable houses, and kids. The ordeal legitimizing their coming-of-age was the War itself. The kids who grew up under war conditions but never saw combat, like Johnny, negated their parents’ bland, boring “return to normalcy” by rebelling against nothing more than their elders’ complacency, but the next generation, the postwar Boomers, who were born in the course of this prolonged Pax Americana, found a cause, in fact, quite a few, to underwrite their rebellion: Civil Rights, Anti-Imperialism, Free Speech, and the topper, Vietnam.

There is nothing like a cause to energize a generation’s sense of autonomy and self-direction and dismantle the authority of the elders. A cause entitles the younger generation to pull rank on the adults by pointing out where they got it—and are still getting it—wrong. It helps if the adults being targeted are hypocrites, which would include most of the human race. The Lost Generation of the 1920s had the Great War to hold against their elders, the Boomers Vietnam. The Zs have Gaza. We’ll return to them, and their cause, when we get to our last “G,” Genocide, in Part 4.

Generational identification didn’t begin with the Boomers, and it doesn’t always need a cause. The Lost Generation of disillusioned ex-combatants who survived World War I had to put up with the antics of a younger, less burdened cohort, the playboys and flappers of the Roaring Twenties, who never saw combat but knew how to get a rise out of their elders by wearing short skirts and saddle-shoes and dancing the Charleston unchaperoned. A century before that, during the Napoleonic Wars, the Dandy debuted on Britain’s home front. Unhappy with the mess his elders were making of the world, this young man expressed his disdain by wearing fake military regalia and “borrowing” passenger coaches to tear around the streets of London like a Hessian cavalry officer—an early version of joy-riding.

As our editor and guest essayist, Charles Rzepka, writes in this issue’s "Essay of the Month," it was in the long shadow of rapid industrialization and rural depopulation following the Civil War that thousands of deracinated young women left their family farms and rural communities to take clerical and sales jobs in the booming economies of big cities like Chicago and New York, far from the normative gaze of parents, siblings, and community of origin. They became known as New Women. Among them, as our essayist observes, we can count Frank Baum’s Dorothy, savior of Oz.

But if each new generation in a modern society is busy defining itself in opposition to those that came before—aka, “the old fogies”—how can the gens ever perpetuate those fundamental norms, values, and rituals that enable it to survive not just biologically, but culturally? It can by letting each oncoming generation of adult aspirants negate them in the effort to affirm their own autonomy. Negation doesn’t mean the utter destruction or annihilation of what's negated. What you resist, persists, usually stronger than ever and in direct proportion to the magnitude of your resistance. You can cast out others, but you can’t cast out the Other, which, as we saw in Part 1, is an indispensable and intrinsic part of your identity as a member of the group. It lurks deep inside you, ignore it as you will, and shapes your world view and behavior even as you deny, vociferously, that it does or can. For the rebellious adolescent, even death may be preferable to becoming a grown-up (or seem so). “I hope I die before I get old,” sang The Who’s Roger Daltrey. But his hopes were dashed. On March 1 of this year, he turned 80, and while he’s still rockin’ and rollin’, there’s no mistaking the fact that he’s turned into a mature, well-behaved, and law-abiding adult.

Like Daltrey, most teen rebels eventually “come round right,” to quote the old Shaker hymn, and become one or another version of their parents, usually by their early twenties. The recent series of TV ads plugging Progressive Insurance to post-Progressives (I’m sure Progressive’s ad agency appreciated the irony) makes this point with wry humor: what could be less youthfully exhilarating and reckless or more stodgy, parental, and risk-averse than the idea of buying insurance? As the ads suggest, it’s about on a par with hosting a dinner party or showing off your new gas grill. Progressive’s “Dr. Rick” is there to help young adults cope with creeping “parentamorphosis.”

I say “cope” because there is no cure, and chances are good you won’t even notice you’ve succumbed. Mark Twain, to his credit, did notice, and what’s more, noticed (eventually) that he really hadn’t—that is, he noticed that he’d managed to ignore noticing. It wasn’t until many years later, in describing his contrasting impressions as a boy of 14 and a young man of 21, that he implicitly acknowledged what I’m describing as the work of negation, which is the projection of what cannot be accepted in oneself onto the straw man of the Other, in this case, his father—all without noticing he’d done so. From the young man’s perspective, it’s not he who’s come round right, but his dad.

Twain’s quotation is apocryphal. His father died when he was eleven, and if Twain did write or say anything of the sort, it must have been in the voice of an imaginary character (who has yet to be discovered in anything he wrote). That only makes the depth of his wisdom more remarkable and aptly proportionate to the vigor of his imagination—which is to say, his ability to imagine himself as another.

And that’s a topic, the sympathetic imagination, with which we’ll begin next month, when we turn our attention to “generosity.”

Part 3: Generosity

“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

--John 15: 13-14, The King James Bible

Pity would be no more
If we did not make somebody poor;
And Mercy no more could be
If all were as happy as we.

--William Blake, “The Human Abstract”

The gens—the family, tribe, clan, or nation that shares, ideationally or in fact, a common ancestor—is itself, obviously, the ancestor of the word “generosity.” This suggests that the act of giving has, since the dawn of human consciousness, been understood as something confined to the network of one’s blood relations.

This was the premise of Marshall Sahlins's Stone-Age Economics, his classic study of pre-modern production, distribution, and consumption. There he explained how, in the absence of money to facilitate the exchange of commodities (things made to be sold rather than used by their maker), gift-giving and gift-exchange were the predominant methods for distributing goods within the gens. These methods prevailed within the concentric circles of blood relationship extending from the most intimate parental nucleus outward to embrace ever wider and more remote networks of biological connection, gradually giving way to barter at the outer limits of the kinship group.

The difference between gift-exchange and barter is that the former creates an endless chain of obligations to “give back,” which cements personal ties between the givers, while the quid pro quo of a barter agreement leaves the participants free of personal obligation once the exchange is completed. Thus, parents don’t charge their school-age kids for room and board (at least mine didn’t), but they do expect something in return for raising them—respect and obedience. This exchange is not contractual or arrived at by a negotiated agreement, like barter. Once the kids have grown up, of course, it’s another story. At that point, payment for living and eating at home becomes a legitimate parental expectation, while obedience is off the table.

Even in modern societies, where kinship networks have shrunk to the point where most of our social interactions occur outside them, we are subject to the same constraints. Consider, for instance, accepting an invitation to dinner, which obliges but does not bind you to return the favor and can often lead to an endless series of reciprocal invitations, as opposed to trading baseball cards, which, once the exchange is completed, leaves both participants free to go their separate ways. The importance of gift-exchange to consolidating the identity of the gens and ensuring its perpetuation is clear. You don’t have to like the people you barter with. You have to at least pretend to like the folks you’re inviting to dinner.

At the limits of the nation, where the gens encounters its Other—the “barbarians,” the “savages” who do not speak our language (or even have a language, apparently, just gibberish)—barter often gives way to outright stealing, plunder, enslavement, or massacre, also known as “genocide.” This is where the “war” part of “all’s fair in love and war” comes in. Here barter, settling for mutual benefit, is a way of making peace in the absence of love, the binding principle (theoretically, at least) of the gens. The limit of nationhood is also where, once barter fails, the gens demands of its members the greatest gift of all: their lives.

“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends,” Jesus told his disciples. He had his own death in mind, but the lesson was meant to apply to all of them. They, like him, were about to learn what giving the ultimate gift meant: persecution, torture, and death. And for what?

The gift of eternal life.

And as Jesus framed it, eternal life was a gift, not a quid pro quo. That’s what the parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16) was all about, the one where the latecomers (the Gentile converts to Christianity) were paid the same wages as those who had worked all day (the Jews, God’s Chosen People for the previous two millennia). Salvation wasn’t contractual, or quantifiable, like hourly wages (see “eternal,” above). Working in God’s vineyard was an unmerited opportunity to live forever in his presence, and what you were expected to give in return was not griping and resentment but love and gratitude.

But who are our “friends”? “Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you,” Jesus tells his disciples in the very next verse of John’s Gospel. Two words stand out here. The first is “friends.” God’s Chosen People will no longer be confined to a gens, to a tribe or nation descended from a common blood ancestor, like Abraham, but will come to embrace all of humanity, Gentiles as well as Jews, whose shared ancestor is Adam, the Original Sinner. His sin, too, will be wiped clean, and he’ll join us in heaven.

So, not gens, but “friends.” Generosity, heretofore restricted to the tribe, is now extended to the whole human race. Jesus makes this point not only implicitly in the story of the Good Samaritan, but explicitly, as well: feed, clothe, and shelter those who are hungry, naked, and unhoused, he commands his disciples, for “inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (Matthew 25:40). All of us are “friends,” now, and all our friends are “brethren,” siblings in the same universal family, children of God. With the promise of salvation for all Jesus planted the seed of our modern respect for the inherent worth and dignity of every person regardless of nation, religion, class, caste, race, gender, or income.

The second word that stands out here is “command,” a word that reveals the dark side of Jesus’s message, the shadow it casts. Yes, God’s Chosen People will now comprise all who choose Him by accepting his gift of eternal life. But they have to show their gratitude by giving, in return, obedience.

By offering eternal life not as a quid pro quo, but as a divine gift, Jesus made all who refused to follow his commands ingrates. And the punishment for ingratitude, when the benefactor is God and the obligation thus infinite and unquantifiable, can only be one thing. “Which do you choose?” asked the evangelists, holding up the carrot and the stick. “It's entirely up to you. Eternal life, or eternal death?”

If gifts and gratitude are what hold the gens together from the inside, the Other is what confirms its identity, negatively, from the outside. Every in-group needs an out-group to define itself against, every “me” a “not me,” every “us” a “them.” For every sheep, a goat (Matthew 25: 31-44), and for every grain of wheat, a handful of chaff (Matthew 3:12). Into the “unquenchable fire” with them! Jesus commands. Lacking any means of punishing ungrateful infidels for choosing wrong, the early Christians had to settle for a stick as imaginary as their carrot: the threat of damnation, a punishment (they said) worse than death. Once the theocratic machinery was up and running smoothly, however, crusades, Inquisitions, pogroms, and the extermination of nations became the preferred method of teaching unbelievers the merits of gratitude.

Looked at from this angle, God’s gift of eternal life is a con perpetrated by the people who chose Him so they can make non-believers do what they say. “Pie in the sky,” in other words.

No one understood the con better than the late eighteenth-century English poet, William Blake. In “The Chimney Sweeper” and “The Little Black Boy,” two of the most bitterly ironic protest poems ever written, Blake let us in on how the con worked.

Speaking in the voices of his titular subjects, Blake showed how the enslaved children of the British Empire, White and Black, de facto and de jure, were made complicit in their own oppression by pious assurances that, after death, all the senseless suffering they were made to endure in this life would be rewarded by eternal life in the next. There they would “sport” and bask forever in the infinite love of the Heavenly Father who had, only God knew why, placed them in bondage and misery to begin with.

In the glow of that expectation, the indentured chimney sweeper, Tom, who sleeps in soot and goes to work each morning in the cold and dark, feels “happy and warm,” ready to “do [his] duty” and “fear [no] harm,” not because there is no harm to fear, but because, however dire, it will be more than made up for in the happy afterlife promised to dutifully suffering children like him. The little Black boy, whose skin has blistered from working in the fields under the intense heat of the sun, symbol of God’s perverse “love” for him, is told that he’s been put on this earth to “learn to bear [love’s] beams.” Once he has, God will “free” him from the “cloud” of his black body so he can go to Heaven and “joy” “round [His Father’s] tent” forever.

Blake understood how the poor were conned by the gift of Christianity’s imaginary carrot into loving the real stick their pious masters beat them with. He also understood how the con kept in place the system that created masters and slaves to begin with. The unregulated capitalism that spawned the “Satanic Mills” of Britain’s nascent Industrial Revolution, unrestricted in its freedom to extend the workday and workweek and drive the wages of its laborers, including children as young as five, down to the point of starvation, made generosity toward the oppressed a grotesque affirmation of the oppressor’s putative magnanimity, turning pity and mercy into farce. “Here, let me help you up,” says the man who struck you down. “Here, take this farthing,” says the man who robbed you blind.

In short, gifts are tricky. Giving one can be an act of kindness (note the “kin” buried in this word) or self-congratulation or temptation (remember Pandora!) or aggression (remember the Trojan Horse!). But all gifts come with strings attached. Some strings lead to obligations, as we’ve seen, but others can lead to worse things: shame, servitude, coercion. (Rule Number 1 in dealing with the Mafia: never accept a favor.)

Giving can get curiouser still. “Home is where, when you go there, they have to take you in,” wrote Robert Frost in “The Death of the Hired Man.” They have to. They are obliged to give you shelter, food, and a place to sleep for no other reason than that they are related to you. Long before you appear on their doorstep, they are obliged to make you obliged for their having obliged you. When you do go there, you better be ready to wash the dishes.

This is how the gens thrives and survives, by weaving strands of mutual obligation into a tight network: you’re obliged not only to give, but to accept. To reject a gift or set conditions on it is to untie one of the knots that keep the kinship network intact and prevent it from unraveling—the knot that is you. Refusing to accept a gift is, in effect, to exile yourself from the tribe.

If we leave aside the massive debt that Jesus says we owe our Father in Heaven for throwing us the life preserver of Salvation, we are left with what used to be known, in gender-exclusive terms, as “The Family of Man,” a family of cosmic orphans stranded at the edge of a galaxy in a remote corner of the universe, sharing no common ancestor except, perhaps, a hominid named “Lucy,” and no common language but that of the human heart.

Jesus had the right idea when he called his disciples “brethren” and made the leap from gens to friends. But making that leap ourselves doesn’t require signing on to eternal obedience to an Almighty Father for His gift of eternal life, or fearing damnation if we don’t. All it takes is imagination.

I’m not talking about “innovation,” or “creativity,” or “best practices” or any of those other buzzwords greasing the wheels of today’s high tech, hyper-mediated, computational industries of abstraction, isolation, and self-love. We, too, have our Satanic Mills, STEM-powered, not steam-powered, where the robust energy of the imagination is put to work grinding out ever-more-wonderful widgets to make us rich and improve our “quality of life.” No, that’s not what I’m talking about. I mean the sympathetic imagination, the human faculty that is entirely useless for making money or widgets, but that enables us to feel, at once and viscerally, what another person is going through.

Mere understanding is a ghostly ectoplasm by comparison. It’s the equivalent of explaining to the woman just run over by a bus why she’s about to die, but without feeling the need to hold her hand. Percy Shelley, surveying the New World Order of colonial empires, belligerent nation states, robber barons, and unbridled materialism arising from the ruins of the Napoleonic Wars, put it best: “We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know.” Knowledge is abstract, and abstractive: it reduces particulars to generalities, people to numbers, the world to a picture of the world. It is mediated. The sympathetic imagination is im-mediate. It’s what makes you want to throw up when you see that woman dying in the street. It’s what makes you cry. It’s what makes you reach out to hold her hand.

Perhaps, surrounded on all sides by a violent and angry and suffering world, it’s a good thing we can live as isolated and insulated from others as our electronic devices let us. Perhaps the sympathetic imagination, like a kitchen appliance, can wear out from overuse. Perhaps we should conserve our dwindling imaginative energies for the families and friends and neighbors that we encounter face-to-face, every day: people we like because they are people like us. Be that as it may, I’d like to end with a reminder of what we are missing when we ignore the opportunity to act generously toward a stranger, to extend the powers of the sympathetic imagination beyond the tight circle of the gens. It’s a trivial example but, I think, to the point.

I was driving the other day and approached a four-way stop, the first car there. I was in a hurry, probably late for an appointment. Almost simultaneously, a woman pulled up to my right and hit the brakes. She was in a hurry, too. In Massachusetts, the rule in such situations is that the first driver to arrive at a four-way stop has the right of way. That was me. But if two drivers arrive simultaneously, the car to the right has the right of way. That was her.

We sat there, motors idling, wondering if we shared the same understanding of the Commonwealth’s driving regulations. And then I waved her through.

Reader, I tell you this not because it required an extraordinary effort of my sympathetic imagination, or because I’m expecting a pat on the back. I’m telling you this because it made me feel, for a second or two, magnanimous, a word that derives from two Latin roots: magnus, meaning “great,” and animus, the word for “soul.” “Great-souled.” That was it. I felt . . . bigger. Spiritually expansive. The urgency of my errand seemed, at that moment, petty and unworthy of me, or of any “great-souled” being. I realized that the self, along with all its needs and concerns, is finite. It, and they, and the body they’re attached to, come to an end. But the soul (the human spirit, the mind, our vital force, call it what you will) is infinite. Or that’s how it feels to us, even in the most trivial acts of mercy.

When we are frustrated in our pursuit of material or mental comforts, which is to say, our selfish pursuits, we have two choices. We can double down on them and make ourselves angry, insulting, rude, even violent. (Road rage doth make monsters of us all.) Or we can “rise above” them, to the level of what (feels like) immortality.

Even if no one is up there to welcome us.

This feeling is accessible only in acts of generosity toward the stranger, the Other who stands beyond the circle of family, neighborhood, and nation. In that tight circumference, giving and accepting gifts is obligatory. The gens perpetuates itself by allowing its members to plug in, as it were, to the ongoing life of the tribe that will outlive them, by giving them opportunities to contribute to that perpetuation. Gifts to strangers plug us in to the rest of the human race.

In a secular universe, nothing and no one obliges us to help the stranger—not what Jesus commands us, not the debt we owe God for the gift of eternal life, and certainly not the gens.

Which is exactly what gives such acts of giving the power to make us, or make us feel, divine.

Part 4: Genocide

“Exterminate the brutes!”

--Mr. Kurtz, Heart of Darkness

“Every day we are not grieving is a day we will be taking vengeance.”

--Sam Keen, Faces of the Enemy

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness no longer appears on most college syllabi. The book’s racism is too palpable for today’s undergraduates to put up with, especially students of color. Attempts to redeem its faults by arguing that it remains relevant precisely due to, rather than despite, its (now obvious) prejudices, fall on ears deafened by the roar of our own desperate battles on every front, cultural, political, environmental, and, increasingly, literal.

Deafened as they may be, however, those ears remain, unlike those of Mr. Kurtz, exquisitely attuned to that “still, small voice” within that we call conscience, just as Kurtz himself remains relevant to our present crisis in Gaza and the West Bank, if only as a mouthpiece for motivations that dare not speak their name.

More power to the listeners, say I. I will argue them no arguments. May they bring to pass what they so ardently seek, for all our sakes. I write here simply as a man, an old man, who was once as single-minded in pursuit of justice as they and as attentive to the whispering of that still, small voice.

I hear it now, in fact. But it’s whispering contradictions.

In short, I have lost my singleness of mind.

Which is odd, because genocide--both the thing itself and the fear of it—usually makes minds single. The fear of it can, in the twinkling of an apocalyptic eye, turn the gens from a cooperative group of uniquely minded individuals sharing a common purpose into a berserk social organism whose one thought is to annihilate what would otherwise annihilate it first. What Samuel Johnson said of execution—“when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully”—goes many times over for the nation that has resorted to genocide, whether the existential threat it perceives is real or only a figment of its collective imagination or, at its most extreme, some form of mass hysteria.

The dominant purpose of the gens, as it has evolved over millennia and as we have seen in the first three parts of this essay, is to perpetuate itself: first, by insuring the generation of new members, second, by encouraging generosity among them, and third, by resorting to genocide when the imaginary Other, the “not us” against which it defines itself as a unified entity, is thought to endanger its very existence.

Genocide makes minds single not only among the slayers, of course, but among their victims and, often, among the onlookers, at least those of us who can bring oursevles to watch it without blinking.

It isn’t easy.

Gone are the days when we could rely on distance to insulate us from history’s atrocities. They are no longer old news conveyed by Phoenician sailors landing on our shores months afterwards, or rumors of war retailed for drinks in taverns by itinerant tinkers, or epical verses on the fall of great cities recited nightly to beguile a prince’s court in some remote province.

They are, in short, no longer merely entertainment.

I speak as one among the first onlookers of atrocities.

Yes, there were newsreels long before television, and photographs well before newsreels. But Matthew Brady’s photographs of Antietam and Gettysburg didn’t move, and the newsreels were unreeled far from our living rooms (“rooms for the living?”). We had to visit dark Bijou boxes and movie Palaces, magnified versions of the camerae obscurae that were our own closed minds. They weren’t even the main attraction, just appetizers.

Television changed all that. So did Vietnam.

Fire is what I remember most, fire and smoke. And bodies. Soldiers torching villages made of grass, a Buddhist monk on fire, the black petals of incendiary bombs viewed from a thousand feet. The bodies of “the enemy”—men in what looked like pajamas, women in flat straw hats, children, too—and of “our boys”—the boys we went to school with. “Body counts.” “Collateral damage.” No euphemism could erase from memory the images I saw on the evening news. Day after day. And nothing had a more immediate and visceral impact in turning me against the War.

What happened in Vietnam was not genocide, however. Let’s not cheapen the term by widening its application to include any conflict where the antagonists are of different races or nations. Genocide, properly speaking, is what Kurtz had in mind: utter extermination. That’s not what Vietnam was about. Yes, there were racist slurs tossed around. But the “gooks” and “slope heads” were the “bad” Vietnamese, the Cong, “Charlie,” not our allies in the South. We weren’t fighting the Vietnamese! No, no! We were fighting Communism, a fatal infection that, as our leaders assured us, nothing short of cauterization would cure.

Atrocity is inevitable in armed conflict, just like prostitution and profiteering. You can try to minimize it, but you won’t eliminate it. Genocide is nothing but atrocity. It is the distillation of all armed conflict into Kurtz’s imperative. This means that the death of every victim of genocide is an atrocity. There are no “rules of genocide” and there are no “just kills,” only justifications. When innocent people are not given the time or opportunity to get out of the way of lethal weaponry zeroing in on “the enemy,” we’re not talking about collateral damage. We’re talking about a reckless, policy-driven disregard for human life—reckless because it does not reckon that life to be deserving of the rights due a human being.

This is the rationale behind all genocides. Dehumanizing the Other is what the gens must first accomplish if it is to justify the extermination of the “not us”—justify it not only to onlookers, but to itself. Even the gens recognizes, on some level, the enormity of what it has undertaken when, in the face of what it perceives to be an existential threat, it goes genocidal.

In Gaza, as of a week ago (October 22nd), over 42,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli guns and bombs, the vast majority of them non-combatants and more than half of them women and children. And the slaughter continues. And yes, the US is complicit in that slaughter as long as it keeps supplying the matériel Israel needs to keep at it.

These facts on the ground have made many minds single in their opposition to what Israel is doing in Gaza and the West Bank, and to our country’s aiding and abetting it. These minds are to be found not just among the current generation of college age students whose sit-ins, camp-ins, and clamorous demonstrations are the most conspicuous signs of opposition to the policies of the Netanyahu and Biden administrations. You’ll find like minds, more and more of them with each passing day, among the general population, including American Jews.

Something must be done.

That’s what I hear my still, small voice whispering, in the tones of my youth.

Something, yes. But what?

The answer is hard to discern because it’s competing with another, spoken in a voice more tentative and cautious.

I recognize it now: it’s my own voice, half a century on.

This is a voice I never took seriously as a young man, when it issued from other lips. Like so many of my cohort, I was taught not to trust anyone over thirty. (Or, when I reached thirty, forty, or in another ten years . . . you get the picture.)

My younger voice urges—no, insists—that I make my outrage and sorrow unmistakably clear by speaking truth to power not only on the street, over the kitchen table, and at coffee hour after church, but at the ballot box. It demands that I withhold my endorsement of the Biden administration’s material and financial support of Israel's war in Gaza by refusing to vote for his political surrogate, Kamala Harris, on November 5th. To do otherwise would be to make myself complicitous in our nation's support for the genocide of the Palestinian people.

I guess you could say my younger voice is hardly still or small. That’s what makes the disruptive power of my older voice, which sounds feeble and hesitant by comparison, so surprising to me. Perhaps I’ve simply learned to trust it more. It’s achieved a perspective on current events commensurate with its longevity. It sees the long game.

It reminds me that what’s happening now, in 2024, happened before, in 1968, on my watch. We had a President running for re-election that year, too, who was not only complicit in, but dyed red to the elbows with the blood of innocents. I remember riding the bus from Milwaukee to Ann Arbor one night in late March, along with dozens of other young door-to-door bell-ringers who’d spent the weekend stumping for Eugene McCarthy, an anti-war senator from Minnesota, as the Democratic nominee for President. This was just days before the Wisconsin primary. Someone listening to a transistor radio shouted the news to the rest of us: Lyndon Baines Johnson had announced, on national television, that he would not be seeking re-election. The bus erupted in cheers and fist pounding. At last, we were really doing something! We were making a difference!

You can read about the difference we made in the Golden Book of Unintended Consequences. Johnson was out, but McCarthy didn’t stand a chance at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. While Mayor Richard Daley’s police pounded and tear-gassed protestors on the streets surrounding the convention arena, Vice President Hubert Humphrey got the nod and the cheers inside. Like Kamala Harris, another vice president, he hadn’t participated in a single primary. He lost to “Tricky Dick” Nixon, largely on the strength of Nixon’s promises to end the war, but arguably for lack of support from my generation of outraged voters. Nixon’s margin of victory in the popular tally was a mere 0.7%.

My shame at having played any part in sending Nixon to the White House would be complete except for one thing: I voted for Humphrey.

Nixon’s election not only prolonged the war—and the suffering and the “body counts”—it also expanded the conflict to Laos and Cambodia, where thousands of square miles of countryside were doused with Agent Orange and carpet bombed in an effort to interdict the Viet Cong’s supply routes without having to commit more American troops to the conflict.

And the unintended consequences didn’t end there. Nixon’s election was the first step in the Republican Party’s Southern Strategy for repainting the traditionally Blue south Red by exploiting Dixie’s backlash against the Democrats’ civil rights revolution. It marked the beginning of the Republicans’ slow and patient take-over of our machinery of governance, from school boards to SCOTUS, for the last fifty years, eventuating in the dire scenario facing us should Harris suffer defeat next Tuesday at the hands of an unapologetic Fascist keptocrat and convicted felon, whose hand-picked Supreme Court majority has handed him the carte blanche of absolute presidential immunity.

I said at the outset of this essay that I would argue no arguments, but didn’t say I wouldn’t get down on my knees and beg. Young or old, if you are consumed with rage and helplessness at what Israel is doing in Gaza and tempted to skip voting on Tuesday or to vote “None of the above” in order to register your disapproval of our country’s current policies toward Israel, I implore you: please don’t complete what my generation began on that fateful weekend in March of 1968.

And if the unintended consequence of living under a dictatorship cannot dissuade you from withholding your vote, consider this one: the stateless nation whose plight moves you to tears and indignation will suffer incalculably worse treatment if a Trump administration assumes power. Benjamin Netanyahu is counting on you to help him stay in office. He is counting on you to help him finish the job he set out to do.

Prove him wrong. Vote for Kamala.

***

I began writing this essay in the heart of darkness (5:00 am to be precise), but I refuse to end there. Sam Keen, philosopher, theologian, psychologist, and (according to his thumbnail bio) master of the flying trapeze, gives us a penlight of hope. It won’t dispel the gloom, but it’s enough, perhaps, to light a way through it.

My good friend, Bill Schulz, former executive director of Amnesty International USA and author of several books on human (and other) rights, put me on to Sam Keen several months ago by citing the epigraph printed above. It appears in the context of Keen’s analysis of why nations go to war, but it applies with special force to what I have called war’s distillation, genocide.

Its relevance to the situation in Gaza and the West Bank is hard to miss. On both sides, among Israelis as well as Palestinians, there is much to grieve, and on both sides, not a day passes without thoughts of vengeance. In our own darkness as well, the darkness of this electoral year, we hear cries of grievance and retribution coming at us from every direction. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” is older than its familiar source in Exodus (21: 23-37), reaching back to the Code of Hammurabi, which pre-dates Exodus by half a millennium. Violence has begotten violence for thousands of years, and will continue to do so, it seems, forever and forever, without end.

Can we break this cycle?

There's a chance, but only if we never stop grieving.

The sorrow Keen has in mind goes beyond the grief that must inevitably give way to vengeance, grief for those "like us," for the members of our family, our tribe, our nation—our gens—who have become the victims of the “not us.” It includes grief for ourselves and, through ourselves, grief for all others, enemies included. “When we are unable to confess that our own parents, our own governments, our own styles of life, have disappointed and injured us,” Keen says in Faces of the Enemy, a book written before the fall of the Berlin Wall,

we will inevitably create an enemy on whom we heap our anger. The Soviets must find a scapegoat on whom to lay the burden of pain caused by World War II, the purges of Stalin, and the continuing brutality of their own bureaucracy. The United States must find a scapegoat on whom to lay the pain of the disappointment in the American dream and the increasing frustration of life in a high-tech, low-touch society.

Keen’s psychoanalytic approach brings us back to where this series of essays on the gens began. The Other against which we define ourselves as a unified people is the repository of everything we least like about ourselves, but cannot bring ourselves to recognize as belonging to us: our greed, our suspicion, our spite, our arrogance, our love of pleasure.

Our fear of death. Of extinction.

In the faces of our enemies we misrecognize this one, great, over-riding fear because we are desperate to give it a form we can fight. We make it the visible target of our hatred because we cannot, ever, eliminate its invisible, terrifying presence inside us.

If we follow Keen’s psycho-logic through to the end, we arrive at a faculty of the mind last encountered in part 3 of this series, on “Generosity,” namely, the sympathetic imagination. “To lessen the quantity of cruelty” in the world, Keen writes, “we must learn to listen to the cry beneath violence. The victor must hear himself in the victim's cry, the winner feel himself in the humiliation of the loser.”

“Every day we are not grieving is a day we will be taking vengeance.” It sounds like a grim prescription for what ails the world, but it’s the only medicine that will work, and offers the only reliable light for finding a path out of this enveloping darkness.