These groups began small: a circle of parents and children, no more. In some of the children of worms, the groups became larger. But, whatever their size, we must remember why they happened in the first place. An individual creature was more likely to survive, and so pass on its genes, if it was a member of the group. The group benefited the individuals that made it up — the individuals and their genes. That was the sole evolutionary justification of the group.
This leads to a problem. Suppose you have a group of individuals, all of whom, ultimately, are in the group to benefit themselves. On the face of it, the group is likely to be an unstable enterprise, scarred by rifts, quarrels and conflicts of interest. How do you hold the group together? In some creatures — ants, termites and bees are good examples — even wondrously large social groups are held together by subtle chemical signals. But some of the children of worms became entirely different sorts of creature. They became sentient, capable of feeling. And these creatures were fertile ground for an entirely different evolutionary strategy. These creatures, through random mutation and natural selection, became fond of each other.
There was more to it than that. Even if some of the children became fond of each other, and acted accordingly, evolution still had to deal with those who, for whatever reason, did not always feel what they were supposed to feel and so did not always toe the line. The role of sanction — of penalties of increasing orders of severity up to and including expulsion from the group or death — plays a significant part in holding the group together. But when we look at some of the more recently developed children of worms, mammalian social groups — coyotes, wolves, monkeys and apes, even human apes — then it is simply false to say that these groups are held together only by the threat of sanction. A human society held together only by this threat would be a society of sociopaths. Perhaps certain criminal fraternities approximate this condition, though I suspect that most do not. But it is clear that this provides a wildly erroneous model of human societies in general. For most of us non-sociopaths, it is natural — biologically natural — for us to like each other: to feel affection and concern for each other, to enjoy the presence of the others, to feel pleasure in their company and sorrow in their absence. All this is natural: the absence of these feelings is an indication that something has gone wrong on a basic biological level. These feelings — these social instincts, as Darwin put it — are the glue that holds together groups of social mammals. These feelings of affection, therefore, make an animal better equipped to compete in the zero-sum competition for energy.
While these feelings — affection, compassion, love — might adhere to the letter of the laws of thermodynamics, there is something in them that is just so inimical to their spirit. The love I feel for my sons is, from an evolutionary point of view, the easiest to explain: I love my sons because they carry my genes. My resulting behaviour biologists call ‘kin altruism’. Evolution equipped me with these feelings because they made it more likely that my genes would continue: it is the propagation of my genes that provides the selection pressure that explains both the origin of this kind of love and also what keeps this kind of love in existence. This claim is true, but has led many people to draw illegitimate inferences. Understanding this is crucial to understanding the way in which love can outstrip the laws that made it.
Some people think this means I do not really love my sons, but only their genes. There are two confusions embodied in this idea. First, there is a logical fallacy — what is known as the ‘genetic fallacy’. The claim that I really only love my genes confuses the origin of my love — what my love derives from — with the content of my love; that is, with what my love is love of. This distinction between the origin and content of an emotion is a distinction between what causes an emotion or feeling, and the object of that emotion or feeling. This distinction is a quite general one, applying not only to love but to all emotions. So, for example, my tiredness might cause me to be angry with someone. Tiredness is the origin of my anger — if I had not been so tired, their behaviour would not have made me angry. However, it is still true that I am angry with them — I am not, in this case, angry at my tiredness (although in other circumstances, I might be angry with that too). To explain the origin of love is to explain what caused love — how love came into being (and also why it is still around today). To give an account of the content of love is to identify the object that love has — what this love is love of. It may be true that I love my sons because of the genes they carry. That is an account of the origin of my love. This origin lies in a biological strategy, based on the premise that fathers like me that love their sons will tend, statistically, to have more sons reaching maturity — and so be in a position to pass on their genes — than fathers that do not. So, all things being equal, evolution would favour the genes of fathers like me. Nevertheless, to suppose this means that I really love my genes and not my sons would be to confuse the origin and content of my love. My genes might be the cause of my love, but the objects of my love are still my sons. It is still true, therefore, that I love my sons and not my genes.
In addition to confusing the origin of love with the content of love, the idea that I really love my genes and not my sons falls victim to another confusion: the idea that we are slaves to unconscious processes driven or dictated by genes. In effect, the idea assumes that my genes are smarter than I am. But my genes have no idea how much I know. The body is the husk, but the gene line is immortal. This is the great myth concerning the idea that my sons carry my genes. The idea of an immortal coil carried within me, passed on to my sons and to their children and their children’s children is simply false. For a start, to point out the obvious, it is not true that, as I am sometimes told, my sons carry half of my genes. I share between 94 and 98 per cent of my genes with any given chimpanzee and, preliminary indications suggest, over 90 per cent of them with any given dog. How curious that I should share over 90 per cent of my genes with Hugo but only half of my genes with my sons. What I, in fact, share with my sons, is not 50 per cent of the genes that comprise me, but roughly 50 per cent of the genes that can vary from one human to another — a tiny, tiny portion of my overall genetic code. As for the genes that do not vary from one human to another — they play a role in making me a human in the basic biological sense, that’s all. They do not, in any way, make me the individual person that I am for the simple reason that I share these genes with all other humans. There is no reason for me to love these genes. They are certainly not the sorts of thing for which I am going to take a bullet.
So if there are any genes that are candidates for objects of my love they are going to be restricted to a vanishingly small portion of my overall genetic code, the ones that can vary from human to human and play a role in making me the individual person I am. What happens to those genes? It is not as if my sons carry all of these genes peculiar to me — the idiosyncratic genes inside of me. Roughly 50 per cent of these idiosyncratic genes will have come from Emma. My already tiny immortal contribution has immediately dwindled by half. If my sons go on to have children — biologically, the best-case scenario for my genes — my contribution will then have dwindled by approximately 75 per cent. Soon — in cosmic terms, the blink of an eye — my genetic contribution is going to asymptotically approach zero. Why would I love this ever-decreasing and soon to be effectively zero genetic contribution? I would have to be pretty stupid, really. Sometimes people assume that if a trait or tendency is genetic, it is immune from subsequent interference or amendment by way of processes of rational inference. That assumption is simply mistaken.
A little more than half a lifetime ago I spent some time in India. Not much, just a few months when the university was in summer recess. My movements were hampered by a rather stubborn case of bacillary dysentery. For three days before getting on a bus or train, I had to completely starve myself. Dysentery is not like a normal case of diarrhoea just ratcheted up a few notches; you have no effective control over your bowels at all — a few seconds g
race is all you have. Only if there was absolutely, positively nothing in me did I dare venture more than ten feet or so from a toilet. Most of what I remember about India is hotel ceilings: lying on beds staring up at ceilings and waiting, waiting for the worm around which I had been built to empty itself of its energy.
One day I found myself on one of these malnourished bus trips to somewhere or other — I think I was still in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, or possibly in Himachal Pradesh, but I have no memory of where I was going or where I had come from. I saw something of which I thought little at the time, but the memory lay coiled inside me waiting until its time came — waiting until I became a father. We had stopped in a village somewhere in the mountains. The people from the bus, all strangers to me, were buying lunch from the roadside vendors, something that my intestinal challenges precluded. So I took a little stroll to the edge of the village. There was a group of monkeys, maybe forty of them, sitting at the side of the road where the village met the forest — little, grey, pink-faced bandars, Rhesus macaques as we know them. And, in the middle of a small congregation of four or five, one monkey was embracing a puppy. The bandar held him in his arms and hugged him close. Occasionally one of the other monkeys from the congregation would lean over and pat the puppy, an open-handed pat-pat-pat on the ribs, just as a human might pat their dog. The bandar held the puppy in his arms, and every now and the puppy would lick his pink face.
When my first son smiled at me, the love I felt was decisively shaped by a certain type of recognition. It was not that I recognized my genes in his smile — genes that had somehow been hidden in his scowls, gas-fuelled grimaces and blank stares. Rather, in his smile I recognized utter helplessness, but also the beginnings — nascent, halting and as yet uncertain — of trust. Life can crush him in a heartbeat; but it can do the same to me too. The differences between us are of degree, not kind. Indeed, in the end life will crush us both. After a promising but ultimately misleading start, life will chew us up and spit us out. We have been thrown into a bad place, abandoned in a strange land built on evil principles. And in his smile I saw this abandonment echoing down through the ages. This love is grounded in mutual recognition. In the end, under the gaze of eternity, I am just a monkey who has found a puppy, and I will love it and hold on tight as long as I can. But the trust, the nascent trust — well, that’s just the most heartbreaking of all. You should not trust me, my sons. I know the world. I’ll do the best I can. But in the end, in my most important duty of protection, I shall always fail you. I’m just not good enough. I cannot save you. No one can.
Let me tell you a story, my sons, now that your nappies have been changed and before you go to sleep. Once, before you were born and in a place you have never been, my thoughts played a game with themselves. I called it the ‘I am built on something much older’ game. The game was interrupted, and I’ve only now been able to finish it.
Once upon a time there was a worm that dressed himself up in fine clothes and told splendid stories about himself. So fine were the clothes, and so splendid were the stories, he almost — almost — succeeded in forgetting that he was a worm. But he couldn’t quite do it; the evidence just kept coming out. Every full diaper is a confession.
We are worms — you and I — and, in the end, we shall be eaten by worms. Our immortal coil is not deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). We are created in the image of the laws of thermodynamics, and our immortal coil is the worm. But for a brief time we have an opportunity to become more than this. When we love, we become more than worms: to love is to reject the laws that made us. Of course, we must stick to the letter of these laws; but we can nonetheless reject their spirit. The laws cannot be broken but sometimes, just sometimes, they can be bent.
To love is to defy the history that made us. Love is the acknowledgement that any living thing is of bad blood — the product of flawed design principles. Love is the acknowledgement that there is a bad end in store for all of us — that we are temporary aberrations that soon will be erased by the rising tide of entropy. But it is simultaneously the realization that we are all in this together. Love is the realization that every living sentient thing both needs and deserves our sympathy and our patience. Every act of kindness we show to someone or something is a defiance of the spirit of the laws that made us. When we cherish what is good over what is evil, this is a defiance of the spirit of the laws that made us. Life, in the final analysis, is a temporary upsurge in a universe ill-equipped for it, a transient incongruity. Heat death is the universe’s final, and indeed normal, state. Life is a defiance of the law. And the fact that this defiance is futile does not make it any less valuable.
But, my sons, my puppies of heavy diapers, mes compagnons de misères: you are beautiful. To this particular monkey you will always be little gods — my little gods who shit. And yes, of course, even a monkey knows that, logically, a god cannot defecate. God would not steal energy to stay in existence — and therefore God would not have ends. Anything that does has a dependent existence: it needs something else in order to maintain itself in being. Its existence is, therefore, not absolute — not the existence proper to any god worthy of the title. But what do I care of logic when I look in your faces and see only life and hope, delight and trust? Logic preaches acquiescence. Logic breathes compliance. But it is only our defiance that redeems us, because our defiance is inseparable from our love. If there is indeed a God who made us, then all love is a war on God.
6
The Digue
2010
I’m running along the digue: a dyke that runs across much of the delta of the River Orb in the Languedoc region of France and was built to discourage the storm surges of the winter Mediterranean. To the south of the digue lies the maïre, and after that the beach. Already, young families are starting to make their way down there, to a place of life and warmth and the echoing laughter of the children of summer.
I first came to this place with my father when I was a boy and he was still a relatively young man. And, no matter where it has taken me in between, my life always seems to return here: keeps bringing me back, offering me one excuse, then another, that I just can’t seem to refuse. Now I’m a father, still relatively young, or so I tell myself. A little more than a decade ago, I carried rocks from this place to bury a wolf that I had come to think of as my brother. The memories of a boy with his father, of a young man with his dead wolf brother, of a man growing old fast whom life has brought back to this place once again — that these memories should belong to a single life strikes me as stunningly improbable. But whose memories would they be if not mine?
On the land side of the digue, there are abandoned vineyards. The winter Mediterranean does not really care too much about our efforts to discourage it and, two or three times in a winter, water will surge over the digue. Where the vines once grew is now bitter, broken ground. The houses of those who once worked the grapes are derelict, and there remain only the broken lines of vines, withered and blasted, mixed with the increasingly triumphant smatterings of cord grass and marsh samphire.
The idea of a line, in some form or other, often decisively shapes the way we think of time. We talk of ‘time’s arrow’, or we think of time as a river — perhaps even as a man and his dog running along a dyke from the past into an unknown future. The fact that we use metaphors that are spatial suggests that we don’t really understand time very well at all. Physicists, on the other hand, tell us that time is an expression of entropy: that the direction of time follows the direction of increasing entropy. I am not sure that physicists understand time any better than the rest of us. But, even so, there are very different metaphors associated with the account physics provides. Entropy is disorder, and so time is a transformation of order into disorder. And, armed with this, we might think of time as a series of waves, storm surges; washing in, retreating, and repeating over and over again. Each time the surge retreats, it leaves less and less of what was there before. When I first came to this place, the vines were young a
nd green, and bent over with the weight of the grapes they carried. But the surges of time have done their work, and this is what remains. Soon, what is left of these vineyards will have returned to the maïre.
It is not time’s arrows but time’s surges that break us down. In the end, we all return to the maïre.
Hugo and I are on a fifteen-mile circuit of the Orb delta. We all arrived here from Miami a couple of months ago. In Miami in summer, or the hurricane and humidity festival that passes for a summer in those parts, six miles is enough to nearly kill us, and we don’t get much change out of an hour. But we’re beasting this run. We both struggled initially with the extra distance, but two months later we’re doing these fifteen miles in two hours thirty, give or take. It’s not exactly cold, of course. This is the south of France in June, and it’s probably only a few degrees below the temperature in Miami when we left — but the dry air feels wonderful. Hugo is so cocky he’s even putting in some extra miles, dashing off to meet the white horses and black bulls that line the edges of the fields as we pass. Hugo is not a particularly brave dog and I smirk at his fawning approaches. Not so many years ago, I ran here with somewhat different animals.
We began running west along the beach, and then turned north along the edge of the rivierette, a small saltwater lagoon. Then west again for a couple of miles along the digue, over as far as the digue will go, to the Grande Maïre, the massive saltwater lagoon from which the rivierette was born a few centuries ago, the result it is thought of subsidence. Turning north along its densely bullrushed banks, we run for a few more miles, water on one side, fields and then vineyards on the other — the hills of the Massif Central shimmering in the hot distance that lies to the front of us. Then we’ll hook up with the Canal du Midi, the incredible engineering legacy of Pierre-Paul Riquet, Béziers’ most famous son. The canal stretches over 150 miles, from the Garonne river in the west to the Etang de Thau some thirty miles east of us. We head along the canal for only a few of those miles, west towards Villeneuve-lès-Béziers, shaded from the growing sun by the mighty sycamores that line its banks. Then, continuing on the dirt tracks through the vineyards to Sérignan, we head down to the beach and a turn to the east that takes us back home.
Running with the Pack Page 13
