I come from a family of 6. Like many families as we were growing up, we each fell into certain roles. In my family, there was the responsible one, the genius, the boss, the trouble maker, the athlete, the spoiled rotten. Often these roles that are defined collectively for each other in our early lives, stick with us – sometimes for far longer than they should…because our identities, in large part, are shaped by those around us, by those closest with us – our families, our friends, our communities of work and play.
Even beyond our formative years, we draw identity from those we surround ourselves. We draw meaning and purpose from the groups and communities with which we spend time.
First, some science. What we learn from evolutionary biology is that the very oldest part of our brain, the very first to develop for the early human was the very base of the brain stem and cerebellum. This part controls our most basic functions – our safety (fight, flight, freeze), our drive for sustenance (food), and our drive to survive as a species (sex). One can imagine why it’s the oldest and most important. If a mammal is going to survive, it needs those very fundamental drives.
But the second oldest part of our brain to evolve is our limbic system. It developed as we became social creatures in need of social instincts: kinship, bonding, status.
We are hard-wired to be social creatures. We evolved like many other mammals with an innate drive to be together in groups and to bond with certain members of those groups. And it’s all wrapped up in status and social conventions. We want to belong to a group, we want to know our standing in that group. This part of our brain is very satisfied when we know the organizational structure of our groups and where we fit into it.
We give ourselves a hard time when we recognize we have a desire to fit in, to be liked, to be accepted. But this is an ancient part of who we are as humans. Maybe we can ease up on ourselves once we understand that our very genetic coding has us look to our groups to help us understand ourselves.
Sometimes, you hear a story that makes you realize just how important our relationships and our social connections really are. One such example is in meeting writer Johann Hari in his recent book, “Lost Connections”. Hari, like many, came up close and personal with drug addiction when he discovered some members of his family and friends were losing battles with the problem. He sought to find out more.
Some of what he learns is that we have a myth that keeps getting reinforced again and again. We believe that drugs are addictive because of their chemical hooks. He cites the common held understanding that if you gave 20 of us heroine for 4 weeks, after those 4 weeks, we’d have 20 drug addicts. Based on that understanding, we’ve taken addicts and we’ve punished them- put them into jails, make them suffer, because we believed it would deter them, make them stop. Numbers across north America would prove that this isn’t working. But recent research says that isn’t true:
Johann Hari describes that this understanding that what makes drugs addictive is the drugs themselves is for a large part based on research in the 70’s wherein rats were given two water bottles, one laced with heroine, one with plain water. The rats chose the drugged water, became addicted, and overdosed.
But the rats were alone in wire cages. Research in the 2000’s repeated this experiment, this time giving the rats a palatial rat-heaveny place to live –where they had plenty food, other rats to conoiter with (if you know what I mean), and plenty of mazes and things to occupy their minds. What happened was they didn’t obsessively consume the drugged water, and none overdosed. The conclusion? The rats had what makes life meaningful to a rat, and addiction was thwarted.
What could this mean for humans? Switzerland and Portugal are interesting examples, says Hari. Instead of punishing addicts, they took all the money that would be used to prosecute, house, and punish addicts, and doubled down on supporting them. If you have a drug problem, you’d be assigned to a clinic. There, you could take drugs supervised by nurses, and then you go to your job, because along with treatment on the health side, there have been massive job creation programs, subsidized work programs, support groups and systems to integrate people into new and healthy communities.
He shares the results that are revealed after 15 years of decriminalization and support programs: There have been 0 deaths from drug overdose on the legal heroine program, overall drug use is down.
Rats or humans…it seems that if we have lives that are filled with healthy relationships and positive bonds, we have less of a need to bond with other, less healthy things. And if we do find addiction as part of our lives, the solutions seems to be more support, more connection – not less or the threat of less.
Switzerland and Portugal seem to give us the wisdom that policies based on shame and stigma don’t work. They lead to downward spirals and isolation. Policies based on love and compassion work much more effectively. They help lives get put back together.
Community has the power not only to impact our identity, but to shape our health and resilience.
On Wednesday night, we hosted a powerful and meaningful lecture on the life and work of author, poet and activist, Wendell Berry. Here’s a man who speaks often about the role of community. He believes that the health of the individual is linked, inseparable, from the health of all around you. He says:
“If we are looking for insurance against want and oppression, we will find it only in our neighbors’ prosperity and goodwill and, beyond that, in the good health of our worldly places, our homelands. If we were sincerely looking for a place of safety, for real security and success, then we would begin to turn to our communities – and not the communities simply of our human neighbors but also of the water, earth, and air, the plants and animals, all the creatures with whom our local life is shared. (pg. 59, “Racism and the Economy”)
When we ask the question “who am I” we can’t really do it, Berry would say, without asking “who are we”? This is the value of having time to ponder all these different facets of our identity. We’re not any one thing. We are not just ourselves, we are not just our humanity, we’re not just our atomic and subatomic elements. We are also our community.
Wendell Berry echoes the sentiments we find in the community instructions written to the young Christian community in Rome in the decades following Jesus’ death. Here’s a group of people trying to figure out how to organizes themselves around a new kind of living. If you’re part of the roman empire and you’re now trying to organize yourselves around an understanding of love, compassion, mutual care and justice in the example of their teacher, then they’re bound to have some bumps along the way. So these instructions give them some encouragement: to think of the community not as cut-throat competition but more like each person working together based on strengths.
“Don’t think of yourself more highly than you ought to think… Not all the members of the community have the same function, so let’s just go ahead and be who we are, without enviously or pridefully comparing ourselves with each other, or trying to be something we aren’t.”
If this letter were written to my family of origin, it would say: if you’re smart, be smart and contribute. If you’re athletic, do it and achieve your best; if you’re a trouble-maker, make trouble for those who do injustice; if you’re bossy, find a way to turn that towards positive leadership; if you’re spoiled rotten, share the wealth. In other words, how are we using who we are to make our communities stronger and better?
Nothing says “we are who we hang around with” like these early Christian communities that remind us of that the health of the group impacts the health of us as individuals. We’re reminded “to rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep”, or another that’s like it: “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.” (1 Cor. 12: 26 )
We remember and celebrate the inspiring life and work of Stephen Hawking this week.
I have been enormously privileged through my work to be able to contribute to our understanding of the universe, but it would be an empty universe indeed if not for the people I love and who love me.
We are more than the labels given to us by our families. We are more than the traditions we were raised under. We are more than accumulation of our own wisdom and knowledge and experience. We’re more than isolated beings. We could have a solo spiritual life – we could read, we could improve ourselves, we could engage in all sorts of solitary practices, but if we don’t have positive and valuable community, we won’t fully know who we are. It would be an empty universe indeed if we didn’t have people to encourage us and love us…but maybe even more important than that it would be empty if we didn’t have those vastly different from us – that grate against our assumptions, that collide with our easy views and biases.
How we treat each other as we learn who we are and do what we need to do is really the whole point. It’s the practice field, it’s the rehearsal hall, it’s the ground on which we discover how we live out who we are…it’s where we make mistakes and can be surrounded by those who’ll pick us up and forgive us, and say to us. Let’s try it again.
We have every reason to care because we’re only as healthy as our communities. As we work to make them stronger and fitter, we are stronger and fitter.
The last words belong to Hawking:
“We are all time travellers journeying together into the future. But let us work together to make that future a place we want to visit.”
-Chris New
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