Dynamic Immediacy Energetic, passionate (energico, appassionato)
Last week, I made note of the fact that our basic bodies, and the life force that infuses them, have in effect been in development for more than half a billion years.
So what else is new, you might be wondering.
For the refinements that we see today to have survived for so long, with life-and-death always as a subtext, their evolution must have entailed the development of some pretty sturdy (in the sense of strong, and reliable) energy distribution and release (in the form of work) networks, and some pretty formidable staying power. If you have ever had to put an opossum or a raccoon out of its misery without the use of a gun or a knife, or even a piece of rope, you almost certainly were surprised at how fiercely strong the life force that resides in mammals is. The fact that an accident can stop it instantly does not change that.
However, being strong was only part of what we evolved to be (and we are not as strong as we think we are—we are much less strong than chimps, for example). If you have ever noted our human characteristics of impatience, or of tension mounting as the moment of a planned action approaches, or our reticence to take the time to think a situation through before we act on it—or the incessant feeling that we should be doing something—these are also in no small part the result of this same long, evolutionarily successful, history.
What I had hoped to evoke or convey last week was that due to the complexity and the constantly shifting and changing nature of our environments (including our social environment), we have also very much evolved to be able to quickly “size up” dynamic and complex, and often dangerous, situations and react to them accordingly.
Call that feature of human nature one of “dynamic immediacy”, if you like; to me, it is a very basic and important truth about us that is so omnipresent that we often overlook it. When a child or an adolescent (or, for that matter, even adults) complains that they are “bored”, it is not so much that they have nothing to do, but that that they have nothing to do, or might be allowed to do, that exhilarates or stimulates them, challenges them, the way that our bodies and minds need to be challenged to feel alive.
The Past out of Place
And if you have ever asked yourself why we still do things that seem so obviously counter to our “best interests”, what has happened is that the characteristics of ours that have been under discussion evolved in environments that were quite different from those that most of us live our lives in today. Yet, even though our circumstances have changed, we are still saddled with these characteristics, whose “staying power” is very great; and, even if evolution were able to move in the direction of slowly “dialing” them back, that would take far more time than we could possibly have to work with.
It is this reservoir of strength and history that lies behind everything we do; it is always in motion, even when we are “resting”, and it colors, as it inevitably must, everything we do.
The Weaker Future
At the same time, we do have our conscious minds, which give us, to some extent, at least, awareness, and also that important capacity, imagination. And where there is awareness and imagination, there is always the possibility of learning from experience and conceiving of ways to temper our archaic tendencies and plan for a future different from the Present that we are experiencing.
However, our minds are prone to the delusion that thinking about something is as meaningful as actually doing it. And, aside from that, given a choice, most of us would prefer to keep on following our natural tendencies, because we don’t have to think very much about what we are doing, and, in that way, feel that we are “free”.
But, as you might already be ahead of me in figuring out, that kind of freedom is precisely what has gotten us into so many of the problems we see now, and it is only through the more difficult work of really being free, the work of figuring out what choices or possibilities we have and deciding between them, that we might be able to thumb our noses at evolution.
“Feeling” free is not the same as being free, which entails having the ability to choose some status or action other than the ones coerced on us, whether coerced by other people or by our biology and evolution.
Sex (How can we talk about biology and vital energy without talking about sex?)
If you ever wondered why our sex drive is so strong, this is why: it had to be - or, let me re-phrase it this way: if it had not been as strong as it is, and if we had not evolved an “always ON” sex drive and receptivity, we might not be sitting here writing or reading this.
I recently read that at one time in our history, according to several writers, environmental conditions were such that possibly only several thousands of surviving humans made their way to the southern tip of Africa, there to be saved by an abundance of shallow-water fish and shellfish fed by a confluence of rich ocean currents, then to explode out of Africa when living conditions became more favorable. If our sex drive were even several percent less strong, would we have made it?
Of course, our problem today is quite the reverse: far too many of us. But the underlying strength of our biological heritage can be seen not only in the existence of that problem, but also in every denial that it is a problem, and every resistance to doing anything to reduce population growth; that innate drive is a difficult one to control, and it is to that passion, as Hume only partly erroneously pointed out, that our minds are slave to. Just look at how much of what we do and think about have to do with sex.
So, far from being simply part of the “givens” of human life, this life force, this built-in pressure to have sex, to procreate, to want and to care for children, is, if we wish to try to order our future on more human terms than evolution possibly could, is the continuously gushing well that we have to learn how to control better.
The “human” side of sex
For all of that, sex can also tells us a lot about being human. Although we humans spend a very great deal of time thinking about sex, dressing for sex, and telling stories to get more sex, the way we go about sex, or what we call it when we do it, is manifested in many ways, some of which are more “animal”, and some more “human”.
In particular, no small numbers of us engage in sex with the specific intention of not adding to the world’s population, or of only adding to it when we can commit to the task of raising a human being, instead of simply “having a baby”. In other words, freeing themselves from the coercion of biology and evolution, and from the coercion of social pressure or ego.
That is the product of awareness and understanding. And self-control.
Then there is the more emotive side of sex that reveals how we are different from most other animals, and that is seen when there is a sharing of sex with another person, with an emphasis on the intimate nature of sexual intercourse, apart from the possible physiological effect of impregnation. This may be what we mean when we call sex “making love”.
What marks us as different as humans, then, is not only what we do or are able to do, but also how we do what we do.
Back to China
We started this section with the Chinese (and Indo-European, and sub-Saharan African) concepts of vital energy, or qi, and I close it out now with Confucius, who wrote:
The [morally] noble man guards himself against three things. When he is young, his xue-qi [literally, blood and breath] has not yet stabilized, so he guards himself against sexual passion.
When he reaches his prime, his xue-qi is not easily subdued, so he guards himself against combativeness.
When he reaches old age, his xue-qi is already depleted, so he guards himself against acquisitiveness.
Analects: 16:7
In this light, it seems to me that a large part of what we label “civilization”, or “being civilized”, has to do with countering or ameliorating the often harmful or injurious effects of our “old” tendencies.
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