We’re meant to take care of one another
When I hear about the great divide that exists in the United States, my immediate fight-or-flight response goes not to buying a generator, survival food, and a gun. Instead, I find peace from a book written by a friend, David Cale. It’s called “Coexistence as the Telos of Humanity, an Essay on Harmonic Understanding.” It keeps me grounded.
What is harmonic understanding? In its preface, Cale refers to the works of E.O. Wilson, who attributed the source of human behavior to evolutionary forces that demonstrated that “caring for others within one’s species, perpetrated the survival of that species.” In other words, it’s coded in our genes to take care of each other.
Cale discusses the fact that we live by sets of rules that can only emanate from three basic places: individuals, institutions, and nature.
In the movie, “Oh, God!”, where God is played by George Burns, when asked why there are so many bad things in nature, his reply is something like, “I never figured out how to make the roses without the thorns.” In other words, nature can be both beautiful and terrifying. Cale says, “The Earth is our home, and despite its thorns, it flowers us with all of our needs. To a great degree, we have blossomed by being in harmony with the laws of nature.”
Yet, if we objectively look at the number of ways nature tries to get rid of us on an almost daily basis through tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, droughts, viruses, killer animals, and insects, it truly is amazing there are over 8 billion of us still hanging around.
When we examine the other two rule makers, institutions, and individuals, the odds get even worse. How many wars have been fought over religion? How about the greed of individuals who want more land, more money, and more glory?
Considering that America has been involved in some type of war for approximately 228 of the last 245 years, one must ask where that telos objective fits into our national coexistence philosophy.
So, with all three rule makers stacked against us, we find ourselves in a situation where the ultimate way to protect our species is by looking out for and caring for our fellow human beings while seeking harmonic solutions to otherwise horrendous challenges. Cale encourages us to replace “us and them” with a vision of humanity as one “us,” one community of like-minded persons coexisting in harmony.”
To achieve this, however, we have to encourage our educational entities to “serve as a place where worldviews . . . can be developed, studied, rendered coherent and made inclusive.” Remember, when we stop learning, we cease to explore self, human, and scientific understanding. It’s the journey of seeking this knowledge that can lead to the objective of harmonic existence where we embrace “human dignity and peace with both oneself and with nature.”
None of this is easy. As Cale elaborates so eloquently, “It requires self-discipline and lawfulness combined with “integrity, honesty, honor, and reliability.” It also makes us realize that the words “Person, self, and one are interchangeable. . . where our virtues are part of our identity.”
He goes on to elaborate that harmonic coexistence means learning the value of cooperation and sharing. It also means seeking fairness, creativity, responsibility, adaptability, sensitivity, curiosity, discernment, recall, respectfulness, symbolic, practical and contextual understanding, and wisdom. This truly is a journey intended to help us evolve into one community.
When your church, political, and educational leaders insist on taking you down a road to separateness, turmoil, hatred, or greed, question their motives. Is this a path to preserving our species, to oneness, to humanity, and human dignity? Or a journey to appease their greed and their desire to dominate.
We can be better than that. Like John Lennon wrote, “And the world will live as one.”
Nick Jacobs is a Windber resident.