Humanity In Solution

You don’t need to stand too far back to see Shakesperean comedy in ancestral victimhood. The biggest risk now is in false claims. If someone asserts to be one-two-hundred-and-fifty-sixths of something, they better make sure their opponent isn’t one-one-hundred-and-twenty-eighths of something more historically oppressed, or it can turn into a scandal. Misappropriating disadvantage is among the most egregious of social faux pas. We are well into a contemporary Comedy of Errors, arguing over fractional identities in a farce whose central device is mistaken identity.

I’m partial to more blatant comedic comparisons. My personal ancestry three generations back includes the name “Witt”. That makes my grandmother a half-witt, my father a quarter-wit, and my siblings and I, eighth-wits – a point my father made frequently to explain the most foolish of our teenage choices. But to accurately understand our status, we need to run our explicit genealogy through some inexplicable social calculus to rank us one against the other. Then and only then is it possible to assign your relative strata, which, in theory, may be different from your own siblings.

Why does this identity trap have any appeal to its practitioners? It hearkens to reasoning we’ve already discarded. Throughout history, there have been zealots and scholars who insist that the dilution of ethnic purity is a bane to civilization. Their arguments are sufficiently notorious that I need not dignify them with extended citation.

That thesis fails as much on inspection as it has in practice. Ethnic purity was always a canard. Similarly, claims that a fraction of American Indian ancestry should morally outrank similar Asian descent — or either should eclipse my Neanderthal-heavy legacy — amount to vacuous arithmetic. Our existence is the product of countless ancestral encounters, most of which were driven by strictly orgasmic impulses – far less strategic than the modern imagination would prefer. Even today, we document the dalliances of our ancestral heroes with embarrassing clarity, as if they are or should have been noble beyond their humanity. But they weren’t.

And yet, here we are. Many more of us; moving around the globe more rapidly than ever; encountering and selecting each other with ever wider windows of preference. Each of us reflexively hoping to share the genetic remnants of the best and the worst of our ancestral society. The more we study human evolution and the advancement of society, the more we recognize the turbulence in those interactions. What is unfolding is not strategy but biology. It is difficult to imagine a locus of control that constrains it.

There is, I think, a certain chemical poetry in this — a process both random and divine. We are who we are not by consensus but by encounter. Every union is an experiment; every child, a hypothesis made flesh. We like to imagine intention where there was mostly instinct, design where there was largely desire. But the impetus has always been human selection — unpredictable, uneven, and largely situational.

Basically, we are all genetic accidents. And if what made us is good, why wouldn’t more of it be just as good, or even better?

There is something profound about how we pair off, female and male, and consent to reproduce with each other. What is it that causes the male to show his feathers? And what is it that causes the female to select him? Biology gives us a language for this — attraction, selection, variation, fitness.

But that describes mechanics without explaining the wonder. Across generations, what begins as instinct accumulates into culture, into family, into civilization itself. Biology may explain the process, but it does not describe why the process feels so weighted with meaning.

If the chemistry is real, so is the mystery. As a young man, I was not particularly adept at displaying my feathers. I was tentative and uncomfortable, attempting to approximate whatever I imagined the proximate females might prefer. The strategy proved ineffective. It wasn’t until a specific female recognized something she must have preferred that a chance social encounter blossomed into a relationship. As a result, my Dutch-boy blondness has morphed into a strawberry granddaughter. How did that happen? And why does it feel so divinely correct?

According to my father’s arithmetic, my granddaughter would now be a thirty-second-wit. But that will never matter to her. Any such distinctions we imagine for ourselves dissolve quickly into irrelevance. The magic is in the blending — the divinely random path that makes each of us both particular and inseparable, a particle suspended in solution with the rest of humanity.

Perhaps that is what is being revealed. The impulse to parse and rank our fractions mistakes sediment for substance. We were always meant to mix. A comedy, perhaps, but not an error.