Community

“In order to become myself I must cease to be what I always thought I wanted to be, and in order to find myself I have to go out of myself…”

~ Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

 

I had a discussion with a friend last week about Richard Dawkins’ book, The Selfish Gene, that presented the argument that selfishness is an evolutionary mechanism for survival of genes.  It essentially states that every action we take will be tainted by selfishness to ensure the continuation of our genetic code, whether it be in ourselves or our offspring, our community or our culture.  Dawkins is an author whose work is often highly controversial, but whether or not he’s a credible author is not really my concern.

 

What I find interesting is that this is just another assertion of the belief that people are selfish by nature.  It’s not a new idea.  Dawkins just puts a biological spin on it.  But here again, Dawkins work isn’t my concern.  This idea of our inherent selfishness is.

 

I’m concerned because I believe it’s true.

 

I can see it in the society that’s been evolving around me.  I’ve been witness to people trying to find themselves by asserting their own desires in a struggle against the rest of the world, imposing their will on other people, acquiring for themselves some share of the limited resources available for consumption.  All this does is emphasize the difference between those who have and those who have not.  And people try to define themselves in this division.

 

Thomas Merton writes an elegant illustration of this condition:

 

I have what you have not.  I am what you are not.  I have taken what you have failed to take and I have seized what you could never get.  Therefore you suffer and I am happy, you are despised and I am praised, you die and I live; you are nothing and I am something, and I am all the more something because you are nothing.  And thus I spend my life admiring the distance between you and me; at times this even helps me to forget the other men who have what I have not and who have taken what I was too slow to take and who have seized what was beyond my reach, who are praised as I cannot be praised and who live on my death…

 

Someone who lives like this is merely an individual, but not a person.  It is an illusion of self-awareness, in which every effort to become more real and more an individual makes the person less real and less a person, because it revolves around a lie.  It is the lie we tell ourselves that we can only be real if we are separate and distinct from others, acting as if we were a different kind of person from the rest. 

 

It is the lie I sometimes hear echoed by my soul.

 

If we can turn away from these lies and seek our identity in community with others, no longer finding solace in division but in unity, the fractures that separate one person from another will begin to mend as we remove the things that divide us, as common ground is discovered, as community is rebuilt.  In time, humanity could be made whole.

 

But first we have to stop being so damnably selfish.  And therein lies the problem…  Turning an introspective eye inwards to my own life, I don’t even know where to begin. 

 

What can change the nature of a man?

 

I don’t know.  I don’t have the answer to that question.  Maybe I don’t even need to know for change to take place.  What I do know is that I’ve a long road ahead of me…  and that makes me all the more thankful for friends to share the journey with. 

 

Here’s to unity.