Long ago, still stinging at one of those intervals when I'd been thrown off the rez, I went to a local Starbucks on a Sunday morning with a NYTimes under my arm. People were settled in small groups at tables carried outside because it wasn't raining. I was just becoming absorbed in reading when another woman my age came over, grinning, and asked to have a section of my paper, expecting to sit at my table.
I blew up. I was invaded. A NYT was an expensive luxury I had no intention of sharing. I gathered it up and stalked off, leaving the suburban white woman with her mouth hanging open. She had thought she was trying to make friends through the trivia of news. NOT. In my world no one approached a white woman in a café unless they were drunk or wanted to borrow money. Newspapers arrived in the mail and were treated by those rules. You don't ask to read someone else's mail.
When I had been back in Portland longer, I was working at the County Courthouse and new magazine shop opened, an imitation of men's clubs in Washington, DC, with cigars in wall-to-wall humidors and big leather chairs for those who wished to rest a bit. In those years I was living through shiny magazines and at first marched in to buy them. Realizing slowly that this was meant to be for power men only, I enjoyed sitting down to look over which magazines I intended to buy while the clerk scowled at me. He didn't quite dare throw me out as ruining the atmosphere. Not welcome.
I never bought any cigars, but it turned out their magazines didn't interest me either. I had better luck at Rich's Cigar Store which carried a wide variety of 'zines but had no place to sit. Not only was the new shop so limited that it finally closed, but the ethos from one cigar/'zine shop to the next was different. Being able to pick up on the rules is part of the ability to relate.
Social relationships are cultural, but also biological. Research shows that the brain is organized by establishing connected circuits between neurons, based on recording experiences through the senses and thought, which includes the introception of the body reacting -- digestion, heart beat, tuning of metabolism. Since biology never forgets a good pattern once it is found, this also becomes the basis for social organization. The motive is even the same: safety, preservation of the entities through relationship and belonging. Most basic is family; most troubled today is nation.
Humans who try to be individuals are exceptions and often don't replicate physically, which is a lot easier now that contraceptives exist, so individuals don't carry over through generations. The universal basis of social relationship has been the virtual "space" that opens between the infant and the caregiver through feeding and cuddling and baby talk. This magical rapport is the basis of communication throughout the rest of life from the intimacy of lovers to the ecstasy of crowds acting together. Those who teach or preach and are praised for it, are those who know how to kindle communication by speaking. Art forms reach for it, but art begins in the virtual space between the artist and the world, or maybe just between the artist and the canvas that teems with potential.
We have greatly damaged this ability to give each other safety by separating ourselves with our little cybergizmos. The group experiences like theatre, concert, opera, festivals, have been seized commercially or just recorded. The feeling of belonging to society that I once got from my stacks of magazines are replaced and changed by websites. Here at my keyboard I keep in touch with one sort of systems but by writing conjure up either memory or virtual people. I construct a fragile safety.
People who don't feel safe are likely to be hostile, to close off, to make bad choices, like joining toxic groups that seem to be powerful. The key to success in many life-paths is to construct systems of connection but not all of us have had infancies and childhoods that taught how to make those connections -- maybe in some permissive setting if we are drunk or need money. Everyone wants money, dues, even the church. We obey bossy sentimental requirements like poinsettias for Christmas.
In their youth my parents and their sibs were country people and family was powerful. For a while when I first came to consciousness during WWII and just after, those ties and obligations persisted and I remember the welcoming hugs, the food gifts, the memories and expectations. By the time we were adults, that was pretty much gone. We'd scattered over the continent and into quite different social contexts. No one realized how much the relationships were moral, setting a standard and speaking plainly to those who went astray. For immigrants whole social systems and contradictions must be reconciled.
Porges argues that this most basic safety for humans was made possible early in the dawning development of humans and then allowed cooperation on projects to begin advancing "civilization" beyond what one person could do alone. We could explain things to each other and accept different roles. Partly this was a matter of language but, more than that, the capacity for empathy -- the ability to look at another person and feel as they feel. Not "sympathy," which is identifying how they feel and making room for it, but real sharing of what the other person is thinking.
I'm slow realizing that not everyone can do this. It is an evolution that hasn't reached their personal variation on the genome or maybe has been suppressed by their culture. For instance, both science and business culture has actively resisted any emotional attachments or "gut feelings" because the model has been math, which is thought to be abstract. We're still very attached to data, often about a mass of people, averaged, which is esp. unhelpful when the average tells nothing about the individual.
The tension between individual and community goes on and probably always will, because often progress is made and boundaries are found by non-conforming or even defiant individuals. But people welded into institutions that act in unity can steam roller everything else with their power. We're witnessing that now with Republicans in Congress. What they fear is that differing from the group that protects them will cause the group to kill them. Hmmmm.
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