Reciprocity – Like Water to Fish, Part Five

Bob Fiske

Reciprocity – Like Water to Fish, Part Five

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Erasing the debt.  Our relationship to the earth has been one of taking and not of giving.  We—all of humanity—have accrued a huge debt.  We have not made a sincere, planet-wide effort to begin making payments to repay the loan.  The big question that will get in our way is this: Who’s going to start?  Which person?  Which neighborhood?  Which city?  Which state?  Which country?

This is not an idle question; it’s a central one.  Just witness the difficulty we are having with climate change related to global warming.  The collective efforts to reign in human production of greenhouse gases (so-called atmospheric carbon and carbon equivalents) continue to stall.  The talks are marked by in-fighting and failure to come to consensus.

What most people fail to recognize is that global warming is just one of several “overshoot problems” looming on, or just over the horizon.  If we’re having this much trouble with the global warming problem—for which replacement technologies already exist—then how are we going to deal with other pollution excesses and resource shortages, not to mention destabilization of the greater biosphere beyond the pale of human concern?

The new human nature.  My answer is a shift in values.  Change ourselves.  If we can flip our taking behavior over to giving behavior, then the question of “Who will start?” may evaporate.

For many, this new direction may be an almost insurmountable challenge.  In the book of Genesis, God instructs Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply, and to take dominion over the earth.  In some religious traditions, these statements are regarded as God’s first commandments to humanity.  I view these statements as somewhat more than mere commandments.  They are concise, brilliant expressions of human nature.

Looking at the broad scope of human history, is it not obvious that our natural inclinations have lead us down the path of “mastery over the earth”?  Our successes in this regard are a logical outgrowth of our basic nature.  Or is it?  What is missing from this description of human nature?

What if we were to recognize that human mastery of the earth—the cause, one might say, of our unquestioned taking from the earth—is only one half of our nature.  In that case, it might not seem quite so impossible to change our nature. 

Changing our nature might appear to be a process of forcefully suppressing our “base desires”.  That is an unpalatable notion.  But the problem can be turned around.  Perhaps there are parts of our nature that are already being suppressed, making it seem as though we are nothing more than taking creatures.

I maintain that fully human beings are more than taking creatures.  Animals are taking creatures.  They respond to motivational forces and show no capability to restrain those motivations.  Only human beings can consciously exercise restraint.  It’s true that many times we don’t want to do that—unless we are provided with a compelling reason.  Nonetheless, it is a capacity we have that is unique in the kingdom of living beings.

What else can fully human beings do?  We can think about and judge our own actions.  We can look back upon something we have done and conclude that that action is not desirable or socially acceptable.  Again, we often do not wish to do this because of emotional barriers such as shame or guilt making us want to hide our actions from others or ourselves.  But if we have sufficient reason, we can override these barriers.

I have given just two ways that mark fully human beings as more than taking creatures: self-restraint and integrity.  Furthermore, if we consciously take ownership of these traits (and other fully human traits), it will become easier to reign in the part of us that exists only to take.  Our full human nature can “naturally” lead us away from fruitful multiplication and dominion over the earth.  Our full human nature can lead us to own that part of our humanity that is rooted in integrity and responsibility for our actions.

And so, I have a proposal to begin our reprogramming of ourselves into giving beings.  This is coming in the next section of this essay.

Another Path to Self-Worth: Nobility.  I have argued so far that our economic system has embedded within most of us a “deep value” that guides many of our choices.  This value is reciprocity, which can be understood as the drive to engage in fair exchanges.  We are so well conditioned in this way of thinking that many of us determine our sense of self-esteem or self-worth based on how effective we are at conducting fair exchanges.  For most adults this occurs firstly through the activity of earning a living.

To illustrate this I will ask you to imagine a person that has developed a severe illness that will require an extended period of recuperation.  Consequently, the person will have to stop working.  If the person is fortunate, he or she may have some kind of worker’s compensation that keeps some income flowing into the bank account.  Nevertheless, this person feels uncomfortable about not working and impatiently waits for the doctor to release him or her to return to work.  Have you ever met a person like this?  Maybe it was even yourself.

When people are denied the opportunity to work they often feel inadequate and may even sink into a state of depression.  I would suggest that this makes perfect sense if generating income for the purpose of engaging in reciprocal exchanges (buying stuff) is the primary means that people have been taught for arriving at a sense of self-worth.  Consequently, people will become highly invested in maintaining a system where self-worth is organized around reciprocity, or fair exchanges.

However, this is a distorted picture of human psychology, as well as of the entire system governing the well-being of the world.

Martin Seligman, who wrote a book entitled Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment talks about a fellow psychologist who built a career on a phrase he learned from his mother when he was a boy.  If the mother found her son moping around, she would say, “If you’re in a bad mood, go find somebody to help.”  This idea brilliantly reminds us that self-worth is not only about exchanges.

Yet our economic system seems to have forgotten this.  It is no wonder, then, that the field of economics has lead us down a path toward ever-increasing imbalance.  It is no wonder that citizens of developed countries, and the United States in particular, are having trouble reclaiming a sense of self-worth.

Summary of Part Five.  In our relationship to the earth, it is time to start repaying the debt.  Who will take the lead?  Suppressing our desire to take might appear to be an insurmountable challenge.  Maybe the answer is to un-suppress other aspects of our nature.  The fully human being is endowed with capabilities such as self-restraint and judgment of actions as good or bad.  There may be other suppressed capabilities of the fully human being.  Expanding these capabilities will help temper our taking nature.  Additionally, our economic system is tied in with the methods we use to achieve a sense of self-worth.  If self-worth is primarily achieved through earning an income and buying goods and services, then this, too, will impair our ability modify our taking nature.

CLICK HERE to go to Part Six.

Nature’s Brains, Part 1

July 8, 2012

Bob Fiske

Nature’s Brains, Part 1

 "But the old crow comforted me, saying, 'If you only had brains in your head you would be as good a man as any of them, and a better man than some of them.  Brains are the only things worth having in this world, no matter whether one is a crow or a man.'  After the crows had gone I thought this over and decided I would try hard to get some brains."
     -- The Scarecrow in: L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, 1900

I have a little story to tell.  I went on a walk in the neighborhood I grew up in on a sunny morning in July, 2012.  This is a section of Los Angeles that is a little hilly.  Most of the houses have foundations that are above street level.  All of the streets curve both up and down and to the side.

I came around a curve and caught sight of a clear plastic bird feeder mounted on the outside of one house’s large living room window.  It was shaped like a little house with an opening in front and a sunken floor for holding the bird seed.  Its unusual position—in the middle of a large plate glass window—was what probably attracted my attention initially, but it took only a fraction of a second to notice the little, brown sparrow inside of it.  Standing sideways to my vantage point it leaned forward and down to peck at the supply of seeds.

I stopped, and so did the sparrow.  I did not want to disturb the bird, I wanted to watch it eat.  But the sparrow stood (sideways to my view) and waited.  It waited for me to walk by and away.  I did not.

This little bird stopped its eating because a large animal—a human being—came into view.  The large animal was close enough to pose a potential threat, and so the bird shifted to defensive behavior.

"Close enough".  That is noteworthy.  The house sat on a rise behind a retaining wall.  I was perhaps 15 feet from the front of the house.  Moreover, the base of the house was at least five feet above my eye level.  And the plastic bird feeder in the middle of the window was an additional eight feet above that.  So that little bird sat on a perch 18 feet above the ground on which I stood and 15 feet away.  Or (thanks to the Pythagorean theorem) there were a good 23 feet between my perch and the bird’s.

And, yet, that sparrow registered me as a threat.

Of greater interest to me was how the bird reacted to this threat.  It watched me.  Remember, a sparrow’s eyes are on the sides of its head.  This is generally true for prey animals.  So, standing sideways, it had a direct view of me.  It made tiny little movements up, down and side-to-side with its head.  This is an understandable response to threat.  Not only was it watching me, but it was scanning the environment, the better to assess if there might be other threats.  The better to assess possible escape routes.

I imagine that this sequence of behaviors—feed, detect, assess, and prepare for lifesaving flight—is a normal affair for a foraging, prey animal such as a sparrow.  Its brain is wired with strategies for preserving its existence.  More about that later.  Yet, I wanted to see if I could maintain a non-threatening status long enough that the bird would relax its threat response and return to eating.  So, I stopped.  I stood still.

I stood motionless, and the sparrow scanned with its little head movements.  I am a patient person.  I waited.  After nearly a minute the bird made a little forward-bobbing movement with its beak.  Just a little movement.  It wanted to return to eating.  But the parts of its brain responsible for the defensive scanning and preparation for flight overrode that impulse.

These impulses, feed, detect, assess and prepare for flight, seem to have independent existences in the brain.  Like a committee formed of department managers, they must come together and negotiate.  Who is going to dominate?  Who will take control of the bird’s behavior?  That all depends on the current conditions, of course.  If a potential threat appears, then the defensive managers win the negotiation.  If the threat fails to materialize, then the feeding manager garners more power in the negotiation.

I could see these internal negotiations taking place—from something as insignificant as a tiny forward-bobbing motion of the head.  I knew that I could affect the outcome of the negotiation simply by continuing to wait without moving.

Another 15 or 20 seconds.  Did I see another forward head movement?  Perhaps.  Now it was well over a minute since our encounter had begun.  There, definitely.  A forward head movement, followed by more scanning.  Another quarter of a minute.  A forward movement, this time more pronounced.  Not the actual eating of the bird seed on the feeder’s floor, but a clear indication that the impulse to feed had not been completely suppressed.

And so it went.  I believe that it was coming up on two minutes.  Finally I saw a deep bowing of the head.  The bird’s beak appeared to make contact with the seed.  Nervously the sparrow resumed its eye-scanning.  Then it tapped its beak back to the bird seed.  After a short pause it did that again.  And again.

I was rewarded by my frozen stance.  As I expected, I could outwait the nervous behavior produced by the little sparrow’s marvelous little brain.

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How I Consecrate Eating

(This continues from "Ignorant Food 1" and "Ignorant Food 2")


When I eat a meal I don’t consecrate the food.  It doesn’t need it; food is already sacred.  I consecrate my actions.  Doing this elevates me.  Here it is:

1.	I eat	people
2.	I eat	the earth
3.	I eat	living beings
4.	I eat	the system
5.	I eat	money
6.	I eat	friends
7.	I eat	food
8.	I can eat because of	the labor of people
9.	I can eat because of	the resources of the earth
10.	I can eat because of	the energy/structure of living beings
11.	I can eat because of	the ingenuity of the system
12.	I can eat because of	the flow of money
13.	I can eat because of	the generosity of friends
14.	I can eat because of	the wonder of food
15.	I can eat because of	the sharing
16.		the caring
17.		the culture
18.		the creativity
19.		the choice
20.		the drive
21.		the direction
22.		and the life force
23.	I'm graced by	the businesses
24.		the factories
25.		the growing equipment
26.		the cooking equipment
27.		the eating equipment
28.		the water
29.		the packaging
30.		the bulk processing
31.		the timing
32.		and the families
33.	As I know and partake of the wonder of food	I see it
34.		I smell it
35.		I touch it
36.		I chew it
37.		I taste it
38.		I feel it
39.		I swallow it
40.		I am filled by it
41.		I become it
42.	And finally I endeavor to eat it	tastefully
43.		gratefully
44.		joyfully
45.		compassionately
46.		honestly
47.		consciously
48.		and lovingly

Ignorant Food 1

Molly, who is the grandmother of Sarif and Rahul, once told this story to Nils.  Molly and Nils are like-minded in certain respects.  It is logical, then, that the story—a memory that Molly found quite moving—affected Nils in a similar fashion.

César Chávez was the legendary champion for the civil rights of migrant farm workers.  He co-founded the United Farm Workers union.  One source describes him as “a self-taught rhetorical genius”.  And so it was that Molly drove forty miles to hear Chávez speak.

Many things were spoken that day.  Of them all, a single thought lodged firmly in Molly’s mind.  You are about to receive this idea.  It is simple.  It has survived the eighty mile journey, the interval of two decades that passed until Nils heard it from Molly, and another ten years until Nils thought to share it here.  It still has the power to raise goose bumps on his neck.

“The ‘farmer’ comes to your table three times each day.”

There is more to this story.  Naturally, Nils shared this idea with Delores.  Her first reaction was, “I eat the labor of people.”  The idea cooked itself in her brain, and then food ignorance took another turn.  To be continued.