ASCAP June 1998, vol
11, 3-4
Learning from the dirt mover
I would like to make a few comments about Dave
Evans entertaining and instructive vignette in the March, 1998 ASCAP.
First,
he seems to be using a reframing technique similar to that used by Gurdjieff,
and which I described in the same issue of ASCAP. He is reframing "adverse
experience" as "learning experience". This is presumably the message Walt Whitman
is giving in the lines that Dave Evans quotes and which could bear repeating:
"Have
you learned great lessons
from those who reject you,
and brace themselves against you?
or who treat you with contempt,
or dispute the passage with you?"
Those who learn great lessons from such
experiences as Dave had with the satellite dish are building up their true
selves, or their "will" as Gurdjieff put it. In my personal metaphor they are developing
their "owl in the head", the owl standing for wisdom. Another way of reframing adverse experience
is to acknowledge that "it will make a fantastic story", and so the
worse the experience, the better the story.
Second, I would dispute the idea that evolutionary theory leads to the
conclusion that human beings are basically selfish. We know that our genes are selfish, but we do
not interact with each others' genes. We
deal with their personalities, which have evolved in the context of group
living and prolonged, intensive, repetitive social interaction. People need to live in groups, and, to stay
in groups, let alone to succeed, you need to be liked and respected by the
other people in the group. And you do
not achieve this liking and respect by being selfish. The group by its norms, standards, beliefs
and world-view fashions individuals who may be inclined to be selfish into good
citizens, who put the group and its other members before their own selfish interests. Anyone who lacks the capacity to be fashioned
in this way stands out like a sore thumb and is either expelled from the group
or allowed to stay with diminished prestige and diminished reproductive opportunity. This process would occur with selection at
the level of the individual, and would be accelerated by selection at the level
of the group. It applies to groups which
practice hedonic (prestige) competition rather than agonistic competition (see
my essay on "Agonistic versus prestige competition" in the September,
1995 ASCAP).
Third,
we can learn from our experience of post-traumatic stress disorder that
reminders of trauma can be themselves traumatic. Therefore, something needs to be done about
that hole (assuming the dirt-mover still hasn't filled it in). Why not make it into an ornamental pond?
Fourth, one must comment on the fact that the antagonist in the vignette
is a "dirt mover". I do not
know whether this is a fiction in order to conceal his true identity for
reasons of confidentiality, or whether he was in truth a mover of dirt. Dirt has certain connotations to an English
ear. For instance, when I was doing
paediatrics a mother brought her little boy to the out-patient clinic suffering
from a boil on the perineum. "Where
is the boil?", I asked the mother. "Down there" she replied,
"between his dirt-box and his thruster." Dirt is a synonym for shit. Are we meant to take on board the unspoken
message that the satellite buyer was "a shit"? In
Lastly, perhaps the main lesson from this tale is that you have to get
the sequence right when you are doing more than one related thing. If Dave had waited to cut down the tree which
blocked the satellite dish until after the dish had been removed, he wouldn't
have been so impatient to get rid of it so quickly - and wouldn't have been
tempted into Kafka's true sin (impatience) and so would have waited another week
for the dirt-mover to collect the dish.
But then he would have missed out on a great learning experience.