“Mercenaries . . . are at once useless and dangerous . . . disunited, ambitious, insubordinate, treacherous . . . . And this because they have no tie or motive to keep them in the field beyond their paltry pay, in return for which it would be too much to expect them to give their lives.”
-Niccolò Machiavelli
The first post in this series discussed the potential of a rewilded Potomac River and introduced the idea of relationships of mutuality or kinship between humans and the world around us. In this second post, I want to explore how that way of relating has been marginalized in our society and how we might begin to recover it.
If you’ve joined us mainly for discussions of water quality, fish, pawpaws, and the like, you should prepare yourself for something different today. This post focuses on making connections between the health of the river and deeper patterns in our society, culture, and economy. I promise there will be lots about trees in post number three.
Why so much talk about relationships, in a blog about a river? It’s because I believe the quality of the relationships between humans and the world around us is key to restoring the river and watershed to health and abundance. Indeed, I doubt a thriving river is even possible without recentering mutuality.
The Nature of Mutuality
Let’s start by getting clear on what I’m talking about. By relationships of mutuality or kinship, I mean relationships in which it feels good to give. The animating force of these relationships is the one I described in the first post, where I talked about the feeling I couldn’t name at first – the desire to give. The origin of this desire is difficult to pin down, because its essence is dynamic and interactive. But one could say it begins with a gift. When we receive a valued gift – it could be a sweater, a son, a serviceberry, a ray of sunlight – and recognize it as a gift, the feeling it naturally provokes is gratitude (accompanied, no doubt, by related feelings like connection and belonging), and a corresponding desire to give in turn.1 When acted on, the desire to give contributes to these feelings in another. Gift – gratitude – gift. A virtuous circle of mutuality.
If you’re like me, you’re not used to thinking about life in these terms. Instead of this effortless, intrinsic motivation to give to others, most of us are more familiar with the alternative – extrinsic motivation, aka carrots and sticks. Systems based on extrinsic motivation assume that, in the absence of rewards and punishments, we do not want to act for the benefit of another. We must, therefore, be made to. This way of thinking is pervasive in the dominant global culture, and it has built a mercenary world.
For extrinsic motivation is what makes a mercenary. As Machiavelli (who knew a thing or two about cynicism) said in The Prince, a mercenary’s defining feature is their lack of “tie or motive.” Without love of country, loyalty to a people or leader, or emotional commitment to the cause, their will to fight must be induced with money. The motivation so produced is partial, insufficient to spur them to “give” their lives, and inferior, resulting in self-interested behavior (“ambition”), disunity, even treachery.
Though you and I may not be called to battle, the quality of our motivation is no less important in shaping our impact on the world. Today there is a growing social-psychological literature exploring intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and their respective consequences. It shows that when we act out of intrinsic motivation, we are more attuned to complexity and context, more skillful at performing non-routine tasks, more resilient, flexible, and creative.2 We are more likely to bring our whole selves to an activity, because we see it as its own reward, not mere means to end. Fully present to the world, we are able draw on emotion, intuition, and embodied knowing, giving us insight that instrumental rationality alone cannot.
All of these capacities become available to us in relationships of mutuality. They shrivel when we navigate by self interest instead, as our mercenary world encourages. And this dynamic has a profound effect on the ecosystems around us, and on the river. By both dulling our capacities and narrowing our focus, orientation to self interest deprives the more-than-human world of our gifts.
The Triumph of Self Interest
To begin to recover mutuality, we need to better understand how we lost touch with it. One major way that the dominant global culture has marginalized mutuality is by marginalizing cultures that practice it. Many scholars indigenous to (what we now call) North America attest that ideas of kinship with more-than-human beings were central to their peoples’ identities and lifeways before colonization and, to the extent that those cultures have survived genocide and forced assimilation, remain so today. This is perhaps most succinctly epitomized by the Lakota phrase “all my relations,” which recognizes kinship with all creatures, not just humans. As described in, for example, Winona LaDuke’s All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life, the phrase has long been an organizing principle and rallying cry for indigenous North American activists seeking to defend and promote ecological health. To take another example, Robin Wall Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation who is also a botanist, ecologist, and professor, tells of how the Anishinaabe word “aki,” which means “earthly beings,” facilitates a “grammar of animacy” in that culture. To promote habits of kinship among English speakers, Kimmerer proposes that we adopt “ki” (singular) and “kin” (plural) as new pronouns to refer to more-than-human beings, rather than using “it.” These are just a few examples of the many who keep the flame of indigeneity alive, and they have so much to teach the rest of us. But they engage that struggle precisely because indigenous cultures and their associated worldviews – on this continent and every other – have been marginalized by the institutions of the mercenary world.
One such institution is the educational system, which teaches no lesson more comprehensively than self interest. Those of us who experienced traditional K-12 schooling in the United States can probably remember moments when we glimpsed the arbitrariness of the program, when we responded to the assigned tasks – filling out a worksheet, say, or reading a textbook – by wondering why. As that experience is repeated over and over, and normalized by adults, children become accustomed to floating in a sea of abstraction and decontextualization. Year after year they hunger, if mostly unconsciously, for some connection between their daily labors and their lives and communities. But mostly that relevance comes only through grades and report cards – benchmarks of individual achievement. Living with this as the primary feedback mechanism, the primary way that school is made real and relevant to the world outside the walls, children are taught that their own success or failure is unrelated to the success or failure of their classmates, or even that their classmates are their competition. They learn the lesson that what matters is their individual performance, which will shape an individual future.
These lessons are reinforced at home. An acquaintance of mine once shared the story of her young child’s stubborn inclination to give away her money. The child, probably four or five at the time, liked to make gifts of her paltry savings, which I assume she had received on birthdays or as an allowance, to parents and siblings. Her parents, worried that their child’s inclination to give was imprudent, sat her down and explained that she should keep her money, because if she gave it away she would have none left to buy things for herself.
This acquaintance’s advice to her child was simply a somewhat more explicit version of the lessons we all learn in our society – an expectation of scarcity and an orientation to self interest. In a subtle way we teach children these lessons even when we try to teach the opposite. When we make children share, for example, we subtly communicate that giving needs to be forced, and deny the reality in which giving is effortless. We forsake the possibility that our children could feel joy and autonomy in giving, and leave them feeling deprived of something instead.
Perhaps you find the same doubt (that giving can be effortless) within yourself. That’s not what our culture teaches us, after all. If so, consider looking to other cultures that attest to a different set of possibilities. One example is from Jeremy Lent’s The Web of Meaning, where (at page 252) he describes an important current of Chinese neo-Confucianism:
Rather than having to learn altruism and generosity ‘because we are born selfish’, the Chinese view was that one simply had to unlearn the layers of misconceptions that society placed on a person as they grew up. Sagehood, Wang Yangming [a Chinese statesman, general, and Neo–Confucian philosopher who wrote in the early 16th century] taught, was a quality innate in every human, an inborn capacity to know what is good and to recognize that self-centered desires only take one away from fulfilling the true potential of human experience. . . . Because of this sense of intrinsic goodness, the Chinese didn’t believe that acting morally required the exercise of willpower. Instead, it required the practice of discernment: distinguishing between what was truly good and what only appeared attractive. As one became more adept at discernment, the impulse to act ethically would become increasingly effortless and spontaneous. Mencius [a Confucian sage believed to have lived between 600 and 200 BCE] likened it to learning how to dance. “When such joy is born,’ he declared, ‘it cannot be stopped. Since it is unstoppable, you cannot help but begin to unconsciously dance along with your feet and wave your hands in time with it.”
I will need to save further discussion in this vein for another post. There is so much to explore, this post is getting long already, and I want to pay other cultures the respect of not rendering them as caricatures. But contemporary science confirms the teaching of ancient wisdom traditions that giving can be effortless. Experimental evidence indicates that babies are born with “empathy, compassion, and generosity, along with a clear ability to distinguish between kind and cruel actions.”3 And in The Master and His Emissary, the neuropsychologist Iain McGilchrist explains in amazing depth and detail how humanity’s robust capacity for altruism has been suppressed by features of our environmental and cultural context that favor competing ways of attending to the world. McGilchrist explains (at page 171) that marginalized parts of the human psyche have a “disposition of care” towards the world, rather than a disposition of control. For these parts of ourselves, cooperation is rooted in “[m]utuality, not reciprocity, fellow-feeling, not calculation.” Cooperation, McGilchrist emphasizes, is neurologically pleasurable.
Likely even harder for many of us to accept is evidence that the dominant cultural and religious systems of Christian Europe, at an earlier stage of history, centered mutuality and gift as well. As Lewis Hyde discusses in The Gift: Creativity and The Artist in the Modern World, early Christians lived a form of communism. Concretely, among other things, this meant a prohibition on usury. For just as we might worry today about what lending money to a family member at interest might do to the relationship, early Christians understood that charging interest displaced mutuality and love in favor of separation and competition. For the early Christian church, the “brotherhood of man” was not merely figurative: it meant that all people should be brought within relationships of mutuality. Christianity attempted to reconcile Jesus’s instruction to live in universal brotherhood with the competing imperatives of empire and the gradual rise of commerce and capitalism, with greater and lesser success, for fifteen centuries. At that point, the Reformation settled the dispute in favor of commerce, changing the common understanding of Jesus’s teachings so completely that few today, including those who may consider themselves Christians, understand Jesus’s command of universal brotherhood as a rejection of our reigning economic and social systems.
The life’s work of Ivan Illich was describing how the central teaching of Christianity devolved from one of mutuality – grace and love freely offered, as a gift or “gratuity” – to one of obligation. He summarized this subtle but extremely important shift with the Latin phrase corruptio optimi pessima, which translates as “the corruption of the best is the worst.” To read Illich, especially his dialogues with Cayley near the end of his life, is to feel his despair at the gradual marginalization of love and gift within Christianity and the secular societies that grew out of it.
The legacy of this “corruption” of mutuality is that our society’s dominant systems both assume self-interested behavior and impel it. Corporations, perhaps the most powerful institutions in contemporary society, are constituted to minimize the possibility and practice of mutuality. Configured to value shareholder returns above all else, they act for the benefit of others, including non-human beings, only to the degree that they are incentivized to do so. More broadly, as described by philosopher Michael Sandel, markets and market thinking crowd out other ways of relating, such that the “logic of buying and selling” “increasingly governs the whole of life,” exerting a “corrosive effect on [norms] of giving.”4 As Illich put it in a dialogue with Cayley, “[i]t has become almost impossible for people today . . . to think in terms of relationship rather than rules.”
Coming Home to Mutuality
As habits of mutuality that once came easily to us have been displaced by habits of self interest, our behavior towards the more-than-human world has changed accordingly. Yet non-human beings have not changed their habits in response – at least not enough to make a difference to the outcome. Non-human beings have not learned to engineer artificial scarcity, withhold, or drive a harder bargain. They continue to live in interdependence with one another, and to offer us their gifts. So when we navigate by self interest in our relationships with them, untempered by care, non-human beings lose. This is the extractive economy.
In the mercenary world, the answer to the ascendancy of extraction is to prohibit its worst harms, or mandate mitigation and compensation, and to enforce these rules with rewards and punishments. But extrinsic motivation is a blunt instrument, as we’ve seen. Some things cannot be forced, like love, joy, and deep commitment. Equally, we cannot force the actions that flow from these states. When we try, what we compel is a mere simulacrum of the real thing. Something important is missing. Because before we can compel, we must externalize knowing, define and quantify it. We must make the implicit explicit, the embodied abstract, and the complex simple.
And the needs of the river are anything but simple. The conditions that give rise to its health and abundance are immeasurably complex, because the river’s health is inextricably connected with the health of ecosystems throughout the watershed (and beyond). In an important sense, the distinction between the river and the watershed is illusory: the river is the watershed, as we can see each time it rains, or by considering the interconnections between river and streams, surface water and groundwater. Healthy ecosystems are therefore inseparable from a healthy river. They sequester chemicals and carbon, enable the flow regime to which river wildlife is adapted, recharge aquifers, keep water temperatures low, and much, much more. And each ecosystem is itself a complex system, whose health, or lack thereof, is a complex matter too.
How do we compel the healing of the river, which is to say the watershed, which is to say the ecosystems that comprise it? Our attempts to do so are bound to fall short. No regime of control can marshal insight and understanding, or exercise judgment and skill, sufficient to restore the river to health. Yes, sometimes we must work within the mercenary systems that dominate our society. But that is not enough. To really heal the river, we must let a million relationships of mutuality bloom.
How then might we recover relationships of mutuality? I hope it’s clear from the foregoing that the orientation to self interest is woven into the fabric of our society, and to loosen its hold is no easy task. So let’s start by being kind to ourselves. An orientation to self is not a personal failing. It’s what we’ve been taught in a million ways large and small. Transcending that orientation is not an obligation, but an opportunity. We have an open invitation to receive what the world offers us with gratitude and attune to what the more-than-human beings around us need. In my next post, I’ll be discussing one concrete way we can do that here in the Potomac River watershed.
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