TRIBE

What Happens To You Happens To Me

As a journalist, I’ve always focused on how evolution affects almost everything we do. When I was with an American platoon in Afghanistan in 2008, I found myself far more compelled by the loyalty and trust amongst the men than by the wider strategy of the war. Based at a tiny outpost deep in the infamous Korengal Valley, these men were essentially re-experiencing human prehistory as a small group in an extremely threatening environment. Anthropology has always shaped my work, so I wasn’t surprised to hear that many of the men I was with later found themselves missing the war. We are social primates and only survive through cooperation and loyalty. Of course they missed the war – I did too.

In survey after survey, Americans say that they are lonely and depressed and worried that they can be replaced by a mass society that doesn’t seem to know they exist. Evolution has wired us to fight against such circumstances because they are a grave threat to our survival.

This Substack is about that fight.

When I was young, I hitchhiked from Minneapolis to Washington State and then down the coast to Los Angeles. At a bus stop in Aberdeen, California, I met a young man who was traveling with his girlfriend. When they ran out of money they would stop and work for a while and then move on. “You ever worry about her out here?” I asked him. He shook his head and lifted the top flap of his rucksack. I was myself looking into the double boreholes of a cut-down shotgun.

We all have a shotgun in our rucksack - the thing that makes us feel we can handle whatever’s coming. For some it’s money, or God, or family. For me, it’s words. It’s the idea that words can ensnare even the most appalling things in a web of meaning and render it to the human heart for remedy. The memorial service. The courtroom verdict. The apology. As a journalist, I believe that marshaling the right words in the service of truth and dignity is a sacred calling among many, and the only one I have any chance of being good at.

If you read my Substack, what you’ll be getting is my words. You’ll be getting my attempts to use words, reason, and science to trap reality like birds in an entanglement net, to be delivered to your doorstep. At first, a journalist like me asking for money from readers felt unethical, but the other day, my daughter and I stopped to listen to a subway musician. He was an older Chinese man who was playing an ancient, bowed instrument called an Erhu (a “two-stringed barbarian.”) His music carried us from the New York subway platform to another continent, another age, and at the end of his song, I gave my daughter a few dollars to put in his bucket.

And then I got it: That’s the model for my new relationship with readers. I’m a busker. I write for free because I believe my work can do some good in the world, and people subscribe because they like being part of something. It’s that simple. The word busking entered the English language from the Spanish, buscar, meaning “to seek.” For centuries, musicians and magicians and jugglers have stood on street corners offering their talents to the world. In Russia they were called skomorokhs – “jokers” – because they mocked the church and the powerful. They were persecuted for it, of course, but enough people pitched a coin into the hat for them to make a living.

I am now entering the ranks of the jokers and seekers. You will find me on your street corner at least once a week; walk past or stay, I will be there.