A Hand in the Dark

American Ritual, part II

Walking my daughter to the school bus stop in the morning is always a family affair. Barring the occasional early work meetings, the cast includes my wife, dog, visiting in-laws, even adult siblings when they are in town. Similarly, the other kids at the stop bring dogs (cats don’t seem to make the cut), family friends, grandparents. It’s not unusual for the adults to outnumber kids.

But the Northern Rockies winter, particularly the early part of it, is cold and dark at six-fifty a.m.—when we set out on this 200-yard adventure. It is a quiet, safe little neighborhood, not unlike one I grew up in. Still, there are animals around. Elk come down from the mountains nearby, moose sometimes wander from the river in search of food, and every year or two a mountain lion decides to hole up in the yard of someone who has fled the winter for southern sun. Perhaps most concerning is when the whiff of skunk is in the air.

Perhaps it’s a dad’s instinct, but I can’t help but play out the scenarios in my head: What the hell am I going to do if my dog bumps into a moose right now, in the dark, in the snow, with a 6-year-old in tow? Like clockwork though, 10 steps into the journey, my doomsday scenarios are put on hold when my daughter reaches up with her tiny, gloved hand to grab my giant, gloved hand. It’s as if she knows I’m getting spun up about all the things parents worry about—from mountain lions lurking around to the troubled boy in her class who cut her in line to the monkey bars. Clearly, she is reaching for security and connection, but the flood of joy is mine. It is a sweet moment; the kind you take with you wherever you go in life.

Writers are always looking for tortured metaphors, so here’s one: Back in the real world, things are going in the polar opposite direction. Tribalism seems to be back, as well as a meanness and vindictiveness that goes with it. Connection and community—the culture of the able helping those who can’t help themselves (ironically, a military ethic)—has been replaced by a much more Darwinian self-interest ethos. While politicians with much to gain in the short term are leading the charge, what is more concerning is that great throngs of regular people in America and abroad have been convinced that life on this Earth is a zero-sum game: your gain is my loss. And if that’s the case, I’m damn sure going to make it my gain and your loss.

In the prehistoric eras—when evolution was first working its magic on the world—natural selection did indeed entail an “eat or be eaten” universe. There wasn’t all that much thinking going on, just raw physical battle. Those with the right combination of traits for the given environment—speed, teeth, claws, horns, venom, you name it—came out on top. However, when the early humans first emerged 2.4 million years ago with slightly bigger, more developed brains, I think what enabled our emergence and thrust us ahead in the Darwinian bloodbath was our capacity for cooperative behavior. We never would have pulled ourselves from the swamp of survival without a helping hand from one another. Besides an opposable thumb—the value of which shouldn’t be underestimated—our ability to harness our communal strengths—cognitive and physical—made all the difference.

And now, the world has gotten smaller. The natural threats have shifted way beyond a moose in the neighborhood. The threats we face overlap; they do not follow political boundaries. More so than ever before, our problems are interconnected, communal, and indirect in causation—externalities—as economists would say. And they are bigger than a little smog that drifts from one township to another.

We are curiously in a position to choose to use our time-tested evolutionary advantage: that is, to reach for a hand or, alternatively, to extend a hand into the dark, winter night.

Or not.