I learned a startling fact the other day while listening to Fresh Air’s Terry Gross interviewing Dr. Nathan Wolfe, author of The Viral Storm, a disconcerting account of his research into pandemics like avian flu and AIDS that leap from animals to humans. Although the interview contained plenty of startling information, the statement that made me jump out of my skin was this:

If we were to count the number of cells between the top of your head and the socks on your feet, we would find that 90 percent of those cells are not human cells. Ninety percent of those cells belong to various microorganisms that exist, primarily in your gut and on your skin but also in many, many parts of your body. There’s tons and tons of microbes out there.

The vast majority of these inner-space invaders are vitally necessary to our health. In a story about the Human Microbiome Project in the New York Times, one Stanford microbiologist described individual humans as being like coral, “an assemblage of life-forms living together.” Another microbiologist commented that from the
standpoint of an individual microbiome, the “I” could be considered “mostly packaging.” So if 90 percent of “me” is actually not “me” at all, who am I? I feel as if my nice empty 100-percent-paid-for house suddenly belongs almost entirely to an unknown corporation, the enormous staff of which has moved in and begun leaving its clothes and coffee mugs all over the place. How am I supposed to relax in a predicament like this, where my “house” is no longer mine? Where’s my place in this in this mess?

Right in the middle, according to the eighteenth-century British poet Alexander Pope: in between God and beasts, on “this isthmus of a middle state/A being darkly wise and rudely great… Created half to rise, and half to fall;/Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;/Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurl’d:/ The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!” Right in the middle of the mess.

I recently reread Pope’s An Essay on Man, published in 1734, and was struck by two things: I was a really bad reader in grad school and, despite the dyspepsia caused by ingesting hundreds of heroic couplets in a row, I found him to be a humane and delicate thinker. I first read his Essay just as the trend of blaming all modern injustices on Enlightenment philosophies was building steam. In rereading it, I fully expected to find evidence of thought—crimes against women, people of color, and the environment—and I came back to it ready to haul Pope and his entire extended family to prison and lock them up until they could see just where colonialism got us. What I found instead was an overwhelming sense of awe for the complexities of the natural world and a deep humility in the face of humanity’s capacity to see these complexities only partially, imperfectly, and at times buffoonishly. To scientists he says with asperity:

Go wond’rous creature! Mount where science guides,
Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides;
Instruct the planets in what orbs to run,

Correct old Time, and regulate the Sun….
Superior beings [angels], when of late they saw
A mortal man unfold all Nature’s law,
Admir’d such wisdom in an earthly shape,
And shew’d a NEWTON as we shew an Ape….
Trace Science then, with Modesty thy guide….

What Pope wants is to put human giftedness in its place, which is in every way reliant on and secondary to what he calls Eternal Wisdom. He wants to give us a place from which to view ourselves, especially when we think we’re masters of the universe. We can’t know who we are unless we also know where we are. Of course,
Pope the poet could himself be accused of overreaching in making his immodest pronouncements, but he nips that accusation in the bud by placing his perspective firmly on the earth with his fellows. In the poem’s introduction, he pokes fun at John Milton’s Paradise Lost, published seventy years earlier, with its lofty, near-heretical goal to “justify the ways of God to men” from the wings of the Holy Spirit. Nope, Pope knows his place, and it’s right in the middle of what he calls the “vast chain of being,” headed by God, that links all things to each other. One of the loveliest passages:

Look round our World; behold the chain of Love
Combining all below and all above….
See Matter… with various Life endu’d,
Press to one center still, the gen’ral Good.
See dying vegetables life sustain,
See life dissolving vegetate again:
All forms that perish other forms supply
(By turns we catch the vital breath and die)
Like bubbles in the sea of Matter born,
They rise, they break, and to that sea return.
Nothing is foreign: Parts relate to whole;
One all-extending, all preserving Soul
Connects each being, greatest with the least;
Made Beast in aid of Man, and Man of Beast;
All serv’d, all serving! Nothing stands alone;
The chain holds on, and where it ends, unknown.

With their wide, inclusive vision of the workings of nature, these could be Wendell Berry’s words. (In fact, Berry much admires Pope’s Essay.) We have been given a singular place in this great chain, and our work is to learn, through careful observation of the natural world, how to become a blessing to it, to our fellows, and to ourselves. Pope places the primal disruption of the fall not in Eve’s disobedience but in the violence—beginning with Cain and Abel—that we inflict on one another both individually and corporately. Not a bad vision for one of the Dead White Guys of whom I was so suspicious in school.

Despite its plasticity, however, the great chain, as Pope envisions it, is quite fragile—alarmingly so. “The least confusion but in one, not all/ That system only, but the whole must fall.” One little thing out of place, and the whole shebang comes tumbling down. It’s hard to imagine living abundantly in such a universe, hard not
to imagine a creeping paralysis arising out of fear of disruption, like someone with a slipping disc in her spine, afraid each thoughtless move might bring on a core collapse. Despite its beauty and humility, there’s a caged, claustrophobic quality in Pope’s place for us—one that might never have discovered that each one of us is
quite literally a world, perhaps a galaxy, in and of ourselves, as the mappers of the Human Microbiome Project suggest.

In a recent lecture, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, gave another account of where it is that human beings have a place. He talks about the need to distinguish between being an individual—someone identifiable by the facts about him and the center of his own universe—and being a person, a “more frustrating,
more elusive, and yet more adequate” way of describing who and where we are.

Primary to a definition of personhood is the reality that each one of us exists at the center of a vast network of relationships, “the point where the lines cross.” That point is never static: every encounter with every person, every creature, every historical reality, every memory, every word—indeed, with every moment—provides an opportunity for re-configuring those intersecting lines. At any given time, a person is the sum total of her myriad, shifting relationships, irreducible to one thing or to a list of attributes. Something about the human person is fundamentally mysterious and inaccessible. For Christians, this messy, elusive intersection of relationships is where the revelatory work of God has its place.

Williams asserts that because “each of us has a presence or a meaning in someone else’s existence,” a sense of personhood is impossible outside of relationship. When I think of myself as an individual, I am the center of the facts about me. When I consider myself as a person, as constituted by an ever-changing intersection of
relationships, I must acknowledge my presence in other people’s lives and other people’s presences in my own. I can’t extricate myself from this web and stand alone, withdrawing from the world. Knowing that I’m fundamentally mysterious even to myself, a creation of these innumerable, ever-accruing intersections, I must
acknowledge that this messy, sacred bundle exists within every person and that we are environments for each other. We’re in some way located outside of ourselves, a situation that calls for a very different social order than one based on the rights of discrete individuals, an order that devolves into competing, isolated, uncooperative selves.

Pope, the literary king of the British Enlightenment, articulated a profound shift in understanding of humanity’s place: he saw an interconnectedness, a democratic necessity for each link in the chain, where before, whole groups—whole races and nations—were accounted as disposable. From thinkers like Pope came the founding fathers of the United States and their insistence on the natural rights of its (white male) citizens. In order to function as it should, this chain of interconnectedness that Pope saw and that the founding fathers used as the struts and joists of a new political system had to rest not only on personal rights: it needed one more thing.

For Forms of Government let fools contest;
Whate’er is best administer’d is best:
For Modes of Faith, let graceless zealots fight;
His can’t be wrong whose life is in the right:
In Faith and Hope the world will disagree,
But all Mankind’s concern is Charity:
All must be false that thwart this One great End,
And all of God, that bless Mankind or mend.

Without the cushioning of generosity, the assertion of one’s rights can become a mere excuse to claim supremacy over another, the chain shatters, and the discrete links become disposable. It’s arguable that we’re in the midst of this shattering, and I find Williams’s elastic and eccentric network a compelling place to set up
housekeeping. His call is to look at our individual selves and find, as in a different sense did Nathan Wolf, that they’re not really “ours” at all.

What we’re reading
Heather: Robert Alter, The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes: A Translation with Commentary
Martin: Patti Smith, Just Kids

George Will, whose elegant prose I enjoy when its content doesn’t irritate me, pointed toward the reason I find protection of individual rights a necessary component of, but insufficient basis for, the existence of government—a protection that Texans already promote aggressively. In a recent column, Will writes that liberalism’s project is “to dilute the concept of individualism, thereby refuting the individual’s zone of sovereignty…. Such an agenda’s premise is that individualism is a chimera, that any individual’s achievements should be considered entirely derivative from society, so that the achievements need not be treated as belonging to the individual.”

Anticipating the argument that corporations, especially through the power of advertising, have too much sway over a gormless public, Will notes that John Kenneth Galbraith first articulated that case in 1958, even as “Ford’s marketers were failing to make a demand for Edsels.” The public, Will implies, can take care of itself.

Finally, Will denounces liberalism’s penchant for “confident social engineering” in favor of conservatism’s insistence on “government humility in the face of society’s creative complexity.”

Moving backward, as is my wont, the idea that liberals are the only social engineers in the political arena strikes me as curious. All laws and regulations, not just liberal ones, seek to shape society to a particular end; refusing to regulate has social consequences as profound as regulating. The idea that there was some Edenic time of self-balancing governments and economies sounds almost quaint—Newtonian thinking in a post-Einsteinian universe.

Quaint, if it weren’t disingenuous. Among the “individuals” that Will is loath to regulate is the corporation, a stance that, to a point, makes perfectly good sense and has a fine American pedigree. Why should individuals lose their constitutional rights when they band together in a common enterprise? It’s a reasonable question, but Will’s reply assumes a static definition of both individualism and corporations. The concept of an individual to whom particular rights accrued developed in a historical context of monarchies and established churches, whose comforts and quarrels were prone to break the backs of the faceless majority that lay beyond their own intimate circles. That the Enlightenment pried apart individual human worth and dignity from wealth and social status is its crowning glory. That its definition of “individual human” was grossly reductive is an ongoing misfortune, imprisoning those deemed less than fully human in a continuing serfdom, unworthy of the full panoply of rights.

As a nation, we have, most of us, slowly come to see those prison bars and to see that we tossed not only races, genders, and legitimate ways of being, but also whole species and ecosystems into an airless, putrid place. Politically and culturally, Americans have more fully taken in the view of a society based on universal individual rights for which Enlightenment philosophy cleared the way. Yet we continue to distort its essential insight—that every individual has an equal right to the pursuit of happiness—when the legal fiction granting personhood to corporate structures becomes destructive of the very individualism it purports to uphold. Indeed, today’s transnational corporations bear a suspicious resemblance to the great, lumbering bureaucracies (monarchies, established churches) whose primary goal was self-preservation and against which the French and American revolutions were fought.

In his last post Martin cited a New Yorker story about Don Colcord, the owner of the Apothecary Shoppe in Nucla, Colorado. Colcord prefers to be called a druggist, whom he defines as “the guy who repairs your watch and glasses. A pharmacist is the guy who works at Walmart.” Colcord repairs a lot of things besides watches and glasses, from chronic medical conditions to broken hearts. His is the only pharmacy for an area of 4,000 square miles, an area with no hospital. Much of Nucla’s population lives well below the poverty level. Until recently, there were a few other independent drug stores in the area, but the combined pressures exerted by insurance companies, big chains, and mail-order pharmacies when Medicare Part D came into effect in 2006 forced them to close—along with more than 500 other independent rural pharmacies nationwide that couldn’t order at the volume level of big chains. In order to keep his Apothecary Shoppe running, Colcord has had to spend his own savings at several critical times.

There’s a lot Nucla lacks, but in its druggist it has someone who sees the humanity of every person he serves, from illegal immigrants to N.R.A. members to the four transgendered people (none of whom live in Nucla) for whom he compounds medicine. He treats them all, whether or not they have the money to pay him. The generosity of his spirit is something that infuses the community and makes its way back to him: a drifter, an older man, settled in the neighboring town and, mistrusting doctors, relied on Colcord’s expertise in treating his high blood pressure and other ailments, one of which was chronic loneliness. When he neared death fifteen or so years later, it was Colcord who stayed with him, arranged for hospice care, organized a funeral mass for him, and went through his effects. He found that in his will the old drifter had left him $300,000—coincidentally, almost exactly enough money to cover the outstanding debts run up by customers who had been unable to pay.

As an individual and a businessman Colcord enacts a kind of sovereignty (the trait Will so admires) that becomes less likely when transnational corporations are defined as persons. When Walmart, to choose a convenient demon, is considered an individual with rights, the kind of sovereignty Walmart practices is based on profit. Let me hasten to say that I have nothing against profitable businesses; I rely on them in virtually every arena of my life. But the culture that arises from these super-sized “individuals” is one in which generosity of spirit and empathy become secondary—and often undermine—the reign of the profit of the few. A society governed by the values of enormous corporations must despise the apparently inefficient operations of a business like the Apothecary Shoppe.

As the heroes and villains of the Enlightenment sought to uncover the treasure buried in every individual (especially white male ones), cultures arose reflecting the shared values of those individuals, from Ben Franklin to Robespierre, from the American Revolution to the Reign of Terror. Sovereignty in and of itself is to be deplored if it leads to tyranny. When the values that drive successful transnational corporations predominate, the culture that arises among those “persons” is not value-neutral or necessarily benign, as so many business fundamentalists—so many of them in the Texas Republican party—seem to believe.

What we’re reading
Heather: W. S. Merwin, The Shadow of Sirius
Martin: Calvin Trillin, Trillin on Texas