Monday, June 13, 2016


That little word “fit” keeps gumming up the thinking about evolution.  “Fitness” is in most minds the goal of a gymnastic or diet regime that will cause robustness and personal longevity.  But the kind of fitness that allows human survival can only be seen in the retrospect of evolution because evolution IS always retrospective.  It’s simply a matter of who survives which depends upon the environment and learning, just as much as muscle development or good digestion.

You can be Arnold Schwartzenegger and not survive a plane crash or a virus.  You can be handsome and intelligent and still destroyed when an avalanche buries your house.  The characteristics that will guarantee survival do not exist in advance — they are situational and no one knows what situation might arise.  What will save a person in one situation might doom them in another.

Many of the characteristics that are likely to provide survival in a majority of situations are not about fitness at all.  The evolutionary advantage of humans is that they can work together to increase both the accuracy of their perceptions and the effectiveness of their actions.  But, ironically, the most resourceful groups may include people who are only useful to the group but will destroy them as individuals.  But one MUST fit the group or the group will destroy the one.

When I was working at Multnomah County Animal Control with Mike Burgwin, trying to address what sort of person to hire to be an officer, at first we thought in terms of the one perfect person.  Then we began to realize that different problems required different kinds of people.  It was sometimes a matter of strength and daring, but also at other times a matter of strategy or gentle persuasion.  A few people had a wider range of skills and abilities, which meant they were “better.”  People who had no skills or who had actively damaging characteristics (cruelty) weren’t always obvious until the damage was done.  

Mike’s management skills were sort of like the character played by Mark Harmon on NCIS.  That is, he was often covert and unexpected, showing up at the shelter in the middle of the night or using an undercover car to observe in the field.  Being so unexpected revealed the truth of the officer’s abilities.  Sometimes merely assigning that person to a different part of town with different demographics made all the difference.  Once or twice a problematic officer was found a new job by Mike himself.  Like the bad-tempered guy he found a candy machine route. It was a better fit.

These days much is controlled by data and standardization, which lead straight into that box of homogenization.  The perfect teacher, the perfect minister, the perfect judge, and the ideal citizen.  The pressure comes from the commodifiers who cannot think in terms of the market except as flocks of sheep eager to pretend to be something more grand by buying a t-shirt with a wolf on it.

We have created a world in which one way to succeed is to allow brutality and rule-breaking.  This neither eliminates nor restrains people who are brutal, but they can find jobs in controlling difficult people.  Nurse Ratched comes to mind. We tolerate them by “not knowing” what they are doing, denying that they are us — basically contracting some people to be what we are unwilling to be ourselves: torturers, thieves, arms dealers, killers of the innocent.  

Schools always have a person designated to be the disciplinarian who might be only an explainer in some schools, but who can be violent and punishing in others.  In Winnemucca being interviewed for a teaching job, I sat in an almond-green velvet wing-chair in the superintendent’s office, gazing at his collection of paddles mounted proudly on the wall.  Several had holes bored in them, thought to raise blisters.  We were not a match.

How are we to understand athletic programs that damage students because they are based on violent confrontations that cause concussions and destroy joints?  There are those who feel that football is merely a kind of chess and that naked boys full of either the testosterone of success or whatever chemical it is that accompanies defeat can go into a group shower room and be perfect gentlemen (which is not to say neuter).  We’ve come to realize that even the coach may not be a gentleman.  What’s the use of a football scholarship if it renders the student too mindless to learn?

from "Splendor in the Grass"

Humans have the ability to alter their environment to make it survivable.  Air-conditioning comes to mind.  We have not been attentive to some of the changes we could make in our social environment for the betterment of everyone.  The individual, by forming a sub-group with power, can create environments that in turn create certain kinds of people:  unemployed, illiterate, angry, traumatized, and unable to attach to anything.

It is attachment that causes us to want to fit, whether it is to an environment, a job, or another person.  Fitting almost always means a certain amount of compromise and change as we self-adjust, sometimes not even consciously.  Growing up in a family means being guided into some way that fits the family.  Tragically what fits the family may be a scapegoat or the designated enforcer or a parent who is not fit [sic] to be a parent and so leaves a void.  These things happen even in a natural genetically created family, and then it is up to the larger group to put pressure on them.

But any small consistent (this characteristic is important because it can take time to change) group with a place for each member and some mechanism for keeping fitting [sic] people together (which is emotional attachment) will work — actively WORK — on behalf of both the individuals and the group.  Then that “family” will need a larger environment that allows them to stay together and grow, form ties and understandings.  Effective soldiers need skills but they also need cooks, paymasters, transportation —  in short, every group is an ecology and everyone in that ecology either fits or falls out.  When they DO fit, then emerges the dedication and love for each other that is so effective in a common cause.

I’ve already said that I value the cop series “Flashpoint” because it always bores into the situation to find out WHY a person is having a “fit” that destroys others and what pressure point of talk will save him from the necessity of the team destroying him (or her) to protect the group.  They Macgyver the situation: what can change the terms? 

What if someone saw what was happening in The Pulse on that ghastly occasion and simply turned on the fire sprinklers?  Surely they were required by code to have them.  One of the problems of such situations is figuring out what’s happening and who the shooter is — which is the problem of a dancer whipping out a concealed gun or the bartender pulling his shotgun out from under the counter, like the movies.  (Do they really do that?)  What if there were bear spray in someone’s pack?

Twice I was with Bob Scriver out hunting on horseback and someone shot at us.  (Probably both by mistake.)  Bob simply shot back at them.  Not to hit them, but near enough to impress them.  Both times it worked.  But this was only a few sane people in a vast space and Bob was a good shot.  Better than the people who shot at us or I wouldn’t be here.  I’m not anti-gun.  I’m situational about it.

The situation was a lot of people with loud music and semi-darkness.  It had nothing to do with whether they were gay or any other category.  They were vulnerable.  The symbolism that gets pushed onto them like a kidnapper’s hood is ancient and no longer fits.  What life would fit Omar Mateen?  What life circumstance turned him into what I call a “Jaguar Man,” one who preys? 

Omar Mateen

I have a prime suspect:  G4S, the private security firm that employed Mateen.  The ideal job for a person who needs control through force, a private army of no nation but private incorporation for profit.  NYPD inside out.  Such jobs reinforce and justify the kind of person who will use force.  Will the National Guard someday have to confront the mercenary armies now in our own country?

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