“Gens”: Generation, Generosity, Genocide

by Roman Sympos

Part 1: the Gens


gens (Latin): family, tribe, clan, nation, race


In ancient Rome, the word gens designated any group of people who claimed to have descended from the same individual—often a legendary or mythological ancestor, sometimes a god. The word has begotten a great many descendants of its own among the languages of Europe derived from or influenced by Latin, the language of imperial Rome. They are often dissimilar in meaning or connotation, although all share the same “family” trait: the notion of “us” versus “them.”

Most people, in my experience, don’t realize that gathering things into groups requires us to reject, to push aside, not just physically but mentally, the things that don’t “belong.” We are under the impression that what belongs simply takes a step forward into our field of awareness, like an obedient soldier responding to a drill sergeant’s command, while what doesn’t belong remains standing at attention or at ease, motionless and silent, unseen and unheard. Minding its own business.

But let’s examine what really happens when we gather things into groups. Take sorting the laundry into “white” and “colored.”

If you’re like me, you don’t begin sorting without some idea of which one you want to do first. Let’s say it’s the whites. You look down into the laundry bin with, perhaps, a mental image in mind—call it “whiteness”—and, behold! the garments matching your mental image seem to leap up at you, as if they were levitating, just begging to be chosen!

And you begin to sort. How? By picking up the white laundry you can see and pushing the not-white laundry out of the way to look for more of what “belongs.”

But how can you push the not-white laundry out of the way without, quite actively, rejecting it? And even before you begin the physical act of rejection, you’ve already rejected “what does not belong” perceptually and mentally. Your eyes have seen it: it’s left its image on your retina and its impact, at some level of awareness, on your mind, via the optic nerve. It’s your mind that has rejected it because it’s “not white.” That black T-shirt? It doesn’t match the mental image of “whiteness” that you’ve made the criterion of “belonging.”

But here’s what really interests me: I’m never aware of rejecting anything when I’m busy selecting “what belongs.” If I were a follower of Hegel, the great German Idealist philosopher, I’d say I must be “negating the negation”—mentally denying my own active denial that this T-shirt is one of the things that “belongs” to the group I’m gathering. If I were a follower of Jacques Derrida, the late French deconstructionist who was himself a follower of Hegel and, like him, helped change the course of Western intellectual history, I might say this is an example of differánce at work. But I’ll settle for the word, “ignore.”

I’m ignoring—denying attention to—what does not belong and, more disturbingly, ignoring my repeated and necessary act of ignoring it.

We typically think of ignorance as a hapless condition of not-knowing that we fall into entirely by accident, like a utility hole in the street that someone left uncovered. We were minding our own business, trying to reach the other side, looking both ways for traffic and—whoops!

But the verb, “to ignore,” is active. In the passive voice it refers to what is “being ignored,” what we are denying entry into our field of awareness, what we are, at some level of cognition, tossing out of the group of things that we’ve decided “belong” there. A big hole in the middle of the street? Doesn’t belong there, so we ignore it, and, apparently, we do so without knowing it.

In short, what’s being ignored is anything “other than” what belongs to the group we’re gathering.

And gathering around us. The group with which we identify. The group in which we have decided we belong. This is our in-group, and it cannot exist, as I hope I’ve shown, without an out-group of rejects from which its members can distinguish themselves. Everyone and everything “other than” the things that belong to our in-group is, collectively, “the Other.”

In philosophy and the social sciences generally, “the Other,” despite the definite article that’s attached to it, never refers to another person as a unique individual. It refers to an idea, a category of persons that includes any and all who are not in the in-group, regardless of other characteristics that might define them as individuals. As an individual, any member of the out-group might share a great many characteristics with individuals belonging to the in-group, and in-groups themselves often overlap, like the fields of a Venn diagram. (We’ll return to the Venn diagram in a later installment of “Views from the Precipice.”)

However, despite these individual similarities with non-members, all in-groups have one thing in common: they arise from our desire for validation, affirmation, understanding—what we call, in everyday life, “connection” or “relatability.” They arise from each member’s search for understanding—religious, moral, ethical, linguistic, racial, national, political, emotional, aesthetic, athletic—name your modifier—down to the most trivial: culinary, horticultural, avocational. Stamp collectors share the same enthusiasm for an inverted Jenny, bird-watchers for the same rare warbler.

This desire for connection, for validation of one’s preferences, opinions, tastes, and enthusiasms, of ones likes and dislikes, if you will, suggests that, as individuals, we are fundamentally uncertain of who we are, and need others to assure us of our own identities, which each individual thinks is unique and essential to them, but which is, in fact, something they construct using the symbolic tools and materials—the words, the clothing, the rituals— provided by the various overlapping in-groups to which they belong.

The most important of all in-groups for the purposes of self-definition is the gens, the group defined by blood, beginning, in the modern era, with the nuclear family (Mom, Dad, sibs) and then, in decreasing importance, the extended family (grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins), the clan (more distant relatives), the community (neighborhood, town, perhaps state or province), and, at the outer limits and after taking many forms, tribe or nation.

All of these concentric in-groups, nested like Russian dolls, have one thing in common: a shared language—crucial for any endeavor at self-definition. But only the first three (unless we assume universal human descent from Eve, or a hominid like Lucy) share a common blood ancestor. And among these three, the nuclear family holds the trump card: it alone marks the site—physical (hospital or bedroom or rice paddy), biological (your mother’s womb), temporal (your birthday and time of birth)—where and when you first came into existence.

The first thing the gens does, then, is generate. It generates generations and these generations draw not just their identity, but also the importance and prestige they attach to that identity, from the number of identifiable generations that have preceded them. This line of progenitors provides each generation with a cultural and linguistic heritage of norms and practices whose origins may be named, but never truly known. Herein enters myth, legend, folk-tales, and those innumerable stories handed down from one generation to the next (and often dropped along the way like a fumbled baton in a relay race) that goes by the name of “lore”—Grandma Taylor’s trip to Egypt, the time a hobo came to Uncle Silas’s back door to beg for work, Great Great Grandfather    McKenzie’s fighting in the Battle of Antietam, or his daughter’s tragic drowning in the Johnstown Flood.

The second thing the gens does is nurture its members: it is unconditionally generous toward them and expects, in return, their unconditional generosity—of time, effort, money, even risk of life and limb—in maintaining the solidarity and longevity of the gens.

The third thing the gens does is defend itself against genocide. Unfortunately, that defense often leads to its committing genocide in order to achieve this goal. Typically, the gens is a poor judge of what is or isn’t a real existential threat, being unavoidably and helplessly prejudiced toward the negative from the moment it defined itself as an in-group. (See “negating the negative,” above.) Because it has relegated to “the Other” all the bad things it cannot admit it shares with individual others, the gens is naturally suspicions of strangers and their intentions.

In the next three months, I’ll be reflecting on the dynamics and consequences of each unique individual’s attempts at self-definition using the tools the gens has provided them, beginning, in Part 2, with the temporal cohort within each gens that goes by the name of a “generation.”

I hope to see you again when you return for our September issue!