Gens Part 3 | Sympos

“Gens”: Generation, Generosity, Genocide

by Roman Sympos

Part 3: Generosity

“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

--John 15: 13-14, The King James Bible

Pity would be no more
If we did not make somebody poor;
And Mercy no more could be
If all were as happy as we.

--William Blake, “The Human Abstract”

The gens—the family, tribe, clan, or nation that shares, ideationally or in fact, a common ancestor—is itself, obviously, the ancestor of the word “generosity.” This suggests that the act of giving has, since the dawn of human consciousness, been understood as something confined to the network of one’s blood relations.

This was the premise of Marshall Sahlins's Stone-Age Economics, his classic study of pre-modern production, distribution, and consumption. There he explained how, in the absence of money to facilitate the exchange of commodities (things made to be sold rather than used by their maker), gift-giving and gift-exchange were the predominant methods for distributing goods within the gens. These methods prevailed within the concentric circles of blood relationship extending from the most intimate parental nucleus outward to embrace ever wider and more remote networks of biological connection, gradually giving way to barter at the outer limits of the kinship group.

The difference between gift-exchange and barter is that the former creates an endless chain of obligations to “give back,” which cements personal ties between the givers, while the quid pro quo of a barter agreement leaves the participants free of personal obligation once the exchange is completed. Thus, parents don’t charge their school-age kids for room and board (at least mine didn’t), but they do expect something in return for raising them—respect and obedience. This exchange is not contractual or arrived at by a negotiated agreement, like barter. Once the kids have grown up, of course, it’s another story. At that point, payment for living and eating at home becomes a legitimate parental expectation, while obedience is off the table.

Even in modern societies, where kinship networks have shrunk to the point where most of our social interactions occur outside them, we are subject to the same constraints. Consider, for instance, accepting an invitation to dinner, which obliges but does not bind you to return the favor and can often lead to an endless series of reciprocal invitations, as opposed to trading baseball cards, which, once the exchange is completed, leaves both participants free to go their separate ways. The importance of gift-exchange to consolidating the identity of the gens and ensuring its perpetuation is clear. You don’t have to like the people you barter with. You have to at least pretend to like the folks you’re inviting to dinner.

At the limits of the nation, where the gens encounters its Other—the “barbarians,” the “savages” who do not speak our language (or even have a language, apparently, just gibberish)—barter often gives way to outright stealing, plunder, enslavement, or massacre, also known as “genocide.” This is where the “war” part of “all’s fair in love and war” comes in. Here barter, settling for mutual benefit, is a way of making peace in the absence of love, the binding principle (theoretically, at least) of the gens. The limit of nationhood is also where, once barter fails, the gens demands of its members the greatest gift of all: their lives.

“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends,” Jesus told his disciples. He had his own death in mind, but the lesson was meant to apply to all of them. They, like him, were about to learn what giving the ultimate gift meant: persecution, torture, and death. And for what?

The gift of eternal life.

And as Jesus framed it, eternal life was a gift, not a quid pro quo. That’s what the parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16) was all about, the one where the latecomers (the Gentile converts to Christianity) were paid the same wages as those who had worked all day (the Jews, God’s Chosen People for the previous two millennia). Salvation wasn’t contractual, or quantifiable, like hourly wages (see “eternal,” above). Working in God’s vineyard was an unmerited opportunity to live forever in his presence, and what you were expected to give in return was not griping and resentment but love and gratitude.

But who are our “friends”? “Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you,” Jesus tells his disciples in the very next verse of John’s Gospel. Two words stand out here. The first is “friends.” God’s Chosen People will no longer be confined to a gens, to a tribe or nation descended from a common blood ancestor, like Abraham, but will come to embrace all of humanity, Gentiles as well as Jews, whose shared ancestor is Adam, the Original Sinner. His sin, too, will be wiped clean, and he’ll join us in heaven.

So, not gens, but “friends.” Generosity, heretofore restricted to the tribe, is now extended to the whole human race. Jesus makes this point not only implicitly in the story of the Good Samaritan, but explicitly, as well: feed, clothe, and shelter those who are hungry, naked, and unhoused, he commands his disciples, for “inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (Matthew 25:40). All of us are “friends,” now, and all our friends are “brethren,” siblings in the same universal family, children of God. With the promise of salvation for all Jesus planted the seed of our modern respect for the inherent worth and dignity of every person regardless of nation, religion, class, caste, race, gender, or income.

The second word that stands out here is “command,” a word that reveals the dark side of Jesus’s message, the shadow it casts. Yes, God’s Chosen People will now comprise all who choose Him by accepting his gift of eternal life. But they have to show their gratitude by giving, in return, obedience.

By offering eternal life not as a quid pro quo, but as a divine gift, Jesus made all who refused to follow his commands ingrates. And the punishment for ingratitude, when the benefactor is God and the obligation thus infinite and unquantifiable, can only be one thing. “Which do you choose?” asked the evangelists, holding up the carrot and the stick. “It's entirely up to you. Eternal life, or eternal death?”

If gifts and gratitude are what hold the gens together from the inside, the Other is what confirms its identity, negatively, from the outside. Every in-group needs an out-group to define itself against, every “me” a “not me,” every “us” a “them.” For every sheep, a goat (Matthew 25: 31-44), and for every grain of wheat, a handful of chaff (Matthew 3:12). Into the “unquenchable fire” with them! Jesus commands. Lacking any means of punishing ungrateful infidels for choosing wrong, the early Christians had to settle for a stick as imaginary as their carrot: the threat of damnation, a punishment (they said) worse than death. Once the theocratic machinery was up and running smoothly, however, crusades, Inquisitions, pogroms, and the extermination of nations became the preferred method of teaching unbelievers the merits of gratitude.

Looked at from this angle, God’s gift of eternal life is a con perpetrated by the people who chose Him so they can make non-believers do what they say. “Pie in the sky,” in other words.

No one understood the con better than the late eighteenth-century English poet, William Blake. In “The Chimney Sweeper” and “The Little Black Boy,” two of the most bitterly ironic protest poems ever written, Blake let us in on how the con worked.

Speaking in the voices of his titular subjects, Blake showed how the enslaved children of the British Empire, White and Black, de facto and de jure, were made complicit in their own oppression by pious assurances that, after death, all the senseless suffering they were made to endure in this life would be rewarded by eternal life in the next. There they would “sport” and bask forever in the infinite love of the Heavenly Father who had, only God knew why, placed them in bondage and misery to begin with.

In the glow of that expectation, the indentured chimney sweeper, Tom, who sleeps in soot and goes to work each morning in the cold and dark, feels “happy and warm,” ready to “do [his] duty” and “fear [no] harm,” not because there is no harm to fear, but because, however dire, it will be more than made up for in the happy afterlife promised to dutifully suffering children like him. The little Black boy, whose skin has blistered from working in the fields under the intense heat of the sun, symbol of God’s perverse “love” for him, is told that he’s been put on this earth to “learn to bear [love’s] beams.” Once he has, God will “free” him from the “cloud” of his black body so he can go to Heaven and “joy” “round [His Father’s] tent” forever.

Blake understood how the poor were conned by the gift of Christianity’s imaginary carrot into loving the real stick their pious masters beat them with. He also understood how the con kept in place the system that created masters and slaves to begin with. The unregulated capitalism that spawned the “Satanic Mills” of Britain’s nascent Industrial Revolution, unrestricted in its freedom to extend the workday and workweek and drive the wages of its laborers, including children as young as five, down to the point of starvation, made generosity toward the oppressed a grotesque affirmation of the oppressor’s putative magnanimity, turning pity and mercy into farce. “Here, let me help you up,” says the man who struck you down. “Here, take this farthing,” says the man who robbed you blind.

In short, gifts are tricky. Giving one can be an act of kindness (note the “kin” buried in this word) or self-congratulation or temptation (remember Pandora!) or aggression (remember the Trojan Horse!). But all gifts come with strings attached. Some strings lead to obligations, as we’ve seen, but others can lead to worse things: shame, servitude, coercion. (Rule Number 1 in dealing with the Mafia: never accept a favor.)

Giving can get curiouser still. “Home is where, when you go there, they have to take you in,” wrote Robert Frost in “The Death of the Hired Man.” They have to. They are obliged to give you shelter, food, and a place to sleep for no other reason than that they are related to you. Long before you appear on their doorstep, they are obliged to make you obliged for their having obliged you. When you do go there, you better be ready to wash the dishes.

This is how the gens thrives and survives, by weaving strands of mutual obligation into a tight network: you’re obliged not only to give, but to accept. To reject a gift or set conditions on it is to untie one of the knots that keep the kinship network intact and prevent it from unraveling—the knot that is you. Refusing to accept a gift is, in effect, to exile yourself from the tribe.

If we leave aside the massive debt that Jesus says we owe our Father in Heaven for throwing us the life preserver of Salvation, we are left with what used to be known, in gender-exclusive terms, as “The Family of Man,” a family of cosmic orphans stranded at the edge of a galaxy in a remote corner of the universe, sharing no common ancestor except, perhaps, a hominid named “Lucy,” and no common language but that of the human heart.

Jesus had the right idea when he called his disciples “brethren” and made the leap from gens to friends. But making that leap ourselves doesn’t require signing on to eternal obedience to an Almighty Father for His gift of eternal life, or fearing damnation if we don’t. All it takes is imagination.

I’m not talking about “innovation,” or “creativity,” or “best practices” or any of those other buzzwords greasing the wheels of today’s high tech, hyper-mediated, computational industries of abstraction, isolation, and self-love. We, too, have our Satanic Mills, STEM-powered, not steam-powered, where the robust energy of the imagination is put to work grinding out ever-more-wonderful widgets to make us rich and improve our “quality of life.” No, that’s not what I’m talking about. I mean the sympathetic imagination, the human faculty that is entirely useless for making money or widgets, but that enables us to feel, at once and viscerally, what another person is going through.

Mere understanding is a ghostly ectoplasm by comparison. It’s the equivalent of explaining to the woman just run over by a bus why she’s about to die, but without feeling the need to hold her hand. Percy Shelley, surveying the New World Order of colonial empires, belligerent nation states, robber barons, and unbridled materialism arising from the ruins of the Napoleonic Wars, put it best: “We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know.” Knowledge is abstract, and abstractive: it reduces particulars to generalities, people to numbers, the world to a picture of the world. It is mediated. The sympathetic imagination is im-mediate. It’s what makes you want to throw up when you see that woman dying in the street. It’s what makes you cry. It’s what makes you reach out to hold her hand.

Perhaps, surrounded on all sides by a violent and angry and suffering world, it’s a good thing we can live as isolated and insulated from others as our electronic devices let us. Perhaps the sympathetic imagination, like a kitchen appliance, can wear out from overuse. Perhaps we should conserve our dwindling imaginative energies for the families and friends and neighbors that we encounter face-to-face, every day: people we like because they are people like us. Be that as it may, I’d like to end with a reminder of what we are missing when we ignore the opportunity to act generously toward a stranger, to extend the powers of the sympathetic imagination beyond the tight circle of the gens. It’s a trivial example but, I think, to the point.

I was driving the other day and approached a four-way stop, the first car there. I was in a hurry, probably late for an appointment. Almost simultaneously, a woman pulled up to my right and hit the brakes. She was in a hurry, too. In Massachusetts, the rule in such situations is that the first driver to arrive at a four-way stop has the right of way. That was me. But if two drivers arrive simultaneously, the car to the right has the right of way. That was her.

We sat there, motors idling, wondering if we shared the same understanding of the Commonwealth’s driving regulations. And then I waved her through.

Reader, I tell you this not because it required an extraordinary effort of my sympathetic imagination, or because I’m expecting a pat on the back. I’m telling you this because it made me feel, for a second or two, magnanimous, a word that derives from two Latin roots: magnus, meaning “great,” and animus, the word for “soul.” “Great-souled.” That was it. I felt . . . bigger. Spiritually expansive. The urgency of my errand seemed, at that moment, petty and unworthy of me, or of any “great-souled” being. I realized that the self, along with all its needs and concerns, is finite. It, and they, and the body they’re attached to, come to an end. But the soul (the human spirit, the mind, our vital force, call it what you will) is infinite. Or that’s how it feels to us, even in the most trivial acts of mercy.

When we are frustrated in our pursuit of material or mental comforts, which is to say, our selfish pursuits, we have two choices. We can double down on them and make ourselves angry, insulting, rude, even violent. (Road rage doth make monsters of us all.) Or we can “rise above” them, to the level of what (feels like) immortality.

Even if no one is up there to welcome us.

This feeling is accessible only in acts of generosity toward the stranger, the Other who stands beyond the circle of family, neighborhood, and nation. In that tight circumference, giving and accepting gifts is obligatory. The gens perpetuates itself by allowing its members to plug in, as it were, to the ongoing life of the tribe that will outlive them, by giving them opportunities to contribute to that perpetuation. Gifts to strangers plug us in to the rest of the human race.

In a secular universe, nothing and no one obliges us to help the stranger—not what Jesus commands us, not the debt we owe God for the gift of eternal life, and certainly not the gens.

Which is exactly what gives such acts of giving the power to make us, or make us feel, divine.