Pack

Two posts in one day? Madness!

I've been reading Bertrand Russel's "History of Western Philosophy," which is quite good, I can see why it is such a definitive introductory text. However, I came to the realization today that Russel falls prey to a fallacy that plagues, among others, Rousseau: he assumes that humans are naturally loners and that they group together out of self-interest.

I will address this by refering to a pop-psychology question that I nevertheless feel sheds some particularly interesting philosophical light on this question. Freshmen and kids at sleep-away camp and other groups of youngsters thrown together, when they are first meeting each other and trying to get to know each other's inner souls as quickly as possible, sometimes like to ask questions like "describe a waterfall to a blind man" and such that are supposed to shed light on various aspects of our psyches. My personal favorite, however, is the question "would you rather be happy or be correct?" I have at various times tried to convince myself that I would rather be the former, but I know that in fact this is not the case.

I have tried a variety of techniques to convince myself of this falsehood, but it ultimately does not ring true. For example, I had convinced myself that I don't care so much about being right because I have learned to accept and learn from instances in which I am wrong. The thing that I have come to realize is that the reason I accept being wrong is that once I have rectified my error, I am right again. It is not that I don't care about being correct, but that I am willing to accept the process nessisary to arrive at correctness. This, I believe, is what makes an intellectual, or a philosopher. And it is this preference for correctness and the road thereto that separates them (us) from the bulk of humanity and turns them (us) into loners.

As my writing group has mentioned in their essays on how "a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing," knowledge can lead to arrogance. This arroagance can be obvious or subtle, but it almost invariably leads to a sense of separation from people, except for such times as it is nessisary to submit to the crowd in order to convince them of things or get things done, but this invariably entails a certian level of condescention.

So I have thought, probably incorrectly, that when I feel lonely here in China, it is because I miss the intellectual stimulation I had back home. I am sure that this is part of it, but I think that what I really miss is pack. What I mean by pack is the easy and seemingly meaningless interactions with the people who form the everyday. Like dogs, humans naturally like to run around in big groups. They like to form their little alliances and rivalries and infatuations and intrigues that seem meaningless to the outside. I have trivially and cynically commented on numerous occasions that there always seem to be some friends who are more or less
"replacable" and others who seem to last. The thing is that it is hard to know who will be the ones to last. And this does not lessen the importance of any of the members of a pack.

So I think what I miss second-most in China, at least at the present, is intellectual stimulation. And what I miss most is pack. Sure, I have been taking iniative to try to find a group of students to do stuff with. The thing is, I value pack more at night than during the day. The day has always been when work and thinking gets done. The night has always been when I ate with family or with the "pack" friends: when we watched Scrubs on Alex's computer or Korean movies on Sanch's TV or Aqua Teen Hunger Force in Rich's room; when I gorged on mini-donuts with Ed, white pizza with Rob, cereal with dad; when Alex wanted to go to the Haven or Mike wanted to go to Wawa or Joe wanted to go to Wawa or we ran into Chris at...Wawa. So night is always when I want to relax with friends, but it is when the students get kicked out of the teachers' appartments. And I miss those last words of the night, the "don't stay up to late" or "wake me up before you go to class" or "I'm gonna hurt in the morning."