Philosophy of Connection
Compared to ideas like "freedom" or "individuality," the idea of connection has never been a U.S. attention-getter. Our everyday use of the word "connection" seems pretty basic and non-eventful. More often than not, "connection" is a word we use to point out an overlap in time or space:
- "I woke up late. Instead of getting the 6:55am bus, I got the 7:15am. So I ended up missing my connection."
- "You are interested in a job with Company X? I used to work at Company X and I made some great connections. If you'd like me to, I would be glad to contact them."
Bus A fails to overlap with bus B in time and space; an overlap in time and space between workers can change the job-hunting process.
Sometimes we use the word "connection" in a more unusual way to refer to people or things that have gotten swept up into a dimension of experience that extends beyond everyday time and space:
- "They were soul-mates. They knew each other's thoughts and feelings without having to say a word. They just had this amazing connection."
- "I cannot explain it. I wasn't born there. I didn't grow up there. In fact, when I arrived there the first time, it was by accident. But I immediately felt a special kind of connection to that place. It was where I belonged."
In these examples, connection doesn't result from an overlap in everyday time and space, but from some bigger-than-life dimension into which things get swept up.
A connection between soul-mates might seem more powerful than a connection between buses. But a soul-mate connection is just as "limited" as a bus connection in the sense that it establishes ties between a very small number of places or people.
This experience of connection as being limited seems important in our culture. We're okay, for example, with lucky sweaters or sports rituals of most any kind - like a tennis player who insists on wearing the same pair of socks throughout a tournament, or a football coach who won't start a game without first taking a bite out of the football field grass.
Connections between a sweater, a pair of socks, or a patch of grass and the outcome of a sports competition might seem weird, but because they are limited, we're okay with them, and even find them entertaining.
But imagine that instead of having one or two or even fifty-two soul-mates, we experienced magical connections with everyone we met, allowing us to know each other's thoughts and feelings without ever having to say a word to anyone. Or imagine that it wasn't just a pair of socks that an athlete found lucky, but everything that he or she came into contact with, including shirt, pants, shoes, underclothes, belt, toothbrush, toothpaste, shampoo, soap, towel, washcloth and comb. Remove all limits on connection and what crops up are questions about sanity.
A distinction between limited versus unlimited connection is artificial and contrived, but it's the best way that I can explain to myself how so many aspects of U.S. life can be so objectionable, and how the culture I live in can be so blind to its own history and personality. Here are some examples that really bug me on the history side of things:
- We keep on celebrating the connection between the "pioneers" and their settlement of the North American "wilderness," but only by ignoring the connection between those "pioneers" and the massacre of 500,000 Native Americans.
- We keep on praising the genius of the founding fathers and their creation of a constitutional republic, but we keep ignoring the connection between our founding fathers and the active expansion of U.S. slavery, as well as the connection between our founding fathers and rejection of religious diversity in favor of Christianity.
On the personality side of things, limited connection seems like U.S. consumers' best-kept secret for preserving happiness. An example is the cell phone. Nearly 225 million of us have mobile phones, and we recognize a connection between these cells phones and an ability to keep in touch with family, friends and responsibilities at work regardless of the circumstances. We may not understand all the science involved with cell phones, but it is easy enough for us to imagine radio waves bouncing off towers, and for us to realize that this bouncing goes on for thousands and thousands of miles - with one glaring exception. Electric currents that oscillate at radio frequencies are permitted to bounce off cell phone towers for thousands of miles and travel anywhere and everywhere in the world except inside a human brain, where they are forbidden to enter. This closes the door to any connection between cell phones and cancer. And yet in their ten page meta-analysis of studies in this area, which appeared in the journal Surgical Neurology (Volume 72, Issue 3, September 2009, Pages 205-214), Dr. Vini Khuraana and his international team of researchers from Australia, Austria, and Sweden concluded that there was "adequate epidemiologic evidence to suggest a link between prolonged cell phone usage and the development of an ipsilateral brain tumor."The connection between cell phones and environmental toxicity is another link that we don't recognize. Cell phones could never have become hand-sized without the mining and refinement of rare metals (especially smartphones), and rare metal refining serves as a connection between cell phones and the ongoing production of toxic wastewater. (We also toss about 150 million used cell phones into the garbage each year.)
Another fun example is organic bananas. A connection between organic bananas and health is one we recognize and feel good about. There are plenty of nutrients in an organic banana that are needed for our body's health, and there are few unwanted contaminants in an organic banana since it's been grown under special conditions. But we don't recognize a connection between organic bananas and global warming (4,000 miles of transport from Ecuador to the U.S. at a cost of 50-100 grams of carbon dioxide emission per banana), or a connection between organic bananas and injustice for Ecuadorian citizens (who work for 26-46 cents an hour on banana plantations thanks to our purchasing decision).
We are probably too big on the idea of boundaries in the U.S. to accept the idea of unlimited connection. Boundaries are one of our benchmarks for measuring psychological health. If a person can't establish and respect boundaries, he or she meets the requirements for borderline personality disorder. Where you end and where another person begins - that's a place where we draw a very firm line, to be crossed at great legal risk. Disconnect is built into our view of people.Other types of dividing lines work against our acceptance of unlimited connection. For example, we believe there is irrefutable evidence of a disconnect between things (inanimate objects) on account of everything we see and hear and taste and touch and smell. With respect to things, unlimited connection strikes us as non-sense. When we walk down a road and kick a rock with our shoe, we know that the road is not walking down the rock and the rock is not kicking the road. We experience the road and the rock and our shoe as things that exist separately and in fundamental disconnectedness from each other.
A first summary: we're like limited liability companies (LLCs) in our thinking about connection. We structure our thinking in such a way as to shield ourselves from most of it.
I would have no problem with LLC thinking, except for the fact that it is dead wrong. In the most literal sense of the word, unlimited connection is the way the universe works. "Functions only occur .. " wrote Buckminster Fuller in his 1975 work, Synergetics, "as inherently cooperative and accommodatively varying subaspects of synergistically transforming wholes." At the risk of insulting Buckminster Fuller, I think he was referring to the idea of unlimited connection in his definition of function. He was pointing out that what we see on the surface of life events does not provide us with the real story, because what we see is always accompanied and made possible by an invisible underlying tension - a tension that is evenly-distributed and dependent on an all-reaching set of underlying connections - the "underpinnings" of experience.
Listening to an orchestra is my favorite example of unlimited connection. Imagine that you are listening to an orchestra of 50-70 musicians performing a symphony. Perhaps not just any symphony, but a symphony that fills you with sadness. Now ask this question. How is it that you become filled with sadness while listening to the orchestra perform the symphony? What accounts for your experience?
You might start out by saying "the composer." Without the composer, the orchestra would not be able to perform the symphony. Quite true! But that would also be the case without the musicians and the conductor. No musicians, no musical performance. (And ditto for "no conductor.") After the composer, the conductor, and the musicians, perhaps the next most likely factor would be the instruments. Instruments are definitely required. And of course, some space that can hold all the musicians and their instruments and the conductor.
This first round of factors - conductor, composer, musicians, instruments, and space - seems like a reasonable way to account for the experience of a symphony. But is it? Can a symphony fill you with sadness regardless of the skill with which it is performed? Can it fill you with sadness regardless of the way each instrument is tuned? Or the way each instrument is made? Or the training of the musicians? Or each musician's understanding of the music? Or the conductor's understanding of the composer? This second round of factors shifts our thinking into the lives of the musicians, the conductor, and the composer. It also shifts our thinking into the lives of the craftsmen who build the instruments.
But it is difficult to stop after this second round of factors. How did each musician develop an understanding of the music? How did the conductor develop an understanding of the composer? How did the craftsmen develop the skill to build the instruments? Were the families of the musicians and craftsmen and conductor and composer unimportant in their personal development and understanding of music? Can we exclude the families of the participants when accounting for our experience of the symphony? And what about the families of the families?
It's easy to see how a full accounting of the symphony experience could expand itself outward indefinitely. For example, imagine that a symphony is performed in a concert hall that was specially designed to highlight the quality of the sound. In that case, wouldn't we also need to include the designer of the building in our account? And what about the construction workers who actually built it? And what about their families? And the families of their families? Or the healthcare providers that help keep all of these individuals healthy? Should they be excluded from the account?
My second favorite example of unlimited connection is atoms. We think about everything in the world as being made of "stuff." Our bodies are made of stuff (43,000 grams of oxygen, 12,000 grams of carbon, 6,300 grams of hydrogen, 2,000 grams of nitrogen, 1,100 grams of calcium, and 1,000 grams or less of about 30-50 additional elements); rocks, soil, plants and water are made of "stuff," some of which is the same as our bodily "stuff" and some of which is different; and even though we cannot see it, the air around us is also made of "stuff." (Our atmosphere is 78% nitrogen gas, 20% oxygen gas, 1% argon gas, plus very small amounts of trace gases including carbon dioxide, neon, helium, methane, krypton, hydrogen and xenon gas.) "Atoms" is the word we use to refer to the basic building blocks of this "stuff."
What's mind-boggling about atoms is that you cannot escape them. For as long as you live, you're swamped by atoms. Even when you're dead, your body is swamped by atoms. Dead or alive, atoms themselves are stuck in atoms. The oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen atoms in your arm cannot ignore each others' presence. They also cannot ignore the presence of nitrogen, oxygen and argon atoms in the air. It also works the other way around. Atoms of nitrogen, oxygen and argon in the air cannot ignore any of the atoms they come into contact with, including the atoms in your arm. Whenever you move your arm, you impact the atoms around it. They in turn impact the atoms around them. Nobody can walk up to a bunch of atoms, draw a line and then demand, "Atoms, when you reach this line, stop impacting each other." In principle, there is unlimited connection between all atoms in the universe. You cannot wave your arm without having a potential impact on every atom. Chaos theory calls it the butterfly effect. According to chaos theory, incredibly slight differences in initial conditions can dramatically change the behavior of large-scale systems. (The metaphor often used to help enrich our sense of this connection involves the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Brazil and the triggering a hurricane on the coast of Australia.)
A second summary: unlimited connection means that you are everywhere in the world, and the whole world is inside of you. The further our thinking moves in the direction of unlimited connection, the more likely it is for distinctions like inside/outside, part/whole, and self/non-self to dissolve. Here are some examples from my own area of training (nutrition and alternative medicine):
- There is a zone on the pad of your index finger that corresponds to your sinus because your sinus is partly in your hand.
- There is a zone on the arch of your foot that corresponds to your kidney because your kidney is partly in your foot.
- Soybeans make hormones that work just fine inside human cells because there are soybean-like genes inside humans.
- There are more bacteria in your digestive system than cells in your body because your digestive system is partly outside you. (Since there is no cell membrane to prevent any object or creature from entering your digestive tract, each end of the tract looks a lot like the outside world in terms of microorganisms.)
- The passage of the earth around the sun partly controls our moods, our risk of chronic diseases like metabolic syndrome, our risk of acute heart attack, and in men, the mobility of sperm.
- The turning of the earth on its axis is partly responsible for virtually all aspects of human metabolism, including our core body temperature. For this reason, the earth's spin is also partly responsible for peak performance in athletic competition.
If the world wasn't inside of you, you would die. And if you could not send your insides out into the world in various ways (by expressing yourself physically or verbally or in some form of communication) you would go insane. The more lines that you draw between inside and outside, part and whole, self and non-self, public and private, the more likely you are to do one or the other (go insane or die).
Unlimited connection means that efforts to dismiss the relevance of any experience or rave about the value of one thing at the expense of another are destined to fail. Every experience is like a vortex of a river, a mesmerizing spot where the water just starts spiraling and swirling downward for no apparent reason. The vortex occupies a well-defined location along the river's course. (It's easy enough to pinpoint a vortex on a map.) But at the same time, the vortex is fundamentally non-localized and not native to any spot at all since it borne of the entire river and its movement. Our personal experiences are non-localized in this exact same way. We like to think that we are clever and resourceful, and that we choose the manner in which we connect with the world. We "weigh our options" and decide. But we make a mistake in claiming the options as "ours," since every option we claim is a vortex in a river.
"Freedom" and "individuality" aren't wrong-minded ideas. Yet freedom and individuality require a life that is full of possibility, and a place where possibility can get turned into reality. There is no place for freedom and individuality to happen except the world, and there is no way for them to happen unless the world remains intact.
We do away with freedom and individuality by doing away with world. This "doing away" can happen physically, or it can happen experientially in what we imagine the world to be. A world riddled with more and more divisions between inside and outside, part and whole, self and non-self, public and private is a world being done away with in our imagining. In spite of cell phones and globalized food chains, it's a world of increasing disconnect. Every time we claim the vortex of a river and imagine that connecting with the world is matter of choice, we engage in recklessness, not freedom. A world of unlimited connection is not a world up for grabs. In a world of unlimited connection, things come and go in accordance with what is fitting, not what we deem fit. A world of unlimited connection provides us with a very finite freedom. It's the freedom of being handed over an opportunity to become ourselves, the freedom of being compelled to proceed in a way that no one else can. Swiss psychologist Carl Jung expressed it as perfectly as I can imagine: every person is a question that the world asks itself, and the way you live your life is the answer.
