Ignored by Mr. Dodge
Hi Old-Timer! What’s up? Wondering. Nothing new. About what? Causes. Why we get out of bed in the morning. How causes come to our awareness. And you couldn’t wait to bring your thoughts to my awareness. I hungered for something. That I couldn’t put into words when I was younger but maybe I can now. Though I’ve been trying so far without much success. Hungered for what? Maybe I’ll get it. To know what certain people were thinking. It mattered to me to understand why they did what they did, because however it affected me – if it affected me at all – it was confusing. I didn’t understand. So I grew up confused, hungering to get rid of the confusion so I could understand.
Understand who? Family. Dad and Mom, older Sister and Brother. And Grandma when she was living with us. They were all a mystery. The whole family was a mystery, and it wouldn’t leave me alone. I had to do something about it.
Weren’t they nice? Nice enough. Kids were showing up at grade school from Rook and Whiskey Hollow with lice wearing hand-me-down clothes and talking rough. Where I was, on top of Greentree Hill riding around in my Dad’s Buicks and Cadillacs, I was embarrassed, I had it so good. What nagged at me was how it felt, being part of emotional currents and undercurrents that sometimes fit with an image of plenty and contentment and sometimes not. And when they didn’t fit it could be quite a jolt. Uncomfortable. For all the sweetness there were sour notes and they had a lasting effect.
How long? Right up to now. They’re feeding my website and this letter. Doing something about it is looking for explanations so I can understand. You’re making progress? Since I first started writing about it I’ve made more progress than I could imagine.
When did you start? My second year at Andover. I was studying Shakespeare in an English class taught by Joe Dodge and one day, out of the blue, I wrote an essay on my own and handed it in. Mr. Dodge rewarded you for extra effort. Hah! Don’t I wish! Shakespeare had extraordinary insight into the human Psyche. Into human motivations and causes, situations and relationships, and maybe this is what triggered my insight. Even though I had little success understanding his plays, and Mr. Dodge took no interest in me. My essay made no impression.
Where things stand
What was your insight? That though the home I’d grown up in till then was populated with people there was nobody home. My essay was a search for personal connection and meaning from empty rooms. All of them? I became aware of a connection, years later, when my Mom described something similar. A recurring nightmare, being alone in an empty house. So my essay could have been a psychic connection with her. An early one but not the last. She and I reflected in conversations sometimes where the others stuck to what they were doing. We were the philosophers.
Where do things stand? The year my Dad died I was thirty, confused and looking for answers. An explanation that I thought would somehow turn up in his effects, in stuff he’d written and stored in a box in the basement. Wow! What did you find? Nothing. The box was there in my mind but not there in the basement. Or anywhere else. My Dad’s life had come to an end without a definitive statement of what it had been all about. This made no sense to me. What’s the point of living if it’s not about something? If it can’t be put into words and shared with the next generation? Same thing when my Mom died. It just ended and that was it. She was OK with the next generation writing her story.
Principles and values
You’re going to write your own story. Trying to. The human family has come to dire stuff going on today, like Artificial Intelligence and climate change, because it hasn’t reflected. And so it’s barreling ahead with little understanding of what it means and the consequences. The ‘story’ it’s following seems a patchwork of cliches and mythologies handed down from the past that don’t offer much guidance. If anything they’re steering us over a cliff, and it’s because they’re not being questioned. They’re getting the Joe Dodge treatment. Leaving Person unattended along with purpose and meaning, which leaves the field open to mountebanks. Tricksters and charlatans, to form cults of non-thinkers like themselves and lead them wherever they want.
The overall effect is lack of guidance. So, yes, if telling our stories makes sense of things and sharing them is guidance I’ll tell my story. And you’ll tell yours, and it will make things maybe a little less confusing for all of us. Keep us from going over a cliff.
Should I look in your basement? No basement here and no box. Just a bunch of essays. No book? Books imply finality, whereas reflection tells me that Life is about Movement. Things moving forward with evolution which makes everything a work in progress. Including my essays. Including this letter, which will be out of date tomorrow or the next day. Or next year. Working papers that won’t be much use in dealing with situations in the future. They’re time-limited, so I don’t see much point in making a fuss over them.
And yet there are principles and values that stand the test of time. That originate with a situation that’s not in and of this world and could be helpful if we gave them any thought. That’s not weighted down by the dead hand of the past. That’s alive with spontaneity in the moment, and so they have relevance. Insights from intuition that come from purpose with meaning. From what I call Guidance. Another perspective that’s both objective and relatable, though even great minds have struggled to relate to it. Because, I imagine, of where they were and are in their growth. In evolution, trying to get it with the awareness that they’re capable of. With the faculties of Mind at their stage of evolution.
Cock-a-doodle-doo!
This doesn’t sound like any ‘guidance’ I’m aware of. It’s because human thought is permeated with the habits of the animals we are and are descended from. That’s not only unaware of evolution but opposed to it. Fooled by bodies and their five senses into believing that whatever is ‘out there’ is all there is and it’s whatever their five senses say it is. An unchanging, one-dimensional poster. ‘Reality’ with no more substance than a sheet of paper. ‘Beings’ with no more purpose than stomachs to be filled and more bodies to produce. A ‘story’ with no more meaning than a cartoon. ‘Finality’, and if you are aware of evolution, if you do have a different perspective and question it, you must be crazy.
This helps get rid of the confusion? It does. Because it makes it possible to experience ‘family’ without being blindsided by its two-sidedness. One side made up of roles and relationships centered around Persons moving forward, the other made up of roles and relationships centered on hierarchy. The former dedicated to learning and growth where everyone learns from everyone else; the latter dedicated to the pecking order, where ‘learning’ is acceptance of things as they are and unquestioning obedience to those who rule the roost from above. The difference being between . . . people and chickens. Yes. ‘Pecking order’ inspired by chickens and ‘rule the roost’ by roosters. Not a bad metaphor if I do say so.
Screw you!
‘Tribal beast’ doesn’t remind me of chickens. It sounds more like a horror from Jurassic Park. The title of my essay. That you expect me to read? “Movement in Reverse: Family and the Tribal Beast that Pretends to Love it.” I try not to ‘expect’ anything since it smacks of willfulness. But I do anticipate that nobody will read it since nobody reads my essays. With the exception of my webmaster who’s much smarter than I am and even he thinks I’m unintelligible. So please ignore it. Go about your business and don’t think ill of me for sharing it.
I think ill of you. Sigh. For thinking I might be a tribal chicken who’s going to inflict more tribal chickens on the world and take us all to our doom. Not necessarily. It depends on whether you’re fried or broiled. I’m plucked. Then we’re doomed.
Is there a moral to your ridiculous story? Indeed! Human-ape was an improvement when it branched off from ape, but we’re still a species of ape. That’s according to zoology. A tribal species which is a huge problem, because the ‘morality’ of tribes is screw you. Like where in politics and commerce some political parties and corporations stop at nothing to dominate. They’re the chickens taking us to our doom as we speak, letting Artificial Intelligence invade the coop and the climate to fry our asses. Where’s even common sense in that let alone doing what’s right?
Dumb animals
Here’s a quote from Stephen Miller, a fascist mucky-muck in the White House:
“We live in a world – in the real world – that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed from the beginning of time.” *
The law of the jungle he means, that applied until it was rewritten. When ape learned to differentiate and empathize and became Sapiens, a very different species of ape. Equipped with faculties of Mind that didn’t stop evolving just because there was one step forward. There could be more steps forward. Logic and common sense say so, and they could take Sapiens beyond being any kind of animal. Beyond inhabiting a planet of Stephen Miller apes. And to presume that we know where that could be or how we’d get there would be as dumb as ape anticipating our arrival.
Stephen Miller no better than a dumb animal. Literally.
The fourth edition of The Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence published by the Federal Judicial Center (FJC) last year contained a section on climate change. What for? To serve as a guide for federal judges who have to adjudicate cases involving stuff they’re not professionally trained to understand. The fossil fuel industry and its conservative political patrons don’t want laws and regulations putting limits on what they can do. Even if what they can do is contribute to global warming and mass extinction, so they threatened to block federal funding for the FJC unless it removed the section on climate change. Which it did, allowing politics to override scientific evidence and screw us all. **
More dumb animals. Right again. What does this tell us about our story? Not only about what it should be about but who should be writing it? That we should be writing it and it should tell the truth. Not what some tribal beast protecting its turf is telling us. We’re talking about the family of humanity. About Persons whose morality isn’t tribal expedience but respect for what’s right. For all of us including future generations. Not just for special interests looking out for themselves. You said it!
Grandparents?
An idea that the tribal beast opposes not because it’s inherently evil but because evolution hasn’t yet gone beyond it. The human-animal has one foot headed toward Person and the other still stuck to ape, and if Movement forward is the way things are then it should be clear what our situation is asking of us. To do the right thing. Exactly. The moral thing that our Conscience is telling us: to help Sapiens move forward and not act like a bunch of chickens.
And not let our families at home be ruled by chicken-thinking either. By pecking-order etiquette that maintains ‘order’ at the expense of learning and growth that young Persons need. At the expense of family integrity that welcomes support from all who can provide it — teachers and coaches, authors, counsellors, and therapists. Extended family. Yes. Like who might that be? Grandparents?
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*Jonathan Hahn, “When We Were Partners.” In Sierra (Fall 2026, p.3)
**Jed S. Rakoff, “And Yet It Warms.” In The New York Review of Books (September 24, 2026, pp. 38-39)