Letter to America – from a biologist’s perspective
John Janovy, Jr.
We as a nation are being dragged down by a narrative of fear and anger that now drives policy decisions at political levels from local city councils to the White House. It is a fundamental cultural problem that slapped us all in the face, hard, on November 8, 2016, and continues to deliver sucker-punches almost daily, namely, a fear and anger that is deeply embedded in our perception of everything from global events to people we encounter in public places to the behavior of professional athletes during a pre-game rendering of The Star Spangled Banner.
Bluntly put, that narrative also is one of post-genocidal racial inequality that in the minds of too many of us is justified, the original genocide being that of Native Americans, and the subsequent inequality being sustained by our history of slavery and its aftermath. But I would add that in recent years, if not decades, many of our elected officials have embellished that narrative with a disdain for science, a distrust of real data, and a malignant willful ignorance of all things foreign. The result is denial of what every biologist knows about life on Earth and a dehumanization, driven by xenophobia, not only of our own citizens, but also of those other multitudes with whom we must deal economically, socially, politically, and sometimes, indeed increasingly often, militarily.
What do we biologists know that politicians seem to ignore? Our perspective is not unique, but it is perversely absent from most public debate. We are very well aware of the burgeoning population of Homo sapiens in a closed system with limited resources, the changing ethnic mixture of that population, and the group behaviors that seem depressingly similar to those of many other animal species when confronted with strangers. Instead of being hidden by euphemisms, our national narrative of fear and anger, fear of the unfamiliar and anger at perceived wrongs, is now, thanks to current political discourse, as evident as a Pope’s black eye. Instead of curiosity about “the other,” we are afraid of him and her; instead of wonder at how “the other” exists in an exotic environment, we reject her and him as dangerous; and, instead of recognition that we are so closely related we could easily mate and produce fertile offspring, we classify “the other” as the equivalent of a different species, in fact a dangerous and invasive one.
As a graduate student, I never imagined that simply by becoming a college professor, my meaningful encounters with human diversity would be so much more extensive than that of so many fellow Americans. For 46 years, beginning in 1966, I taught large introductory biology courses at a state university, and I estimate that over the years I must have taught about 16,000 students. Some of these young people I actually got to know reasonably well because I encouraged them to come in for brief conversations with the reward of a few extra points. They filled out questionnaires the first day class and when they came in, I used those pages as conversation starters. In addition, I also found myself writing increasing numbers of letters of recommendation, so I wanted to know something about the individuals—the young human beings—who passed through my classroom and so briefly through my life.
The information that I gained from simply trying to find out who my students were turned out to be sobering. Indeed, it was a revelation in the sense that these people, as a group, seemed to match the human population figures in their textbooks. In those figures, the human population skyrocketed but over the course of my career, the fraction of people from the developed world remained relatively constant, whereas the fraction from the developing world increased greatly. Thus over the years, my classes became more diverse and more cosmopolitan. My students were immigrants; they’d graduated from high schools in a dozen different countries; their parents spoke many different languages at home; and, some had been in places now considered terrorist strongholds. These students were of pretty much of all shapes, sizes, and colors, academic strengths, interests, clothing styles, religious affiliations, and sexual orientations (insofar as I knew). Their majors were a reflection of their hopes and dreams; they wanted to be doctors, lawyers, engineers, and teachers.
My first assigned class was a lecture section, 07:30 Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, with 362 students, in the fall of 1966. From those conversations with my students, over the next year or so I came to feel like their understanding of introductory zoology was important, but my real task was to instill a sense of pride in the university’s declared mission of teaching, research, and service. In other words, my job as a biology prof was to make the world into a better place by producing people who thought seriously not only about the structure of worms, but about the role that a broad education played in the maintenance of civilization. I imagined, and more realistically hoped, that they walked out of the final exam believing that in the future they must read carefully, analyze world events, and preserve a healthy curiosity about the universe. I never imagined that those intellectual traits would be so willfully disdained, half a century later, by our highest elected officials, and especially by the President of the United States of America.
Thus in the same way we might remind ourselves of the basic missions of a university, we might also ask: what is the basic mission of a nation? I submit that the answer is: maximize the health, wealth, cultural richness, and civic engagement of the largest possible number of people. A nation that is statistically sick, poor, uneducated, in prison, and discriminatory is not great, and states that purposefully generate sickness, poverty, and ignorance, especially through disenfranchisement, if not outright dehumanization, cannot ever be made great. “Make America Great Again,” Donald J. Trump’s campaign slogan gracing his Chinese-made ball caps, must stand as one of human history’s most remarkable four words, unequivocally demonstrating the power of language. We’ve discovered since January 20, 2017, that he has no clue what makes a nation great.
In retrospect, I wish I’d had four magic words back early in my career, although they would not be those same words, and they would not be used the way they have been recently. When a four-word phrase, delivered in a certain context, functions to place a single person’s finger on a nuclear trigger, especially when that individual demonstrates repeatedly that his thought processes seem constrained to 140 English language characters, then every human must stand back, look in the mirror, and ask herself and himself what in the hell has happened. My own four words might be something like “make America smart again,” or “make America rational again,” or “make America curious again.” My goals for introductory zoology in 1966 seem to have disappeared, so that the “again” now becomes vitally important to me, personally.
And when an elected governing body sets about to make a nation that is already struggling with its economic and physical health, its ability to interact wisely with its environment, and its role in the world community falls in line behind an individual leader who seems determined to make us statistically sick, poor, uneducated, in prison, and discriminatory, that nation is in real trouble. Furthermore, the evolutionary processes unleashed by political dehumanization of those who are rapidly becoming most representative of our species—the dark-skinned, foreign language speaking, men, women, and children of Earth—cannot easily be contained, if at all. Our best example of an ethnically homogeneous and pathologically patriotic nation, i.e., one that demonstrates what our current president and multitudes of his followers seem to be striving for, and evidently would like to achieve for the United States, is North Korea. And our best example of a society governed by God’s word, i.e., one that demonstrates what our vice president and his ilk evidently would like to impose on the United States of America, is ISIS.
So the real issue is not one of fact—pathological patriotism and religion as governing principles—but of form: ours vs. theirs. And that is the issue steering our current ship of state: ours is good, theirs is bad. Every biologist can analyze situations in which fact and form are distinct, but related, properties. Horses are a fact; Belgian draft horses and racing thoroughbreds are different forms. Human beings are a fact; skin color, native language, religion, and place of birth are form. Massive movement across geographical space is a human fact; who is moving and why they are migrating is form. With the fact of a burgeoning human population comes rather extraordinary diversity of form, including cultural forms. Every teacher knows that diversity of almost any kind empowers those who seek to understand it and draw strength from various sources—new ideas, new and different ways of approaching age-old problems. Every teacher also knows that when humans are stripped of their humanity in the eyes of other people, violence is sure to follow. That principle is what we learn from schoolyard bullies.
Not long ago I listened to Bryan Stephenson, Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative and author of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, deliver a speech. His visit to Lincoln, Nebraska, was sponsored by Nebraska Wesleyan University as part of a symposium on American Discourse and Abandoned Communities. Stephenson’s talk resonated with me, a quintessential privileged upper-middle class white guy, because for the last year I’ve also been working on a book project, the professional biography of a good friend, Gary Hill, who is Director of Staff Training and Development for the International Corrections and Prisons Association. In this role, Gary travels constantly, around the world, to prisons.
I finally convinced Gary to let me write this biography because I felt that his unique perspective would tell us something about how humans treat other humans who have violated a society’s behavioral codes. That question, of how we react, officially, to people who are not doing what someone in a position of authority believes is proper behavior, may be the leading one raised by the Trump presidency, intended or not. So as research for this project, I’ve spent the last year reading literature about incarceration, ranging from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish to Ted Conover’s Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing. That reading and my interviews with Gary have been fascinating, enlightening, and in many ways depressing. From that book research, I’d memorized the statistics that Stephenson used; thus Bryan Stephenson didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know about America, but he told it in a way that elicited a standing ovation from his audience. By the end of the evening, he’d answered my question about what’s happening to make our nation devolve into a failed state. Although his talk focused on a racial divide that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not, and in retrospect could not, resolve, he also addressed that battering to the body politic with which I opened this commentary.
So what is the take? The answer is relatively simple: humanity’s problems, and by extension any nation’s, state’s, or city’s problems, cannot be solved to everyone’s satisfaction. Even so-called liberals or progressives, regardless of their good intentions, do not have all the answers to our nation’s overriding questions. These problems can, however, be alleviated when we know their origin, collect data on various attempts to solve them, and are rational about their actual impact on the quality of human life in general. In other words, when we recognize what is wrong, what needs fixed, and apply what humanity has learned about fixing big problems, we’re making progress.
Xenophobic, racially-charged, simplistic and self-serving rhetoric, especially when that rhetoric functions to stir up passions that lead to violence, cannot make America great, now or ever in the future. We made a serious mistake in electing a president whose daily behavior stokes our fear of that we don’t understand and don’t want to understand. A hundred years from now, if there are still historians, they will be generating a library full of analysis focused on the beginning decades of the 21st Century. And they will cite November 8, 2016, either as the date upon which this amazing experiment in human freedom ended, or upon which three hundred million people were shown their deepest fears and decided, as a nation, to spend the next few years taming those fears by use of a ballot.
