1968: Graduation (Part 2)

“Violence is replaced by escape, not escape from what is essential, but escape in order to achieve the essential.”
Francois Truffaut

When my class of 1968 marched into graduation, I was not among them, for reasons described in the previous post (Graduation Part 1.) Instead I was on the other side of a wall from the ceremony, in the student union parlor, watching a different kind of ceremony on the television set.

That was Sunday, June 9, 1968: fifty years ago today. But this story begins on the previous Tuesday, June 4.

We had some big parties at our house on West First Street in the 1967-68 academic year, the place that housemate Bill Thompson dubbed the Galesburg Home for the Bewildered.

In the fall I remember a mid-party appearance by our new Homecoming Queen, the radiant Shirley Kishiyama. Several of the Stoney Mountain Boys—Rick Lindner, Tom Stern and Mark Brooks on tub bass—set up and performed, and I got to play some guitar runs with them on an improvised jam.

Some of our parties were semi-official, like one we had for a blues artist after his concert. I'm pretty sure it was Bukka White. He brought his classic shiny silver National guitar with him, but when people asked him to play he would just look around the room, pick somebody and hand over the guitar. He always found a guitar player, and laughed, claiming he could just tell. It was the only time I ever got to play one of those steel-bodied guitars.

In the spring, we hosted a party for poet Denise Levertov that drew faculty as well as students. We had the cast party for What's Happening, Baby Jesus there.Then our last party of the year—and the last ever for us—was scheduled for Tuesday June 4: primary election day. It was a Victory Party—we just weren’t sure for who. But Thompson had been working since before the New Hampshire primary for Senator Eugene McCarthy. (He’d even made a halfhearted attempt to get “Clean for Gene,” which basically meant kind of a haircut.) I was supporting Senator Robert Kennedy, and hoped I would be working to elect him President that summer and fall. Both were against the war.

For although the world’s imperfections may call forth the acts of war, righteousness cannot obscure the agony and pain these acts bring to a single child.”
Senator Robert F. Kennedy, in the March 1967 Senate speech in which he broke with the Johnson administration on Vietnam.

Robert Kennedy had been the keeper of the flame after JFK’s assassination in 1963, and President Lyndon B. Johnson knew it and resented it. By 1967 RFK was making speeches on the Senate floor questioning American involvement in Vietnam (which—several historians confirm—his brother President John Kennedy had intended to end in his second term.) But the media usually saw everything RFK did as reflecting his animosity towards LBJ or his political ambitions, or both.

It has since been reported that RFK wanted to challenge LBJ for the 1968 nomination, but felt frustrated that it would be seen only as expressing that animosity, and not as a principled opposition on both the war and on his signature domestic issue, racism and the plight of black Americans, especially in the inner cities.

Until early 1968 it looked as if there would be no anti-war alternative in the November election. Then a relatively obscure U.S. Senator from Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy, entered the New Hampshire primary as a candidate opposing LBJ, and the Vietnam War.

Some at Knox responded quickly. Wendy Saul chaired an exploratory meeting in February. I attended either that meeting or a subsequent one, held in the basement of a women's dorm. I remember being depressed by the discussion, and taking a break from it to sit alone nearby, where I could hear the sound of someone taking a shower. I remember the image because I put it in a poem.

I wasn’t enthusiastic about McCarthy or his campaign. I didn’t believe he could win. But of course if he had remained the only alternative, I would have supported him.

McCarthy did shockingly well in New Hampshire, coming in a very close second to LBJ. RFK felt that he could no longer be accused of dividing the Democratic Party: it clearly was already. But reportedly two other factors pushed him. First, that the generals were asking for 200,000 more American troops, and LBJ agreed. Second, that LBJ wasn’t going to even consider the recently announced recommendations of the Kerner Commission to address the causes of racial strife in the cities.

Robert Kennedy announced his candidacy for President on a Saturday morning in March. It was spring break and Joni and I were visiting Mary Azer and her family in West Chicago. Joni and Mary were Post Hall roommates. I think I met them at the same time the previous spring. I remember Mary, red hair, blue eyes, quietly mischievous smile, showing up at West First Street one night that winter in her Navy blue peacoat to go play in the snow.

So I met Mary’s parents and her younger sister, Barbara, then in high school—dark-haired, energetic, direct, pretty, funny. I remember watching RFK’s announcement, probably in their basement rec room. I knew that now I had my candidate. RFK had political and rhetorical strengths McCarthy didn’t. And as became apparent in the remaining primaries, particularly in California, RFK had enthusiastic support in the black and Latino communities.

I was encouraged, wary and dared to be a bit hopeful. I’d followed RFK’s career from the Justice Department to the Senate in 1965. He was running for the Senate in New York as we started our first year at Knox, and I remember lending a paperback book of his speeches and statements (The Pursuit of Justice) to classmate Nina Palmer with whom I shared a class (probably Spanish), because she was from New York. I noted his first Senate speeches, on nuclear proliferation and gun control. My second year I participated in Prof. Dean Torrence’s mock Senate—for that exercise I was Senator Robert Kennedy.

Not long after RFK’s announcement and his pledge not to attack McCarthy directly, we all heard that LBJ was going to address the nation that night, on April Fool's Day Eve. Joni and I got to the nearest television, which was a few doors down West First at the home of Robin and Lynn Metz. The moment that LBJ announced that he would not run for reelection was surreal and delirious. Now the chances that the war could end had greatly increased. There was dancing in the streets at campuses across America that night. I didn’t see any at Knox, but our hearts were dancing on West First Street.

Then in April, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. RFK was campaigning in a black neighborhood in Indianapolis, and he broke the news to the crowd. He spoke softly, from the heart, mentioning the assassination of his brother. He quoted a line from Aeschylus, his favorite poet, from memory.  Then he expressed what was to become an unusual campaign theme:

"What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice towards those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.” He urged everyone to "dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and to make gentle the life of this world.”

The next day he spoke in Cleveland, on the “mindless menace of violence.” He started with the violence of shootings and riots and the war. “Why? What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created?”

But he also spoke of less obvious violence, hidden, persistent and insidious: “For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is a slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.”

But he did not stop there.  McCarthy got credit for being intellectual, but RFK had the depth derived from classical literature, and so he spoke in ways no other politician could.  "The question is not what program we should seek to enact.  The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of human purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence."  

And then, a statement that must strike terror in the hearts of Social Darwinists, consciously or otherwise:  "We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the advancement of all.  We must admit to ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortune of others."

RFK won primaries in two states, Indiana and Nebraska, that had few elements of his natural constituencies. He lost Oregon to McCarthy however, and so the next big step in the campaign was California, the last and largest primary. A victory there could mean RFK would be the coalition antiwar candidate at the August convention in Chicago. He would be opposed by the establishment candidate, LBJ’s vice president Hubert Humphrey, who supported LBJ and the war.

Our festivities started before the polls closed in the West Coast time zone. It was crowded and loud, with the latest Hendrix, the new Cream on the stereo. But we didn’t have a working television in the house, so every once in awhile Thompson would get on the phone with a friend watching a dorm TV to get the latest speculation and then the vote counts.

I was restless, moving back and forth from the heat and laughter of the party and the cool solitary dark quiet outside. When the call came confirming Kennedy’s victory, I mostly felt relief.

Joni and I rushed down to the Metz house to watch RFK’s victory statement, even though they were McCarthy supporters. Kennedy appeared in the incredibly crowded ballroom of the campaign’s hotel and spoke briefly. He congratulated McCarthy and spoke about their common effort. He thanked his staff and supporters. He saw his victory but also McCarthy’s campaign as a validation: “The country wants to move in a different direction, we want to deal with our own problems within our country and we want peace in Vietnam.”

“On to Chicago,” he concluded, “and let’s win there.”

We went back to the house but I was still restless. Something about that ballroom scene, something about how RFK looked made me anxious. So I went back out almost immediately. I began to walk in the cool humid night, the sidewalks moist from recent rain. I headed away from the streetlights, to dark weedy fields. RFK’s victory in California would signal his appeal to anxious party leaders like Mayor Daley, who was inclined to support him. He’d also won that night in South Dakota, within Humphrey’s midwestern sphere of influence. That also would be noted by party leaders. Could it be that the war was going to end? That there would be a President I could believe in again?

The walk calmed me, and by the time I got to West First I was ready for sleep. Then I saw Joni running up the sidewalk towards me, alarmed, frightened. I stopped in front of the Metz house. She stood still in front of me and said as evenly as she could: “Bob Kennedy’s been shot.”

The Metz house was dark but I banged on the door until the porch light came on. When Robin opened the door, I repeated Joni’s words exactly. We both wondered about it later, that we had called him Bob. He was always Robert, or RFK, he was Bobby.

Later Joni told me how she’d heard. Thompson answered the phone, and through the noise of the party’s remnants she heard him saying: “Who?” and then cry “No! No!” At that moment Joni thought something had happened to me.

We turned on the television coverage. The bedlam at the hotel. The first medical reports—Kennedy was alive, but in critical condition. It went on all night. First Lynn then Robin went upstairs to bed. Joni dozed on the sofa, woke up and walked back down the street to sleep. I stayed there, watching, the rest of the night. Frank Mankiewicz, RFK’s campaign press secretary, announced that the Senator’s vitals were good but doctors were about to begin surgery. He had been shot in the head.

The first two plus hours were filled with anxious talk, facts reported and then rescinded and corrected, about the shooting itself, the number of victims and their condition, and the person or people who had done it. There were interviews with witnesses, a lot of talk about a woman in a polka dot dress who had disappeared. For awhile everyone was obsessed with the woman in the polka dot dress.

I remember the NBC reporter Sander Vanocur trying to look in the camera calmly in the atmosphere of shock and hysteria. At one point he reported that police had a suspect in custody whose last name was Sirhan. They didn’t have a first name. So it became the mystery of the hour, what was Sirhan’s first name. Finally he was able to confirm that they knew the first name now: it was Sirhan. His name was Sirhan Sirhan. Maybe it was the reporter, or maybe it was me, but at least one of us almost lost it at that moment.

At dawn I turned off the set, and probably after stopping at the house, walked over to campus. I had early breakfast in one of the dining halls (the one on the corner that isn't the Oak Room.)There was something eerie about that breakfast, both bleak and comforting--I still dream about it.  In the dream the room is filled with bright gray light, and it seems a miracle, or a mistake, that I am allowed to eat there.

But for a few moments on that morning it seemed possible that none of what I'd seen all night had actually happened, that nothing had happened to me either for the past several months and I was back at the beginning.  But soon I was camped out in the union parlor in front of the television, and it was quickly clear that it all had happened, and was happening now.

Judging from the times recorded in later reporting, it must have been around five a.m. in Galesburg when surgery started. It went on for more than three hours. So I was probably watching the union TV when the coverage was focusing on the medical aspects.

Doctors were interviewed, pointing at charts of the brain. They were not optimistic. Then someone brought new information on the location of the wound. One doctor who saw it got excited. He said if that were true, RFK could be out of the hospital in a few weeks, perfectly okay.

But a few minutes later, that doctor was interviewed again. Pale and shaken, he said that the new information was actually about another victim, Paul Shrade, a California official for the United Auto Workers and a major Kennedy supporter. He’d also been shot in the head, and he did leave the hospital in a few weeks. His was the only apparently serious wound. All five of the other victims survived.

Then the surgery was over, and just past 9 a.m. Mankiewicz said it had gone well, but the next 12 to 36 hours would be critical.

The coverage continued and I kept vigil until I couldn’t stay awake any longer. But after a few hours sleep, I was back again. It was Wednesday evening when Mankiewicz returned to the microphones and said that the doctors were concerned that Kennedy hadn’t show improvement. “Kennedy’s condition is still described as extremely critical as to life.”

So it was now just a matter of time. Time to contemplate, time to look around with different eyes, time to almost forget. Time to relive the nightmarish day that JFK was shot and the weekend that followed. I’d watched it all on television then, too. On that Sunday my family went to church but I stayed home to watch. I saw Lee Harvey Oswald being moved from jail—I was startled by what looked like a gun. But it turned out to be a microphone. And a moment later I heard the shots. I saw Oswald shot on live television.

At four in the morning on Thursday, Mankiewicz stood on the lawn of twisted cables in front of Good Samaritan hospital one last time to make announcement everyone knew was coming: Robert Kennedy was dead.

I must have watched stretches of coverage in the following days—the casket arriving in pools of bright light amidst the darkness of the New York airport, the motorcade of black cars to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. There his mother waited, and his friends took turns attending the casket, and in different parts of the cavernous cathedral, red-faced Mayor Daley and ashen Tom Haden wept.

On Friday the crowds gathered, formed into block-long lines to pass by the casket, to touch the curved cold steel covered in flowers, each with a word of farewell. A reporter noted what words he heard most often: “Forgive us, Bobby.”

Saturday morning was the funeral Mass, with all the dignitaries in attendance. Senator Edward Kennedy gave a brief eulogy: “My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.”

And all day Saturday the funeral train made its slow way to Washington, passing thousands of the unimportant. Many of those gathered, in small groups, families and even alone, or in large groups near the cities, were poor, and many more were black.

Failing to account for the people on the tracks to see the funeral train, the railroad allowed its regular traffic. Several people were killed, including improbably a woman named Antoinette Severini, who died saving her granddaughter. That’s my aunt’s maiden name, though it wasn’t her. Still, given the woman’s name and her location, it’s possible if not likely she was a distant relative.

Jacqueline Kennedy, her children and her sister

Then in darkness, Robert F. Kennedy was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, next to his brother, President John F. Kennedy.

I’m not sure how much of this I saw as it was happening, but probably quite a lot. Yet I felt compelled to go back to the television on Sunday, to see programs that compiled images of the events.

Having no particular business there I probably should have left campus before graduation weekend, but inertia in packing up to leave was compounded by these paralyzing events. So I was around as families of my classmates arrived. I believe I met Wendy Saul’s father out on the Gizmo patio. I may have seen Barbie Cottral’s parents and her sister Lindsey, who I’d met on a brief visit to Clinton, Iowa the previous summer.

But I believe it was that weekend that I had a singularly memorable experience, so different from the rest of that week. Mary Azer’s parents and sister Barbara were there, and Joni and I probably went out to dinner with them. Joni flew back to Denver on or before graduation day, so this might have been Saturday night.

What I remember is returning with them to their motel in what had to be a prearrangement, because I found myself swimming at night in the motel pool out on the highway somewhere with three lovely young women: Joni, Mary and Barbara. It was heaven, and a little torturous as well. But most of all it was peaceful. The effect was not even completely destroyed when I noticed the black night sky was dominated, not by a silver white moon, but by a large red or orange round neon sign high on a stanchion, probably a Gulf sign.  It reflected red in the pool.

But on Sunday, as the graduates gathered, I was back before the student union television. On that day as on the previous ones there were faces and voices on the dotted screen talking about Bobby. Charles Evers, slain Medgar’s brother, with angry tears insisting Bobby did more for blacks than anyone. A longhaired young man claiming that as news came of Kennedy’s impending California victory, Abbie Hoffman was ready to disband the Yippies and call off the demonstration at the Democratic convention in Chicago.

A young aide said Kennedy behind the scenes was advocating American withdrawal from Vietnam when antiwar leaders were only calling for negotiations. The playwright who said that the day he died, Kennedy praised the Watts Writers Workshop and wanted the federal government to fund others. An American Indian writer spoke of Kennedy’s visits to reservations, said Indians considered him a warrior on their behalf.

A steelworker who said he was the only politician who might end the war and still get the hardhat vote. An historian who said RFK had been the best Attorney General in American history. Another who noted that Kennedy reveled in poetry, and once completed a couplet that Richard Burton forgot when the two were reciting for each other by heart.

People really loved him, they said. And people really, really hated him, they said. He knew he was going to be killed, a few whispered.

And pictures of Bobby, smiling and touching, frenzied hands reaching for him, talking softly to children, joking with campaign crowds, pounding his right fist into his left hand. This is unacceptable, he said. This is not satisfactory, he said. We can do better.

A student at a medical school asking him where the money was going to come from to pay for his programs for the poor. “From you,” he said.

Bobby talking about the war, about “the vacant moment of amazed fear as a mother and child watch death by fire fall from an improbable machine sent by a country they barely comprehend.”

And endless repetitions of his last public words, on the podium in California, with people pressed against him, his victory statement. “...the division, the violence, the disenchantment...whether it’s between blacks and whites, between the poor and the more affluent, or between age groups or on the war in Vietnam...we can start to work together. We are a great country, an unselfish country, and a compassionate country. I intend to make that my basis for running...”

At the funeral, young Kennedy children carrying Communion articles to the altar, while Mahler played, and people wept. The cameras had trouble with the contrasting light, so there were dimly visible pools surrounded by recesses of darkness. An announcer noted that the priest wore violet vestments, not black. But on TV they were gray.

Always present, RFK's wife Ethel Kennedy, pregnant. (There's a label on this blog called "land of guns," for the numbingly frequent stories on gun violence and so on. It comes from a line in a poem I wrote at the time about this week, that ends with the image of Ethel Kennedy "swollen/in the land of guns.")

I do remember that it was Sunday that I saw more of the long surreal funeral train, and the night burial. Of all the images, the funeral train seemed to say the most, rolling slowly, reluctantly past the once again abandoned, for when it stopped, it marked the end of possibilities.

Without Bobby, the war would go on. The mad havoc, the mechanical killing would go on and on in Vietnam, and young men here of my age, boys I’d gone to Catholic schools with or played with in the vacant lots of my home town, sons of salesmen, milk truck drivers, factory workers, cooks for the last rich family in town, as well as young men in my college class, now out there with beaming parents watching, would have to face those awful choices.

I would never have my graduation. But this was my commencement.

1968: Graduation (Part 1)

“No need to survive.”
Nano Sakaki to Gary Snyder

a later Knox commencement

Gray metal chairs were lined up on the freshly mowed, bright green lawn at the back of Old Main. Men in suits, women in dresses were starting to assemble, parents and relatives of the graduates, with younger brothers and sisters dancing and jangling around.

Meanwhile, members of the graduating class of 1968 were buttoning their black robes, at least some of them rented for the occasion, shiny with the wear of generations. Or so I imagined.

Not far away, with just a wall between them, was the Seymour Hall student union parlor. It was dark, curtains on the tall windows drawn against the June sun. The big squat television set was on. Laughter and chattering voices drifted in from the foyer, but tended to diminish if someone came cautiously into the carpeted room for a moment to peek at the TV, though there were those who had cynical comments to make.

At first a few people sat watching the television. But as the ceremonies began there was usually only one person there, lost in the sofa’s worn out cushions, hidden from sight behind the ancient couch’s stiff high back. That was me.

Why I was on the other side of the wall from what would have been my graduation ceremony after four years at Knox was the result of two very different sets of circumstances.

One set was set in motion at the end of winter term, as related in a prior post, when I flunked Evolution.

Bill Thompson and Joni, enacting an American
Gothic scene in the broken fields behind our
house on West First Street.  My photo.

In the golden green month of May, many things were moving towards conclusion, if not culmination. I was living in a big prairie Gothic house on West First Street, shared with my last remaining housemate, Bill Thompson, and my frequent guest, Joni Diner. I was back in the attic, as I had been at the start in Anderson House. This time however I had the whole floor—basically two rooms, a snug bedroom and down a short narrow passage, a large study.

I wrote a lot in that room, though it never felt like enough. I had already begun to mythologize my time at Knox, and those manuscript pages—worked over, cut up and reassembled many times over the next decade or so—currently reside in boxes in the garage, along with the detritus of those years that happened to survive. I never did get the manuscript quite right.

That spring of 1968 I was writing fiction for another workshop course. Earlier in the year I’d written a short story that everyone who read it seemed to like, called “Diamond in the Sky.” Robin Metz was in his first year teaching fiction writing—he and his family lived just a few doors down on West First—and he urged me to send it out to possibly get published.

So I sent it to my favorite magazine, the New Yorker, which also was pretty much the gold standard, the premiere place for fiction for professional writers. I’d read John Updike and J.D. Salinger in those pages.

They kept it for an unusually long time. Then the letter from the New Yorker finally arrived. It was from the inimitable Roger Angell, then the fiction editor. Its first sentence has been seared into my brain for fifty years: “We could hardly bear not publishing your story.”

And yet, they did bear it pretty well. In the letter, Angell wondered whether it wouldn’t have been better to just send me a straight rejection, but they thought so highly of the writing...and so on. Highly encouraging in a way, but in another way... I don’t want to exaggerate the effect, but I think it did qualify as being a bit traumatic. It haunted me for years. I never got that close again.

In April I finished off and collected my fiction, as well poems and plays for the college annual writing awards. Earlier in that attic room I wrote the play I directed in April, What’s Happening, Baby Jesus. I recently found the production script which included some lines I added late:

SONNY: We gave you everything we had. Where did we go wrong?

DRIFTER: Where? Dresden, Berlin, London, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Birmingham, Watts, Hue, Saigon, Berkeley... 

SONNY: Well, nobody’s perfect.

That’s God speaking, get it?

Me with Thompson's hat, enacting my version. BT's
camera facing the other way, towards campus, the
field already being prepared for major construction.
All the houses on W. First are gone now.

Also that spring I wrote a twenty page paper, with footnotes, for my Science and Society class. It’s strange what papers survived storage and transport over the years. I’m missing the ones I best remember: my long independent studies paper on three Scott Fitzgerald novels, my paper on a Wallace Stevens’ poem that at the time Doug Wilson thought was good enough to submit for academic publication.

 Instead, I have a junior year paper on Emerson that Wilson thought wasn’t very good, and gave me a B-. I remember it with frustration: I was annoyed that a love affair had interrupted writing the paper, and annoyed that writing the paper had interrupted the love affair.

And I also have the Science and Society paper, which I recently found. Indeed its subject is how scientific theories are influenced by outside factors and ideas: in particular, Darwin’s theory of evolution and Einstein’s theories on relativity. The citations are from history and philosophy of science, and include Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which was later to become quite famous. So I got to research that subject after all, though a term too late for other "evolutionary" purposes. I got an A on the paper and for the course.

My other course work was in connection with the English comprehensive exams. I remember the frantic reading and studying that shredded that beautiful spring, all the near-panic among the students I knew as the exam date drew near.

There was a question and answer component, and an essay. The essay seemed to cause the most concern, as we tried to figure out in at least what period or area we should expect the topic to be. The whole of English literature was a daunting expanse to consider. I remember that one of our professors—on his way down to the bookstore or the mail boxes in Alumni Hall—laughed at our anxiety and told us to relax, we would enjoy it.

Oddly enough he was right. The essay question was to analyze the poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats, a surprising choice in that none of my teachers had seemed that impressed with the Romantics.  But in fact I did enjoy every minute of discovering elements of the poem that led directly to the famous conclusion: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," – that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

I’d love to have that particular blue book now. Later I was told that my essay “could not be graded high enough,” and that as a result, I had the highest combined score on the comprehensives for my department. Given my grade however, I have my doubts about that.

At some point in May, the spring edition of the college literary magazine was published. It was still called, for probably the last time, the Siwasher. I was co-editor that year with Wendy Saul. I believe we divided the basic editorial chores in half—she took the winter issue, I took the spring. There was more of a shared process on selection of the material for both issues, involving other students as well.

For my years at Knox, the magazine looked basically the same: a standard size print magazine with poems, short stories and an occasional play script, with a discrete section of reproductions of student art work, some in black and white and some in color.

I wanted to try something different. My dream was to someday create a complete art work in a box: a novel with a related musical record album, visual collage, photo or art work, and a film. For this issue I wanted to try a variation of that, and especially to include components or presentations that hadn’t been included before.

The question was the budget. Though I had (and have) remarkably few practical skills, I had been bringing things to publication since junior high school. I did the grunt work for several issues of the Knox magazine called Dialogue in previous years. Budgets weren’t my forte either but I did figure out how to do this for the same price as earlier issues: a magazine that came in a brown manila envelope. It contained a booklet of print, plus two vinyl records of music and six 8x10 sheets of photographs, and a poster by Steve Miller.

Unfortunately that didn’t leave enough money for the usual four color separation for art works. But I figured skipping one issue was worth the additions. We did include a black and white photo of a sculpture by Peter Overton and Recep Goknil, an art student from Turkey.

The photographs were by Jack Brown (whose photo from the Pentagon demonstration in October was the cover of our fall issue), alumnus David Axelrod, Leonard Borden and Bill Thompson (including a portrait of Lisa Metz, then four or five, looking rapturously ahead at what Robin ruefully admitted was the TV.)

The envelope itself included a short unattributed poem by Howard Partner. (I was a big fan of his poems. We published two of them in our winter issue.) The booklet inside included fiction by Jeremy Gladstone and Barbara Ann Cottral, a play by Sherwood Kiraly and poems by Nicholas Brockunier, Anne Maxfield, Bob Epstein, Harvey Sadow, Linda Pohle, Wendy Saul, Phil Ralston and me.

One side of the pink record was comprised of “Allegro Con Brio for Two Pianos” written by Karen Janecek, and performed by Karen and James Pinkerton; “Single Girl” by Four in the Morning and “Baby, Now That I Found You” by the Bushes, a Rascals-style group composed of Knox students and Galesburg residents.

The other side was the Joni Mitchell tune “The Urge for Going” performed (vocal and guitar) by our star at both, Rick Clinebell.

The yellow record had three songs by the Stoney Hollow Boys (“Maggie Blues,” “I Saw the Light,” “Mountain Dew.”) The other side was me, singing a long song I wrote, “Nightdove.” However, I used a 60s whimsy secret identity of Captain Toothpaste. I did own up to co-writing the song, but my co-writer was another fictitious alter ego.

Most of the cuts were from live performances. Rick Clinebell reviewed the submitted tapes for quality, and rejected mine. He was rightly impatient with me and my slipshod musicianship in general. In this case he pushed me into a rehearsal room in the CFA, handed me his guitar (much better than mine), plopped down a tape recorder and told me to re-record the song. I seem to remember there was urgency in getting it done before we were off to Iowa, and I believe I had exactly one take.

Wendy, Barbie Cottral and I took the tapes to the nearest studio capable of turning them into records, which was in Iowa—Davenport, I think. It was run by an older gentleman and his wife. She thought “Captain Toothpaste” was a scream. Every once in awhile she would repeat it and laugh again. (When I went back to pick up the actual records weeks later, she was still in stitches over it.  She said when she brushed her teeth at night she would think of Captain Toothpaste and laugh.)

While we were there the first time, he played the tapes and fiddled with his dials, to see if they would work. As he played mine he added a little echo and asked if I wanted him to use it. I said sure. That was the extent of the studio production.

So by May, I was treated to a special experience—walking under an open window at Post Hall and hearing my voice and my song floating out:

And you turn yourself to magic
and fall into the snow
you go the way the wind is slow
foggy and warm, away from harm...

In mid-May the college writing awards were announced. I got a first in fiction, second in plays, third in poetry. I also won the award for the best student library, for the second year in a row. That streak actually went back to winning a library competition for sophomores only. I won the prize of $50 in books from the Knox Bookstore, which helped me build up the bookcase for the following years.

I’m not sure when I was accepted into the University of Iowa Writers Workshop graduate program (one of a handful to be admitted into both the fiction and poetry workshops) and given a fellowship. That process must have at least begun in the spring, assuming my B.A.

All of these apparent achievements bunched together in late spring were distanced by the experiences and feelings of a surreal finality—that this all-embracing and defining madness of our college life would soon be abruptly over, that the next time you saw someone you’d seen many times over four years might actually be the last time.  They were also hollowed by the ongoing effects of those few hours towards the end of winter term.

For though the domino theory was famously not applying to Southeast Asia, it turned out to be working very well in regard to me: I flunked the Evolution final, and so failed the course, failing thereby to complete my distribution requirements, and therefore failed to be eligible to join my class for graduation.

That fate, and ongoing efforts to somehow avoid it, formed the undercurrent to everything else that spring, especially in May. I no longer remember the exact sequence of events, but the first effort was to find some sort of accommodation that would allow me to graduate. I knew that students in prior years had been granted such accommodations (though I failed to consider that, unlike the one student I knew, my father was not a trustee.)

The decision was up to a faculty and administrative committee—though I don't think it was the ultimate irony of being the Student Affairs Committee. I petitioned the appropriate committee. I was refused.

Some years ago I attempted to write about all of this in a short story, and I included an account of a conversation I no longer remember. Still, it has the ring of truth, both in terms of the teller and of my response.   If it didn’t actually happen that way (as my Aunt Toni used to say), it could have.

In this conversation, a faculty member told me that the main reason my petition was denied was because the professor who taught the Evolution course--who was on the committee making the decision-- vigorously opposed it. “When he wouldn’t budge, the others fell in line. You got his back up.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You as much as told him his class was a fraud. It made him mad. So instead of punching you in the nose, he just dug in his heels.”

“But...” I stammered. “He’s a—he’s a teacher.”

(There's some documentary evidence supporting this possibility: the 1968 Knox Directory (I actually have two surviving copies) shows that the professor who flunked me was also on the committee that decided my fate. As far as I know he didn't recuse himself from the case, which might have been appropriate.)

A few years later I collected a bunch of poems I’d written in college and shortly after, and labeled the folder Epitaphs of Innocence. As naive as I had been about value-free science, I discovered that I harbored this weird innocence in which teachers put aside ego and anger, and eventually act in the best interests of their students. This situation stuck the epitaph on that particular illusion--though of course there were and are those who do. I suspect others had figured it out earlier. And since I had been attacked viciously and personally by a faculty member in the Knox Student just a few months before, I should have figured it out earlier as well.

Of course I had also been a well-known loudmouth (though mostly in print) and troublemaker on a range of issues, who particularly (and stupidly but somewhat innocently) insulted the college administration and faculty. I guessed that didn’t work in my favor.

Denise Levertov

I had some faculty support, and two writers who visited that spring added theirs. Novelist Daniel Curley, who judged the writing awards, wrote a letter on my behalf. He told the committee what he told me in person: though he had awarded me a first in fiction, he could have just as easily awarded me a first in any of the categories. But the moment I wish I had witnessed was when poet Denise Levertov told off one of the deans, asserting that they were being “irresponsible.”

There was also some effort to get someone else to give me an independent studies course that would fulfill the requirement, but the only professor available, in math, was reluctant because he had to finish his dissertation, and his continued employment probably depended on it. Robin Metz, who was active on my behalf, was willing to talk to him again, but I called a halt.

Just earlier this year, when I finally went through some papers left to me after my father died and the family house was sold, I found a letter from Robin to my mother. Evidently she’d written to him about what could be done, and he mentioned this last effort and my deciding against asking this professor (the same one who’d taught my first year math classes) to do what he felt he couldn’t manage. Robin’s very kind letter made me sound like a hero of self-sacrifice, but I remember just being tired of it all.

I had seen what was coming, at least by early spring when I wrote a poem later published in the Siwasher called “Evolution.” There was a famous and favorite example of natural selection that teachers loved because it perfectly illustrated the principle, and it had happened in modern times. It was the peppered moth that lived in England.

It was a mostly white moth that suddenly found itself visible to predators when it perched on tree trunks that had been blackened by coal dust and soot generated in the 19th century industrial revolution. Thereafter the moths tended to be black, so they were less visible. The white moths largely died out but the black moths survived and procreated—a neat example and illustration of natural selection.

The particulars of this example were already being questioned in 1968 by further research that suggested, for one thing, that these moths might not actually cling to tree trunks very much. For awhile the peppered moth as an illustration of natural selection itself died out, but it seems to be back in favor.

Anyway, it was the prime example in our course, so I could end my poem with the lines: “And I am a white moth/pressed against/ a blackened tree.”

The hardest part of all this was writing the letter home to tell my parents not to plan on coming to graduation after all. They’d driven me the 800 miles to Galesburg for my first year, but they would not be returning. Neither of them had gone to college. I would have been the first to graduate.

A year or so later, Douglas Wilson suggested various changes to the Knox curriculum, in an article published in the new campus magazine, Catch (which combined the old Siwasher and Dialogue.)  His strongest words were in favor of dumping distribution requirements, as "a major source of frustration and resentment," and an expression of hypocrisy by faculty (and one might add, administrators) whose education did not include these courses.  I believe at least for awhile, Knox did drop them.

But as hard and as saddening and depressing and guilt-inducing as my situation was at that time, it had serious competition in the immediate scheme of things. Whether I graduated or not, I faced the near certainty that I would be drafted within weeks or months. That—and my possible responses--were causing conflict and confusion in the family already. I won’t even get into the uncertainty it added to personal relationships.

And it was late spring, and there were the gold-green days, the night wind high in the trees around the cemetery, the Toddle House waffles and the Q’s blueberry pancakes, the smell of the first donuts of the morning downtown, the lovely, long-haired girls in the warm light. There were still the pattymelts and endless paper cups of coffee in the Gizmo, the poetry reading against the war on the soft lawn as evening edged across the brick sidewalks. There was music from the open windows:

Though the dark trees can’t see the sun
you walk through the cold
before you’re old
the day must begin
fly above them...

Then it was June and this account of my little drama has told why I wasn’t out there on the Old Main lawn with a funny black hat on my head. But as that day grew closer a larger drama of a larger fate began, which accounts for why that day I was on the other side of the student union wall.

To be continued...

1968: Flunking Evolution

“The evolutionary backdrop and the ecological setting, rather than the flashy on-stage protagonists of the drama, are more of my concern. Yet the answers are never simple, in part because the questions cannot be clearly phrased. The shadowed globe continues to spin. We are embedded in our history, in all our personal histories, and in theirs.”
Lynn Margulis

In order to fulfill my distribution requirements so I could graduate in the spring of 1968, I took "Evolution" in the winter of the 1967-68 school year.

I don’t recall how I felt about the subject before the course started, but the course itself didn’t inspire me. It seemed too technical for a non-science majors course, which it was supposed to be. But I believe I was just barely passing. Then it was time for the final.

Two things happened at that point, which were at least partly related. The first—and possibly most fateful---happened in the library.

I was also taking a philosophy course that term. (I’d taken several, starting my first year, and had considered it as a major, before committing to English Literature and Composition.) Perhaps it was for this philosophy course, but in any case I was reading a journal in philosophy in the library.

In what I seem to recall was just a book review, I read a sentence that was almost incidental. It said that the Darwin’s theory of Evolution was shaped in part by existing political and economic ideas and ideologies. It suggested that so-called Social Darwinism predated Darwin.

It was a sudden bolt of lightning to my conceptual framework, which is what I learned to call it in my first philosophy course. Scientific theories were, I had believed, based strictly on the scientific method of hypothesis and experiment (or evidence) to test the hypothesis. The idea of pure science, or "value-free science" was a kind of postulate, an axiom, if not a dogma. It was what you assumed as a starting point. The logic of Natural Selection emerges directly from meticulously studied evidence. Darwin’s theory was based on science, and nothing else.

But in a sentence in a philosophy journal, I was told that it might not be necessarily so.   Science might also be guided, consciously or not, by other factors, including invisible ideology.

Oddly, although studying the Vietnam War had shown me the tangle of motives and ideology leading to deception and self-deception in politics and government, I still assumed the evidence-based objectivity of science itself, if not the ends to which that science was directed. Especially a science and a theory so remote from weapons development and social control.

But this comment suggested that even the theory of evolution is not utterly impartial and objective. I had just found an opening to this idea, and sensed a glimmer of the other side. I was both stunned and excited. It was like the moment that nearly every first year philosophy student faces when presented with the argument that it’s possible that the world does not exist at all except in our heads. It becomes both an obvious and more complex argument pretty quickly, but at first, it’s a mind-blower.

So was this. To some, this may now be a commonplace observation: that the formulation, acceptance and rejection of scientific theories, including Darwin’s, are shaped in part by ideas outside of science as well as ego, institutional power struggles and conventional inertia. To others it may still be unorthodox.

But to me in 1968 it was a new and electrifying notion. We hadn't learned it in Evolution class. I was very excited by the idea. It filled my head, and I wanted to learn more. I wanted to explore it.

Too late, as it turned out. Because there were no papers in the course, just this last big exam.

Which brings me to the second thing that happened.

In the days leading up to the final exam, we were supposed to view an exhibit of bones in a room on campus. There would be questions about those bones, and how they illustrate evolution, on the exam.

I went with a group of other students from the class. The exhibit made no sense to me. I didn’t see how I was going to remember the shape of skulls and tiny white bones. I went into a Groucho Marx crazy scientist routine, perhaps with the help of a white lab coat I found on a hook. Nobody thought it was funny. Everybody was worried.

The night before the exam I walked around campus. In the library, at tables outside the dining rooms in Seymour, students were frantically studying. It was clear as day to me that none of them expected to remember anything they were studying past the day of the exam. The exam was everything.

I had done the same thing before—studying for the exam, and the exam only. It was the drill. Play the game, that suddenly serious game. I knew I should suck it up and do it just one more time. But I could not bring myself to do it. It was a charade, it was a travesty, it was a tragedy. With the seriousness of what was going on around us, what might be happening to some of us next, it was insane.

It had nothing to do with education, I felt so acutely, and nothing to do with reality. It even had little to do with the study of evolution as far as I was concerned.

I was supposed to be concentrating on the patterns of bones. Instead my head was swimming with this new idea that the theory of evolution, that science itself, was not so pure, was complex, perhaps more human. What did it all mean?

Sick at heart, I expressed some of these thoughts, and my desire to research and write about this, on the back of my exam the next day. Probably not as calmly as I just have.  On the exam itself I got as far as the first question on the bones, and stopped. Just stopped.  No More.  No More.

There are various ways now to describe this second thing that happened, and its relationship to the first. I tended towards self-righteous anger, and there was some of that. But the emotions were more complex and more complete. It was definitely some kind of crisis. Perhaps in a way, of conscience, or consciousness. So much suppressed, repressed, was rising. It made me suddenly very upset and very tired.

I failed the exam. That was enough so that I failed the course entirely.

The immediate outcome, the result of that failed course I will tell in another post. But the result of that moment in the library with the philosophy journal comment about evolution, I will tell now.

Paul Shepard

The first story I relate to that moment also leads back to Knox in for me a melancholy way. Three months or so before I hauled my stuff up the stairs to the third floor of Anderson House and began my college residence, a young family packed up their belongings and left Galesburg. The father was Paul Shepard, a much beloved and revered young teacher in the biology department for about a decade. His legacy lives on at Knox in Green Oaks, some 700 acres restored to natural prairie habitat. It was Shepard’s vision, and he directed Green Oaks for its first decade as well.

At the behest of a mutual friend, Prof. Doug Wilson of the English department, I bought  Shepard’s first book, Man in the Landscape (1967)at the Knox bookstore.

I'm not sure when I read it all.  I recall being mesmerized by the writing in just the first chapter for awhile, which set me off dreaming and thinking.  But it may not have been until after I left Galesburg that I read enough of the book to understand that it is an ambitious and multi-disciplinary study in the area of what we came to call ecology. It dealt with the relationship of social and cultural beliefs to attitudes about the natural world, and how science was conducted. Shepard apparently taught a course by that title which must have been the basis for the book.

Doug Wilson and Paul Shepard. Photo by Flo Shepard.

In other words, it was just what would have intrigued and interested me. If our time at Knox had overlapped, I would have taken that course, and the course of my life might have been altered.

For one thing I would likely not not be worrying about a science course requirement in my senior year.  But that realization was to come, for this story is just beginning.

Apart from two books he co-edited I saw in the 70s, it wasn’t until the late 1980s that I chanced upon another Paul Shepard book while visiting Seattle. Nature and Madness was even more mind-blowing. In the Squirrel Hill public library in Pittsburgh I found two of his books between Man in the Landscape, and was awed by those as well. They were Thinking Animals and The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game. Both dealt profoundly in aspects of animal and human evolution--and in the co-evolution of humans and the animals humans hunted.

Eventually I mentioned my discoveries and enthusiasm in a letter to Doug Wilson. He brokered the beginning of a correspondence between Paul Shepard and me.

Unfortunately it lasted only to the extent of two letters from me and one from him. Just after I arrived in Arcata in 1996, I learned that he had died from cancer.

I learned it by a letter from his widow, Florence Shepard, who noted our brief correspondence. Very soon she asked me if I wanted to write something for an issue of the Wild Duck Review about his work. I met Casey Walker, its editor, and writer Jack Turner (The Abstract Wild) for coffee here at Los Bagels, and talked about the approach I would take. My article appeared in that special issue of August 1997, along with contributions by Stephen Kellert, Delores LaChapelle, C.L.Rawlins, Barbara Ras, Barbara Dean, Steve Chase, Joseph Meeker and Flo Shepard, and a poem by Gary Snyder. (I’ve republished a longer version of my essay here.)

By then, yes, I had realized that all the events that flowed from flunking that evolution course would likely have been quite different if Paul Shepard had still been teaching at Knox when I was a student there.

Flo and Paul Shepard

And even that isn’t the end of the story. In fairly short order, Flo Shepard asked me to create a website about Paul Shepard, featuring biographical information that she wrote and photos she provided; photos and descriptions of his books (including posthumous volumes) with quotes from reviews, plus other information and a couple of short Shepard essays not otherwise collected.  So I did.

Eventually that site became technically obsolete, but it was the basis of a subsequent site that Casey Walker assembled. Not too shabby for the guy who flunked evolution.

In that winter in early 1968 we were already awash in dreadful waves of information about air and water pollution and environmental destruction, and in predictions of ecological doom. That became my major interest brushing upon science in the 1970s—when I read two of the first academic collections on the new subject of ecology co-edited by Paul Shepard (The Subversive Science, still a classic, and Enviro/Mental.)

In grade school and high school I had been interested in astronomy and the sciences of the Space Age, so I later gravitated towards the new physics of the very large and the very small. But all along the way since college I kept my eye on the larger question of what influences a scientific theory.  I was reading Lewis Thomas, James Gleick, William Irwin Thompson and others, and watching the Nova programs and the great PBS series' by Jacob Bronowski, James Burke and Carl Sagan.

Then as earlier posts on this blog attest, I became interested in the history of the theory of evolution through an interest in H.G. Wells and the future. That’s been ongoing since the late 90s. Those posts express some of the ideologies and examples of self-interest that contributed to how Darwin and evolution were interpreted, even today.

Consider it irony, given my less than stellar academic record or experience in the sciences, but in the early 2000s I found myself becoming the go-to guy to review books on science for the general public at the San Francisco Chronicle, and wrote them also for Salon and other outlets. Perhaps their theory was that if I could make sense of it, other readers could, too. But of course the Chronicle has many scientifically literate readers in the Bay Area and down Stanford way, including eminent scientists. So I had to work at it.

Back cover of the paperback edition of Damasio's book,
with excerpts from my review at the top.

Nevertheless, for the SF Chronicle I reviewed a biography of Einstein, and a couple of books on brain science, including one by Antonio Damasio. (His agent later said that an overjoyed Demasio read the entire review to him over the phone.)

 I reviewed a half dozen or so books on psychology, and all nine books in the Mind and Life Series, derived from public discussions held by the Dalai Lama and Buddhist practitioners with scientists in a number of fields, including physics, neuroscience, psychology and biology.  One of the Mind and Life Institute cofounders was biologist Francisco Varela, who introduced the concept of autopoiesis, or self-regulating life.

For the North Coast Journal I reviewed books on the history of quantum theory, on astrophysics, paleoanthropology, two books on Darwin, one on cultural evolution, several more on psychology and another half dozen or so on climate science.

And partly because publishers kept sending me new books on science, I wrote about dozens more on my Books in Heat blog.

Along the way I learned how impure science is. A theory may be accepted because of reputation, or denied because of ego and institutional politics. I saw examples of this over and over, and some seemed pretty scandalous.

But this is apparently so widespread and so well known among scientists that they can joke about it. One of the books I reviewed for the Chronicle was The Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe by Simon Singh. In it Singh quotes physicist Max Planck saying that new ideas seldom win over adherents of old ones—usually a generation must pass while the new idea’s “opponents gradually die out.” He also quotes English geneticist J.B.S. Haldane’s four stages of acceptance for a scientific idea: 1. This is worthless nonsense. 2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view. 3. This is true, but quite unimportant. 4. I always said so.

But the role of ideology in the formation of a theory has also entered into the dialogue. And its clearest example has always been evolution. In my posts on H.G. Wells and his novel The Time Machine I’ve noted the ideological influences on Darwin and the ideologies that latched onto his theories as a triumphant exemplar.

But we don’t have to go back to Darwin.

It should be unsurprising—but instructive—that much of the actual science taught at Knox in 1968, including in that evolution course, is now considered wrong. Apropos of bones, dinosaurs were believed to have all been cold-blooded and slow of foot. T.H. Huxley’s suggestion that they were ancestors to birds was derided and forgotten. None of that is considered the true view any longer.

Life was divided into two kingdoms only: plants and animals.  Now there are six (though some scientists are abandoning the entire classification.)  Protozoa in 1968 were one-celled animals. They aren’t anymore, and some scientists consider the very word to be obsolete. In other sciences, such basic concepts as plate tectonics had not yet made it into textbooks, and even the Big Bang itself was not the accepted cosmological explanation until the late 1960s.

What has lasted is the lesson I learned that night in the library: to question, to probe, to analyze theories and how they are made. Seeing them in the larger context of society, history and ideology eventually makes for better science, and—for citizen non-scientists (and non-science majors)—better evaluation of scientific theories and findings.

But it may be even more important than that.

In 1968 the latest interpretations of Darwinian evolution were gene-centered. Gene centeredness became both especially prominent and popularized with Richard Dawkins’ 1975 book The Selfish Gene. That book, and the  gene as the determinant of evolutionary change via survival of the fittest , took the 19th century ideology supporting the predominant interpretation of Darwin to a condition close to dogma. That ideology begins with the master 19th century metaphor of the machine--lifeforms as cogs in the machine of evolution.

That ideology further emphasized violent competition, aggression, conquest, and man against nature.  Survival of the fittest, the struggle for existence, nature red in tooth and claw, winner take all, the war of all against all--they all were idolized as drivers of natural evolution and as the essence of animal and human nature, with no exception, and no room for compassion, cooperation, or co-existence.

But in subsequent decades, both the science and the ideological basis came under attack from different directions. (And perhaps I need to say here I am not at all talking about so-called creation science, or a denial of evolution itself.)

By the 1980s eminent paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould was attacking the Darwinian tenet that natural selection operating slowly over great periods of time is the main or only driver of change, despite the discrepancies in the fossil record (those little white bones presumably.)

He believed that the basis for this bias was more ideological than scientific: the insistence that natural selection is very gradual was because it came from a politically conservative class and time in England that favored gradual social change. A theory of more sudden change as well as gradual change—the “punctuated equilibrium” Gould favored—was too much like revolutionary political threats to the established order.

Today variations of punctuated equilibrium are more generally accepted, as is another more recent—and more revolutionary theory—proposed by biologist Lynn Margulis, who found in microscopic life the evidence that crucial steps in evolution were taken by means of symbiosis: separate organisms living together for mutual benefit, beginning with the evolution of microbial life.

Lynn Margulis

Perhaps it is possible that among the periodicals in the Knox library in the winter of 1967 was an issue of the Journal of Theoretic Biology which contained Margulis’ now-landmark first article setting forth the central tenets of her theory of symbiosis within the cell. It had been rejected by 16 other journals. But even when it appeared, it was derided. Though symbiosis is not the same as cooperation, it is close enough. It did not fit the prevailing ideology of selfishness.

Margulis persisted and found more evidence while the establishment had time to get used to the idea. She later joined with James Lovelock in developing the Gaia Theory, which is symbiosis on a grand scale. It is, as another biologist described it, symbiosis as seen from space.

Life, Margulis wrote, "does not 'adapt' to a passive physiochemical environment as most neo-Darwinians assume; instead, life actively produces and modifies its surroundings."  The biosphere is not "determined by a physical universe run by mechanical 'laws...the metabolizing biosphere is physiologically self-controlled."

 If science survives for another century, Lynn Margulis will be recognized as a major figure.  Far from being a war of individuals or species, or objects that operate according to 19th century machine metaphors, she has shown that life is completely interdependent.  The earth is not only our home--it is our body.

Evolutionary theory in the 21st century is moving towards multiple explanations. In their 2014 book Evolution in Four Dimensions (MIT Press), Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb examine not just the genetic (itself a vastly more complex subject than got fixed in the public mind in the 1990s), but the epigenetic (non-DNA inheritance), behavioral (animal learning passed on) and symbolic (human heritage though language and other systems.)

Science is based on evidence, but evidence can be a tricky thing. Sometimes people see the evidence they look for, and they fail to see it if they are not looking for it. That includes scientists. One of the primary reasons for not seeing the evidence is that it does not fit into the current theory, or the current ideology.

This has been shown to be true countless times in the study of animals, when evidence of intelligence, tool-making and communication have been overlooked, because of the ideology of human exceptionalism, which itself derives as much from the ideological right of capitalist humans to exploit and lay waste to the rest of existence as it does from any religious or scientific dogma.

One important illustration is the work of primatologist Frans B.M. De Waal, who documented patterns of reconciliation behavior in primates (after fights, the participants would seek each other out and engage in friendly behavior.) Previous researchers hadn’t seen this because prevailing beliefs emphasized aggression and competition, and so they missed the signs.

It does not seem a coincidence to me that many of these beliefs—the selfish gene, animals as aggression and competition machines, human exceptionalism and so on, are all major underpinnings of capitalism, and its exploitation of the planet. Nineteenth century capitalists were at least conscious of co-opting evolution, and thereby guiding any science that deals with animal or human behavior. By the modern age, these sciences were functional captives of that ideology.

Contemporary British philosopher Mary Midgely has written eloquently on this broader subject of the ideology often unconsciously assumed in scientific theories, particularly in her book Evolution As A Religion. (Margulis also refers to the orthodox neo-Darwinism as "a minor twentieth century religious sect.")  Midgely points out that scientists attack others for basing their beliefs on ideology or religion, while failing to see the cultural myths and assumptions that underlie their own scientific views.

“Social Darwinism or Spencerism is the unofficial religion of the west,” Midgely writes. “And it is widely believed that the theory of evolution proves this kind of narrowly self-assertive motivation to be... fundamental, universal and in some sense the law of life. Mystical reverence for such deities as progress, nature and the life-force is then invoked to explain and justify cut-throat competition. As we have seen, such a view of the natural motivation of our species is simply a mistake, a projection of current interests.”

Many new discoveries run counter to the 19th century ideologies of man against nature rather than humanity embedded in nature, of capitalistic selfishness as natural but cooperation for a common good as unnatural in human or animal nature, and even human intelligence as entirely separate from animals.  And, the argument goes, this is all so embedded to our nature that it is useless to believe we can resist or change it.  What could be more basic than your selfish genes?  You can't fight it because it's human nature.  These ideologies survive and try to rule science as well as the rest of us, in Ted Carpenter’s phrase, “like a watch ticking in the pocket of a dead man.”

There are those who are tempted to inappropriately use the new research to support a different ideology, but animal research for example does find support for the existence of cooperation and altruism, perhaps even the empathy and imagination that are clearly survival tools for our species.  But taken together, the implications of this research are necessary correctives to the one-sidedness and especially the destructiveness of the ruling paradigms.

What does the new science regarding the origin of species tell us? That we must be talking about origins plural, for evolution is much more complex and involves several different pathways than suggested by Darwin and mandated by Dawkins. This is even truer in regard to evolution in a larger sense.

We must see this as the ideology it is, and what it means. Insofar as it is a rigid explanation of animal and human behavior, this ideology of complete selfishness, acting only in one’s self-interest, life as a war of all against all, all the time—is wrong. For more than a century it has excused human destruction that has led us to the brink of mass extinctions and an unrecognizable Earth. And it is still leading us there.

Failure to see this ideology for what it is—an ideology—is a major failure of science in the modern age. That the ideological underpinning of predatory capitalism are the same as those of evolutionary science is no coincidence. Capitalists at least were conscious of co-opting evolution, and thereby guiding any science that deals with animal or human behavior.

This dogma of evolution fit wonderfully well with capitalist economic theory—and why not? Capitalists were paying the bills. Although some scientists tried to refute these interpretations, the scientific mainstream continued to aid and abet this view.

All of this contributed to the seeming present inevitability of predatory capitalism which rules the world, and which has proven unable to modify itself in light of the findings of science, most conspicuously climate science.

 Fredric Jameson is reputed to have observed today it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. Evolutionary theory and dependent theories of human nature have contributed to this stranglehold on the imagination. Yet predatory capitalism continues to bring the end of the world closer.

All our ecological "doom and gloom" of the late 1960s led to change, but not enough, and not fast or widespread enough. With the onrushing climate crisis, with mass extinctions and multiple ecological catastrophes underway or in the offing, time is running out.

Ours remains a crisis of consciousness. If humanity doesn’t fully commit to an ideology of interdependence and the science that supports it, then humanity as well as the world that supports it are in danger of extinction. Human civilization will turn out to be a bloody but hopeful experiment that didn’t quite make it far enough to respond to this challenge, largely if not entirely of its own creation. We’ve taken this course of evolution, and we’re flunking it, and taking the planet we know with us.