Mixed Criticism

Mr. Stickfigure is no secular humanist, but he reads evolutionary imperatives in human actions. It is possible to feel the genetic switches clicking on and off, pushing and pulling animal energy in bursts of immediate either/or reactions. One of the things we have evolved is the use of emotion as a sensory organ. Like all sensory organs, it works both ways, translating the world for our brains, which then prepare our bodies for the world.

On parent-teacher afternoon, I passed a teenager in the hall. He was obviously older than our middle school students, but not enough to be the accompanying sibling of one of our students. As I passed, I had no trouble overhearing the teenager say to his friend, “Rad, dude! That’s so rad!” This was when evolution switched on in Mr. Stickfigure’s brain.

“Hey, come here for a second,” I said. The kid paused and then approached, his eyes steely and challenging.

“Yeah, what’s up?” he said. We stood, our eyes nearly level, arms across our chests.

“The last time I heard someone say ‘rad’ was in 1984,” I said. “So I thought you might have been talking to me.”

“I wasn’t talking to you.”

“Are you sure?” I said. “I haven’t heard anyone say that word around here unless they were talking about my sideburns.”

“Okay,” he said, “I was talking about you.”

The exchange was an evolutionary moment in two senses. The first is literal, insofar as we were involved in an emotional exchange with a trajectory towards death. I had chosen this path for us, because I had chosen not to ignore the lad’s comments like I probably should have. And yet, like any fool who bristles when called “chicken,” a fear of my own flight mechanism propelled me to escalate.

But also in the exchange, I could see that I have evolved, too. I could read his mind, and it seemed fair to me: Don’t talk to me like I’m some little kid from this school, you funny-haired freak, and don’t talk to me like I’m scared of you. And, there may have been a touch of, Maybe you should be scared of me. And why not? I might as well be from 1984, for all I look like someone around whom you should hold your tongue. The young man’s interests did not seem to entail my only small claim to authority, which is being a fully certified nerd.

Though the lad was not acting like an adult, he had succeeded in ensuring that I wasn’t, either. But unlike middle-school students, he knew the game he was playing: He had been talking about me, and he wasn’t going to get trapped into lying about it like he was afraid of the consequences.

I let my arms drop first. I asked him what high school he went to. He told me. He spoke with the programmed-response of the student that was still in him, though the man of the streets that he is becoming seemed to regret having answered so quickly. And I saw something else in his eyes as we spoke: it was a kind of emancipation. There was a decision already made staring out from his face with a sincerity that was not mirrored in my own eyes. The next afternoon, the same young man walked past the school while I was having a cigarette. I greeted him from across the street, and he offered the same stony stare as he passed.

Mr. Stickfigure is no gangster, but part of him believes the same thing as that young man: a man is a man, and that means he will kill you. Nor is Mr. Stickfigure a proper feminist, but he sees how our evolutionary danger-mechanisms are shaped and contained by sex in the human species. Man and woman, we have made ourselves in the image of fight and flight. Perhaps as pure animals we are all killers, or all survivors, but as man and woman we kill and survive.

As human beings, we have a history that is all our own, across which evolution has barely had time to budge. We are the same animals we always were, though we remember little of our younger days. All human change and difference is working with the same evolutionary elements it always has, which means that evolution alone will never account for our history.

And yet, our history will always have to account for evolution. All history has to encode the inequities of biological survival, even the history of equality. The historical search for equality has led us to observe and define the ways in which we control inequality in order to make ourselves into human beings. Many of our histories, some would say all of them, have managed the existence of human beings through the dynamic roles of man and woman. The part of the human animal that chooses whether to fight or fly has been controlled by preemptively assigning the functions to gender. History, much of history, is the history of men who fight, and women who survive.

History is not determined by evolution, but it always works with it. Every culture ever to exist is evidence of this work. There is a culture currently in existence, for instance, that has moved the fight or flight mechanism beyond male and female into the realm of law. According to the law, it is the citizens’ duty to flee and the duty of the legal authority to fight. Historically speaking, this is a feminization of the social order. That is to say that citizens in general are called upon to restrain their fight response in favor of fleeing. Those who participate in this culture agree to this deferral of aggression because the law assures them that the aggression of others will be controlled, whether they agree or not.

Recently, I spoke with another guest at our school, or rather, he spoke to me. He was considerably older than the young man, and had, apparently, considerably more authority than me. “This is unacceptable!,” he said, managing be both imperious and conniving at once. “That is unacceptable!” What is unacceptable, I thought, is that you think you can talk to a grown man in that way without getting your face punched in. Mr. Stickfigure doesn’t have to kick your ass to put you in your place, old man, but don’t forget that he could if he wanted to. The young man and I had agreed on this point, and I’ll concede the stronger resolve to him. As for the old man, well, I’m not a kid, either. I’ve read some Richard Wright and I know what you are, too. You’re an American type—the boss who has forgotten the history of bosses. The history of bosses is the history of the strongest animals, the alpha males and females that have driven species since before walking apes were a twinkle in the eyes of some ancient predator.

In a culture such as this, weak men can become powerful. They can also forget that theirs is only a culture among cultures. Among cultures, that is, that still believe a man is a man, and that means you have to be ready to fight.