Sanction

by Roman McClay

  A news helicopter circled, it was as a shark around the fish in the coral. Lyndon sat down and ate his sandwich, such a high metabolism meant eating every three hours or his body would dig into the pantry of every earned muscles for caloric inputs. Metabolically he was a spender not a saver; and thus he had to always being making more than he spent. He had a theory that hard-gainers were more industrious by temperament than those with fat-insulin receptor genes and had to be for they could not store calories at all. Fat people were lazy for an evolutionary reason: they could afford to be, they stored up for the winter in their bodies while profligate men like Lyndon burned every calorie he made and stuffed in his face.

  He looked at Bugz and watched him unscrew his thermos; he was meticulous in each act; as if they were ends in themselves. Lyndon eschewed such rituals and thus had never noticed Bugzy’s behavior as anything other than inefficiency before, but like the bolt that had riven Ahab and white scarred him, he now saw Bugz was his Parsee. How had he taken each word he had said to him and squeezed it through his rational brain. “Oh God! that man should be a thing for immortal souls to sieve through, ” Lyndon thought.

  Bugz was a mystic; he must have seen Lyndon as a Daemon of some kind. Bugz -his real name was CJ Liliekis- had asked how Lyndon achieved each goal he’d tasked himself with; accomplished with such seeming ease. Bugz had asked in a reverence, a respect, nearly an awe that Lyndon -at first- had thought was evidence of Bugz being merely decent and polite. But the man truly thought Lyndon had some black magic powers; some thurgic diabolii . Lyndon saw the world as all clockworks and Bugz saw it as a skein of the gods' webs and the pollen of imps populating the beams so man's eyes can see the rod of substance in the ether and light.

  Men, Lyndon thought, were like chickens who are given food pellets at random intervals by a machine; each fowl then repeats ad infinitum the equally random act they happened to be engaged in at the time the pellet shot out at them. They, in their bird-brains, make the causal connection between them turning right a quarter turn for one chicken; the other maybe was stamping its feet; a third craning its neck to the scientists’ sky; between this -their behavior- and the random ejecta of food from a metal orifice fashioned from Pittsburgh steel.

  All our brains are evolved from this type of reinforcing loop system and are still this way as we think our rituals connect to outcomes , Lyndon lamented. Jesus, we’re all birds in a cage frantically praying and whirling and crossing our hearts to get some prize, some favor from the gods , he thought. He thought this way with half contempt for the religious and half as banishment of his own feral mystical conceits. It’s banal to say, but it’s true, all male-feminists are rapists and all atheists have just half-buried a body they’ve killed and are trying to hide it mostly from God. But that dirt is employed by -works for- God, and so do they.

  He had never taken it seriously aloud; he thought each man was just trying for a day with a few dollars, a few beers, some pussy, and maybe a good piece of literature to read. But these men, the propitiating men, maybe even most men -maybe most in generations past, before science had won- for these men it wasn’t an abstraction of an abstraction two layers down; chemicals and neurons and beep beep boop, he thought as the hammer drill in his hands now banged inside the sawcut he’d made around the spall.

  These men, they want true love, God's love, they want God's forgiveness and grace; they want approval from more than their peers; they want it from the universe itself. The food pellet was not even the point any more. They wanted the approval, he thought.

  I shouldn’t pretend to not understand , he chided himself. I know why they reach for the hand at the opposite end of the glass. Maybe I'm too insouciant about my materialism. Maybe I want something more; something beyond. I think of abstractions like respect and loyalty; I desire them. I’m more than a mere machine for absorbing resources. But, I don't see the invisible webs the way they do I guess. And, he thought, I don't want God's approval at all.

  In fact, His imprimatur would be like a good review by the New York Times: a sign of moral failure on my part, he thought, and he believed he believed this as he kept hammering at the wall and ignoring the Pacific as it stretched out forever in loched blue and reflected lapidary whites just to his 9 o’clock position; the Kona winds were still a week away, and the breeze blew on him and Bugz and hanging Siah too. The winds pulled the humidity from him as quickly as it landed. He felt little of the heavy Polynesian moisture and the heat was thus abated by the movement of air. Bugzy -over the radio- guided Johnny on how to lower the scaffold down to retrieve Siah as he was captured for the Hawai’ian evening news.

  He admired his friend Bugzy so much, and he felt all was right with the world.

  III. 2038 e.v.

  “I’m not saying that at all; I’m saying the opposite. Of course, western civilization is predicated on Christianity. Of course. Of course, the values, the innate values of western people, including the -we rationalists- is articulated by Christianity. I’m saying that doesn’t go far enough.

  “I’m saying that Christianity is merely the articulation of a deeply embedded behavioral code, a code older than the species itself. I’m saying that mankind had moral feelings manifesting inside the basal ganglia, the limbic region that sprouted into a two-leafed plant, differentiated but conjoined, and empathy was the first feeling of awareness of others, and consciousness is the other leaf .

  “And those two leaves branched out into two leaves, empathy made we brutes feel that others had feelings too, like our own, and thus, we could make them feel good by doing the things we wanted done to us, and the dark side of empathy, we could wound their souls, not merely their bodies. Their feelings we could wound by doing to them the things we knew we wouldn’t like done to us.

  “This is an emergent phenomenon of the mammalian brain, and it’s taken for granted by people; either taken for granted that it’s innate to all or that it’s a human artifact that comes later with religion or articulated moral codes. The idiotic hippies think all creatures feel empathy and that it’s only a force for good; and you people, the Christian types think only mankind feel empathy and only because Jesus told them to feel it.

  “The Jews are slightly more aware in that they say the gentiles may not have the Law but they do have it written on their bodies; that is to say you gentiles, we gentiles, have morality instantiated in our bodies via the soul,” he paused.

  “I believe that too,” Tania said haltingly.

  “Ok, so that is good, because we do have empathy instantiated on our souls, it’s biological, it’s pre-human, Franz de Waal showed that in his book, The Age of Empathy , I suggest you read it. Now, because empathy shows man and chimps how both to help and how best to harm others, wound them emotionally, torture them, that is exactly what chimps and humans do, we go to war, we get malicious revenge.

  “Did you know that chimps go to war, and that they kill for fun, independently of territorial designs or wants, independent of need for food or defense? Yeah, tons of work from Goodall, who originally repressed the data, to later books like Demonic Males , to others, have shown that chimps kill for kicks. Just like humans.

  “We kill for feelings like revenge, and hatred and vengeance, which are all empathetic feelings, we say, oh, you want to hurt me with your existence, you want to make me feel a certain way, then I’ll turn that back on you and hurt you; I’ll scare you, harm you, tear you to pieces .

  “You see, how often have you felt that someone’s mere presence, their status, their existence somehow mocks you? I know you’ve felt this, it’s universal, and it arises when someone has traits that you lack, and you hate them for it. Why does every guy in the world call Tom Brady a fag or every girl call Melania Trump a whore ?

  “It’s because these two individuals are so excellent in form and function that the rest of us look like shit in comparison; and we know it. See, we know it. That is empathy too. We say, I know I think these people are above me, better looking, more tale
nted, richer, smarter . By the way, you know Melania speaks five languages, yes? I mean she’s a badass, a total badass, she’s so cool, so smart, so beautiful, I mean she looks like an assassin not some Bambi type, but a killer; she’s rich, powerful, fecund, look at the son she produced, she’s the real deal.

  “And women look at her and see everything they are not. Just as men look at Tom Brady and see the same. And they immediately think, if I can see my insufficiencies then so can everyone else.

  “You see, that is empathy, that innate, evolving, proto-human and human trait that makes us less solipsistic, is empathy. See, we don’t just automatically and autonomically search for food, run from threats and rut while the female is in heat. No, the human line, including our cousins in the chimp and bonobo line, have a new suite of emotions and cognition that extends the self out into the world so that it may blanket others in their own investiture.

  “We shroud others in thought and feelings, we no longer see them as objects, they are people too; the chimps see them as chimps -other chimps- too. And this -like any trait in nature- has the forked tongue of the serpent, the splayed foot of the bird, the eyes on either side of the head of the horse or leviathan,” he said and raised the brow.

  She listened, but she did wonder if he might get to the point.

  “Empathy began to help chimp and man do the soft, friendly and grand thing, help their mates, their offspring, their comrades, it made them act with earnest desire to treat others as they wanted to be treated. And this helped them as a trope or as a tribe of man,” he said as he was interrupted.

  “Troop , you meant troop not trope ,” she said.

  “I did, my bad. Yes, troop , a troop or tribe. But it also made them jealous and feel aggrieved; seek vengeance for being wronged.

  “How else could a beast or man be wronged unless he felt in whatever inchoate way, I wouldn’t have done that, I treated him as I wanted to be treated. See, that, this is the new tao of empathy. He, we all begin to think, he -that bastard- he broke the rules .

  “That is the feeling that comes once you are no longer a solipsistic beast, once you have empathy you can feel wronged ; you can feel not just attacked or hunted as prey animals feel; but wronged, as if it isn’t fair or right . No lower order beast feels anything like that; they run, they’re scared, their autonomic systems makes them dart away from threat. They don’t ruminate on justice or injustice.

  “But once you have empathy, that is exactly what arises in the mind: you wonder why someone else, a mate, a child, a friend, would do you wrong. You wonder why they would lie, cheat or steal. Why they would wound you so? What the hell did you ever do to them to deserve it? you ask,” he said.

  Tania looked at him as if she had objections still forming in her brain.

  “If this is opaque to you then I have nothing more to say,” he said as he went on speaking anyway. “It’s so obvious and so true and so fundamental that to argue it would be just to insist on your point of view regardless of the facts or logic. There is no way to have jealousy or justice as feelings without empathy and the ability to see others as having minds like your own, who can see the good, the fair, the right; other minds that can see you too as capable of pain and fear and hurt.

  “That’s what empathy is. It extends back and forth and back again like a recursive mirror that goes on forever as -we think that they think that we think that they think that I think you know what I think- as the language game goes. Right? Remember that scene in A Princess Bride , where the Vincetti character says:

  Well it’s so simple, all I have to do is divine, from what I know of you, are you the sort of man who would put the poison in his own goblet or in his enemy’s; now a clever man would put the poison in his own goblet for only a great fool would reach for what he was given, but I am not a great fool and so I clearly cannot take the wine in front of you, but you must know that I am not a fool; you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not take the wine in front of me !

  “At this point the Dread Pirate Roberts says, so you’ve made your decision then ?

  “The Vincetti character expatiates on this recursion of empathy and knowledge of the mind of others, the theory of mind that develops in mature simians like humans and chimps. He continues:

  Not remotely! Because Iogaine comes from Australia as everyone knows and Australia is entirely peopled with criminals and criminals are used to having people not trust them as you are not trusted by me, so I can clearly not take the wine in front of you. And you must have suspected I’d know the powder’s origin so I clearly cannot choose the wine in front of me…

  “Roberts says, you’re just stalling now , to which Vincetti angrily replies:

  You’d like to think that wouldn’t you! You’ve beaten my giant which means you’re exceptionally strong so you could have put the poison in your own goblet counting on your strength to save you so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you; but you’ve also bested my Spaniard which means you must have studied and in study you must have learned that man is mortal so you would have put the poison as far from you as possible; so I clearly cannot choose the wine in front of me…

  “Now Roberts is forced to say, you think you can trick me into giving something away, it will not work, to which Vincetti says, it already has worked you’ve given everything away; I know where the poison is!

  “Well, then the whole thing descends into a farce of Vincetti switching glasses and drinking from the cup in front of him and watching the Pirate drink from his own goblet as the game was designed to make each man do. Vincetti drinks thinking he knows what Roberts is thinking, and says as much, when Roberts says that Vincetti , quote, chose wrong. To this Vincetti retorts with glee:

  You only think I chose wrong, that’s what’s so funny, I switched glasses when your back was turned, you fool!

  “Vincetti laughs it up with his theory-of-mind, thinking he knows what Roberts can and cannot know, which is true insofar as it goes. Of course, the pirate has counted on Vincetti not knowing the larger truth, which is that the poison is in both goblets, as the pirate has spent years building up a tolerance to Iogaine so it didn’t matter from which goblet either man imbibed.

  “It’s a classic tale of theory of mind and recursive empathy and it proves my point exactly, perfectly and unimpeachably,” Isaiah said.

  “I don’t agree,” Tania said.

  “Inconceivable!” MO said. He’d been planning that.

  “It’s conceivable,” she said. “I think only man knows the mind of others, not chimpanzees, and finally, that gift, empathy and moral action is given to him by God or evolution or simple bio-chemistry; but the rational mind picks it; picks the action.” She said this as her disgust sensitivity -being that close, a few minutes earlier, to a murderer with bad skin and bad tattoos had triggered it- was primed via the enteric neurons firing this data to her cerebellum. She felt herself wanting to put distance, even moral distance, between them; she was saying things she maybe 30% believed .

  “Look, I’m delineating a logical argument, I cannot make you believe it. I only ask that you put yourself in my position, see it from my mind’s point of view; don’t allow it to corrupt you, just take one moment to see it my way, assure yourself you can return to your way of thinking at any time,” Isaiah said. He had brought her into the room as the inmate was leaving to test this very phenomenon.

  “Ok,” she agreed.

  “From my point of view, this empathy is what changed behaviors, instantiated new cultures in chimp and man; it made both apes nicer, more decent, more helpful, better able to care for helpless offspring in the early years, care for mates as well. But it also facilitated killing for sport, for revenge, for wars of vengeance. It both gave malevolence its bite and made malevolence itself thus wound.

  “It made the jealousy, the insecurity, the self-consciousness as tantamount to self-doubt; take an object upon which, against which, to lash out. Man and chimp could gaze out upon another and see their sour
ce of insecurity and jealous rage, and attack it. It could make them see their comrade as betrayer, their mate as turning him -this giant alpha rex, the beast that feels itself grand, large, and in-charge- turning him into a cuckold and this made him feel a fool.

  “A fool, an idea only capable of arising in the mind of a beast that could think from someone else’s point of view. Think of it, how can you feel a fool, unless you think someone else thinks this of you too? You put your mind in their mind and see it from their POV; and in so doing you feel chagrined.

  “This is the double edge sword of empathy. It creates a space for a battlefield of jealousy and vexation and insecurity that before this was handled by mere mechanical or bio-chemical means,” Isaiah explained.

  “How so?” Tania asked.

  “Well, in the white rat, when a female is pregnant the male rat, the father, guards her assiduously, for if he doesn’t and she merely brushes just her fur against another male rat, a stranger, a friend, whomever, but any male rat -not the father of her offspring still in gestation- if she makes any contact, that offspring has an automatic 30% chance of aborta facia , of miscarriage.”

  “How?” she asked.

  “Biochemistry,” he said. “The pheromones of the strange male rat, not the father, seep into her fur and skin and her own body poisons the pregnancy and kills the potential rat. So, if the father is insouciant, a modern liberal rat, who says, sure my wife can have male friends why not, I’m not jealous or insecure , well that male rat loses his scion one out of three times, and in evolutionary terms that means males who guard their mates with a furrowed brow and nasty sort of disposition, well he has 3 kids to every 2 the laisse-faire rat has. Over time, guess which model predominates? Go on guess?” Isaiah laughed with almost zero malice.