At it's crudest, a man's parts are his genealogy and his personality. Personality can be further decomposed into genetics and circumstance - it's the classical nature-nurture debate. The theme of society is conformity - socialisation, gender roles, stratification and career orientation are all hinged on conformity. That is a disturbing notion in an age hailed for its focus on individuality. My history is bevelled with counter-conformity and this is a common thread in all spheres of my life - be different at all costs. The costs can very great indeed.
Three generations down my family tree my genes were going about their daily lives in Lithuania, Russia and England. Long before that, somewhere on my father's father's side, a man left the silversmith town of Posen1 in Poland to settle in Plusjang, Lithuania. Posen has the disturbing distinction of being one of the many towns in Poland in which the entire Jewish population was annihilated during World War II. But by the time Nazism was poking its snout out from under the rocks of recessive Germany my grandfather was living in Memel, Lithuania. He was the first non-rabbi in my father's traceable of ancestry. Dejected with the politics of religion, he ventured from a middle-class, spiritually oriented bloodline to upper-middle-class professionalism by paying for his own tertiary education with the proceeds of his infant pharmacy. In 1937, distrustful of the frenzy that was swallowing Western Europe, he boarded a ship to South Africa.
Although he did not leave in the mad rush that followed a few years later, there was space for only one green suitcase on the ship. Before he could speak English, and before he established SA Druggists (where he employed a young Nelson Mandela) he found accommodation in a busy boarding house in Berea. In the neighbouring room lived twin girls.
My father's mother was born to a Russian couple in South Africa. Soon after her father died from illness her mother was murdered in an armed robbery of their convenience store. She was only 16. Her twin sister and her older brother moved with her to a nearby boarding house to live. Her brother was a brilliant neurologist and he supported himself and his sisters by his small medical practise. However, he could not cope with their traumatic life and he killed himself, leaving the girls alone.
She never recovered fully and blocked out her life before she met my grandfather. When probed she'd be vague and misleading. I don't know why her parents left Russia. I can only assume it was a direct result of the pogroms and other religious persecution that rattled the Shtetls at the beginning of this century. I don't even know where in Russia they had lived.
Whenever my father's parents would have a spat he would lighten the mood by declaring, ``I'm going to get my green suitcase and go back to Memel!''
My father was the younger of two children. He followed the trend of young, up-and-coming Jewish males into the prestigious University of the Witwatersrand Medical School. I'll never know why he chose pathology - it is a high human-contact position, but you don't want to be his patient. The trend of the upper-middle class Johannesburg Jews later shifted to commerce. This is precisely why I chose engineering - to be different at all costs.
My father and his sister have always had a bond that continues to provide stability to an interesting family history. She is my mother's closest friend.
Three of my mother's grandparents joined the flux of immigrants from Lithuania in the late nineteenth century due to rife religious persecution in Prussia and Eastern Europe. It seems to be imperative that immigrants enter a society in the lower strata and have to fight to ascend from there. This xenophobic teething period ensures that the processes of socialisation particular to a certain population are not jeopardised by an influx of different cultures. An immigrant to the USA is quoted in the Ellis Island museum: ``When I arrived in America I discovered three things:
The teething ensures that the grass is never greener on the other side - at least not for the first generation. The offspring of the immigrant generation may, depending on circumstance, feel closer identity to the culture of the population of birth than to the culture of the parents. In an area slightly outside of New York City, called Great Neck, there is a large immigrant population of Persian Jews. These typically large, extremely wealthy families have managed to pry open the New York upper-class with no teething period at all. They are despised and shunned like school children that have not undergone a compulsory initiation into an exclusive club.
However, this was not the case with my family. My mother's grandmother on her mother's side (Rebecca) was born to a poor Cockney family. In London, Rebecca's sister met a Lithuanian man who brought her to South Africa. She then arranged for Rebecca to join her here. Rebecca married a Lithuanian banker in Luipard's Vlei. His financial influences flowed through the blood of his descendants in stereotypically Jewish fashion. What is interesting, however, is that his children were all female and my grandmother escaped the chains of gender typing by becoming a female accountant. That was unusual, if not unheard of, in the 1940's social conformism.
My mother's father (Jock Isacowitz) was conscripted to Egypt during World War II. By profession he was a lawyer but politics was his strength. He was posted in Helwan where the living conditions were particularly inadequate and, always the leader, he incited a riot that eventually led to a revamping of the camps. When he returned to South Africa Jock established a veteran soldiers' union - the Springbok Legion. In principle the union was anti-establishment and, inspired by a book on communism he had read at 17, he joined the Communist Party. Interest in the Springbok Legion declined and he spent more time with the Communist Party, bubbling through their ranks to become a regional leader. My grandfather retired from the party soon before its disbanding in 1951, and together with Alan Paton, Jack Unterhalter, Margaret Ballinger, Ernie Wentzel and Father Trevor Huddlestone he co-foundered the Liberal Party. He served as vice-president and chairman of the Liberal Party until his death in 1962. In 1952 Internal Security declared him a banned person after the Liberals spearheaded a campaign in Sophiatown that ultimately failed. My mother drank hot chocolate and read The Hardy Boys while the leaders of South Africa's Caucasian Apartheid activists whispered political strategies in her living room. They whispered because, only a few hundred meters away from the house, police listened in on the bugs littering the room.
At three o'clock one morning, as an immediate result of the Sharpeville Massacre, two officers ordered Jock to pack one bag of belongings and follow them. It was illegal to speak of it and when Mr Unterhalter heard my grandmother cry into the phone, ``Jack - uh huh'', he knew exactly what had happened - it was not quite unexpected. He endured 90 days detention without trial. A day after being released he was rearrested. In prison Jock incited a mass hunger strike. He was the only person still strong after a week. My grandmother pleaded to him to dilute sugar in his water or he would cause severe damage to his liver - but he saw that as giving in. His deteriorating health forced his release before the 90 days was complete. He was diagnosed with leukaemia and died in 1962 when my mother was only 12. Nobody was ever sure if the leukaemia was related to the hunger strike.
That was her childhood. The fear and tension in that family due to Jock's activities has repercussions that have crafted my life. My grandmother, Eileen, became immensely strong and independent. When Jock died my mother cared for her two younger brothers while Eileen worked fulltime. My mother matured from a young teenager to an adult mother figure tremendously quickly, effectively loosing a part of her childhood. She also became strong, independent and obsessed with control. Her elder brother, Roy, found a niche amidst the shady areas of Israel when he was 20. It took him another 15 years to settle his life and, having never graduated, he was contracted by a major South African media company to direct an electronic publishing and financial services division. Her younger brother, Steven, was too young to understand why his father was being led away by police. The day after the first arrest he asked his mother, ``Mom, is daddy a robber?'' - and that became the headline of the Rand Daily Mail a few days later. Steven spent time recovering from depressions and insecurities, which undoubtedly stem from the circumstances of his father's death and he has never been able to lead a settled life. He has practised medicine in St Helena, Papua New Guinea and Vladivostok (where he is presently).
I have never dared to ask if my mother, my uncles or my grandmother felt resentment to Jock. I certainly do not - when I read in Liberals against Apartheid (Randolph Vigne, 1997) that ``he was a brilliant organizer, an outstanding conference chairman, a most perceptive political student and incisive debater, a warm friend and, even on the darkest day, an inveterate optimist'' I was overcome by pride that I could associate myself with an era of history which is still playing itself out. And although I'm certain that his friends and family felt the same way, I do believe that his wife's relations must have wished he'd lead a normal life for hers and for the children's sake.
Like her mother, my mother ignored the gender divisions of her time by being the only female registered in computer science in 1967. She continued her professional career in risk management, information technology and eventually marketing.
Since my father's father had escaped oppression, and my mother's father had fought oppression, my mind was conditioned to be free of prejudice, uninfluenced by mass hysteria, and primarily to develop its own principles, philosophies and values amidst enormous pressure to conform to the accepted ways of society. This liberal upbringing, in which I was always encouraged to think independently, is probably the most influential factor of my life.
That is my recent ancestry and it makes up half of the sum of my parts.
My liberal and independent background allowed me to mature without being moulded to accepted social patterns and roles. My development was largely by trial-and-error rather than disciplinary conditioning. This has two major results. First, I value my achievements by my own standards and my own capabilities. My progress is therefore not hampered by the inferior expectations of others, nor is it premature because of the superior expectations of others. Second, the phenomenon of male inexpressiveness has never affected me.
I was an aggressive and short-tempered child. I was the self-proclaimed boss of my mafia-style preschool gang - with my older cousin as a bodyguard and my beautiful girlfriend on my left arm. The punishment that cornered me after concussing an opposing gang leader with a wooden beam did not quell my temper. What did quell my temper occurred three years later.
Having a sister on either side of me I suffer both from middle-child syndrome and from lone-boy syndrome. My sisters could throw me into a rage in seconds, and they did if only to keep their skills of verbal irritation sharp. I would lose my senses and I wouldn't even realise what I was doing until I'd already done it. After throwing a tantrum in my elder sibling's bedroom I stormed out violently slamming the door behind me. Only when there was a ten-centimetre gap between the door and the doorpost did it occur to me that I was holding the door by the closing edge and not by the handle. I couldn't get my fingers off in time and two seconds later I was running down the corridor shaking my hand and crafting a piece of impressionist art from my blood on the walls. The three leftmost top joints of the fingers on my left hand were in twelve pieces in total. Today, when I feel my chest bursting, and my eyesight narrowing, my deformed fingernails remind me to excuse myself from carbon-based company.
And so I became adept at retreating into this world of my own creation in my mind. I would look out from that world into this one and watch people. Human behaviour fascinates me. Perhaps that is the reason that I attended five schools in total - to see the greatest variety of cultures.
My first high school was a King David. If society epitomises conformity then the King David subculture is socialised beyond reason. Deviants are made to feel inferior, inept and unwelcome. I acquired a number of derogatory nom-de-plumes because of my emotional expressiveness, coupled with my left-wing vocalism, in line with my stance of non-conformity. I was an unofficial miscreant - of which I am still proud. One morning in Hebrew class we were discussing kashrut. My teacher claimed that it is as easy, as inexpensive and as tasty to be kosher as it is to not be. That is simply a lie. But when I was weighing this up I realised what had been taking place for all my six years at a Jewish day school - passive brainwashing. There is no evil intent, in fact I don't think that there is any conscious intent, but our minds were malleable at that age and our ideologies were subtly cast from the mould of theirs. This disturbing realisation was the angle-grinder that my mind needed to finally break the chains of conformity that tethered me to this greater society.
Although the doctors of this brainwashing had only the positive spiritual effects at heart, what they did not realise is that this moulding of susceptible minds rubs out individuality and, far worse, freedom of thought. Thus began my quest for objectivity and logic. I would listen to all arguments but accept only those with non-circumstantial evidence. I asked 'why?' to everything and discovered that one would always reach a base point when the answer is 'just because'. Systematically, I cleaved off all of those stereotypes that had been thrown at me and stuck like wet clay all my life; and I replaced them with my own beliefs and fears. The result is that everything that I believe has been developed by myself, and not by a stranger on another continent. So I understand myself and, absurd as it may initially sound, the same is not true for most.
I devised a test of this while standing in the synagogue one day. During the most sacred of daily prayers, when nothing but the prayer itself should be occupying the brain, I looked up to see one thousand people staring intently at the daily prayer book. ``What are you doing?'' I asked myself. The answer is trivial - I'm praying. ``What are you praying for?'' - this time I wasn't so quick to answer. ``Who are you praying to?'' - God, surely? ``But do you actually believe that? Do you feel that?'' - the answer was emphatically negative. And so I put down the book and I asked myself two simple questions, each requiring a yes-or-no type answer:
It seemed obvious that my answers were 'no' and 'no', and I became very curious to how others would answer.
Although the rationale of religion might be the most clichéd argument since homo-erectus became homo-sapiens, it remains my favourite mental exercise. Everything that I believe of religion is my own work based on my own experience.
The sharp retort I received to ``How can you believe in a God?'' was ``How can you not believe in a God? How can you explain our lives and our Universe?'' Of course, this leads directly to the argument that God has been created by man to explain the inexplicable. That busy crossroads has been scrutinised to exhaustion, so I cut my own path through the slithering vines of philosophy. I ask what created that God and I am told ``He just exists.''
My choice of belief comprises only two options:
It is an arbitrary choice that one might or might not feel compelled to justify. I choose option 'b' since I prefer to think that the Universe can be explained by knowledge that is too vast and complex for human minds to understand at this point, or maybe ever. By the mere mysterious nature of God, he can never be understood - and I'd rather have the chance to understand.
However, I could be incorrect. If I am incorrect then the deity I would choose is the compassionate and understanding one who is exalted by all major religions. No compassionate and understanding being will punish me for not believing in something for which I have no evidence. Therefore, whether I am or am not correct, I am at no disadvantage and I am living a charmed life that can only be interrupted by divine signature given directly to me.
I make an analogy:
I am standing with two friends (Dean and Steven) in Steven's kitchen. I reach behind my back and close my fist around a lentil. ``Steve, do you believe that there is a lentil in my hand?'' ``No,'' says Steven. So I show the lentil to Dean and he confirms that there is indeed a lentil in my hand. Steven still believes that my hand is empty but readily admits that he might be incorrect. I open my hand to convert the disbeliever and on closing it again Steven feels he has sufficient evidence to believe in the lentil.
I have yet to see the lentil.
Steven proposed an extension to my analogy:
Dean does not immediately confirm the existence of the lentil to Steven, but one hundred years later Dean's great-grandson confirms to Steven's great-granddaughter that there was indeed a pencil in my hand.
The beauty of God is in the mind and not in the truth. Kurt Gödel's 'incompleteness theorem' (1931) shows that it is always possible to make a statement that denies its own existence. This is the incompleteness of religion: God is sustained by the uncertainty of his own existence.
I have now put my survey to about 450 people. One other has had the same reply as mine; about ten have initially said 'yes and no', but have admitted (after some probing) that the 'yes' is a conditioned response; and the enormous majority have answered affirmatively to both.
What is more interesting is the reaction to my questions of 'why?' that follow. Those who are secure in their beliefs answer anything from a lengthy analysis to ``because I'm comfortable with it.'' I have spent entire nights discussing these analyses, all the time renovating my philosophy because of their ideas. Those who are insecure with their beliefs, and those who have conditioned beliefs which they have never poked, squeezed or bent become offended and sometimes even tearful.
If an engineer had to construct an office block with foundations made of string we would all look at it in disbelief claiming that it is beyond physics! Our entire scientific knowledge base would be suddenly proved incorrect and we would be left having to start again from Egyptian times feeling hopeless, helpless and inept. I reduce the foundations of those with insecurities to string, and that brings the tears.
They cannot refute my arguments because they are logical, and not hypothetical. My system of logic has been continually expanded since the day I broke free of conformity in Hebrew class. I am analytical about everything and I insist that everything must have an explanation. ``You are too analytical,'' people say; ``Some things should not need to be explained.''
It was three years after my revelation that I finally agreed with the latter statement.
By the time I met her I was so squarely objective that I played my life as one would play Monopoly. But strange occurrences began to bang at the doors to my mind. I couldn't get to sleep at night because she was fiddling with my mind; in the mornings I pictured her face before I saw my room; I couldn't concentrate on lectures and sometimes tried to use that time to catch up on my sleep - in vain of course; I felt a rush of electricity pulse through my arms and legs into my heart whenever the phone rang. I had an unfamiliar tightness in my chest and I couldn't explain it. It was absolutely counter to everything I've ever been secure with, and I could not rationalise it. My stress levels rose until I started having heart palpitations! My foundations had been reduced to string.
To prevent a nervous breakdown I had to concede that there were two frames of reference to our world: scientific and romantic. I could never reconcile them. Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig, 1974) examines this concept in depth, and under his guidance the rift between the scientific and romantic worlds has begun to be bridged. Mr Pirsig proposes that the incongruency is not inherent to the world, but it is inherent to our methods of analysis. He analyses the analysis itself. However, this leads to a bootstrapping problem - there is no foundation from which to analyse the logic because it is that very logic which drives the engine of analysis.
Inevitably the question of whether or not I loved her arose. I believed I did. I even told her that I did and she rebuked me. We had an exceedingly strong emotional bond for 18 months after which time I decided that I had to cut myself loose. The difficulty I had doing so is testimony to the solidity of the ties.
Today I wonder if I ever did love her - I think I did. Ultimately, it depends on how one defines 'love' - as with any abstract concept each person is entitled to his own definition. Each person must decide for himself whether he loves or does not love. But I cannot resist asking if it makes any difference. It is the very same concept as Shakespeare's ``A rose by any other name would smell as sweet''. Call it anything you want to, call it whatever is most pleasing. It is pleasure that makes life more than existence, and giving a pronunciation to an emotional experience does not make it any more or less pleasing.
I believe that I know what the meaning of my life is - pleasure. I can think of nothing else that fuels me. It is selfish, but every organism reacts selfishly to its environment. It is the nature of any organism to optimise its surrounding conditions for itself and only itself. However, selfishness is not necessarily a negative phenomenon. It can take three fundamental forms: constructive, destructive and neutral selfishness. It is destructive selfishness that gives the word its modern connotations.
This is my most vilified of theories. I always have someone defensively shouting with a red face that he can act unselfishly. I challenge him for an example and it is always the same one: ``What about giving charity?'' I follow with my standard ``Why? Why do you give charity?'' After some circular arguments the answer, in its most basic form, is, ``Because it makes me feel good!'' That is selfish! He gives charity because it pleases himself! But it is constructive selfishness in that it is beneficial to another individual or to society in general.
This selfishness is vital for the stability of the ecology. It supports the evolutionary theory of natural selection - if each organism acted for the benefit of another and to the detriment of itself, the stronger organisms would be martyred for the sake of the weaker.
Taking money out of a charity collection would be destructive selfishness. It breeds disapproval and conflict and can lead to the destruction of individuals, communities or even entire societies - the biblical town of Nineveh is an example. However, it is important to note that this is only one type of selfishness.
I have been told that 'selfish' is the incorrect word and that I should rather use 'self-awareness' or 'self-preservation', but they all have the same meaning - chiefly regarding ones own self.
This insistence to polish a façade onto everything in our world is similar to the Americans' insistence to polish the apples in supermarkets. Not only does it not affect the quality of the product but it also makes the beauty seem superficial and artificial. It is a veneer and the only harm is that it detracts from the deeper understanding of the commodity, the circumstance or the philosophy. Often that deeper understanding is unnecessary, but sometimes the protection that the veneer offers has damaging unintended consequences.
It is especially prevalent in the Italian, Greek and Jewish communities for the family to be overprotective of the children - particularly the female children. While this is done with deep love, and although protectiveness is positive in moderation, overprotection prevents the individual from gaining experience from real situations. There is a veneer glossed over their world so that they never have to cope with strife, pain, discomfort and prejudice. The brain is adaptable and it uses childhood to develop tools that will improve its capabilities in adverse conditions. This is analogous to the production of antibodies that prevent a second bout of some diseases.
When the protected mind reaches an age of maturity such that it strives for independence, it suddenly finds itself floundering naked amidst attacking influences - and it has no way to protect itself. This can lead to low self-esteem, depression and various insecurities - and this can be manifested is such psychological disorders as anorexia and suicide. Thus, I would expect the distribution of anorexia to echo Durkheim's results on suicide rates.
My approach to the veneering of reality is exactly opposite to the approach described above. I'm a vehement proponent of the 'throw him in the deep-end' theory and I actually believe my approach to be too extreme. I intentionally subject myself to uncomfortable conditions in order to build immunity to adversity. I look carefully at gruesome accident scenes, I insist that I be immediately and bluntly told of disturbing occurrences that relate to me personally, I avoid medication unless my condition is life threatening, and I avoid anaesthesia unless the pain is intolerable. When my parents discussed my grandmother's illness in a whisper so that my younger sister would not hear I chided them - `Let her grow up! She'll have to deal with it eventually anyway.''
I had made myself almost untouchable and that is why it was three years before I would recognise that inexplicable emotion was an intricate part of humanity.
Even after that admission I still play my life as a game. Recently I met a friend in the USA who has ex-South African parents. She asked me if the crime is as bad as the media makes it out to be. I didn't want to exaggerate the situation, but I didn't want to brush it off either; I simply answered that we learn to live with it. She couldn't understand how we could learn to live with such high levels of violent crime, so I explained it like this:
``Ones life is made of decisions. An event occurs; one reacts to it based on possible consequences; the person experiences the consequences; the person learns from his experiences; he waits for the next event or the opportunity to act again.
``This is quite like large scale Monopoly. Treat life like a game - be analytical about it. When there is an unexpected event, imagine that you landed in the Monopoly jail - consider your options, consider the consequences and act on them.
``However, you must always play by the rules. Most of the rules are universal, but some of our rules differ from yours. If you had to emigrate to South Africa you'd have to learn our rules and conform to them or you could bring misfortune on yourself. But we are acquainted with our rules, so there is no problem.''
This is a comforting thought, and I do live by it, but its intrinsic flaw is that it applies only to ones self. When I have to consider my affect on others the Game becomes far too complex to be analogous to Monopoly. There is no analogue to this Game of Life, but it is still nothing more than a game.
An ancient Chinese curse translates to ``May you live in interesting times''. I find contemporary South Africa to be extraordinarily interesting indeed.
This unromantic perspective on existence combines with my dabbling in religion and the meaning of life to produce my philosophy of death. I have never had a fear of death. It holds no mystery for me - life holds that mystery. When I die my nerves will stop conducting, my brain will stop processing, and all of these thoughts will disappear. They will not become encapsulated in some other form but they will simply vanish. It may be anticlimactic and rather disappointing but it is not frightening.
Few people believe that I'm being honest with myself when I present that argument but in 1998 I had an experience that concreted the idea. I had my wisdom teeth extracted. I am thrilled with medical procedures - they're always interesting, somehow exciting, and a terrific method of attention seeking. I always keep mementoes of any surgery I am subjected to and I decided I that my teeth would be suitable heirlooms. To beat the anaesthetic I began counting. I blinked at 36, again at 79 and again at 112. When I reached about 130 the surgeon entered the room and I asked him to keep the teeth for me. His reply was curiously comforting, ``They've been thrown away already. You've been out for twenty minutes.'' Evidently I had lost consciousness when I closed my eyes at 112. When I regained my consciousness I continued counting from the same position without knowing that twenty minutes had elapsed. That is how I imagine death, and that is why it does not frighten me any more than walking. Death may be associated with pain and then I am disturbed, but not by the loss of life.
If life is simply a game, and I do not dread retiring from the game as people do dread death, and if there is nothing to answer to upon retirement then the only reason for me to continue playing is the pleasure to which I have already attributed the meaning of my life.
I have set myself down in hardcopy, but hardcopy is deceiving since it is a static representation of a single moment. To be greater than the sum of my parts I have to be dynamic - I must experience, learn, adapt and experience again. But that is reactive and it is not sufficient to become truly great - it is essential to be proactive, to decide how I want to adapt and to ensure that I am provided that experience.
Ultimately, it is the quality of my life that will determine how I compare to the sum of my parts. Yet 'quality' is indefinable and so the success of my life would depend on the opinions of others. That notion is troubling so I'll rely on another form of measurement - peace of mind.
If I die at peace with myself then I will have accomplished everything I ever set out to. Peace of mind is my only goal - far too few have it.
1 Now called Poznan