Questioning Questioning

One of the most basic questions a human being can ask is "What is life?"

In the past, the religious community has dealt with this conundrum. Shamans, priests, and preachers have claimed exclusive revelation about the answer. Nowadays, science -- our new religion -- has taken up the challenge. Instead of being divinely inspired, however, modern teachers are institutionally accredited. Which, like faith, also has the disquieting feel of knuckling under to authority, for the paranoid among us.

The popular press has for some time published volumes on the subject of the electric basis of life. Two such examples are the recent The Spark of Life by Dame Frances Ashcroft and from 1985 Robert O. Becker's The Body Electric. Each of these works explores the function of electricity within and among the basic building blocks of the body -- cells. However, Nick Lane, a biochemist in the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London, takes a rather more in-depth look at the mystery in his The Vital Question. (A presentation by Dr. Lane can be found here.)

Although all three books have at their core the idea of bioelectricity being what powers living cells, Dr. Lane's book goes furthest into the hows and whys of the matter, explaining the difference between electricity, the flow of negatively charged electrons, and proticity, the flow of positively charged protons, an idea first formulated by Peter D. Mitchell. "Essentially all living cells power themselves through the flow of protons...." The harvesting of power from "...proton gradients...is universal across all life on earth...." (page 13)

A major tenet of Lane's thesis is that single-celled life arose some 4 billion years ago around alkaline hydrothermal vents on the deep ocean floor. Eventually, two radically different forms of life emerged, though both were based on the same energy gradient structure. Those two forms were bacteria and archaea -- what are termed the prokaryotes (from the Greek 'before the nucleus'). Complex cells -- the eukaryotes ('true nucleus') which make up all the rest of the plethora of life on this planet -- came about, according to Dr. Lane, as a result of a synthesis between the other two, "an endosymbiosis in which a bacterium got inside an archaeon, enabling the evolution of vastly more complex cells." (pages 13 - 14) He further states that there arose a founder population of essentially identical cells which happened only "on a single occasion -- and all plants, animals, algae and fungi evolved from this founder population." (page 40)

Eukaryotes harnessed the savings in energy which came from a simplified gene structure; they had much more power at their disposal. The metabolic rate (energy per gene) of eukaryotes exceeds by several factors that of the prokaryotes. Human beings "use about 2 milliwatts of energy per gram -- or some 130 watts for an average person weighting 65 kg [143.3 lbs], a bit more than a standard 100 watt light bulb. That may not sound like a lot, but per gram it is a factor of 10,000 more than the sun". (page 64) Each one of us literally burns brighter than the sun.

In the earliest times of life on Earth, this huge energy supply drove the explosive diversification of flora, fauna, and microbes. Interestingly, "there is a deep and disturbing discontinuity at the very heart of biology". (page 21) One of Lane's more startling propositions is that evolutionary biology is not predictive. That is, even if we knew all the starting perimeters, we could not foresee the forms which life would take. Just as the Uncertainty Principle means that both the trajectory and the position of an atomic particle cannot be known simultaneously, and Chaos Theory means patterns of repetition cannot be predicted, so the course of life can never be charted. Freedom, stark and beautiful, holy and terrifying, is in our very genes.

War Dancing

Some people like radishes. Others prefer bananas. This difference manifests itself not only in culinary choices, but in other areas of life as well. Some readers like literary fiction; others prefer popular titles. Some folks like George R. R. Martin; others prefer J. R. R. Tolkien. Some people like Tony Hillerman; others prefer Sherman Alexie. Mr. Hillerman won honors for his mystery fiction, including the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar award; Mr. Alexie won, among other prizes, the 2010 PEN/Faulkner award for his collection of poems and short stories, War Dances, the title story of which appeared in the August 10, 2009 issue of The New Yorker.

The point I want to bring up with Mr. Alexie's writing is how much whitewashing goes on in the selection of which writer wins which award, and what writer gets published by whom. Like so much else in capitalist America, publishing exists to make money. Which means editors will buy only those manuscripts they think will appeal to the most buyers. Therefore, they aim at the lowest common denominator. Which in a market dominated by Euro-Americans means Euro-Americans.

So for a non-Euro-American writer to break through in the United States market, his or her writing must appeal to the majority of Euro-American readers. Which means the writing must conform to Euro-American standards and taste. Which means that even when the writer is a bona fide outsider -- as in the case of Mr. Alexie or Toni Morrison or Gore Vidal --  that writer must still engage a majority of Euro-American readers. Which means that no successful Tribal or Black or Gay writer has ever been able to achieve real, meaningful cross-culture appeal. To attract the most readers, a writer must appeal to the most readers. Which in North America means middle-class white.

Mr. Alexie's stories are alternately funny and poignant, touching and barbed. They give a view of the universal human experience. However, they do that through a biased lens. Because of that, their truth is subjective. Though they are about people on the fringe of society, they are still about people in society. They are ultimately Euro-American tales. Because that is what Euro-Americans want.

And that is whitewashing.