The Anticlan

  I wrote last week about the life-long damage that discrimination inflicts, a result of the clannish, "us vs. them" behavior that is all too normal in human affairs.  Today, I write about the antithesis of such clannishness, a "we, all of us" mindset that is embodied in a group I know, which I'll call The Anticlan.  (I won't identify it for fear of embarrassing its core members.  Many readers will recognize it anyway.)  The Anticlan is surely not unique.  It is no doubt like other outreaching groups that you may know, but let me describe its operation so I can make my final point.

   A traditional clan is exclusionary, membership obtained on a limited basis, usually through birth or marriage.  It views other clans with suspicion, often hatred.  Contrarily, The Anticlan is obsessively inclusive.   It is as if it were a giant planet like Jupiter, sweeping into itself everyone who comes near.  Originally comprising a nuclear family that still forms its core, The Anticlan has grown for many years as others came into its gravitational field.

  I was drawn into orbit decades ago through a business colleague, himself a member by marriage.  Others were captured by living on the same block, having gone to school or done business with other members, or chance meetings.  Each new member in turn attracts additional members in the same manner.  This growth is not at all by active planning or proselytizing, merely by happenstance and an unspoken credo of inclusion.

  An initial introduction is followed by a warm embrace: one is asked to various Anticlan events.  The invitations are sometimes quirky.  In my case, my business colleague would call up and say, "Sunday's dinner is at 6 pm."  Just that.  I would scramble to my calendar to see if I had forgotten something, but I hadn't.  Yet such invitations were so charming and sincere in their idiosyncrasy that my wife Helen and I would attend if we could.  Others in the extended Anticlan would be there too, likely invited in the same abridged manner.

  Often the invitations are to more significant events than dinner—weddings, graduations, even vacations.  On one occasion, Helen and I were informed that The Anticlan had rented a compound in Hawaii, at which a milestone birthday of The Anticlan's matriarch would be celebrated.  We were told by my colleague that seats had already been reserved for us on such and such flights; we only had to make the final arrangements.  We were again enchanted by the warm but eccentric inclusiveness, and found ourselves going. 

  While in Hawaii, a signal event occurred.  One of the matriarch's sons, as a surprise to his parents, flew his new fiancée there from Russia, where he had met her, in order to introduce her to them—and, incidentally, to the assembled horde from The Anticlan.  Poor woman, I thought.  She could barely speak English at the time; Hawaii and The Anticlan must have seemed like another planet!  Yet that planet was the self-same Jupiter I have mentioned, and she too was captured by its strong gravitational pull.  When she married into The Anticlan, her parents, who lived in Moscow, were also swept into its orbit, embraced by it on their own trips to the U.S. 

  On another occasion, a year or two after Helen died, I almost magically found myself on a sailing trip in the Caribbean—ten glorious days of hopping between islands, sharing nautical tasks with other Anticlan members I'd not previously met.  The boat charter, every detail, had already been arranged, and I was simply told when and at what gate to appear at the airport.  I, a loner (especially after Helen's death), had still after all those years not quite gotten used to the zaniness of such arrangements, but was again quite literally captivated.

  To this day, I have thus been drawn out of my shell.  Recently, I attended the 90^th birthday of The Anticlan's patriarch.  About sixty people from all over the country were there to pay him honor.  Although I knew most of the attendees from previous Anticlan occasions, there were again new faces.  One couple had not long before moved from Australia to settle in the Bay Area.  They had been introduced to the core family by another son, who—although himself living on the East Coast—had thought that the new arrivals would need a network of friends as they adjusted to California.  The woman of the couple told me that they had been adopted by The Anticlan, which made their transition so much easier.  I had heard the same story many times before by migrants to the Bay Area from the world over.

  Why do I tell this collection of anecdotes?  Because I think they well illustrate how The Anticlan's infectious inclusiveness runs counter to the normal human trait of clannishness—a trait I believe must be a genetic legacy of the cave man's need for self-defense, 50,000 or more years ago.  Although recent millennia of human history have led us to ever more inclusiveness, our genes still often reflexively tell us to flock with birds of our own feather, a conduct that even now splinters the world.  The Anticlan flocks with birds of many feathers in a lovely symbiosis.

  That leads me to my point.  I cannot help wondering:  Is this Facebook generation, with its obsessive "friending," the germ of a new norm of inclusiveness, an Anticlan on steroids?  Will the age of digital hyperconnectivity be a turning point in human social organization?

  In a previous posting, Neurons and the Internet, I quoted Jesuit priest and media scholar John Culkin as saying, "We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us."  That was in a pessimistic context: the possible deleterious neuronal effects of multitasking.  More optimistically, in the present context, could social networking be rewiring our neuronal networks toward a more inclusive nature?   Could even a genetic adaptation start to take place?

   Of course, I am wildly speculating here.  A connection between multitasking and neuronal rewiring in individuals at least has some basis in observational data, as discussed in the Neurons and the Internet posting.  I'm unaware of any scientifically established connection between social networking and reduced clannishness, not even a hypothesized neuronal rewiring of individuals, much less a predicted evolution of the species.  However, if there were a beneficent evolutionary force at work over generations—if belonging to extensive social networks confers a competitive advantage over belonging to just a narrow clan—one can only hope that its fulfillment won't take another 50,000 years!